I hear a word alienation from marxists and anarchists but I still don't know what is these mean? can any one define it to me in simple way?
thnx
Aug 18 2010 15:39
Aug 18 2010 16:18
Cheers for that oisleep, dead helpful.. 
Put really simply, alienation as used by anarchists/Marxists is the idea that when working, workers are forced to take on activities that they have no control over. Basically, their actions for the majority of their day is decided by their bosses.. when they work, when they stop for coffee/cigarette/conversation with workmates, when they eat etc.
As a result, the activity (work and what is produced from work) becomes seperate from the person performing it and actually dominates the person. So rather than the worker creating a product through their work, the product forces the worker to create it through the process..
Martin Glaberman, a Marxist car factory worker put it really well:
Quote:
A long time ago Robert Blauner wrote a book on alienation in which he dealt with several industries, chapter by chapter. In the chapter on the automobile industry he noted, this was in the early sixties, that the average job in the industry took a little less than 60 seconds to do. By the time that the Lordstown plant was built, the average job on the assembly line at Lordstown took about 36 seconds to do.
[...]
Consider these two units of time: 36 seconds, the rest of your life. The job that takes 36 seconds to do that you're going to do for the rest of your life. I don't know a better definition of alienation than that.
Aug 18 2010 16:26
Alienation is when 'wanting' and 'doing' don't coincide. It is an inevitable part of being alive, but capitalism takes alienation to its most degrading and inhuman stage by imposing the commodity form.
As much as I love oisleep's shit analogy, I think you should read a bit about what Marx had to say on this topic:
Marx wrote:
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers[18]; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.[19]
So much does the labor’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.
All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.
Read the rest here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm
Aug 18 2010 16:38
Ed wrote:
Cheers for that oisleep, dead helpful..Put really simply, alienation as used by anarchists/Marxists is the idea that when working, workers are forced to take on activities that they have no control over. Basically, their actions for the majority of their day is decided by their bosses.. when they work, when they stop for coffee/cigarette/conversation with workmates, when they eat etc.
As a result, the activity (work and what is produced from work) becomes seperate from the person performing it and actually dominates the person. So rather than the worker creating a product through their work, the product forces the worker to create it through the process..
to be fair there's nothing you've said above that wasn't included in my shit analogy - in fact i covered more in mine that you did above - can't see what your whinging about
Aug 18 2010 23:30
Alienation is like estrangement.
Because we have no control over our work, we are estranged from it.
Here's my analogy:
Imagine two kids.
One loves to play piano and sits down to play music whenever they can.
The other does not choose to play the piano but is forced to by their parents. They have no connection of their own with what they do. It is not 'music to their ears.
The second is alienated when they play the piano: the activity is alien to them, imposed, not from within themselves.
The first is entirely at home and is expressing themselves through their actions.
Aug 19 2010 00:19
cobbler wrote:
The second is alienated when they play the piano: the activity is alien to them, imposed, not from within themselves.
The thing with alienation for Marx is that it does come from within ourselves, or at least from our notionally voluntary activity.* We create capital through our labour, but yet we are not masters of it - on the contrary it dominates us and social life in general. So everything from what time we get up, where we can afford to live, whether we can afford to start a family etc becomes structured by capital, even though we create it. Hence "capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, sucks on the living, and lives the more the more it sucks".
So the equivalent would be someone who plays a tune on a piano, but gets the tune stuck in their heads until eventually their whole life is structured around it. They feel exhausted by playing it all day. They dream about it. Stress about it when they're not playing it. Get depressed they've been playing the tune for years with no prospect of another one etc. Or something like that.
* this of course is where the potential for freedom rests: we can refuse the role capital gives us, bringing its circuits to a halt and imposing our needs on it. the obvious example being a strike.
Aug 19 2010 01:50
Just to complicate things, there is some confusion between 'reification' (as used by Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness) and 'alienation' as used by Marx in the 1844 Philosophic Manuscripts (which were unknown to Lukacs at the time - 1923). the later Marx, writing in Capital about the fetishism of commodities, doesn't use the term 'reification there either.
From 'Reification a Myth Shock' by David Black (2010)
Amongst post-Marx marxists “reification” is variously, though not exclusively, defined as:
The process by which a social totality (or “wholeness” of a person) is fragmented, destroyed or denied.
