What is alienation?

From my experiences, much of what people has seen as what Marx meant by ‘alienation’ is a sense of displacement. The readings this week of Marx and Ollman reveal that much of what Marx was discussing is not just about theorizing alienation but how it happens and this is why Marx starts this argument with understanding not just the essence of existence but material life in motion: the body. Much of Marx’s theorization about alienation is based on current philosophies of biology. Within his writings I can recognize Darwin, Linnaeus, Plato, etc.. Alienation occurs when the labour of man becomes materialized in an object as private property. This relation between man, labour, product, and property is hence also about the relationship between men. Objects are alienated because they are not produced for the worker. They are made by the worker for the capitalist and in essence a part of the worker is crystalized and sold to belong to another for the purpose of generating capital. This reveals that everything that we see about capitalism is very much about exchanging people. There are four types of alienation: (1) alienation from product of your labour (2) alienation from the process of production (3) alienation from the species’ being (4) alienation from other humans. You are alienated from the product because you don’t own it. A commodity is a realization of a part of you, you’re extending yourself in this production & there is a part of you that is objectified in that commodity. Thus exploitation and alienation is about the commodification of life itself.

Much of Marx’s discussion about alienation grew out of the conception of what men are in relation to other biological beings. This is why he builds his argument on the differentiation between man and animals, and specifically refers to men as species. To Marx, as well as many other European theorists, consciousness is what separates man from animals. But Marx does not end there, he elaborates that its consciousness that enables man to create and labour for something beyond need. Marx argues that the alienation that results in the countless abstractions of capitalism harms man, his relationships with other people, the environment and ecology. In essence, Marx is arguing that alienation not only destroys people and causes harm to them but harm to them is harm to others as well (organic and inorganic). Alienation is one of the processes within capitalism that makes it necropolitical. It produces social and physical death. This is one of the reasons why Marx refers to capitalism as necromancy. Because in essence, what it truly being sold is life and death. Capitalism is thus a market of existence that alienates and corrupts relations between people as well as everything else in the world. Marx argues that what is at the core of alienation and political economy is private property, the notion that an object can belong to another hence alienates the worker from their crystalized labour power. This is a call for communal relations and also a call for a new type of production and relation (new to Europeans). What I am interested in is what defines the nature of production and economic (and social) relations that aren’t about alienation and profit. What relations exist in a society that is interested in producing the best quality people versus the greatest quantity of profit?

What does it look like to practice scientific methods that are against alienating all involved? 

This brings us to the discussion of the relationship between science and capitalism/wealth/profit. What does it mean to not do science for profit? Especially when scientific institutions have worked in service to the capitalist state since its modern inception?

What immediately comes to mind is the ownership of scientific research and ideas. Which brings me to Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) which are two models for doing public health research that center community members where the research is being done. In these cases community members are active agents and participants in the research process.  This ensures that they are not alienated from their own ideas and lived experience.

Another thing to take into consideration is the ownership of intellectual ideas in the academy when it comes to research assistants (RAs). Research assistants who come up with ideas while on the clock working for their primary investigator (PI) do not own their own ideas, instead that belongs to the PI. What can be done to provide RAs intellectual property rights when they are working as developing scholars?

 Science Towards Positive Action

Ask yourself where you and your work are situated in your field, industry, and the larger means of production.  Is your work positive or negative action?  Does it provide people with the power to act or does it simply give hegemonic institutions more tools and toys to exercise power over others?  This intellectual revolution re-situates our responsibilities away from fields, institutions, and capitalism and redirects them in service of humanity.  We have a commitment to do undone scientific work, the work that is underfunded, the work that can contribute to policy changes that get resources to under-served communities, the work that generates dissent against an unjust state, the work that provides the public with the resources needed to better strategically organize and dismantle harmful systems and build equitable ones that meet human and not capitalistic ends.  What have you done to contribute to a creation of new men, a new language, and a new humanity? Decolonialization is, as Fanon put it, “the creation of new men” (2004:2).  This creation of a new people is a project that must be strategically and scientifically informed.  Scientists have a role in establishing and practicing a new ethic that constitutes revolutionary change in service to the colonized.  And if the destruction of exploitation and oppression is not your research agenda; who is your science for?

REFERENCES

Fanon, Frantz and Richard Philcox. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Ollman, Bertell. 1977. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.