Posts Tagged ‘surplus value’

May
21
2010

Marx, Engels and Alienation

Marx, Engels and Alienation

Aware of Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx was concerned with alienation and recognized the connection between the estrangement of human beings from themselves and from nature and the Industrial Revolution.  Marx re-wrote Schiller’s psychological alienation, as the estrangement of workers in industrial capitalist society from the products of their labor.  Capitalism is based upon money and money is abstract.  If money is abstract, then value is abstract.  Barter for goods and services ceases to exist and is replaced by exchange of money and thus the value of both labor and goods become arbitrary.  Once the worker is alienated from the product produced then the value of his or her labor is rendered arbitrary.  According to Marx,

“…devaluation of human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things…” and “…labor does not only create goods’ it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity…” therefore  “…his labor becomes an object…”

Marx’s concept of alienation was worked out in his 1844 essay, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” which set up a triad of alienation: the state is an alienated form of social life, social life is an alienation of labor, and the wage laborer is alienated from the product of his/her labor.  The cause of the alienation of the worker is the unfortunate discovery of surplus value.  As Marx’s writing partner, Friedrich Engels, stated,  “…the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of the worker…” Surplus values pocketed by the owner as profit.  What the owner refers to, as “profit” is also, according to Marxist theory, the fundamental incompatibility between mode of production and mode of appropriation.  When the worker was in control of his/her own product, all such “surplus value”, or “profit” accrued directly and only to him/her.

But, as Marx pointed out, surplus labor creates surplus value,  and surplus labor allows exploitation.  Surplus labor is the result of two major factors: an increase in population and the development and use of labor saving machinery increases profits for the owner of the mode of production.  Although the initial capital investment in the machinery was substantial, this investment was finite, compared to ongoing or infinite costs of hiring extra workers.

Under capitalism, the product belongs to the capitalist, not to the worker.  The worker is alienated from the product because his/her actions are performed in relation to the desires of the capitalist.  The laborer becomes a “tool” for the owner and is robbed of “humanity” or of the potential for human development.  Working in a state of “illiteracy”, the wage laborer is trained in one operation and cannot participate in the benefits and achievement of society that is progressing…but only for the middle class.  The products are objects of desire, which the laborer must labor to purchase in a viscous circle of desire and debt and powerlessness.  All workers are competitors with each other because their choice is between work and starvation.  Thus all workers are alienated from each other.

These are the facts of productive life, the fundamental factors that influence the ways in which all other aspects of all human affairs will develop. The question is why are the workers complicit with a system that enslaves them?  The answer is that their consciousness has been determined by the economic system.  Ideology or the belief system put forward by the ruling classes teaches the laborers to work on employer’s premises and on employer’s terms.

Ideology is a powerful mixture of truth and lies.  Capitalism requires capital or money to invest in a business.  A laboring family may take generations to accumulate the capital necessary to become bourgeoisie. A person from the working class encounters a system that is monopolistic and works to eliminate or bar competitors. The workers are made to believe that their alternative is no job and no wages, and they are made to hope that some day their condition will improve if they are cooperative.

The laborers believe the dreams of success and wealth that capitalism keeps alive and count on the positive effects of social mobility.  The owners of the mode of production, after all, were once lower class people who were rewarded for their hard work.  Surely, the worker thinks, me and my family will also receive the benefits of capitalism.  Laborers labor on, not realizing that fortunes are made within a network of privileges, invisible to the workers, and not upon merit.  Because the workers are in the thrall of an ideology of social and economic improvement, the owners of the mode of production are able to buy labor cheaply and sell goods dearly.

But Marx predicted that the consciousness of the workers will be “raised” and they will see past the veil of ideology, or “false consciousness,” and the proletariat will become aware of itself.  The workers will rise up against the owners and the two classes, the thesis, and the anti-thesis will clash.  The destiny of the proletariat is the truth of dialectical materialism and destruction of capitalism.  The class revolution is inevitable when “false consciousness” is dispelled and proletariat recognizes the exploitation and recaptures its own labor from the masters and institutes a classless society that Marx called the “Dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx’s dialectical model of change is the revolution and the destruction of one class by another.  According to this model, violence and conflict between classes are fundamental.

