Dignity Denial and Social Conflicts

Abstract

Struggles over dignity and dignity denial are a central facet of class struggles and other struggles under capitalism. Marxist theory, however, has not developed an adequate understanding of dignity denial or of struggles against it as a crucial part of capitalism and its dialectic. This paper discusses dignity denial as inherent both in a society based on commodity production for profit and also in the political, ideational, and social implications of capitalist production. It shows how struggles against such dignity denial are also inherent in capitalism. Finally, the paper suggests that an enhanced appreciation for and theorization of dignity denial and the struggles around it can help when framing issues for concrete conflict situations and can also help the development of firmer and better visions of a future socialism.

Key Words:

• Capitalism
• Dignity Denial
• Labor
• Marxism
• Scapegoating

Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge support from the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, projects P30 DA11041 (Center for Drug Use and HIV Research) and R01 DA19383 (Staying Safe), from a Fogarty International Center/NIH grant (D43 TW001037) through the AIDS International Training and Research Program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine-Argentina, and also from the University of Buenos Aires (UBACyT 20020100101021). The contents of this paper are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NIH or its institutes. We also acknowledge insightful suggestions from Pedro Mateo-Gelabert and Milagros Sandoval.

Notes

1. There are of course many definitions of “dignity” based on different philosophies, disciplines, and politics. A useful review is Jacobson (2007). Merriam Webster defines dignity as “the quality or state of being worthy, honored, or esteemed.”

2. Marx (1964, 112) expresses it thus:

Man is a species-being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but—and this is only another way of expressing it—also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.

 The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art—his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible—so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body—both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man's inorganic body—nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

 In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man [emphasis added to this sentence]. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.

While describing this issue in relationship to capitalism, Hudis (2012, 60) says, “Private interest prevails over the general interest in the form of private ownership of the production-process. As noted earlier, Marx views the predominance of the former over the latter as a violation of the communal or social nature of humanity.”

3. The names of those who took part in the interviews referenced throughout the paper have been changed to protect their confidentiality.

4. There are ideologies of the dignity of labor. These have three roots: (1) employed workers are contrasted with unemployed “idlers,” as is discussed later in the paper; (2) workers and unions, as part of their struggles against dignity denial, have made claims about the dignity of work (see Thompson 1963; Montgomery 1979); and (3) some employers and their representatives make claims that they respect their workers, perhaps evoking images of happy families.

5. This is an aspect of the social component of wages as Marx discussed it and as Lebowitz (2003) has discussed at some length.

6. The works of Piven and Cloward (1971 and 1977) and of Sartelli (2013) and Lo Vuolo et al. (1999) also show how the poor in the USA and Latin America have sometimes reacted to degrading treatment by demanding higher welfare payments, asserting their dignity, and engaging in various forms of direct social action.

7. In addition, both the logic of capital as a value relationship that has to expand and the logic of the capitalist state system have led to wars of conquest to subordinate the resources and labor of conquered or conquerable countries to the needs of capitalist value production and competition. See Smith (1991), Harvey (2003), and Callinicos (2009).

8. See Anderson (2010), Draper (1978), Dunayevskaya (1981), Fanon (1963, 1965, 1967), Farber (2000), Galeano (1971), James (1960), Marable (1983), Memmi (1991), Myrdal (1944), Shalom (1983), and Wolf (2009).

9. A study on imprisonment for drug crimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay showed that those who are incarcerated tend to occupy the lowest links in the chain of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of drugs, such as users caught with small amounts of drugs and small dealers. In seven of these countries for which it was possible to obtain data for the fifteen years from 1992 to 2007, the incarceration rate has increased, on average, more than 100 percent (TNI and WOLA 2011). These data show a strong relationship to neoliberal policies, particularly those aimed at combating drug trafficking through repression of drug consumption.

10. One advantage of trade unionism is that it usually tries to reduce or eliminate such underpayment for the same kind of work, and it also (although probably less often) tries to insist on equal access to employment at each job (Hill and Jones 1993; Moody 1998).

11. See Dziuban and Friedman (forthcoming). These struggles have also been touched on in Friedman (1998b); Friedman et al. (2007); Friedman and Rossi (2011); Friedman, Schneider, and Latkin (2012); Rossi (2012); and Simic and Rhodes (2009).