>> > Distasteful work will still have to be done and peoples' social
>> obligations
>> > will still have to be met.
>>
>>I never argued that distasteful work will be avoided. However, there is
>>a difference between alienated work that only serves to create profit
>>and shitty work that people need to do to live. Cleaning a toilet can be
>>distasteful work for many people. Working in a cubicle or factory is
>>alienating for most people.
>>
>>Isn't this like basic Marxist and socialist theory?
as i recall, marx made a distinction between productive and unproductive labor. housework was unproductive labor. marx and engels and some of their followers later argued that the thing to do was to move housework from the realm of unproductive labor to the realm of productive labor. marxist feminists in the late 70s argued for social policies that would pay women to do housework. the point was to _socialize_ production. they actually wanted to bring it into the realm of wage-labor. (i'm not advocating this approach. i thought it was the most assinine policy proposal i'd every heard when i first read about it).
remember marx's famous phrase about how work was socialized already? (i can't recall the exact quote and am too lazy to look it up). the socialization of labor (the division of labor in which we all depend on one another to produce the goods and services we need.) was the opposition against the centralization of capital. the two antagonisms that characterized capitalist class society.
and remember that needs are historical: they constantly change. in the process of creating the goods and services we need now, we create new needs. this is why EE, i say that marx believed that work/labor/whatever you wanna call it is fund. to human being. (in the past i've argued that it should be human being (as process) rather than nature or essence as thing. hope that makes ya feel better EE.)
marx was saying that we already had a division of labor and this was a good thing! a complex division of labor created plenty of material goods with less effort, objectively speaking. the point was to truly socialize it so that people had control over what and how they produced things. work wasn't alienating because it existed under a complex division of labor (which is what Adam Smith said). work was alienating because we didn't have control over what we produced, how we produced it, and why.
marx believed that we objectified our humanity in our work. think: hegel. the problem is, under capitalist class relations--we could no longer see ourselves objectified in our work. instead, the object was fetishized, while individuals/humanity receded. instead of fulfilling our creative potentials in productive labor, we began to see objects as who we were. (put simply)
(see his work on religion to really understand. to really understand, it's helpful to know how indebted Marx is to aristotle's conception of causality in Physus)
we are alienated, not because of a division of labor per se, but because the products of our labor do not belong to us. so, alienation is characterized by four things:
1. we are alienated from the products of our labor. we no longer determnine what is to be made nor how to dispose of it. work has become a means to another end, rather than an end in itself (acquiring money to buy things.) Because people no longer have a meaningful rel. to the thing they create, they come to related to the things they produce as alien objects rather than extensions of themselves.
2. people are alienated from the _process_ of work. someone else controls _how_ it is done (tools, techniques, methods, pace, etc).
3. people are alienated b/c they are denied the opp. for creative, productive activity. marx believed that such creative activity was essential to human life, what made us different from the ants that simply created ant hills because it was instinctive.
4. alienated labor is isolated, not pat of a collectively organized project of meeting human needs. we are alienated from each other as we go about our work lives under contemporary captialism. we don't understand how our work fits in with the bigger picture. our work always involves others; we are interdependent. contemporary class relations make it difficult to see that. as such, we are alienated
At 07:02 PM 1/25/02 +0000, Erik Empson wrote:
>This is just a tautology. Too right 'work' is something to be opposed in
>principle when what is understood by that principle coincides with
>absoltuely with its current social form. 'Work' would have an absolutely
>different essence under communism, and its not true to Marx nor to that
>project to conflate them.
no one is.
>It is contradictory to argue that for Marx man's
>essence is the result of the totality of historically existant social
>relationships and then in the same breath argue that he thinks one type of
>social relation is an enduring quality of being human. Still, I think I know
>what you mean.
i'm not arguing that work as we've known is man's essence. rather, marx argued that what made us distinct from other animals is that we produce our own subsistence and substantially change the natural world and ourselves in doing it. we have to work. if you call making shelter, food, and clothing something other than work, fine. even hunting and fishing is work. if you interpret marx to mean that hunting and fishing is play, somehow not work, then i think you need to lose your contemporary understanding of hunting and fishing.
i'm arguing that marx would not likely claim that we should do away with work completely--though surely he advocated the use of technology and the division of labor to reduce its burdens--since he wanted us to be able to fulfill our capacities as creative, productive human beings.
but that is precisely the debate in the first place, for some here were arguing that technology, in and of itself, was the problem.
kelley