Although he understood that the economic system determined human consciousness, Marx could not predict is how deeply ideology was embedded in society.  The lower classes continued to reinforce the needs and the dominance of the upper classes who proved to be adept at misleading the workers through misinformation and gaining their cooperation to work against their own interests.  The consciousness of the lower classes was structured to obey the dominant class and no amount of information could release or “raise” the consciousness of the exploited class.  Those who attempted to advise the workers of the “truth” were rejected as elitist oppressors and the familiar and real owners of the mode of production were embraced and defended.  Labor unions could easily be co-opted by management be entangling the worker with the fate and profit of a company.  The poor would reject the very social policies designed to aid them, preferring the known and the familiar, no matter how badly they were treated.

For Marx, ideas and theories are epiphenomena or byproducts of economic forces, which are the real determinants of change.  Marx stated that “Consciousness does not determine life; life determines consciousness…” and that “…man makes religion, religion does no make man…” Although these statements sound idealist, they are actually materialist.  Yes, Marx understood and accepted that the mind constructs reality, and he asserted that social relations are bound up in material production, which become forms of perception or particular ways of seeing the world related to dominant way of seeing or social mentality.  Marx remarked,

“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.  The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises on a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.  The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general.  It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness…”

The ideology of the age is the product of concrete social relations, in other words, materialism.  Actual lived class relations are experienced, legitimized and become perpetuated.  The dialectical method accommodates itself to fundamental changes of reality due to constant change, resulting from oppositional forces. Marx was opposed to the formalism of Kant who sought the transcendental.  According to Marx, it is life that determines consciousness and the resulting consciousness is understood as “natural.” This unseen set of beliefs is unrealized or so accepted the ideology is invisible.  The lower classes are trained to believe in an ideology of inferiority, which is internalized and forces them to accept their lower status in society.   They are poor because they “deserve” to be poor.  The poor are poor, not because the system is designed to work against success for the many, but because they lost out in the Darwinian struggle for survival.  Ideology is the ultimate form of alienation because the workers will work against themselves.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


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May
14
2010

Philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Today it is fashionable in some quarters to dismiss Karl Marx because of his apparently “failed” theory of an inevitable revolution in which the lower classes, realizing their exploitation, would rebel against those who owned the means of production.  Witnessing the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many said, “Marx was wrong.”   This rather anachronistic judgment fails to take into account that Marx was not an economist but a philosopher and that he could not see into a future in which capitalism would create a dazzling world of commodities that would tempt the working class to become consumers, buying into the very system that enslaved them.

In many ways, Hegel established a way of analyzing the past and set up a method by which Nineteenth Century historians could work.  Karl Marx adapted Hegel’s idea of the dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis into what he called “dialectical materialism.” Instead of appealing to ideas, Marx appealed to historical forces, a theory of history or a theory of things.  In contrast to Hegel’s “absolute” synthesis of categories, Marx was critical of “ideas,” which are empty and produce ideology.  Like Hegel, Marx claimed scientific precision for his philosophy with history as measurable record of clear progress. History, for Hegel, consisted of opposing forces: thesis and anti-thesis that over time would evolve into a synthesis that would, in its turn, become the new thesis.  Through these colliding forces, new stages would be reached and progress would occur. Marx was deeply concerned with social process/progress.  As a materialist, Marx’s ideas were phenomenological and not transcendental but he gave a great deal of attention to Hegel’s philosophy of history.  As Marx commented,

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.  And just when men seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language…”

Marx was also aware of the ideas of Kant and knew that Kant’s Copernican Revolution needed to be taken into account.  Kant, Hegel, and Marx were Determinists, that is, they all created philosophical systems that had a high explanatory value—each system could answer all the questions.  The difference in the thinking of these philosophers rested upon what forces determined their particular structure.  For Kant, the a priori workings of the human mind determined his system of knowledge, for Hegel it was the dialectic, and for Marx, it was the economic system.  Marx asserted that people are not free to choose social relations but are constrained by material reality, which is determined by economic production.

The key to Marx’s system is dialectical materialism, and his dialectic was the class system created by the capitalist system.  The creation of a privileged upper moneyed class and a dispossessed underclass resulted in a clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  The basis of society or the skeleton of society is economics.  Marx created a social model that distinguished between base and superstructure.  The base is the mode of production, which in Marx’s time is capitalism; and the superstructure can be defined as the social structures produced by human consciousness.  The superstructure is the laws and politics that define the form of social consciousness.  Consisting of education, cultural customs, political and legal practices, the superstructure both produces and reinforces an ideology, which functions to legitimate the power of the ruling class.

