Estranged Labor

In Marx's manuscript titled "Estranged Labor" he argues that in a capitalist society, it is apparent that the status of workers becomes that of commodities. The material object workers creates becomes a symbol of the labor that went into making the object. It is through this object that the laborer losses materials necessary to his life. He becomes alienated because his work, that is part of him, does not belong to him. In producing the final product, the laborer is unhappy, he is not free to express his own thoughts. The labor becomes forced. It is only in relaxing and non-productive activities is the laborer free. This is related to the point that Marx makes in "Division of Labor and Manufacture." He notes that it was a positive practice to hire stupid people to manufacture products. These people have a larger capacity for happiness while performing menial labor for hours on end. The laborer is also estranges from nature. Manufacturing does this because it is human nature to produce things that they themselves use to make life better for future generations. In the capitalist system, laborers are separated from their product. The laborer produces these products not for the good of the species, but for his individual need to survive.

I found it interesting that Marx states that the worker becomes the product and that a little bit of their identity is lost because the product does not belong to them. It is true that the laborer is giving up their time that could be used for their own intellectual pursuits to create an object that is so far removed from them. But, on the other hand, as stated in "Division of Labor," the worker is an organ in the process of production, performing small tasks that are dependent on tasks of the other workers. Through menial labor, the worker performs a simple task that many other people could do with the right amount of training. None of their personality is visible in the final product. They become an object themselves, unlike skilled artisans who create a product from start to finish.

It is not clear to me what Marx was trying to get at when he wrote "Division of Labor and Manufacture." He is critical of the common process of manufacturing at his time: 1) an object passes from one artificer to the next on its road to completion, and 2) many artificers create small pieces that are assembled into that final product in the last step. These two ways are efficient but they render the worker an unskilled laborer controlled by a capitalist. He then talks about small Indian villages and their division of labor creating no commodities. These are created through the caste system where the skills are past down through family. The levels of the Indian caste systems are not equal and to me they do not seem that different compared to the inequality between the bourgeois and proletariat. The money or power is passed down to the same people.