Summary Of Estranged Labor By Primo Levi

Night and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich express the potential horrors of humanity’s immense capacity for extreme cruelty. Both took place in mid-twentieth century Europe and exposed the hardships of life in forced-labor camps: Wiesel’s in various concentration camps, Solzhenitsyn’s in Gulags. It is important for human populations to be aware of these tragedies so as to not commit the same atrocities again; therefore, this essay will explore each with regards to shared or different themes included and the messages presented. Both of these books are important due to their influential and informative nature regarding the horrors of their respective historical times. Night by Elie Wiesel and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr

Hitler tried to use dehumanization to wipe Jews off the face of the planet. Millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis in brutal and savage ways, but some were lucky enough to make it through the selection. Although the Jews survived the selection, they were forced to live like animals. The Jews were given scarce amounts of foods and necessities, which made the Jew’s struggles even harder. The Jews had been treated as if they were animals for so long, that they started to act inconsiderately of others in some situations. Dehumanization was portrayed in multiple ways, throughout the story.

Elie Wiesel is the author of Night, in Elie’s memoir, he explains how the Jews were dehumanized throughout the time they spent suffering in the Labor Camps. Dehumanization is the act of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities, while the Jews were forced to live in the concentration camps they were treated as anything but humans. In the memoir Elie explains the observations the fellow Jews made during their time of suffering. During the Holocaust Jews, as a race were treated as nothing more than an object. Within the camps babies had no significant value as they were shot with no remorse. Nazis urge to kill off the Jewish population increased, the Jews in the camps lived discouraged lives as they were reduced to being treated with little to no standards.

Dehumanization is understood as the process of humans being deprived of what makes them human, but the Nazis took it a step further to encourage mistreatment between the prisoners . The Holocaust is a ghastly event in the history of the world, that killed around 6 million Jewish people, but the horrors don’t stop there. The way the prisoners were treated in the concentration camps left lasting effects on the survivors. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he recounts the horrific actions of the Nazi party against the Jewish people . The lasting effects of dehumanization do not take long to show, and the effects are only worsened through the numerous reminders from the Nazis that they aren’t worth anything.

Primo Levi, in his novel Survival in Auschwitz (2008), illustrates the atrocities inflicted upon the prisoners of the concentration camp by the Schutzstaffel, through dehumanization. Levi describes “the denial of humanness” constantly forced upon the prisoners through similes, metaphors, and imagery of animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization (“Dehumanization”). He makes his readers aware of the cruel reality in the concentration camp in order to help them examine the psychological effects dehumanization has not only on those dehumanized, but also on those who dehumanize. He establishes an earnest and reflective tone with his audience yearning to grasp the reality of genocide.

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

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

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

So essentially the increase in production and specifically the power of mans product of his labour suppresses him further into an alienated state at the cost of his humanity. His fulfillment at work is minimal; on the contrary he is miserable and survives only as a means to produce capital. The worker remains detached from the product of his labour and produces only wages in an attempt to prosper in the same way as the capitalist seeks to prosper – only the prosperity of the capitalist ascends at a higher level through the exploitation of the worker . (ibid).

Among four types of alienation that Marx provides; alienation from the product, alienation from labour process, alienation from one another, and alienation from species-being, the first one explains that what the workers made does not actually belong to them but capitalists (Marx, 1932, p. 325, 326). Furthermore, the process of activities of workers are also estranged from them because workers externalize their ability to work, labour power, to the object, but that labour power is controlled by capitalist and exists outside of workers (Marx, 1932, p. 324). As we saw in the movie, those are workers that who spend 10 hours a day at the workplace and devote themselves producing productions; however, those productions end up belonging to capitalists. For example, trains cars, clothes, and those other commodities are made by hands but it is head that who actually uses them. Consequently, in the capitalist society,

The philosophy of Karl Marx begins with the belief that humans are inherently cooperative with common characteristics and shared ends. To human beings, life is considered an object and therefore, humans make their “life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness” (Tucker 76). In other words, humans are able to think, imagine, and “produce even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom” (p. 76). It exemplifies that idea that humans not only have the capability to create things for survival but express themselves in what they produce, within the standards of the human race or universally. When capitalist wage-labor enters the picture, it forces these shared ends and the freedom of expression in human production to cease, causing a rise of competitiveness among

Not only is the worker alienated from his labour, but he is also separated from the result of his labour - the product. This is the most obvious manifestation of the alienation of the worker; he has no power over what he produces. The wage contract ensures that the products of labour are surrendered to the capitalist, who then sells them on the market, and pays the worker a wage. Marx points out that the alienation of the product is double - not only is the worker separate from his own product, but that product, as increasing the power of capital, actually weakens the worker's position. (4) Marx refers to the product of labour as 'the objectification of labour'. The worker's labour objectified is used against him in a capitalist

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

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

"Hence," Marx wrote, "the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working, he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His labor is, therefore, not voluntary but forced, it is forced labor.