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Abstract
This paper aims to evaluate Marx’s conception of alienated labour from the point of view of Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of practice. I will argue that Marx’s conception of alienation in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (and elsewhere) is too abstract, and therefore needs to be revised to reflect the reality of the 21st century. It presupposes that, in capitalism, all salaried and waged labour is alienated (a claim recently reiterated by Amy Wendling in her otherwise outstanding Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation). Clearly, this is not the case. The key characteristics of alienation as spelled out by Marx may not be present in a great variety of contemporary jobs dominated by services, especially if they are (or can be seen as) MacIntyrean practices (for example, practicing medicine in a public hospital or working as an engineer in a private company). Drawing on some of the most notable literature on the forms of alienation and reification, I will aim to theorise the conception of meaningful non-alienated labour. Given that practices, as meaningful non-alienated activities, are small islands of human excellence and resistance against the economic pressures of institutional profit maximisation and the self-valorisation of capital, I will conclude the paper by considering the political importance of this conception of labour for anti-capitalist struggles in the 21st century.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This research was funded by a grant (No. S-MIP-21-48) from the Research Council of Lithuania.
2 Carl Benedict Frey, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 320.
3 The list of end of work and post-work literature is long and growing. Not all of it, of course, is informed by Marxist political economy. One of the first to advance the end of work thesis was Jeremy Rifkin with his book The End of Work (New York: Putnam Books, 1995), which was later called ‘prophetic’ while its author, for good or bad, enjoyed great success, recognition, and influence. The end of work thesis has also been extensively debated within the fields of sociology and political economy (see, e.g., Shaun Wilson, The Struggle Over Work: The ‘End of Work’ and Employment Alternatives for Post-Industrial Societies (London: Routledge, 2004)). The most recent defenders of this thesis from the point of view of the Left, i.e., as a desirable future, are Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2015). Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (London: Verso, 2019) and Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (London: Penguin Books, 2016) also argue for this thesis, although Mason is less explicit about a future beyond work and focuses on the contradictions that the digitalisation of production poses to capitalism.
4 Geoff Moore, Virtue at Work: Ethics for Individuals, Managers, and Organisations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
5 A similar view is expressed by Ch. Byron, ‘The Normative Force behind Marx's Theory of Alienation’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 41:3 (2013), pp. 427–435 where he argues for the normative Aristotelian foundation of Marx’s theory of alienation.
6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998 [1958]).
7 Aristotelis, Politica, edited by D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 1251b16.
8 A. Bielskis, ‘Managers would not need subordinates and masters would not need slaves’: Aristotle’s Oikos and Oikonomia Reconsidered’ in Andrius Bielskis, Kelvin Knight, Eleni Leontsini (eds) Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Aristotelianism (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 40–57.
9 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1985 [1981]), p. 187.
10 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990 [1867]), p. 138, ft. 16.
11 There is, of course, a growing body of literature on Marx’s ‘Aristotelianism’, whether supposed or not, but the claim of Marx’s ‘thin Aristotelianism’ is indeed convincing: there are (loosely understood) Aristotelian ethical-normative premises implicit in Marx’s analysis and critique of capitalism which, although they were underdeveloped and undertheorised, informed his notion of ‘species being’ and freedom as our ability to cultivate our powers and engage in higher activity (see Ruth Groff, ‘On the Ethical Contours of Thin Aristotelian Marxism’ in Michael J. Thompson (ed) Constructing Marxist Ethics (Leiden: Brill, 2015, 313–35)).
12 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2015).
13 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 3 (London: Penguin, 1991 [1894]), p. 959.
14 J. M. Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ in John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963 [1930]), p. 358–73.
15 See e.g. J. Noonan, ‘All Work and No Play? The Role of Non-Alienated Labor in Marcuse’s Emancipatory Vision’, Constellations, 27:2 (2020), pp. 300–12.
16 MacIntyre, op cit., p. 187.
17 Ibid., p. 188.
18 Ibid., p. 190.
19 There is a great deal of good secondary literature on this subject. The most noteworthy recent accounts are Amy Wendling’s Marx on Alienation and Technology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Sean Sayers’ Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
20 Ch. Arthur, ‘Objectification and Alienation in Marx and Hegel’ in Radical Philosophy, 30 (1982), p. 16.
21 Ibid, p. 14.
22 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 30, 37.
23 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, op cit., 120.
24 Aristotle, Politics, edited by R. Stalley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1257b41.
25 On contemporary forms of kitsch and its genealogical critique, see Andrius Bielskis, Towards a Postmodern Understanding of the Political (New York: Plagrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 58–94.
