Karl Marx And Durkheim 's Theory Of Labor Alienation

The division of labor is a complex phenomenon that is characterized by varying aspects of an individual’s social connection to the society in which they reside. The Division of labor is a broad process that affects and influences many aspects of life such as political, judicial, and administrative functions (Bratton & Denham, 2014). Two of the main sociological theorists, Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim, had different understandings of the notion about the division of labor. This topic has been contested and debated by many theorists but this paper is going to focus on how Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx views this topic. Karl Marx views the division of labor as a process that alienates the individual from their work (Llorente, 2006). Marx also views the division of labor as a way for the capitalist bourgeoisie to take advantage of the wage labor of the proletariat. Emile Durkheim identifies with Marx in the economic sense that the division of labor furthers the rationalization and bureaucratization of labor, but differs in that the division of labor provides individuals in society with social solidarity and ensures their connection to society. This paper is going to reflect on some of the aspects in which Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx view the division of labor, while showing some of the similarities and differences between the two theorists conception of the topic.

Division of labour is also credited with the rise of trade between different areas, the rise of capitalism, and increasingly complex manufacturing and industrialization. For Karl Marx, the production portion of Capitalism signalled great trouble. He believed production in Capitalist society worked in a way that the rich factory owner benefited and the poor factory workers lost. In his manner of reasoning, the Capitalist system was inherently meant to benefit the rich and exploit the poor: “All the bourgeois economists are aware of is that production can be carried on better under the modern police than on the principle of might makes right. They forget only that this principle is also a legal relation, and that the right of the stronger prevails in their ‘constitutional republics’ as well, only in another form.”[ii] Marx’s view of society and the world lead him to believe that humans create change in their lives and in their environment through practical activity in the practical world.

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

Durkheim’s theory of anomie and Marx’s theory of alienation have had a very strong influence on the sociological understandings of modern life. Critically compare these two concepts.

Marx’s conception of society has its grounds in a theory of action: as he put it, human beings make their own history. But Marx goes on to argue that they do this is circumstances which are not of their own choosing, and he develops an analysis of how action is organized by these circumstances as material conditions of production which structure and determine the social relationship that are primarily generated by the particular material forces of production utilized, which include not only raw materials but also the technology which is used to extract and work them into products (Jenks 15).

The United States has been historically known as a country of innovation, business, and a land of opportunity. Recent history has led to the questioning of the validity of the amount of opportunity that is truly still available within the United States. The consistent questioning of the way that labor works in the United States has led individuals to begin analyzing the works of Karl Marx. Marx has written a plethora of information regarding his view on how capitalism encourages alienated labor. The United States is still predominantly a capitalism and there is an increase of education being forced due to inability to find lower level employment. The amount of individuals being educated has increased dramatically due to necessity, but it has not necessarily encouraged the death of alienated labor. Alienated labor is still prevalent in the modern day United States, but it should not necessarily be

The Marxist theory of historical materialism understands society to be determined by the relationships which people enter into with one another to fulfill their basic needs, for instance to feed and clothe themselves and their families. In general Marx identified five successive stages of the development of these material conditions in Western Europe.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) were sociologists who both existed throughout similar time periods of the 19th and early 20th centuries, resulting in both Marx, and Durkheim to be concerned about similar effects and impacts among society (Appelrouth and Edles: 20, 77). Marx’s main focus was on class distinctions among the bourgeoisie and proletariat, forces and relations of production, capital, surplus value, alienation, labour theory of value, exploitation and class consciousness (Appelrouth and Edles: 20). Whereas Durkheim’s main focus was on social facts, social solidarity – mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity, anomie, collective conscience, ritual, symbol, and collective representations

In his discussions of capitalism in The German Ideology he frequently accuses existing social structures for alienating man from his production. “Each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape” (Marx, Page 160) as a result of the division of labour in capitalist societies. This division of labour exists because there is higher priority placed in communal interest than individual interest. As such, there is an inequality here – communal interest is taken to be of greater importance than individual

Where Marx saw the modern industrial world as a necessary step to freedom, Durkheim saw it as a development with specific social phenomenon which he refers to as “social facts” that needed to be studied scientifically as explained in The Division of Labor in Society. These social facts were outside the individual and were capable of exercising power over the individual and influencing behaviour.

Marx viewed the ‘commodity’ as the most elementary form of modern wealth. The essence of the commodity is the

In order to understand how Karl Marx came up with his theory of alienation this essay will look at Marx’s early life and what was happening in the world during this time, including the spread of industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism is an

Marx’s historical materialism gives logical explanation to the history of society by evaluating the different transitions of political turnover. Marx states that there are the “Asiastic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production” that “can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society” (5). In every transition, there is the evidence of a ‘lord’ and ‘bondsman’ interaction where eventually, as Hegel has theorized, the ‘bondsman’ overcomes the ‘lord’ (Hegel 117-119). This is due to the theory that “social character is the general character of the whole movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him” (85). Society forms the working class and in turn this class, by

The theoretical relevance of Marx’s theory of alienation has been the subject of much contention since the posthumous publication of his Economic and Philosophical manuscripts in (). While the notion of alienation, along with its distinctly Hegelian underpinnings, has frequently been dismissed as a youthful error in comparison with Marx’s supposedly more ‘mature’ work, I argue that it is fundamental to his critique of capitalism. As Sayers (p.xi) notes, “After his early period, Marx did not often use the term - it and much other Hegelian language is for the most part abandoned. Nevertheless, the concept of alienation is implicit throughout Marx’s work, and it continues to provide a major basis for his understanding of capitalism and for his critique of the impact of the market”. It is important to relate Marx’s philosophical project back to the always-implicit notion of alienation as a set of relations between people and as a mode of being in the material world specific to capital(ism), otherwise there is a risk of overlooking the human relationships that underpin the capitalist mode of production. As Ollman () points out, “By dismissing the essential human relations, the basic relations of alienation which underly capitalist production, its surface relations become everything” (p.202). So, in dismissing the human relationships that maintain a given mode of production, it is reified - thus, any critique that does not take this into consideration fails to address the matter

Marx wrote "On The Jewish Question" in 1844. It was a written response to Bauer's works. In his works, Bauer said that Jews should give up their religion and fight for their civil rights. Bauer believed the Jews should become emancipated from the Germans and Christians. Marx contradicted this entire belief through the idea that civil emancipation does truly emancipate.