1)
By reading through the text of extraction, in a nutshell it implies the dissatisfaction borne by the receptionist due to working as a machine not as a human. According to the cited text, the receptionist has innate notion that she was a cog of wheel of conceptual machine. What is the origin of this dissatisfaction? Philosopher Carl Marx stated that emerged because of estranged labour and alienation from the world. He formed his conceptualization of estrangement of labour which helped to identify what caused the dissatisfaction of the labour.
Karl Marx believed that the society is divided into classes as propertied and propertyless; everything is considered in terms of utility or commodity and price in the capitalism. Marx recognized the labour is external to the individual because it is not an important part of his being. Therefore, intrinsically individual does not exist and confirm herself in her work itself. As a result of this the individual, like receptionist in this case denies herself, feels unhappy and miserable, and cannot develop mental or physical energy freely. Actually, she is hostile to herself. She can feel herself when she is not working, not she is working. She can feel she has a home when she is not working where as she feels homeless when she is working. All in all, her labour is not volunteered but coerced. It means and when she is working she feel at it is not real satisfaction of the worker other than just attempts to satisfy needs outside it.
Within the perimeter of external labour, man alienates himself and it seems some kind of self-sacrifice and self-humiliation. Eventually the worker sensed that his spontaneous activities possessed or disposed by others not by him, that is the loss of worker...
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...apitalists who gain the profit at the cheap cost of labours. Therefore, the workers feel alienated from and antagonistic towards the entire system which is appropriated by the capitalists. In the case of receptionist, she estranged herself from the society bonded with machine. The circumstances create alienation workers from the human relationships, precisely from human nature.
Here, it can be summarized relating the receptionist that the receptionist has dissatisfaction towards job since she is alienated from her labour, alienated from what she produced, from the wealth she created and alienated from her own life.
By considering above aspects of estrangement it is viable to analyze why the receptionist feel about her job and her dissatisfaction towards her job. Their existence assists to capitalist keep their production intake at cheap cost of labour.
2)
This paper focuses mainly on the sincereity as well as the passion with which we do our job. Human body is a very sophisticated machine created by God himself. It can do all sorts of things but there are a few things at which the human body gets very perfect.And that perfectness comes from practice, devotion,love,sincerity and responsibility towards that particular thing. Let me associate the word "thing" in the previous sentence as working. Working for living. Reason I chose to write on this topic was that the Poem " Singapore" written by author Mary Oliver that I read in the book by John Schilb and John Clifford influenced me alot. The Poem narrates the life of a woman which works on an aeroplane and is cleaning teh restrooms which are very dirty. She visually and physically finds the job dirty. But while cleaning that restrooms she sees it in her own world.She finds her hands working in pleasure as she is wondering the scenes of rivers. She realises the truth of life that she has to work to earn her living.
...ering the thoughts and opinions of their employee. On the other side, despite the hash and dangerous working environment, the workers could not quit. The jobs at the factories were their main source of income and without it they would suffer form hunger and poverty. Hence, the workers at that time were tangled in the system that only supports a small proportion of the population, the upper class.
Commodity fetishism has blinded people into believing that value is a relationship between objects, when in reality, it is a relationship between people. This in turn, prevents people from thinking about the social labor condition workers have to endure; they only care and value about how much objects costs. They think that the source of the value comes from the cost, but it truly comes from labor (FC). Through this objectification stems alienation and estrangement. Marx starts with the assumption that humans have an intrinsic quality. As human beings, individuals like to be create and manipulate his or her environment. Creating is a part of people; therefore, people their being into their creations. However, Marx postulates that capitalism and specialized division of labor separates that working class from their creations in four ways- through alienation from the product, the labor process, one’s species-being, and humanity itself. The working class suffers through this hostility to make create more wealth for owners of factories. They get trapped in a cycle to make products for profit, but as automation advances, machines begins to take over people’s jobs; therefore, there less employment opportunities available, which in turn allows factory owners to decrease wages and exploit and devalue the working class (EL). In the The Poverty
...ory of alienation are of course present in the film Norma Mae. The characters in the film are shown to be working in a loud, fast paced environment, performing repetitive tasks in a factory. The tasks they perform are for the creation of factory products, which does not belong to them. The film also displays alienation between co-workers, when the main character is briefly promoted to a supervisory position, causing her to be alienated from her friends in the factory. Characters are also frequently shown to shout with each other in the factory due to the noise, with one character at one point even suffering from deafness. The final component of alienation is displayed with the characters feeling alienated from their own potential. They are shown to work in a very low quality environment for minimum wage, and the management shows very little regard for its workers.