26 György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 83.
27 Ibid, p. 100.
28 Ibid., p. 92.
29 Ibid., p. 86, 93.
30 Ibid., p. 94.
31 Ibid., p. 100.
32 As he put it himself: ‘[modern philosophy] did not manage to do more than provide a complete intellectual copy and the a priori deduction of bourgeois society’, ibid., p. 148.
33 Ibid., p. 145.
34 Ibid., p. 142.
35 Ibid., p. 145.
36 Ibid.
37 For this point I am grateful to Alasdair MacIntyre, who, commenting on Lukács, claimed that ‘the logic of his own theorising committed Lukács to denouncing himself. Which he did. The theorists of the Third International condemned what they saw as Lukács’ subjectivism, voluntarism, and revolutionary romanticism’, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (London: Duckworth, 1995 [1968]), p. 100.
38 Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 55.
39 Andrius Bielskis, Existence, Meaning, Excellence (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 69–74.
40 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, translated by D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1109b33–34.
41 As Nilou Mobasser acutely put it a while ago, what matters is the distinction ‘between activity determined by external necessity (things we do only because we have to for some reason or other) and activity determined by internal necessity (things we do because we want or need to, where this want or need is dictated by our personal characteristics)’, Nilou Mobasser, ‘Marx and Self-Realisation’, The New Left Review, 161 (1987), p. 122.
42 The issue of meaningful labour vis-à-vis Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of ‘practice’ will be discussed in the next section.
43 One of the definitions of a so-called natural slave provided by Aristotle in Politics is: ‘anybody who by his nature is not his own, but another’s, is by his nature a slave; anybody who, being a man, is an article of property is another’s man; an article of property is an instrument for the purpose of action and separable from its possessor’, Aristotle, op. cit. 1254a14-16. For a critique of Aristotle’s notorious account of ‘natural slaves’ from the point of view of his teleology, see Andrius Bielskis, Existence, Meaning, Excellence, op cit., p. 90–95).
44 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, [1913] 2003).
45 The International Labour Organisation’s Forced Labour Convention defines forced labour as ‘all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily’, ‘Global Estimates of Modern Slavery’, International Labour Organisation, Geneva, 2022, p. 2.
46 Graeber argues that there are five types of bullshit jobs: 1) flunky jobs are those whose essence is to make someone else feel or look important (different feudal servants, doormen, concierges, other jobs whose sole purpose is to fill an empty place); 2) manipulative or aggressive goons (army personnel, telemarketers, bank and/or corporate lawyers, PR specialists, etc.); 3) duct tape-type jobs, defined as ‘to be forced to organise one’s working life around caring about a certain value (say, cleanliness) precisely because more important people could not care less’, which applies to both the domestic and software engineering tasks; 4) box-ticker jobs in the form of meaningless paperwork in highly bureaucratic environments to prove that organisations are doing something that they are not doing in reality; and 5) task-makers who either create bullshit tasks for others or create tasks which are actually harmful to workers or organisations, David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (London: Alan Lane, 2018), p. 28–58.
47 Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2004) and J. Bakan, The New Corporation: How ‘Good’ Corporations Are Bad for Democracy (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 2020).
48 Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 131.
49 Blake A. Allan et al, ‘Outcomes of Meaningful Work: A Meta-Analysis’, Journal of Management Studies, 56:3 (2019), p. 500–28; Catherine Bailey & Adrian Madden, ‘Why Meaningful Work Matters’, Industrial Management 59: 3 (2017), p.10–13; Catherine Bailey et al, ‘The Mismanaged Soul: Existential Labor and the Erosion of Meaningful Work’, Human Resource Management Review, 27: 3 (2017), p. 416–30; Christopher Michaelson et al, ‘Meaningful work: Connecting business ethics and organisation studies’, Journal of Business Ethics 121 (2014), p. 77–90;
50 See, for example, Simon L. Albrecht, ‘Work Engagement and the Positive Power of Meaningful Work’ in Albert B. Bakker (ed) Advances in Positive Organisational Psychology (Rotterdam: Emerald Group Publishing, 2013), p. 237–60.
