Economic Alienation and Dialectic in Marxist Thought
Economic Alienation
Economic Alienation, the primary form of alienation, is dependent on other forms. It occurs in the workplace and refers to the fact that in this activity, the subject’s product is plundered—the fruits of their labor, their activity, and ultimately, their terms. Marx denies that there is no human nature; he believes it is limited to basic functions, such as those related to biological needs. All other features found in humans are a consequence of the social order. Man is what he has done, both individually and collectively. Man is a being of action; his reality is not given genetically but is a consequence of what he has done.
Man is a productive being, and work is the transformation of reality to satisfy his needs. However, as reality is transformed, man transforms himself. As man alienates himself, the work product becomes a “foreign object that dominates.”
- Alienation in operating companies is expressed in the following particulars:
- Alienation in activity: In the work process, man is alienated from his own creative powers. He does not live his activity as something that belongs to him, as part of his projects.
- Alienation in the object: The objects produced by the worker’s activities do not belong to him; he experiences them as outsiders. Even if a slave constructing a building made a product, it was not his but his master’s. Additionally, the object is presented as something alien in a more fundamental direction: in these production systems, the producer submits to the product, meaning that the producer is a means to produce the object. In this situation, the important thing is not the producer’s well-being but the goods produced.
- Social Alienation: The fact that the produced object does not belong to the worker but to another creates a split in society, giving rise to two antagonistic social classes: the oppressed class that produces the goods and the oppressive class that appropriates them.
Dialectic in Marx
Dialectic, in Marx, refers to the process by which society evolves throughout its history and how it should be thought of to adequately capture the process. Socrates practiced the art of dialogue; Plato’s dialectic is the method for understanding Ideas and discovering the Idea of Good. Kant also stands at the level of discourse. Marx takes the concept from Hegel but removes the religious interpretation, considering the motion described by dialectic as having the world of nature and history—the finite world—as its subject.
We can characterize the dialectic as the theory that agrees with:
- Change: The dialectical view sees movement as one of the fundamental categories of being; reality is subject to evolution and history.
- Contradiction: Change stems from the existence of contradictions in the very heart of things; reality is the area where there is conflict and confrontation, both in nature and in the human world.
- Rationale for Change: Change is not chaotic, messy motion, but follows a law. Thesis, or claim upon a reality; antithesis, or denial of the previous; and synthesis, or the time of integration of the two previous contradictory realities.