Marxist Analysis of Labor, Alienation, and Exploitation
Capitalist Society: Alienation, Objectification, and Exploitation
Capitalist society is characterized by alienation, objectification, and exploitation.
- Alienation: The worker is alienated or separated from what is theirs—their labor power—in favor of the capitalist, who purchases it in exchange for unfair wages, as we shall see below.
- Objectification: People are considered as objects or goods. Thus, the worker is bought and sold on the labor market based on market laws and is also treated as a “machine” in factories.
- Exploitation: This is the final result of the capitalist mode of production. The worker, who has been stripped of their natural property, their labor power, and is treated as a commodity, is exploited by their employer. The bourgeois class exploits the working class by removing their nature and their property, and in doing so through a system that is unfair and unequal, leading to rising corporate profits and the gradual impoverishment of the working class itself. The bourgeoisie seize the worker’s wage labor, which Marx called surplus value.
Marx’s Economic Thinking on Labor
Marx’s economic thinking provided a thorough and novel approach to the concept of work, largely forgotten by the classical economists. The peculiarities of the analysis are as follows:
- Labor is a social force. Although it is performed by specific individuals, its true value lies in promoting, through the value it provides to the capitalist, not just private benefits, but the development of the means of production.
- Although its initial goal is to reproduce the goods necessary for the subsistence of the worker and their family (living labor), the true power of the work is evident to the extent that it is incorporated into the assets that are owned, not by the worker, but by the capitalist—means of production, goods, and stocks (cumulative work).
- Here also lies the revolutionary nature of work: if the proletariat appropriates the fruits of their labor, they are actually taking over the productive and revolutionary forces of society. The work must be owned by the class that produces it, not those who exploit it.
- The immediate product of labor is a good of exchange, called a commodity. The value of the goods is always higher than the value of labor embodied in it. In that dispute, the capitalist system calls it profit. Thus, when the capitalist sells one unit of product on the market, there is an irretrievable rift between price and value. The price is only one unit of change, and, ultimately, it is the capitalist system and market that fixes it, but the concept of value contains within it the wage-labor, so that if there is an overexploitation of worker’s labor by the capitalist, what they are removing from the worker is the only property capable of producing value.
- This overexploitation exists for the following reason: when the capitalist hires a worker, they do not buy a particular job, i.e., a job that would produce exactly X units or freight, for which the employee would receive a salary. No. What they actually purchase is the “labor power” of workers, i.e., their ability to produce the value of work during the duration of the workday, and day after day.
- What the worker perceives from the sale of their “labor power” is always lower than the benefit the capitalist gets from the sale of units produced. This is facilitated by the technical division of labor, i.e., the structure of the relations of production. Capitalist profit, then, is derived from the difference between the work that pays the worker and what they actually receive. This difference is called surplus value. Technically, surplus value is a function of wage labor, and not the price of the goods.