Alienated Labour and Transcendence Sample Clauses

Alienated Labour and Transcendence. In demonstrating that the goal of the economic system is the distress of society and suffering for the majority of mankind [EW, p.286], Xxxx'x analysis of the system of private property gives rise to the concept of estranged labour. In fact, Xxxx'x argument turns on this pivotal notion. His analysis of the concept of estranged labour shows that “although private property appears as the basis and cause of alienated labour”, it is “in fact its consequence” [EW, p.332]. The system of private property is revealed as arising out of a system of estranged labour, or, as Xxxx argues, private property is the “material, summarized expression” of estranged labour [EW, p.334]. If we wish to assess the validity of Xxxx'x assumption that private property as a subject can be expressed fully as the product of alienated labour, we must investigate the process of estrangement by which Xxxx conceives this transformation of the system of labour into the system of private property as taking place. Xxxx places human activity, as labour, at the centre of his theory of estranged labour. He seeks to show how the relationship of man, as worker, to labour and the product of his labour is fundamental to the creation of the de-humanised world of private property. Its contradictions, he argues, are 6 For Marxists such as Xxxxx Xxxxxx, as I will argue in a later chapter, this problem of synthesis is bound up with the practical creation of a unified subject-object of history, the proletariat as class-for-itself. driving it towards its limit, culmination and decline [EW, p.337]. This theory seems to place labour, the source of all value, as the potential subject in the transcendence of this economic system. It is however currently dis-empowered in its estranged form. The formation of labour as a subject requires the elaboration of a process of mediation through which estranged labour is transcended. The workers, initially defined by their passive suffering, are now, in the context of estranged labour, enabled to conceive even this suffering, in an active sense, as an enjoyment of self [EW, p.351]. Thus we find a pivot from which even, or especially, the most developed estrangement can present the potential for a transcendence of this estrangement. At the same time, whilst in present-day production man is produced as a human commodity, “a self- conscious and self-acting commodity”, he is also produced as a “mentally and physically dehumanized being” [EW, p.336]. Since I argue that Xxxx'x t...