Karl Marx
Religious Studies: OCR A Level, topic 3.11.6
Karl Marx's View on the Exploitation of Workers
Karl Marx was a 19th-century philosopher and economic theorist. His most famous works are The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867).
Marx's view of industrialisation
- Marx's ideas were important foundations for the development of socialism and communism.
- As Marx was alive at the time of the industrial revolution, he noticed a paradoxical feature of the industrialised world that was emerging: as humans gained more control over the world, they felt more out of control in that world.
- For Marx, this was because workers were being alienated from the product of their labour.
Alienation of the worker
- In a factory or a mill, a worker might only focus on one particular part of the manufacturing process, with other people focussing on other aspects of the process.
- So, a worker may be spinning cotton that is then dyed by someone else, then cut up by someone else and then stitched together by yet another person.
Analysis of the worker's role
- Here the worker is alienated from the product. There is no link to the product. The worker might never see the finished product. And so work becomes repetitive and dull.
- The worker becomes little more than a machine, just one cog in a giant system. This dehumanises the worker, who spends most of their life doing the same unfulfilling job.
Exploitation by factory owners
- The factory owner, removed from his workers, comes to see the workers as mere parts; a means to an end.
- Labour becomes like any other commodity: one that can be replaced by cheaper labour.
- This results in exploitation as the workers only options are no work (and so no money to live) or to work for a very low wage.
21st-century worker exploitation
- A Marxist analysis would argue this exploitation continues in the 21st century with a globalised economy.
- The owners constantly seek cheaper labour to produce their products by, for example, moving production to a country with the lowest wages.
Test yourself on Karl Marx
What paradoxical feature of the emerging industrialised world did Karl Marx observe?