examine the direct relationship between the worker (work) and production.”32 Fractured thinking, if you will, distorts common experience by allowing for an infinite expression of different products, abstractions produced by each individual mind operating on
and appropriating objects in infinite directions.
And insofar as the epistemological foundation is individual – what he or she knows is what he or she created – the meaning of acts and the significance of objects (accomplished through naming, the act of signifying) becomes determined in the last instance by the
individual or in the case of the social realm by predominant individual tastes, or in the case of the political realm by the superstructure of the state. It is an aesthetic grounded in distortion, with relational ties to and among things no longer available for all to see and understand, thereby opening the door to a world in which people define products and manipulate environments to their advantage against the very person or people who created such.
This is why “labour produces marvels for the rich but it produces privation for the worker … it produces beauty, but deformity for the worker … it produces intelligence, but also stupidity and cretinism for the workers.”33 With no objective foundation underlying value judgments, value itself is meaningless and can be distorted for personal gain. No other reason than the existence of this core problem caused Marx to focus on the relationship of the worker to the means of production, because “the direct relationship of labour to its products is the relationship of the worker to the objects of production,” itself the “foundation of property owners to the objects of production and to production itself.”34
Why? Because the means of production – the act of producing products — is, in the first instance, man’s mind working on the world, producing if you will thought-things. The mental process is itself what Marx referred to as the “means of production.” This is why, if value
itself has become meaningless through the process of imbuing objects with meaning, then the process itself must be alienating: “if the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation – the alienation of
activity and the activity of alienation. The alienation of the object of labour merely summarizes the alienation in the work activity itself.”35 In other words, work is alienating for man when it “does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased” by being against one’s nature.
In this sense work is against one’s nature when it becomes defined as labor, as work/labor is of an-other whether person or thing. Much as in the ancient Greek sense, work/labor would not be freely undertaken if it was forced out of the person by the contingencies of the world. “It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs,”36 and thus it cannot be considered either good or ethical. And not being an end in-and-of-itself, it cannot produce the happiness required of a moral being desirous of fulfilling his/her most intimate character. Instead, consisting of and being defined through an alien character, this kind of work must be regarded as external labor wherein the work a man engages “does not belong to himself but to another person,” one unlike him in nature.
Giving up this distinctively human characteristic of pursuing one’s ends – namely, happiness
The mental process is itself what Marx referred to as the “means of production.”
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