Jia Wei's Entry For The 2004 Moffatt Prize in Economics
Introduction
Several outstanding philosophers such as Marx (1844), Kierkegaard (1941), Rousseau (1950), and Nietzsche (1954) paid serious attention to the notion of alienation. They strongly believed that alienation existed in the world and characterized it for us in such ways that we couldn't help but accept it as part of human reality. However, the literature of alienation is considerably fragmentary as the arguments made by these philosophers are largely based on their own theoretical and ideological assumptions and not influenced by each other. In this thesis, I mainly refer to Marx's definition of alienation because Marx was the most closely associated with and thus made the most contributions to the concept of alienation. According to Marx, alienation refers to the split between a human's existence (material) and essence (soul).Marx discusses alienation in a relatively restricted context-namely, the lives of wage workers in the early capitalist society. The wage workers are, at least according to Marx, fundamentally different from salaried professionals because they had few skills and their aim of work is just money. While Marx's theory of alienation can be applied to every kind of person in capitalist society, we must focus on the working class first because "a primordial condition explains nothing" and "it merely pushes the question away into a gray nebulous distance" (Marx, 1844). This will be discussed further in the first section. According to Marx, alienation is the inevitable product of the private property. Contrary to Marx, I argue that we need to place the phenomenon of alienation in the historical background to examine the true origin of alienation. Therefore, my view is that alienation is a consequence of the Modernism; I contend that the private property is not a necessary but sufficient condition for creating alienation.
The paper is structured as follows. First, I briefly review the literature of the alienation of workers mainly drawing on Karl Marx's theory. Second, I present my argument that the alienation of workers results from the modernism ideology. Finally, I conclude the paper with some brief remarks.
Alienated Labor
Inspired by Western Enlightenment humanism and influenced by Hegel's dialectics, Feuerbach's materialism and Darwin's natural selection, Marx redefined human nature and examined carefully the concept of "alienation". He focused on the working class, the poorest and most wretched in the society, and concluded that their alienation came from private property. He then searched for a way (communism) to emancipate the working class and eventually mankind. Let us take a look at his system, beginning with The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the true point of origin for his theory of money and alienation. Some of his central notions are briefly summarized as follow.What should a man be? According to Marx, the essential difference between nonhuman animals and human beings lies in "consciousness". Unlike any nonhuman animals, which are "immediately one with its life activity" for it "produces only what it immediately needs for itself and its young," human beings have conscious life activity, and "he makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness." Therefore, human life is an object for man and in this sense he is free and universal. Marx argues that human nature is not dualistic but dialectical because the objects external to a human, plants, animals, air, light, etc., become food, heating, clothes, etc. Therefore, he is not an abstract natural species being who lives in the equally abstract natural surroundings, but a social species being in harmony with nature and himself. As Bottomore pointed out, "Marx's ideal human is a productive man, contrasted with the acquisitive man." (1963). Alienated man is the antithesis of the productive man because man's essence is to produce and create. An alienated man is the man whose essence and existence are split, which means he works not for producing but for others (e.g. money and social power).
Be Sure to Continue to Page 2 of "Comment on Marx's Theory of Money and Alienation".
