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ESTRANGED LABOUR TODAY

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The Montreal Review, April, 2010

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In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx argues that there are two classes of people - property-owners and "propertyless" workers. There are people who possess capital and resources and there are people that possess nothing but their labour. The people who keep the resources and the capital exploit the labourers to amass more resources and more capital. The workers, the people that have nothing except their labour, submit their talents, bodies, time and life under the dictatorship of the property-owners. They work for money in order to cover their basic human needs. But they are not humans, they are like animals, says Marx, because their existence is restricted to long hours of labour and spare hours of freedom and rest. They are like animals, because they do not use their creative power. Their existence has meaning only as long as they provide cheap labour for the owners of capital and keep production intact. In this world, says Marx, they are just means for production, not end goals.

Marx argues that the workers are alienated (1) from their labour, (2) from the results of their labour (the product they produce), (3) from the wealth they create, and, eventually, (4) from their own life and individuality. The estrangement from person's own life is nothing but slavery. The worker is slave of the capitalist (or the capital-owner); and he is an animal, because his labour "does not belong to his essential being."

Why is that?

Everyone has some talents and inclinations. Some people, for example, are interested in trucks and driving, others in writing and staging. I have a friend who is a musician by profession and who works as a part-time University teacher. He is also passionately interested in trucks; he knows everything about the heavy trucks, truck engines, truck design, and even he has knowledge of the history of truck production and business. One day, he told me, he will quit music teaching and will become a truck driver. This was his dream, a reallistic one. In his free time, he takes classes for truck driving licence and he plans starting work as a driver next summer.

I have another friend who is a nuclear physicist but who has left the laboratory a few years ago and now works as a part-time hotel valet. In his free time he writes books and plays.

These my friends are real people, somewhat exceptional persons, who live in Canada. These people are an example of almost free people, because they are ready to follow their passions and interests, their natural inclinations. The musician has a real potential to become the happiest truck driver in North America and perhaps a future owner of successful truck company. The physicist, on the other hand, has the potential to become successful writer and stage plays in New York, Montreal or Toronto.

These two people have the potential to live like free men, because they do not follow social prejudices, they do not fear the risk to work odd part-time jobs, and they chase their dream tirelessly. They sacrifice respected "professions" for their personal passions. They are brave. Yet this bravery is due to the fact that they are able to live a decent life with the money they receive from their part-time work. They can use and develop their creative powers and personal ambitions because the society (or the economic system of Canada) and the wages they receive permit this. Such people are not common in the Western capitalist world, and they are literally non-existent in countries such as China, Japan, etc. Only in developed, capitalist, liberal and individualistic society, one can find ordinary people with potential not to be estranged from their own life, labour, and product. Only in these countries the spirit of individual entrepreneurship is alive. In states with rigid, authoritarian political systems, oppressive collectivist culture, and economic order based on big corporations or central government the existence of "free" workers such as my friends is impossible.

Marx spoke about communism. We often hear that the socialist states that existed in 20th century were based on Marxist ideology. This was not true. The communist states were not real Marxist states, because Marx, in "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844", did not speak about the "capitalist" as the sole exploiter. He spoke more generally - about the "master of labour" (Marx, K.  (1978)  Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.  In R. C. Tucker (Ed.) p.79; The Marx - Engels reader (pp. 66-125).  New York:  Norton & Co.). "Master of labour" is a general term. Master of labour can be not only the person of the capitalist, the owner of capital. It can be also the state or the company (corporation), or any collective economic body. The exploiter can be a human or an organization.

In the 20th century's communist states, the state was the supreme master of labour, and the "capitalists" were the high rank state bureaucrats. The capital was in their hands. In China today, the state and the capitalists are enmeshed in one. The lack of individual freedom, the attempt for maximal central control over the people in China, shows exactly the condition of Marx's "estrangement of labour". Thus, China is proclaiming itself as a "socialist" state, but not truly Marxist in its real organizational principles. In China the state, the bureaucracy, and the proxies of bureaucracy - the so-called "Chinese entrepreneurs" - are the masters of labour. The condition of Chinese workers is a condition of slavery. They have long working hours, they create products that they cannot use, they are poor, and exploited. They do not have human life, because they do not have complete human existence, e.g. freedom. The more they produce, the more enslaved they become. The more their lords receive from the forced labour, the more powerful they become. In an interview for Ben Wattenberg Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, expressed the popular view that when the GDP growth in a given country raise steadily and the society becomes richer it becomes also more disposed to liberalization and freedom. This is not always true. Today, China has a rigid political system that supports bureaucratic-capitalist elite that is experiencing big economic gains and enrichment, while the general population hardly can feel the effects of wealth accumulation. The population is completely subjected under the control of the masters of labour. The ordinary Chinese have higher wages and more money for consumption in comparison with the times of Mao, but these gains correspond neither to the sacrifices they made to receive this higher "standard of living", nor to the levels of their real productivity and wealth creation. The Chinese people are robbed by the masters of labour (the Communist party and its proxies). That is why the Chinese society is thriftier today than the Western society is. Not because it is more virtuous than its Western counterpart, but because the accumulation of Chinese wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few (state and bureaucrats-capitalists). These few possesors of capital are not able to spend all of their fortune or to invest it all. The great part of the accumulated wealth naturally stays unused, in savings, it becomes "rent-wealth" or lending capital invested in foreign entrepreneurships, usually in the Western world.

