Marx’s (1975) alienation theory has tended to play a marginal role in labour process analysis (LPA), often as no more than an unelaborated, passing comment on the harmful experience of labour power. However, with the rise in analytic importance of emotional, aesthetic-corporeal and sexual aspects of labour (Thompson and Smith, 2010) in response to increasing managerial efforts to mobilise the whole person, there is a growing need for a theorisation of the subjective experience of labour power (Brook, 2010), which is able to capture and explain the effects of systemic subordination, inequality and the increasing commodification of the person and their workplace interactions. Significantly, in recent years a renewed interest in Marx’s alienation theory has emerged (e.g. Meszaros, 2005; Yuill, 2005), which chimes with a wider concern, way beyond the academy, with the social and individual costs of inequality, as demonstrated by Wilkinson’s and Pickett’s (2010) hugely successful book, The Spirit Level – Why equality is better for everyone.
This paper argues that Marx’s alienation theory offers labour process theory (LPT) a revived basis for elaborating a materialist theorisation of subjectivity. However, in order to capture the cumulative effects on workers’ well-being and identities of all aspects of labour power, it is necessary to avoid Hochschild’s (1983) common error of partially applying Marx’s theory to only product and labour process alienation (Brook, 2009). In order to capture the range of effects on workers’ well-being and identities, a renewed theorisation needs to incorporate Marx’s other two dimensions of human nature alienation and fellow beings (including commodity fetishism) alienation, which refer to the corrosive effects of alienation on self-knowledge and social relations within and outside the workplace . For emotional, aesthetic and sexual labourers, these latter two dimensions offer important additional scope for comprehending the impact of managerial attempts to mobilise their person beyond the immediate capacity to produce an external product.
Too often within the LPA tradition there is a mistaken tendency to interpret Marx’s alienation theory as implying that workers agency is profoundly debilitated (Brook, 2009), which is compounded by the understanding that alienation is intrinsic to capitalist social relations (Meszaros, 2005). However, Marx’s theory conceptualises alienation as a contradictory phenomenon because while the experience of waged labour power and participating in market-commodity relations are intrinsically alienating, workers are not blind to the realities of the capitalist labour process (Lukacs, 1974). This is because workers have the capacity, desire and space to seek to ameliorate their alienation, often through a daily mix of informal shop floor cultures (Korczynski, 2003), misbehaviour (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999) and even overt resistance (Linstead, 1995). As such, integrating alienation theory within LPT offers the potential to capture the effects of the full-range of labour power experiences, as well as enrich its analyses of the mix of consensual, indifferent and resistive behaviours.
References
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