How can Karl Marx's theory of alienation (and his other labour market theories) apply to the MODERN workplace?

Question

Also, what are the instances where Karl Marx's labour market theories FAIL to be of relevance to the MODERN workplace.
Thanks:)

Answer 1

The first responder does not not seem to actually be familiar with Marx's theory of alienation. Marx wasn't talking about a modern psychological conception of alienation; he was talking about his own idea of alienation, and it had everything to do with the workplace.

Marx's idea of alienation had to do with the separation of people from what is generally translated into English as their "species being." Basically, he means alienation from human nature. He saw it as a fundamental part of capitalism: common workers put their labor into something that the capitalist class owns, and Marx saw one man's ownership of another's labor as an alienating force. This has not changed in any significant way since his time.

Marx would have probably expected capitalism to have mostly collapsed by now, and that's one way in which his theories could be said to fail to be relevant, although there have been plenty of post-Marxist thinkers who have adapted Marx's ideas to new ideas and historical evidence over the years.

Edit: NC, after looking at some of your other answers shortly after posting mine, it became clear to me that you probably were familiar with the theory, but that doesn't change the fact that you answered the question as if you weren't. I don't see how Marx's concept of alienation is empirically testable, or what child psychology has to do with what Marx was talking about when he used the word "alienation."

Edit: I see Marx's alienation as a primarily philosophical concept, albeit a philosophy of the nature of economic activity. He is not, as you continue to insist, talking about the psychological state of feeling alienated. He's not using the word to mean what people generally use it to mean today. You might as well be talking about some movie called "Alienation," because that would have almost as much to do with Marx as the psychological condition you're discussing does; you're confusing completely different concepts simply because they have the same name. Alienation is a Marxian PHILOSOPHICAL term for the ABSTRACT concept of being alienated from one's species being, and is not the same thing as the subjective, measurable psychological state of feeling alienated from other people. You're comparing apples, to Apples: fruit to computers.

Answer 2

Alienation In The Workplace

Answer 3

From "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844," in the section "Estranged Labour," Marx writes about workers being alienated from their species being, the products of their labor, their family, machines and other workers. Certainly it is not hard to think of instances when people produce something at work and the product is own by the business. Secondly, a lot of people who work long hours and could be considered alienated from their family. Lastly, in some businesses people are isolated from each other; for example cubicles in an office space. It could be argued that these people are alienated from one another. Nonetheless, a lot of people make friend with their co-workers. So, how could a wage earner NOT be alienated from the products of their creation? Arguably, they can't as long as the capitalist own the means of production and also own the wage earner's products. Nonetheless, most people don't really seem to care that they are alienated from the products of their creation.

Answer 4

Karl Marx says that we are alienated from the labor market because we're not involved with the production of the products we buy. We are alienated from the labor market because of the extreme craft/product specialization that exists in our society- we work in the city, live in the suburb and our food, clothes and products just magically appear in stores. We don't appreciate the work, effort, labor and human capital that was put into the products that we buy.
Marx also says that by giving up ownership of one's own labor (one's capacity to transform the world) is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature. Marx says that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labor-power. So in the modern work place we're alienated form the rest of the labor market and we also give up our human capital in exchange for money.

Answer 5

Karl Marx's theory of alienation does NOT apply to ANY workplace. Alienation, as we understand it today, is a consequence of parental neglect suffered between ages two and six and thus has absolutely nothing to do with workplace.

Marx, being a genius, saw the problem and described it as best he could. However, he was not equipped to deal with it. They say, when the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems start looking like nails. Marx did exactly that; he treated the problem of alienation as an economic one, because no other way of treating it existed during his lifetime. Marx died in 1883, while Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, the founders of modern child psychology, were both born in 1896...

To Geoffrey F: I am familiar with Marxian theory of alienation, thank you very much; it just happens to be a bad (meaning, unsupported by empirical evidence) theory, just as, say, phlogiston theory is a bad theory of combustion. And, since this theory is proven to be bad, it should not be applied.

To Geoffrey F (2): you don't see how Marx's concept of alienation is empirically testable because you, like Marx, are viewing it as an economic problem (which in and of itself suggests that this is the wrong approach; what good is a theory, if you can't test it?). As soon as you decide to look at it as a psychology problem, however, it becomes very testable. You administer a battery of tests (one of which you design to measure how alienated a person feels and others, to measure various variables that you feel could help explain the level of alienation) to a random sample of individuals and draw statistical inferences between results of different tests. What you typically discover is that individuals who feel alienated at work as adults are very likely to have experienced parental neglect as children... No other variable (except history of depression) explains alienation better...