Marx's View

Marx believed that as the process of industrialization advanced, workers were robbed of any meaningful relationship to their work. The emphasis on the specialization of tasks, he believed, contributed to a growing sense of alienation among industrial workers. The term alienation refers to a condition of estrangement or dissociation from the surrounding society. Consider today's telemarketers, who make "cold calls" to sell people products and services. Do they feel a part of the financial institution that employs them? But it wasn't just the monotonous repetition of the same tasks that concerned Marx. In his view, an even deeper cause of alienation was the powerlessness of workers in a capitalist economic system. Workers had no control over their occupational tasks, the products of their labor, or the distribution of profits. Moreover, they were constantly producing property that was owned by others (the members of the capitalist class).

The solution to the problem of workers' alienation, according to Marx, was to give workers greater control over the workplace and the products of their labor. Marx didn't focus on the limited reform of factory life; rather, he envisioned a revolutionary overthrow of capitalist oppression. After a transition to collective ownership of the means of production (socialism), the ideal of communism would eventually be achieved. Yet the trend in capitalist societies has been toward concentration of ownership by giant corporations. Currently, about 49 percent of the paid U.S. labor force is employed by business firms with more than 500 workers. Through mergers and acquisitions, such corporations become even larger, and individual workers find themselves dwarfed by firms of overwhelming size and power.

When Marx wrote about work and alienation in 1844, the physical conditions of labor were much harsher than they are today. Yet his writings inspired research that persists today, even though workers now enjoy safer, more comfortable surroundings. Most studies of alienation have focused on how structural changes in the economy serve to increase or decrease worker satisfaction. In fact, the growth of the size of businesses, the emergence of huge franchise chains, and the dominance of multinational corporations have only increased the isolation of laborers. Large business organizations report an escalation in episodes of "desk rage," in which employees or angry ex-employees act out their frustrations, disrupting the workplace and often raising other workers' alienation in the process.

Marx focused on alienation among the proletariat, whom he viewed as powerless to effect change in capitalist institutions. But by the 1980s, the term burnout was increasingly being used to describe the stress experienced by a wide range of workers, including professionals, self-employed persons, and even unpaid volunteers. The concept of work-related anxiety now covers alienation even among more affluent workers, who have a greater degree of control over their working conditions. From a conflict perspective, we have masked the fact that alienation falls most heavily on the lower and working classes by making it appear to be endemic, from the boardroom to the shop floor.

Поиск по сайту: