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Marxism and You: How to Rise from the Ranks of the Proletariat

April 24th, 2009 by Foo-Foo McKinley

The title is deceiving because, really, you can’t. I remember when I was a kid (junior-high aged), I had to write a short story about how I thought the world should work. I’d never heard of Karl Marx at that point, so I wrote about a Utopian society in which all was shared and there were no class rankings. Apparently I was a little Commie revolutionist in the making.

I’ve settled down greatly since then, and I’ve accepted my rank as “lower middle-class,” willing to take just about any job for a buck. However, my philosophy class recently had a section on Kierkegaarde, Marx and Nietzsche, and it re-whetted my taste for social uprising, as I focused more on Marx than the other two. (I know what you’re thinking – “UGH again with this fucking class!” Well shut the hell up.)*

What struck me was that his idea of the Proletariat and the Bourgoise is disturbingly similar to how the country is working these days. (Yes, I am an Obama supporter – I’m talking more about the damage that was done over the last 8 years.) Show of hands: how many of us sell our time and labor to “the man” and make just enough to get by? I thought so. My friends, you would all fall under the title of proletarian in Marx’s eyes. And he would feel for you, as he was one himself. (In fact he had a really shitty life in general. We’re lucky we’re just broke.)

In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx wrote about the alienation of a worker from his work. Here’s a simple breakdown of what the alienation entails:

Man used to create for himself. He would take natural materials, form them into a product and do with that product as he pleased. With the rise of Capitalism, that was taken away, and therefore the worker is alienated from nature.
The Capitalist form of labor is not natural to man. It’s not voluntary, as it’s essential to maintaining a comfortable place in society. “[A worker] feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions – eating, drinking and procreating – or at most also in his dwelling and personal adornment – while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal.” In this way, the worker is alienated from himself.
Capitalism prohibits one from doing as he pleases, as fulfillment of one’s self is not necessarily fulfillment of the need of higher-ranking people. Human species-life is taken away by Capitalism because the idea of free and spontaneous activity and creativity gets lost in the buying and selling of labor.
In an environment of alienated labor, workers view fellow workers as exactly that: workers. If a laborer is the product of his own labor, then other workers are seen as products whose time is bought and sold. When seeing someone else of the same make as one’s self, the other person can be considered competition, which leads to a fall in camaraderie and brotherhood with fellow man.

In Capitalism, the final product of labor is private property. The wage system in Capitalism is analogous to servant wages, as the means by which one acquires wages is by serving a higher-ranked person or persons. Not even forced increases in wages would correct the wrong that had been done to human value, as man would still be laboring for a living, which in Marx’s eyes, devalued them to animal-kind. “It is not the consciousness of people that determine their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” According to Marx, a person isn’t really a conscious person if their free will has been taken away due to social classes.

I should clarify that I am in no way saying “Let’s start a Communist Party!” Communism in the sense of shared property and everyone holding hands, singing “All You Need is Love” could never work. While the raw idea of Capitalist labor (i.e. dehumanizing people to make money off of them) isn’t exactly natural to human kind, greed is. Surely we could give it a try, but it would only be a matter of time before someone said “I want more,” which would cause an unbalanced deal and pretty soon everyone would be saying the same. And in specific cases that would be justifiable. People should be able to earn their living based on their abilities.

What I am saying is that under the Bush Administration, we were heading in the direction that Marx so passionately wrote against. The “haves” will always outweigh the “havenots,” but his rule was tipping the scale in a ridiculous direction. The election of Barack Obama was our proletariat revolution. In the few months that he has been in office, he’s already making great strides to correct the wrongs that were done to us. We’ve got a long road ahead of us, but I remain hopeful (there’s something so catchy about that “Yes We Can” slogan). It’s time for our comeback. The havenots are on their way to rising from the ashes and becoming more fruitful in their labor, and after 8 years of oppression, that’s something to finally be positive about.

*EDITOR’S NOTE: The management of Suburban Panic enforces a strict “bugger off if you don’t like the content” policy.

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