Human consciousness is determined by the mode of production or the economic system.  According to Marx, material relations between things are part of universal laws of history.  Marx wrote of the fatal evolution of capitalism, which is characterized by the domination of the bourgeoisie or middle class society who owns the mode of production and its necessary exploitation of the lower classes who produce the wealth.  The Bourgeoisie created a new social class, the urban poor, or the proletariat, that was collected into urban centers and concentrated in masses that could be exploited by the new system.  In contrast to the previous system, feudalism, value-in-exchange, capitalism is an abstract system, based upon an abstract concept called “money” and is not attached to the external qualities of things. Feudalism was a system based upon barter and upon a system of responsibilities.  Thing was exchanged for thing, obligation was exchanged for obligation.  A peasant could exchange a cow for a pig and give a portion of the harvest to the feudal lord who, in turn would protect the peasant who took care of the land he owned.

Within capitalism, a thing, an object is priced abstractly on the open market and will be sold according to what “the market will bear,” or according to what people will pay for it.  The end “value” of the object on the market has no relation to what those who own the means of producing the thing pay the workers for their labor.  Human  “labor” is embedded in goods and becomes abstracted.  In capitalism, the worker is alienated from the object and the difference between what s/he is paid and what the object sells for creates “surplus value,” which is appropriated by owner of capital who has exploited the laborer’s lack of alternatives. The excessive supply of labor drives wages down.  The minimum cost of making the product is covered by the laborer in a few hours, while the surplus or excess “value” goes to the employers.  According to Engels, “The appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of the worker….”

When the surplus value, created by the worker, is appropriated by the owner of capital, a dialectic is created between “labor and management,” and management’s exploitation of the helpless laborers leads to a class struggle.  The competition among the capitalists functions according to the law of capital accumulation or the concentration of wealth in a few hands.  The capitalist impulse is towards monopoly control of production, such as seen currently in the business model of Microsoft. The end result is that capital becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of the few, and unemployment grows as production becomes more technologically efficient. The result is overproduction and a crisis, such as seen in the American automotive industry.

The crisis of overproduction is resolved by opening new markets, which become new centers of production.  The old markets are limited in ability to absorb goods, which increases stress on the producers who must sell commodities.  Theoretically, the consumer needs only one television set but to resolve the stress a new and false need must be created, such as a television set for every member of the family.  The problem of overproduction is solved by manufactured desires that engender new demands for the new commodities, which are absorbed into the community. Marx and Engels stated,

“…the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with them all the relations of society…constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones…”

Marx and Engels wrote a theory of social causation or historical determinism and understood history to be a history of class struggles with every epoch having a prevailing mode of economic production and exchange.  The human being and human consciousness and social organization necessarily followed from this basis of political and intellectual history.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Oct
30
2009

The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution

For the artist of the modern period, the most essential problem was how to depict the modern: as a new style, as new content, as a new attitude?  Each generation would fine its own answer, only to have the next generation find this answer inadequate.  In the process of attempting to find the “modern,” the role of art would change, the role of the artist would change, the role of the public would change, and ironically, the artist and the public would become completely separate.  How did the artist become separated from the mass art audience? This estrangement was the result of significant social and economic changes that had changed the artist’s role in society.  The condition of the avant-garde—that is, artists being “ahead” of the public’s taste and expectations—is closely linked to the development of the Industrial Revolution.  This social and economic revolution in manufacturing was, perhaps, both the most sudden and swift and also the most complete and comprehensive revolution in history: it changed everything.  The trend away from small scale artisanal or intimate domestic manufacture towards mass production began around 1740, in England and a bit later in America with the industrialization of the textile industry and the development of mining to find the coal to run the machines to run the mills.  Textile mills sprang up near rivers, drawing thousands of workers from the surrounding countryside to new factory towns.