51 Meaningful work was analysed from a Kantian perspective by Norman Bowie (see his ‘A Kantian Theory of Meaningful Work’, Journal of Business Ethics, 17 (1998), p. 1083–92), where he argues for at least six features of meaningful labour: it is freely chosen and entered into, it provides a sufficient wage from which workers can meet their essential needs, it is not paternalistic, and it means that workers are autonomous and independent and can develop their rational and moral capabilities (for an analysis of his arguments see Joanne B. Ciulla’s ‘Worthy Work and Bowie’s Kantian Theory of Meaningful Work’ in D. G. Arnold & J. D. Harris (eds) Kantian Business Ethics: Critical Perspectives (London: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012), p. 115–31). Mike Healy and Iwona Wilkowska’s ‘Marx, Alienation and the Denial of Dignity of Work’ in Monika Kostera & Michael Pirson (eds) Dignity and the Organisation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 99–124 and Jon Elster’s ‘Self-Realisation in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 3:2 (1986), p. 97–126 analysed meaningful labour from the Marxist point of view, arguing for the importance of workers’ ability to control their work processes, without which meaningful labour and dignity at work are impossible.
52 Ron Beadle and Kelvin Knight, ‘Virtue and Meaningful Work’, Business Ethics Quarterly 22: 2 (2012), p. 433–50; Ron Beadle, ‘Work, Meaning and Virtue’ in Ruth Yeoman et al (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Meaningful Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 73–87; Keith Breen, ‘Production and Productive Reason’, New Political Economy 17:5 (2012), p. 611–32; Moore, op cit.
53 Keith Breen, ‘Meaningful Work and Freedom: Self-Realisation, Autonomy, and Non-Domination in Work’ in Ruth Yeoman, op cit., p. 51–72.
54 Sarah Bankins and Paul Formosa, ‘The Ethical Implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Meaningful Work’, Journal of Business Ethics, 185, 2023, p. 727.
55 Geoff Moore, op cit, p. 85–88; Sarah Bankins and Paul Formosa, op cit, p. 725–40.
56 Given that this paper is informed by the intersection between Aristotelianism and Marxism, the claim that the objective aspects of meaningful labour are more important than the subjective is evident from the following. It is not inconceivable that an individual worker working for a highly exploitative company which values their professionalism (and is therefore financially generous and creates a respectful and friendly working environment) could feel that their labour is both fulfilling and highly meaningful. The subjective sense of meaning of the worker cannot, however, deny the objective reality that their labour is exploited (in Marx’s sense of exploitation) or that it creates a product which is objectively harmful for people or the environment. The Aristotelian approach presupposes that the right kinds of practices educate our desires, and therefore what we feel about our activities depends on what depositions (or virtues) we have. As MacIntyre puts it, ‘if we use “happy” and “happiness” as they are now most often used, it is often good for us to be unhappy about our lives and about the social order that we inhabit. (…) What matters is what we are unhappy about’ (see Alasdair MacIntyre ‘The Meaning of Philosophy as A Practice: Interview with Alasdair MacIntyre’ in Andrius Bielskis (ed) Apie filosofijos ir meno prasmę (Vilnius: Mykolas Romeris University, 2015), p. 40.
57 Aristotle, Politics, op cit., 1253b35–1254a1, emphasis added.
58 Amy E. Wendling, op cit.; Sacha Engel, op cit; James Steinhof, Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
59 Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016); Sascha Engel, ‘Minding Machines: A Note on Alienation’, Fast Capitalism, 16: 2 (2019), p. 129–139; Joel Bakan, Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children (New York: Free Press, 2011).
60 Evgeny Morozov, ‘Digital Socialism’, www.eurozine.com, 2020; Andrius Bielskis, ‘Judging Automation: Towards a Normative Critical Theory’, Capital and Class, advance online publication, 2023, p. 1–18.
61 Andrius Bielskis, ‘Anti-Capitalist Politics and Labour for the Twenty-first Century: History and Future Challenges’ in Andrius Bielskis & Kelvin Knight (eds) Virtue and Economy: Essays on Morality and Markets (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 229–248.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrius Bielskis
Andrius Bielskis is Director of Centre for Aristotelian Studies and Critical Theory at Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, and Professor of Philosophy at Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania. Andrius is the author of several books including Towards a Postmodern Understanding of the Political (2005), The Unholy Sacrament (in Lithuanian, 2014), On the Meaning of Philosophy and Art (2015), Existence, Meaning, Excellence (2017), and the (co)editor of Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Aristotelianism (Bloomsbury, 2020), Virtue and Economy (2015), Debating with the Lithuanian New Left: Terry Eagleton, Joel Bakan, Alex Demirovic, Ulrich Brand (2014) and Democracy without Labour Movement? (in Lithuanian 2009). He was an International Onassis Fellow at the University of Athens in 2017 pursuing research on the critique of natural inequalities in Aristotle's Politics. He is the director of DEMOS Institute of Critical Thought and completed the research project “Human Flourishing and Non-Alienated Labour in the Era of Automation” (2021-2024) funded by the Research Council of Lithuania. Email: [email protected]