Marx and Weber: Alienation
At the core of Communist theory, is the idea that the average person within a society is essentially separated (alienated) from the ability to determine his own destiny. The idea was that with bureaucracy, dictatorial / autocratic rule, and automation of work within the industrialized world, people are unable to see the extended value of their work and, by extension, their lives. First written about in his "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts", Marx put forth the premise that in the agrarian economies of the "past", when a person created something, they did so in its entirety. Thus, you were a bread-maker, a distiller, a craftsman, a bricklayer, etc. and when you worked, you saw the direct result of your labor and could thus take legitimate pride in yourself and maintain a true sense of control over your destiny. In the modern industrial world, however, when people work on assembly lines, when machines make their products, or they create things that don't exist in the physical world (such as web-sites), then labor is absolutely disconnected from all of the positive attachments of labor to productivity that were enjoyed in the agrarian past. Weber, too, felt that the alienation of labor would ultimately dehumanize its creator
Henry Ford did not make cars, he managed the people who managed the people who managed the cars. Fortunately, according to Marx, this state is transitional, that eventually the evolution of the world's economies toward socialism and communism would result in a reversal - that the laborers would become the most important elements of the economy because it is labor that produces all that a society needs - not management and ownership of the companies that produce things. the worker then becomes a slave of his object," (Marx, 1844). Thus, capitalism alienates labor by "objectifying" it, (Marx, 1844). but just as nature provides labor with the means of life. Ultimately, the owners (the autocrats, oligarchs and technocrats) are credited for the products made by the thousands of faceless, nameless, worthless laborers. As the primary economic force, nearly every person would have fit within the global economy as an independent producer. For Weber, "the more fully realized the bureaucracy is, the more completely it succeeds in achieving the exclusion of love, hatred and every purely personal, especially irrational and ) feeling from the execution of. The fact that man's labor has been made to be external to the worker, succeeds in making the worker no longer "present" within the work - work no longer is an expression of the self, of the art or craft of the individual. For Weber, socialism is made possible by the removal of ownership of the economy from private individuals (thus destroying the corporate nature of capitalism and absolutely removing the worker even further from the process as the point of their labor becomes nothing more than to contribute to the intangible nature of government and politics. As such, the worker is no longer important beyond their facility to be a cog within the economic machinery. While Max Weber agreed with Marx on the entire concept of the estrangement of worker and labor, he held no belief that socialism or any other form of ownership within the economy, would return the world to the economic model that Marx envisioned. In this, Weber determined that the best course of action for an economy to reverse this form would be to achieve a relative level of anarchy within the marketplace - let the laws of supply and demand determine the course of the economy, let people be the center of production and the core of worth, let the worker determine what he will produce based upon his own individual understanding of the economy and thus specialize in a way that makes sense to the individual.
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