Alienated labor takes away the meaning of life and that “life appears only as a means to life.” Living without creativity and only to subsist reduces humans to an animal-like status; they are alienated from the very things that distinguish them as humans” (Dillon, 2010, pg. 54). This can been vividly seen as the industrial revolution moved forward in society. Factory workers were very much alienated by their job. Below are some examples that correspond with Marx’s
Marx’s idea of the estrangement of man from the product of his labor described the suffering of countless hours or work by the laborer, contributing to the production of a product that he could not afford with the wages he made. He helped to produce a product that only those wealthier than he could afford. As the society around him became more object-oriented, he became increasingly more alienated. In the lager, one factor that distanced the laborer from his product was that he no longer worked for a wage, but for survival. In a description of his fellow worker, Levi wrote, “He seems to think that his present situation is like outside, where it is honest and logical to work, as well as being of advantage, because according to what everyone says, the more one works the more one earns and eats.” Levi pitied his fellow worker for his naivety, as the Lager was not a place of labor for prosperity, but strictly a place of labor by force. One worked in order to live, focusing more on the uncertainty of their next meal, day, or even breath than the product of their l...
In the 19th century Karl Marx gave an economic analysis of alienation. He suggested that people were alienated from their own labour because they did not own their means of producing their work.... ... middle of paper ... ...
The concept of alienation plays a significant role in Marx's early political writing, especially in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1848, but it is rarely mentioned in his later works. This implies that while Marx found alienation useful in investigating certain basic aspects of the development of capitalist society, it is less useful in putting forward the predictions of the collapse of capitalism. The aim of this essay is to explain alienation, and show how it fits into the pattern of Marx's thought. It will be concluded that alienation is a useful tool in explaining the affect of capitalism on human existence. In Marx's thought, however, the usefulness of alienation it is limited to explanation. It does not help in either predicting the downfall of capitalism, or the creation of communism.
One of these problems that occurs in work is alienation. Alienation is defined as, “The Sense of meaninglessness and powerlessness that people experience when interacting with social institutions they consider
According to Karl Marx, alienation is a result of living in a socially stratified society, because the mechanistic parts of a social class alienates a person from his or her humanity and human nature. This is done through the work of the market economy and capitalism in which prior, society was cohesive and worked together to combine and achieve ultimate goals. However, with the onset of capitalism, the market economy placed individuals on metaphoric stations doing one single task to accomplish mass production. Based on specific qualities, education, and abilities, people were placed on a specific role to accomplish a task for the powerful to make more money. Since the ideology of capitalism came before psychology, the field of psychology was inherently influenced by this type of process, which has been ingrained into out socialization of society’s function. Methodological Individualism attempts to identify all human characteristics on an indefinite continuum. Once these characteristics are understood, scientists can then research and control for specific outcomes in order to ultimately control human behaviour; this is how psychology functions today. By reducing human beings, we can understand the strengths and weaknesses of individuals and have them place on a track to fit in with a capitalist economy. Like the market economy, humans are issued on a chain for mass
For Marx, then labour is "alien to the worker.[and].does not." belong to his essential being. " Marx identifies two explanations of why men lack. identity with labour leads him to be estranged from labour. (1) "
In conclusion, Marx states that the worker is alienated from his own life as well as individuality. This level of estrangement from one’s own life can be equated to slavery as he cannot think, make decision or plan for his future life but rather the capitalist is his owner. Labor camps tend to characterize workers as objects which should be act or behave as normal human beings but are required to follow a set routine of activities in the production of products.
In the early 1900’s people were content with the simple pleasures in life. They spent their time with family and friends, instead of the engaged in electronics. It is during this time of family devotion and satisfaction with the things they had in life that Kafka wrote a story about a man who continued to work a job where he felt alienated and unappreciated. The story portrays a loathsome image of the internal struggles that the workforce is soon to face when Gregor states, “The work is so much more strenuous than it would be in head office, and then there’s the additional ordeal of traveling, worries about train connections, the irregular, bad meals, new people all the time, no continuity, no affection,” (Puchner, Kafka, 2012, p211). Then he continues his internal self-sabotage when saying “If I tried that out with my director some time: it would be the order of the boot just like that… once I’ve got the money together to pay back what my parents owe (my boss)… Then we will have the parting of the ways. But for the time being, I’d better look sharp,...
From a scholarly point of view, the film accurately depicts the lifestyle of a factory worker in the timeframe. Workers would stand on an assembly line and repeat the same action day in and day out. The film also depicts the transition of the human dependency of machines very well. The workers would work at the pace of the machines. The film also had metaphors of humans being controlled by machines when the main actor was sucked into the pulley system of a machine. The film also has a scene where there is a machine that automatically feeds humans.
The synopsis of Marx’s Theory of Alienation is the belief that in a contemporary industrial society driven by capitalism, the working class will eventually lose jurisdiction over their lives by relinquishing control over their work. Prior to capitalism, tradesmen would be the proprietors of their own workplace, be able to set and keep their own hours of operation, be the driving force behind developing and producing the product, have the ability to create and maintain their working conditions, as well as have input on how the commodity is bartered or sold, and the associations and rapport with the people whom he worked with and had dealings with had a more intimate character to them.