I’ve just reread Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts… The part on estranged labor and alienation is brilliant. It’s weird, I tend to have a revelation of some sorts everytime I read Marx. I remember the first time I ever read some of his work. I was on the subway, trying to pass time until my stop… I had just bought the Marx and Engels reader for class, and I was flipping through its pages when I randomly happened to stumble upon the Communist Manifesto. Right then and there I was blown away by the enermous power of his words – “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win” – I was ready to storm out of the subway car to start conquering the world… Marx is a profoundly powerful writer (I can totally understand why some people are so passionate about his theory).
Anyway, back to the 1844 Manuscripts… Human beings are the only conscious species on this planet, and man can realize his true potential and become truly free only through a conscious awareness of his life activity. When a man performs menial labor with the sole purpose of making ends meet, he is not free because he cannot see his work as a satisfaction of a need in itself. We are only free when we derive pleasure from our activities, when we consciously enjoy the work we do. However, I am pretty sure that 90% of the labor force in a modern society do not see their jobs as satisfying a certain intrinsically personal need. Rather, most of us work in order to get paid – quite too often, a job is only a means to an end. Marx would say that we are not genuinely free if we spend most of our lives working merely to receive a paycheck. Communism was supposed to give people freedom in this larger sense. However, it is obvious that communism as we know it came a little too prematurely – the economic foundation, which would allow every man to pursue his interests, did not exist (nor does it exist now). A communist utopia in the Marxist sense would be only possible if technological progress advances to such a degree that men would not need to work for subsistence. In other words, if all of our primary needs can be met without us having to work insane hours, then we can devote our time to higher goals of promoting the life activities of our species being. It sounds like a sci-fi fantasy, where you get an extremely advanced society, where nobody has to work and people in white robes just float around and philosophize. I’d like that.
