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Karl Marx/ Susan Willis

In Marx's (Karl Marx home page) view, alienation begins with the production of an object which "exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him..." (Marx, 108). Marx names several factors which contribute to the alienation of labor. Primarily, there is "the fact that labor is external to the worker" (110). This leads to the notion that "His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor" (111). Marx goes on to say that man would not participate freely in labor, as he would in other functions, if he were not forced to do so. A third factor is that "it is not his own, but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another" (111).

To Marx, the relationship between private property and alienated labor is key. Inadvertently, the capitalist (private property owner) creates an unequal division of labor because he has the money and he has the hired labor. Marx states:

that on the one hand it (private property) is the product of alienated labor, and that on the other it is the means by which labor alienates itself, the realization of this alienation (117).

Marx approaches alienation in a way that attacks the very fundamentals of capitalism and private property. I think the current way of thinking about alienation doesn't view the basic economic structure; the way of working, as causing the problems, but it is more the position one holds. In other words, one's class or rank within that capitalist structure. Come to think of it, maybe this is what Marx was saying. There are the privileged executives (the property owners) and the rote laborers. They were and are still part of the capitalist system.

Marx's points also coincide nicely with another book we have been reading in class by Susan Willis, called A Primer for Daily Life. In her chapter on "Working Out," Susan Willis relates Marx's work in The Economic Manuscripts of 1844 to her arguments about commodity fetishism when she writes:

Alienation informs the entire circuit of production and consumption under capitalism. In such a system, the utopian impulse often finds expression in the very forms that simultaneously articulate its containment (Willis, 77).

Willis relates this back to the modern day commodification of the self in relation to "working out." She talks about the way that, throughout history, women have been alienated from machines and the products which they produce. Willis argues that now, with the advent of the nautilus machine and specialized health clubs, women have been given "access to the machine but denied access to production (73)." The woman is putting all her energy into the machine but there is no product emerging from her work. She is the product; she is producing her body.

Shape, January 1986

In the same vein of detachment from one's labor, Guy Debord sets forth his own opinions on the relationship between production and labor. Debord, however, sees production as the worker producing an independent power, and not himself. For more on Debord, see The Spectacle.