GS 336: WORK AND SOCIETY

LECTURE 13
 3: CLASSICAL APPROACHES TO WORK

Objectives
Karl Marx on Work and Society
 Capitalism and the Division of Labor
 Unalienated Production—Utopian concept
 Capitalism and Exploitation
Karl Marx on the Division of Labor

 The division of labor is the separation of tasks in any

system so that participants may specialize. Individuals,
organizations, and nations are awarded with or acquire
specialized capabilities. They either form combinations or
exchange to take advantage of the capabilities of others
in addition to their own.

 In capitalist system, according to Marx, the organization

of economic activities leads to the division of labor which
causes the formation of classes; over time, these classes
develop different material interests, they become
“antagonistic.”
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Division of Labor as Key in Explaining Social
Transformations?
…Karl Marx on the Division of Labor
 The hierarchical division of labor, which is an integral part of the capital
system, requires what Marx calls the fixation of social activity against
individuals. The individual thus reduced to a fixed occupational role.

 This social activity becomes a material force that asserts itself

over and above individuals and reduces the diversity of human
self-activity to the uniform standard of exchange value.

 For Marx, the division of labor is the origin of the process of

alienation which leads to private property.

 The division of labor leads to social processes and products which

escape human control and reduce the objects produced by
human beings into vehicles of abstract exchange value.
Unbalanced relations of class, power, private property, the wages
system, political alienation all follow as a matter of course.
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Un-alienated Production….
• Karl Marx believed that there will be a mass
production in Communism;

• However, some Marxist approaches to the

world of work hold a critical view to capitalist
methods that implicitly assume an utopian
alternative:---communism.

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 Un-alienated Production…Marx Utopian Concept
• Alienation would remain as an unfortunate but necessary aspect of
work even under communism.

• It means there seems to be a clear contradiction within his criticism

of alienation under capitalism. That is:

 For Marx alienation exists wherever capitalism exists: the

absence of empirical data concerning alienation is irrelevant.

 Alienation is not defined by the subjective experiences of

workers but by the objective experience of capitalism: the
apparent satisfaction of workers at work is the manifestation of
the depth of their alienation, not their freedom from it.

 In fact the concept of alienation could not be proved through

empirical investigation. 7
 Capitalism and Exploitation…
• Alienating consequence of capitalism:
Exploitation

• Exploitation: disequilibrium between work and

wages = (value of labor added to the product –
wage = invisible surplus value taken by
capitalists).

• Exploitation can only be avoided when the

rewards of labor are exactly equivalent to the
value of that labor added to the end product.
 …Capitalism and Exploitation…
• Since Marx believed that it is labor that determines the exchange
value of commodities, the exchange of labor for wages is not
reciprocally balanced. In fact what is exchanged is not labor at all,
but labor power---the capacity to work.

• Marx while responding to the consideration of labor as commodity

asserts three counter points:

 Labor is not just a non-living commodity and cannot therefore

be reduced to exchange relations.

 The commodity exchanged—labor power—is not the equivalent

of that entering the labor process—labor.

 The consumption of labor power does not take place within the
sphere of circulation, or market, at a fair exchange, but within
the sphere of production under conditions of gross inequality.
 …Capitalism and Exploitation
• Marx regarded all this (exploitation) as
temporary and socially constructed which
can be changed though the labor conscious
and revolution.

• Marx called for a communist society to

overcome the dehumanizing effect of
private property.
 THANKS

Any Questions?

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