Thanks to the increasing importance of industry, the workplace moved from the home to an environment that was artificial, where there was no day and no night. This interior environment was based upon the relentless rhythms of the omnipresent machines that ruled those who worked for and with them, severing the workers from the outdoor world of nature and its eternal rhythms.  Beneath the earth, miners toiled in an equally artificial environment, in total darkness broken only by candles, in constant danger from escaping gases or cave-ins or flooding. Here, as in the factory, night and day had no meaning, time itself was unnatural, linked to the length of the “shift,” or the span of time one worked, not to the rising and setting of the sun or to the cycle of the seasons.  Far from home, severed from the land, people–men, women and children–now worked long days, measured by carefully segmented time, in dangerous places for low pay.  But their alternatives were few.  With the growth of population due to better hygiene and diet, farming communities could absorb only so many people and many hungry peasants joined the growing army of industrial workers.

“Labor” became a new kind of concept, referring to a new kind of  work regulated by the rhythm of the machine and timed to the ticking of the clock.  Time itself was sped up, cut into tiny pieces.  Work, too was sped up, and was equally divided into a segmented process.  In dusty, noisy factories, absorbed in repetitive tasks, working like machines, the workers were also alienated from the end product, an object produced in pieces, the result of a rational and an analytic process, which investigated and examined each aspect of manufacture.  Each worker was responsible for a segment, for a part of the process.  The factory resembled a vast machine, the workers mere cogs in the machine.  The process and pace of manufacture ruled their lives. With the social and financial shift from landed wealth to industrial wealth, money and power were no longer solely dependent upon inherited position and were increasingly based upon new opportunities provided by trade and commerce and manufacture.  The shift in social power also moved the site of culture from the aristocratic courts to urban centers, teaming with ambitious individuals, all determined to take advantage of the opportunities capitalism promised.  These individuals created prosperity for themselves and controlled the new sources of wealth as completely as the now-deposed aristocrats had once ruled their domains. Working conditions actually declined in quality for the workers who worked every day for well over ten hours a day under inhuman and unhealthy conditions.

Despite the unprecedented hardships on the workers, the Industrial Revolution allowed a new form of upward mobility. Any man with wit and foresight and a few good ideas could become wealthy and powerful. Two hundred years ago, vast fortunes were made by the newly formed middle class who had scrambled up the social ladder, eager to forget their humble origins. Coming from the lower classes, the peasants and the urban proletariat, the factory workers operated machines which fabricated products on a massive scale, making consumer goods available to the entire population, making the owners of the factories wealthy while raising the standard of living for everyone. Those who owned the manufacturing process—mining and making—enjoyed the fruits of what the Prussian philosopher, Karl Marx, called “surplus value,” meaning the difference what the worker was actually paid and what the object was actually sold for. During the Eighteenth Century, the middle class grew in social and political power.  The result was a changing of the guard from one ruling class—the aristocrats who had inherited wealth, which was based upon land holdings to the middle class who had created wealth based upon manufacture.  Land is limited; farming is dependent upon weather; manufacturing, on the other hand, is theoretically unlimited and independent of anything but the marketplace, as Karl Marx pointed out, was driven by desires for commodity.  Later Sigmund Freud would agree with Marx that a commodity was a mere symptom or a fetish, guaranteed to create, not to satisfy desire.

The ephemeral commodity would “melt into air,” as Marx put it, only to be replaced by the next fad and the next novelty.  Writing the Communist Manifesto in exile in England, the Prussian philosopher imagined an uprising of the proletariat once the veil of ideology was torn from its eyes.  The proletariat would seize the mode of production, and during this phase of the people’s ownership would be “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Witnessing the degradation of the workers on the eve of the Revolution of 1848, Marx waited in vain for the success of the workers’ uprising. But it was not to be. Workers were seduced by the all-powerful commodity, which, as Marx noted, had the qualities of the fetish to arouse desire.

“Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it.  The newfangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want.  The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.  At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to have become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.”

During the Nineteenth Century, burgeoning technology was buttressed by an unfettered optimism.  It was an era when most people believed in Progress, that industrialization had ushered in a better way of life, which, like the human beings who benefited from it, would develop and evolve in a positive direction.  The world became defined by constant changes, some of which were good, but there was a dark side to the state of flux: upheaval and disequilibrium.  Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, human beings seemed to be in control of the environment, capable of acting as designers of Nature itself.  Although by the time the Industrial Revolution was fully in effect, the Enlightenment was a philosophical or social movement was long over, the new economic system of capitalism still echoed some of the Enlightenment’s most cherished concepts: optimism and progress.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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