Marx noticed that the humans in contrast to the animals produce more than they are able to consume. Humans produce "universally", or they create wealth, or production surplus. Animals care only for their immediate needs, their activity is connected only with their reflex for survival. Humans are different from animals with their ability to create and invent, and to do things that are not directly connected with the immediate needs for survival. The important point here is that human creativity depends on human freedom; humans create the most beautiful things and the most intelligent machines when they are free of immediate care for survival. In liberal and prosperous societies, humans invent more, and in fact produce more, not because of the free market and competition, but because of opportunities such as free time, intellectual and physical (mobility) freedom, availability of free capital, and existence of effective or fair judicial system that oversees economic actors' relations. These and other factors bring relative stillness to all individuals who want to experiment and follow their inner inclinations, interests, passions and talents. Free labour is the base of technological and economic progress. Freedom is the soil for rise of entrepreneurship.

We are living at the beginning of a Digital Age, knowledge is more valued and productive than simple physical labour. The knowledge creates intelligent machines that are used for labour and elevate production. As Marx predicted, in future, the human exploitation will not be profitable. The emerging knowledge-based economy is very different from the traditional labour-based economy. Knowledge-based economy depends on creativity and knowledge that are the sources of machine invention; labour-based economy depends on human labour, which is the source of production. Creativity depends on freedom and prosperity, labour depends on force and oppression. In a fully developed Digital Age the machines would produce, not the humans; in such a world the exploitation and dehumanization, or estrangement of labour, would disappear just because it would be needless and unprofitable. In the Digital Age, the companies and the owners would find different ways to exploit the human potential.

Drawing from contributions from 14 members of the Japan Society for the History of Economic Thought, the editors focus on Marx in the twenty-first century. The result is a collection with such topics as Marx and modernity, Marx's economic theory and the prospects for socialism, Marx and the future of post-capitalist society, the influence of Marx on distributive justice and the environmental problem, reappraisals of Marx's theories of history and labor money, a comparison of Marx and J. S. Mill on socialism, a bioeconomic Marx-Weber paradigm, Japanese cultural concepts of eclecticism and civil society, and amongst essays on new horizons, topics such as Louis Blanc and associationism in France, the Brussels Democratic Association and the Communist Manifesto and editorial problems in establishing a new edition of The German Ideology.

These new ways are already present in some "new generation" companies based in California specialized in production of high technologies. We all know that some knowledge-based companies permit their workers to have free time during the working hours in which they can do what they want. This new approach is more human and more profitable. It corresponds to the Marx's theory of estranged (non-estranged) labour. The worker who works with his brain has free time, during which he ostensibly works for himself. The company expects from him to invent. It tries to create an environment that encourages creativity. If 150 years ago one of the heated social debates was the reduction of the working hours from 12 to 8, today we see companies that voluntarily reduce the working hours from 8 to 6 and pay extra 2 hours in which the workers have freedom to work on their own projects. Obviously, this is a great progress in work conditions, labour, and business. The problem is that this freedom is confined in the framework of the company. So the workers are still partially enslaved and deprived from the full value of the product or the invention they would create (if they succeed to do it). The company risks its capital, but this is a well-calculated risk. In the Digital Age the company or the capitalist is not anymore the Lord. It is the Big Brother who pays and oversees the results of the freedom and creativity of the workers. The master of labour watches closely his minor "partners", assesses their inventions according the market value, and is ready, at any moment, to buy or develop the "free-born" idea, of course, for his own profit.

In these new companies, we see the future of business and labour much brighter than the past, yet a future still under the terror of estrangement.

This book combines a lucid exposition of the fundamental categories of Marxian political economy with an interpretive analysis of advanced capitalist development. Unlike neo-Marxist economists, who attempt to reinterpret Marx in the light of Keynes, Professor Becker adopts an unalloyed Marxist approach to the leading problems of political economy. The book forthrightly defends the labour theory of value, argues that its alleged theoretical weaknesses are groundless, and demonstrates its continuing analytic fruitfulness in the age of monopoly capitalism. In the same vein, the author explains the importance of orthodox Marxist conceptions concerning both productive and unproductive labour and productive and unproductive consumption. Professor Becker uses Marx's celebrated theorem concerning the tendency of the rate of profit to fall to analyse the current 'stagflation' crisis. He argues that officially announced goals of full employment and growth are impossible without structural change. This presentation of Marxian economics critically appraises those premises of utility maximizing and economic hedonism that often underlie conventional economic theory.

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