Exploitation and Alienation in Marx

Mark and Rawls

Karl Marx: Capitalist Society is Exploitative and Alienating

The Communist Manifesto characterizes capitalism as exploitative and alienating by pointing to three primary features. The Manifesto identifies the role of industrialization and technological advances, the commodification of the individual laborer, and the profit derived by some members of society not from their own labor but that of others. (Marx, 68-72) Capitalist society's tendency to produces classes of people who are either members of the bourgeoisie or proletariat, and the remnants of the aristocracy is itself seen as problematic. In Marx's attack of the bourgeoisie, he links the capitalist process itself to their own downfall. He writes "what the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all is their own grave diggers." (Marx, 79). This overly dramatic sentence and indeed the chapter can be viewed as a bit of propaganda or an act of psychological warfare against Marx's critics, but what it illustrates is the relationship between industry and Marx's notion of exploitation. The two are nearly inseparable.

As to the exploitative implications of the means of production, Marx and Engel are concerned that the value of the individual laborer's wages are reduced in value because of the sheer scale of production- I think he is pointing to the ability to negotiate that comes with monopolies. They write "no sooner than is the exploitation of the laborer…at end…then he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie." (Marx, 70) In that passage they seem to be asserting that the earning of wages is necessarily exploitative because now one has to exchange labor indirectly for food, where as in the agrarian era -- an individual's labor could be calculated by some amount of land tilled or bushels collected. The exploitive component comes from what they call the "piece male sale" of the laborer and the commodification of his labor. The disconnect between labor and the means of subsistence is considered to create the conditions for exploitation and it is this disconnect that the Communist Manifesto attempts to address.

Capitalism Does Not Exploit Workers

For Marx the argument that capitalism does not exploit workers because the worker in a capitalist system contributes to the productive process would not be very compelling. Marx and Engels already acknowledge that the laborer contributes to the productive process; their contention is not that laborers are absent but rather in their existence as laborers subject to exchanges of labor for wages, and wages for goods, they are exploited.

Beyond just the capitalist conception of labor v goods, Marx and Engels were concerned about the implications that the existence of a class structure posed for entire periods of human history. When Engels writes that "the economic production and the structure of every historical epoch; that consequently…all history has been a history of class struggles…" (125), it is clear that the Manifesto is concerned less about the fate of the individual and more about the fate of society. The appropriate unit of analysis then is the group or the class, and in this sense even when specific individuals are not exploited, Marx and Engels would still be concerned if there are classes of people who are.

I believe that Marx and Engels would respond to any argument which identifies workers who are not exploited with a question about whether there are any individuals in society who profit without expending any labor. Or whether there are any possessions which have been stolen are appropriated. For instance, in the present sense, if the Native Americans who live on reservations almost as an independent nation were to be held up as an example of emancipated peoples, I think that Marx and Engels would point out the fact that the U.S.A. In its entirety belonged either to the Native Americans or to the Mexicans. This would illustrate for them the idea that justice cannot arise out of injustice. A belief that I think is inevitable in their characterization of exploitation.

Rawls: Two Principles of Justice

In the first instance Rawls articulates the two principles as follows:

"First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.

Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all." (p.53)

Even a society organized according to Rawls' egalitarian principles of justice would be vulnerable to a critique that the society is exploitative and alienating. Marx's problem with capitalism is not merely a quarrel with the distribution of disadvantage and wealth but rather a problem with the very existence of a model in which labor is exchanged for wages. As such, Rawls' two principles which merely attempt to democratize this exchange would be challenged by Marx. Though Rawls' proposal of a society guided at its foundation by the two principles of justice is egalitarian, Rawls' proposal fails to address the normative question about how society should be organized before we begin discussions about the rights and responsibilities of citizens of a nation.