Hannah Arendt Animal Labor

The novel ‘Animal Farm’ created by George Orwell heavily expresses the ideals of a prolonged cruel or unjust treatment and the exercise of authority. The exponential ignorance of the farm animals towards the actions and ideas of the pigs (Napoleon, Squealer and Snowball) prove the incentive that it is easier to conform to the ideals/ways of the ‘New England’, than to rebel, as well as through the exposure to propaganda and the distortion of reality. This therefore leaving them docile, numb, and oppressed.

Orwell reveals the corruption of the farm’s rules, which mandated, “they were not as other animals. If they were hungry, it was not from feeding tyrannical human beings; if they worked hard, at least they worked for themselves. No creature among them went upon two legs. No creature called any other creature ‘Master’, all animals were equal” (Orwell 62).

This intimate relationship between man and nature, his activity and the objects of nature, is the ‘appropriate’ relationship because worker is not capable of creating without nature, that is, without the sensual external world. Hence, the world is the material into which man invests his labor, through which he produces things, and without it he cannot live. However, in a capitalist society, such relationship does not exist and man is alienated from nature, from the products of his activity or work. Under capitalism, workers produce for the market rather than for their own use or enrichment. According to Marx, the object produced by labor in modern society stands as an alien being to the worker. His labor is embodied in the product he created, and this product is an objectification of labor which represents a loss to the worker, as well as servitude to the object. Hence, alienation occurs when worker lacks control over the products of his labor. Additionally, during the process of production, man’s labor are seen as much an object as the physical material being worked upon, since labor is a demand in modern society, which can be bought or sold. The more objects the worker produces, the fewer he can personally possess, and therefore the greater is his loss. For instance, in

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx identifies a dichotomy that is created and bolstered by the capitalist mode of production. In this mode of production, the dichotomy presents itself in a division of labor that forms of two kinds of people: capitalists, the owners of the means of production, and laborers, those who work under the domain of the capitalist. Marx harshly criticizes this mode of production, arguing that it exploits the laborer and estranges him from himself and his fellow man. According to Marx, this large-scale estrangement is achieved through a causal chain of effects that results in multiple types of alienation, each contingent upon the other. First, Marx asserts that under capitalism, the laborer is alienated from his product of labor. Second, because of this alienation from his product, man is also alienated then from the act of production. Third, man, in being alienated both from his product and act of production, is alienated from his species essence, which Marx believes to be the ability to create and build up an objective world. Finally, after this series of alienations, Marx arrives at his grand conclusion that capitalist labor causes man to be alienated from his fellow man. In this paper, I will argue in support of Marx’s chain of alienations, arriving at the conclusion that laborers, under the capitalist mode of production, cannot retain their species essence and thus cannot connect with one another, and exist in a world

Man no longer exercises his essence as a species-being in productive labour for the good of others, but on the contrary, he becomes detached from his essence and the product of his labour is abstracted as a means to produce for the sake of capital. In this sense man becomes reduced to nothing but a machine; the more capital the product of his labour acquires, the more the worker will be encouraged to produce through the influence of wages. The appeal of this profit for the worker sustains his alienated state by further sacrificing his ‘body and spirit’ for the sake of his wages;

Therefore, they need to work harder to avoid being thrown away. Instead of questioning the unfair treatment, the animals rather think less and do more work. Common animals are naive working class, who are unable or unwilling to question authority, condemning themselves to suffer the full extent of the ruling class’s oppression.

Animal Farm by George Orwell is a satire that exposes and criticizes the corruption of the Russian Revolution by using animals to represent political figures. The novel symbolizes a time of darkness in Russia as one that resulted in a government more controlling, totalitarian, and deadly than the one it overthrew. The short story “Harrison Bergeron” is set in the year 2081 where thanks to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments, everyone is equal to each other. Although the two works of literature may sound to be very distinct from one another, they both are full of social commentary.

The animals in the farms, along with Jurgis, have limited to zero control over their own future because of the system that many wealthy, selfish businessman have stylized to give themselves the maximum profit. Jurgis and his fellow co-workers fell into a never ending cycle of expendability from the moment that stepped foot into America, just as the pigs play another role in society’s meat crave and statistics. Workers and pigs never meant much as a big picture, however, workers would kill the pigs and create meals out of them, just as the pigs create jobs to butcher the workers job’s into a job cycle that could never

Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labour is stolen from us by human beings...”(Chapter 1, pg.3), also “...Man is the only creature that consumes without producing...”(Chapter 1, pg.4). In these extracts of paragraph, it shows exactly a symbol which implies the idea that big companies are priority area over the rest (proletariat), where they take the biggest assets of their work (in this case, the animals work) and these animals are the ones who sell their labour in return for a minimun wage that it is unfair.

Marx on page 327 of his essay estranged labor is describing what to him were

Labor for Marx reduces man to a means of production. As a means of production

As human beings, one of the most fundamental aspects of our existence, according to philosopher Karl Marx, is the act of work. More specifically, it is the idea that work fulfills human being’s essence. Work, for Marx, is a great source of joy, but only when the worker can see themselves in the work they do, and when said worker wants to partake in the work they are performing. In the capitalist identity, workers are “a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital” (Marx and Engel, 1946, pg. 116). Labourers were simply described as “a commodity” (Marx and Engel, 1946, pg. 117) by the ruling class; they are but pieces of a large, intricate gear system, all for the profit of those above them. In this, the worker loses touch with their essence. This concept is referred to, more or less, as alienation. Alienation is a form of separation of how one sees themselves, and how one sees themselves in what they do. Alienation, in many ways, relates to the idea of false consciousness. False consciousness, for Marx, revolves around the idea of misleading society; It is an ideological way of thinking in which no true perception of the world can be achieved. Both alienation and false consciousness delve into the notion of what constitutes true reality. Alienation describes how those that are controlled by the ruling class are subject to a form of disconnect, and false consciousness is a hierarchal idea in

The division of labour ensures that each worker only does one job, and the labour market decides which job any particular worker will do. During labour, the worker uses capital not under his own control. The capital available determines the nature of the work. On top of all this, the worker has no choice but to work, as wages are needed to provide the worker's means to life. Work is seen to be 'not voluntary, but forced' (3). This shows that in a capitalist society, the worker is separated from the decisions of whether or not to work, what the work will be, and what form the work will take. This alienation of labour is the separation of man from his life-activity.

Animal Farm is a novel by George Orwell. It is an allegory in which animals play the roles of Russian revolutionists, and overthrow the human owners of the farm. Once the farm has been taken over by the animals, they are all equal at first, but class and status soon separates the different animal species. This story describes how a society’s ideologies can be manipulated by those in political power, to cause corruption by those in leadership.

Marx uses the concept of labor as the social activity to explain how humans are shaped by the interaction of society and themselves. He points out the concept of objectification of labor to describe humans themselves as the subsistence of objectification. “The product of labor is labor embodied and made objective in a