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employer-employee relationship and factors affecting
marx critiques of capitalism
social inequality in the workplace
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The relationship between worker and employer has created what is perhaps the most prominent disparity in the capitalist economy. Wage labor is controlled by private owners who manage trade, production, and industry with the goal of making profit. A worker’s labor becomes a marketable instrument used by a proprietor for capital accumulation. Since the laborer works in the service of his employer, the employer has ultimate control over both the wage and assignment of the worker. Karl Marx dubbed the result of this divide, alienation, or Entfremdung, which asserts the supremacy of prolificacy over the well-being of the worker. According to Marx’s theory of alienation, the worker becomes estranged from the object of production, from the product itself, from his autonomy in the workplace, and from fellow workers. In this excerpt from the New York Times, which discusses the distribution of capital among Google Venture employees, Bill Maris, managing partner of the company, addresses these ramifications. Maris believes that because “Google values openness over hierarchy (Miller)” and makes certain that its employees receive an equitable salary and fair say in deciding their task; the workers in Google Ventures may not be “alienated.” However, although his reasoning encompasses Marx’s theory, Marx would contend that capitalism inevitably alienates workers from their potential to realize their full humanity regardless of Google Ventures’ worker privileges and would thus, disagree with Bill Maris, which I will go on to discuss in greater detail.
The article declares that a primary issue in firms is an uneven distribution of wealth. The text explains that “profits from successful investments,” which are known as carry, in the “vast majorit...
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...ion making privileges, the worker is still alienated from the four aspects described in Marx's theory. I agree with Marx that workers are alienated in all four senses as long as they work for someone or something. When a human being becomes one's employee, he essentially becomes his employer's possession in the workplace. Even if he works in good conditions, he must adhere to the requests of whoever provides his salary. In a modern capitalist economy, and as long as wage labor exists, alienation is absolutely inevitable. Wage labor is defined as the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells his labor under a formal or informal employment contract. Regardless of how generous a worker's salary may be, he is still selling his labor to his employer, and is therefore a marketable commodity, even in a company like Google Ventures.
His critiques highlight his concern that capitalism makes economic exclusion inevitable. He believes that under a capitalist system, workers lose their identities as individual agents and instead become slaves to their own labor and to their employer. One may initially claim that working actually contributes to a sense of self, rather than detracts from it. While this makes sense intuitively, Marx contends that “labor is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself” (30). In other words, while work may not be inherently isolating at first, under capitalism, work shifts from where individuals first develop skills to where employees are then performing labor for the sake of another. Additionally, when an agent no longer identifies with his labor, it may compromise his identity. For example, if I am a skilled plumber and I consider this to be central to who I am, then under a capitalist system where my plumbing is only valued insofar as it brings instrumental benefits, I am stripped of the intrinsic value of plumbing. In this regard, “the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien” (29). Essentially, labor for a system of capital perpetuates alienation, as each worker just becomes another cog in the
Karl Marx sums up the basics of his thoughts on alienated labour well in the first paragraph in the last section of the first Manuscript. “On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and propertyless workers.” This is how our society today really does work, and it is much more evident then in 1844 when karl marx was writing about this.
According to Marx, estranged labor occurs when an individual partakes in the production of an object that “confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer” (Marx, 1844). Due to this objectification of labor, which results in labor being established outside of the producer, Marx suggests that this is translated into the separation between an individual and the object that he or she has created. As such, under the capitalist mode of production, the individual is unable to connect with his or her labor. This contrasted strongly against Marx’s statement in The German Ideology (1932) that the individual is a free and self-realized being who makes labor an object of his free choice and consciousness.
Marx, discuss a certain concept of alienated labor as an unavoidable result of capitalist system. The framework that he tries to draw in the book is that capitalist system should be blamed to have class strafication and alienated labor in the society. In a capitalist society people suffer from class conflict and property ownership of bourgeoisie. Bourgeoisie owns the big factories and businesses so then, small manufacturers have to shut down and basically have to join the labors in the big businesses. Workers in capitalist system are obligated to work for long hours under unhealthy conditions for really low salaries. In order to feed a family provide just basic needs, they have to accept those conditions otherwise they would be down the street without any source of income. While bourgeoisie class is enjoying large profits and luxuries life that has been provided by the effort of labors, they can barely themselves and the family.
(Marx 1) this job was real estate I was working in a very competitive office in Crown-Heights and every here and there they had meetings with the very wealthy building owners on what they should do to make thing better and by the looks of it they all became nastier the the next the look of peoples faces when they would do anything for money even though they have so much of it is remarkable. Another alienation I noticed was alienation of product Karl Marx mentions in his passage Alienated labor “That the product of labor does not belong to the worker” (Marx 6). I remember when I would do showings that I would make the unto look so amazing that I made it sound like it doesn’t even need a broker, it so happens to be that one time someone actually said “if this unit is so amazing why is there a brokers fee you could have sent me the keys and ill show it to myself” I don’t know what was worse the feeling of someone calling me useless or my boss and my trainee witnessing that, from that moment I learned something and that it that never make the cure for something make a treatment so you’re not used for a one time service you always make
When you hear the name Karl Marx (1818-1883), it is tempting to wonder and question why you should be studying him, considering that he’s been dead for over a hundred years already. This German philosopher had become one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. Marx’s ideas all come together and holds that human societies develop through class struggles, a conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that dominates over the working class (known as the proletariat). He was well known for studying the disputes that occur between different classes in society, also refer to as the ‘conflict theory.’ Through his theories of alienation, Marx argued that capitalism promoted the idea of inequality, commodification, and the exploitation of labor. The purpose of this paper is to view Marx’s concept of capitalism and alienation along with how it affects the workers.
