WiP - Lixing Miao / Is Alienated Labor Reducible to Extrinsic Motivation?
WiP - Lixing Miao / Is Alienated Labor Reducible to Extrinsic Motivation?
September 9 we resume our Work-in-Progress (WiP) meeting, which meets Wednesdays from 1:00 to 2:00. First up is Lixing, who updates us on whether "Alienated Labor [is] Reducible to Extrinsic Motivation".
In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx criticizes that labor under capitalism becomes alienated. What is the root cause of alienated labor? Pascal Brixel (2024) reduces alienated labor to the worker’s extrinsic motivational structure. I raise two criticisms. First, Brixel’s necessity thesis, that incentivized motivation is required for alienated labor, is false. A good-willed doctor, wholly motivated by the intrinsic concern for her patient’s well-being, can nevertheless be alienated because capitalism’s structural imperative of profit-making forces her to compromise the internal end of medicine. Second, Brixel’s interpersonal model of alienation cannot explain why capitalists are alienated. A capitalist is not motivated to hire workers because some specific person incentivizes her, but because the social structure demands capital accumulation. The root cause of alienation under capitalism, I argue, is social-structural and impersonal: the domination of surplus-value production over the concrete, ethically meaningful content of labor. This social-structural, impersonal account achieves a higher degree of diagnostic unity than Brixel’s motivation-based, interpersonal account does.