8/11/2013 Lughnasa Honey Moon
Having an intellectual experience with a lot of reverb right now. I read the Communist Manifesto as I said above, but I also read estranged labor, also by Marx. The two together make for surprisingly contemporary and trenchant critiques of our political economics. A key point Marx makes is the problem for the working class is that their labor becomes, literally, objectified. That is, the thing they make, whatever it is, contains their effort and energy but belongs to another, usually, too, becoming unavailable to the ones who made it. I thought of workers on a Cadillac assembly line or LPN’s working in hospitals but not having adequate health care. The object, the product of labor, leaves the hands of the worker and his/her life, then becoming estranged from them. Thus, labor is an act of self-estrangement from the product of your labor.
Marx believed that labor should reveal and reaffirm the who that you are, make you more of, better than, the you were before your work. In this case the work is subjective, or the subject of the laborer, not an object. Here is an article from the NYT yesterday about the arguments over raising the minimum wage. And another about worker deaths in Texas. And, most tellingly, this one: U.S. Companies Thrive as Workers Fall Behind. These are from just this last week. I never immersed myself in Marxist thought so I don’t know the objections to his analysis, but from my cursory look at it, it explains a lot of the headlines.
Here’s the thing. In the third phase I have been promoting the idea of doing the work only you can do. Does that sound like work that reveals and reaffirms who you are, work that makes you more of, better than, the you before the work? It sure does to me. And that congruence feels fine to me, reinforcing. But. What if the third phase of life, life after formal education and life after full-time work, is the first time you can take up the work that only you can do? Doesn’t that mean you engaged in alienating labor that estranged you from the product of your labor?