The process by which concrete labour is abstracted to constitute exchange-value.
The transformation of social relations into the appearance of relations between things.
The identifying of an abstract concept with a concrete reality.
In the theory of George Lukacs (1886-1971) reification is the specifically capitalist form of objectification, which determines the structure of all capitalist social forms. But, as shown by Gillian Rose (1947-1995), in post-Lukacsian “Critical Theory” there is a crucial shift, in which theorists concerned with “the point in history at which reification irrupted into society, and the possibility or impossibility of overcoming it” usually date it “from the end of Greek antiquity!” The bemusement denoted by the exclamation mark is significant; for in Rose’s view the equation of “alienation “ and “reification” ignores Marx’s notion of “species being” which he developed to counter the unhistorical view of “human nature” as fixed, unchanging essence (part of the problem for Lukacs and those influenced by him was that Marx’s 1844 writings on alienation were unknown until the 1930s).
IN FULL AT
http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/2010_gillian_rose_sohn-rethel.htm
Aug 19 2010 09:26
Quote:
The thing with alienation for Marx is that it does come from within ourselves
hence the power of the shit analogy/metaphor
Aug 19 2010 11:34
thanks All, your info were really helpful.
Aug 21 2010 01:43
Hassan Dbouk wrote:
I hear a world alienation from marxists and anarchists but I still don't know what is these mean? can any one define it to me in simple way?thnx
Aug 22 2010 15:05
http://en.internationalism.org/ir/070_commy_03
This article is called 'The alienation of labour is the premise for its emancipation', written in the 90s as part of the series 'Communism is not just a 'nice idea'.....'. It focuses on Marx's conception of alienation in his early writings.
Aug 22 2010 19:08
oisleep wrote:
Quote:
The thing with alienation for Marx is that it does come from within ourselveshence the power of the shit analogy/metaphor
Yes, this is the shit, dude. But as Paul Lafargue noted,
Quote:
When the worker re-expropriates his (sic) shit, he should want to flush rather than embrace it!
Aug 22 2010 19:20
and what does the worker want but to flush capital/shit (the product of labour) rather than embrace it
Aug 25 2010 07:23
oisleep wrote:
when you go for a shit, something that has came from you, was once part of you, and has been produced by you, is no longer part of you, moreover this product (which in this case may well be a gross domestic one) then stands over you, dominating you, dictating what you do and how you do it, the more you shit the weaker you get, relatively to the huge pile of shit that is from, but external to,you, that controls everyhting you do, including shitting - this shit controls your life's daily activities and mediates your relationships, like an alien force even though you've produced it and without you it would be nothingthe anaology falls down half way through i admit, in fact it's a shit one from the start pretty much
Is this some kind of Marx/Freud fusion thing? I had a dream I shat my father. Alternatively you could substitute shitting with giving birth
More seriously I'm having a hard time distinguishing what the difference between realization and objectification is in the Marx quote above.
Aug 25 2010 07:45
888, I think "realization" is the very process of labor (in Marx's later terms: "the living, form-giving fire", labor "in actu"), which entails its gradual "objectification" (when labor becomes "congealed"; "The process disappears in the product"). Realization and objectification of labor are necessary and transhistorical features of human activity. Only in certain circumstances they become "loss of realization" and "loss of object".
Aug 26 2010 11:16
I heard a short section of this programme the other day, which talks about alienation. I'm hoping to listen to it all in the neasr future.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00tgf11/Thinking_Allowed_Alienation/
I did rile at one point: they were talking about a liberal democracy being a society which liberates the individual to be his or her self, then one man said "communism is the antithesis of liberal democracy" 
Can comment on articles and discussions
when you go for a shit, something that has came from you, was once part of you, and has been produced by you, is no longer part of you, moreover this product (which in this case may well be a gross domestic one) then stands over you, dominating you, dictating what you do and how you do it, the more you shit the weaker you get, relatively to the huge pile of shit that is from, but external to,you, that controls everyhting you do, including shitting - this shit controls your life's daily activities and mediates your relationships, like an alien force even though you've produced it and without you it would be nothing
the anaology falls down half way through i admit, in fact it's a shit one from the start pretty much