Marx, Karl. “Alienated Labor.” In Classics of Moral and Political Theory, edited by Michael L. Morgan, 1160-1166. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011.
Karl Marx’s article titled Estranged Labor as found in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts pays significant attention to the political economic system, which is commonly referred to capitalism. He further delves into nature of the political economy with a keen focus on how it has negatively impacted the worker or laborer. Therefore, the laborer forms the subject of his critical and detailed analysis as tries demonstrates the ill nature of the political economy. To start with Karl Marx portrays how the political economy as presented by its proponents has led to emergence of two distinct classes in society; the class of property owners and on the other hand, the class of property less workers. According to Karl Marx (2004), proponents of the political economy have introduced concepts such as private property and competition indicating without providing any form of analytical explanation but rather just expecting the society to embrace and apply such concepts. In particular, political economists have failed to provide a comprehensive explanation for division that has been established between capital and labor. Estranged Labor clearly depicts Marx’s dissatisfaction as well as disapproval towards the political economy indicating that proponents of such a system want the masses to blindly follow it without any form of intellectual or practical explanation. One area that Karl Marx demonstrates his distaste and disappointment in the article is worker or the laborer and how the worker sinks to not just a commodity but rather a wretched commodity (Marx, 2004). This is critical analysis of Karl Marx concept or phenomenon on the alienation of the worker as predicted in Estranged Labor in several aspects and how these concepts are ...
Because of the conditions that the wage-workers worked in, Marx described it as exploitation. Marx felt that the wage workers were being exploited. The capitalist, also known as the bourgeoisie, were exploiting the wage workers, the proletariats, because of their cheap labor. They were essentially using them to create and increase their own profit. This in turn brought up alienation. Basically, alienation, also known as estrangement, is when a person is separated from their work, what they produce, themselves, and their environment. Marx’s theory of alienation was used to describe workers laboring under the capitalist society. The workers, also known as wage laborers, were commodities—things that are bought, sold, or exchanged in the market. They were selling their labor which means that they were being alienated from what they were doing.
Alienation, in Marxist terms, refers to the separation of the mass of wage workers from the products of their own labor. Marx first expressed the idea, somewhat poetically, in his 1844 Manuscripts: "The object that labor produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer."
Throughout my work experience I have been a witness to various degrees of work alienation. As I continue to gather additional experience in the work environment and engage in discussions with fellow employees, it is clearly evident that there is workplace discontentment and feelings of being taken advantage of. Based on my work experiences to date, I agree with James Rinehart’s claim that forms of alienation are evident in the workplace. They force human beings into modes of behaviour that are unnatural and possibly harmful. I will illustrate that as we live in a capitalist environment, employees have little say or control over decisions made by their employers; workers do not have power over the processes or methods of work; workers lack fulfillment and are not treated fairly in their workplace and class structures are created to show dominance behavior.
Marx’s theory of alienation is the process by which social organized productive powers are experienced as external or alien forces that dominate the humans that create them. He believes that production is man’s act on nature and on himself. Man’s relationship with nature is his relationship with his tools, or means of production. Man’s relationship with himself is fundamentally his relationship to others. Since production is a social concept to Marx, man’s relationship with other men is the relations of production. Marx’s theory of alienation specifically identifies the problems that he observed within a capitalist society. He noted that workers lost determination by losing the right to be sovereign over their own lives. In a capitalist society, the workers, or Proletariats, do not have control over their productions, their relationship with other producers, or the value or ownership of their production. Even though he identifies the workers as autonomous and self-realizing, the Bourgeoisie dictates their goals and actions to them. Since the bourgeoisie privately owns the means of production, the workers’ product accumulates surplus only for the interest of profit, or capital. Marx is unhappy with this system because he believes that the means of production should be communally owned and that production should be social. Marx believes that under capitalism, man is alienated in four different ways. First, he says that man, as producers, is alienated from the goods that he produces, or the object. Second, man is alienated from the activity of labor to where...
Marx’s theory of alienation describes the separation of things that naturally belong together. For Marx, alienation is experienced in four forms. These include alienation from ones self, alienation from the work process, alienation from the product and alienation from other people. Workers are alienated from themselves because they are forced to sell their labor for a wage. Workers are alienated from the process because they don’t own the means of production. Workers are alienated from the product because the product of labor belongs to the capitalists. Workers do not own what they produce. Workers are alienated from other people because in a capitalist economy workers see each other as competition for jobs. Thus for Marx, labor is simply a means to an end.
The relationship between employer and employees plays a pivotal role in the performance of the organization. Employers and employees have certain responsibilities towards each other which facilitate a fair and productive workplace. Positive work relationships create a cooperative climate with effort towards the same goals. Conflict, on the other hand, is likely to divert attention away from organizational performance.
How difficult (or easy) is it for an employer to prevent an employee working for others (or themselves), both during the employment and after it has ended? Refer to relevant cases and legislation.