Exploitation and Alienation in Marx Essay

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Mark and Rawls

Karl Marx: Capitalist Society is Exploitative and Alienating

The Communist Manifesto characterizes capitalism as exploitative and alienating by pointing to three primary features. The Manifesto identifies the role of industrialization and technological advances, the commodification of the individual laborer, and the profit derived by some members of society not from their own labor but that of others. (Marx, 68-72) Capitalist society's tendency to produces classes of people who are either members of the bourgeoisie or proletariat, and the remnants of the aristocracy is itself seen as problematic. In Marx's attack of the bourgeoisie, he links the capitalist process itself to their own downfall. He writes "what the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all is their own grave diggers." (Marx, 79). This overly dramatic sentence and indeed the chapter can be viewed as a bit of propaganda or an act of psychological warfare against Marx's critics, but what it illustrates is the relationship between industry and Marx's notion of exploitation. The two are nearly inseparable.

As to the exploitative implications of the means of production, Marx and Engel are concerned that the value of the individual laborer's wages are reduced in value because of the sheer scale of production- I think he is pointing to the ability to negotiate that comes with monopolies. They write "no sooner than is the exploitation of the laborer…at end…then he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie." (Marx, 70) In that passage they seem to be asserting that the earning of wages is necessarily exploitative because now one has to exchange labor indirectly for food, where as in the agrarian era -- an individual's labor could be calculated by some amount of land tilled or bushels collected.

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The exploitive component comes from what they call the "piece male sale" of the laborer and the commodification of his labor. The disconnect between labor and the means of subsistence is considered to create the conditions for exploitation and it is this disconnect that the Communist Manifesto attempts to address.

Capitalism Does Not Exploit Workers

For Marx the argument that capitalism does not exploit workers because the worker in a capitalist system contributes to the productive process would not be very compelling. Marx and Engels already acknowledge that the laborer contributes to the productive process; their contention is not that laborers are absent but rather in their existence as laborers subject to exchanges of labor for wages, and wages for goods, they are exploited.

Beyond just the capitalist conception of labor v goods, Marx and Engels were concerned about the implications that the existence of a class structure posed for entire periods of human history. When Engels writes that "the economic production and the structure of every historical epoch; that consequently…all history has been a history of class struggles…" (125), it is clear that the Manifesto is concerned less about the fate of the individual and more about the fate of society.….....

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