By Renee Masur 

One of my favourite moments in education is when ideas, thoughts, and assignments seem to speak to one another. At the moment I am taking three classes in three separate departments: Poetry, Liberal Studies, and Interactive Communications. At several points, these classes intersect one another in harmony. Similar themes of compassion, empathy, and the industrial revolution have been brought up in every class. Each one seems to blend into the next and ideas that come up in one can helpfully apply to another. THIS is what education should be and it’s finally happened for me, serendipitously. Even better is when these themes also apply to my work. 

In Liberal Studies we have been studying works from the Enlightenment: Austen, Smith, Wollstonecraft and Rousseau to name a few. This week Karl Marx was on the list. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from the author of the Communist Manifesto.  What surprised and delighted me was his chapter from our selected readings about “Alienated Labor.” Perhaps I am not reading quite enough to know about his entire philosophy on the life of man – but his look into what it means to have a purpose-driven life really inspired me to write this post. 

“The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.” At the time, in the industrial revolution, men were used as tools for production purposes in creating products and profits. This kind of labor has not disappeared. What really resonated with me is what kind of life this produces for the workers:

“The more a worker appropriates the external world and sensuous nature through his labor, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in two respects: first, that the sensuous external world gradually ceases to be an object belonging to his labor, a means of life of his work; secondly, that is gradually ceases to be a means of life in the immediate sense, a means of physical subsistence of the worker. In these two respects, therefore, the worker becomes a slave to his objects.”

When a man receives his wages, it feels as though it’s an apology because the work he does all day does not come home with him. He must suspend himself for hours and hours every day creating and producing for some external source. It is only outside of that work he is able to feed his family and spend time in his community. He is not working for himself but for someone else. 

“The worker, therefore feels at ease only outside work, and during work he is outside himself. He is at home when he is not working and when he is working he is not at home.” This is what Marx refers to as forced labor. It is an activity not belonging to the self. In a way, it’s a loss of the self. 

When we are working in a job that does not provide us with daily satisfaction, but a paycheque as a means to find satisfaction, are we completely happy? 

Some of my classmates made interesting arguments: perhaps this a Darwinian way of being and humans are meant to be unequal (perhaps even miserable at times). 

I am quite more optimistic than that. Of course, as long as we receive paycheques, we will always, in some way, be in this “forced labor”, but how can we make this work for us?

If we can engage in our work, find a reason to smile while we do it, our alienation may not be so out there. 

Finding a career that is closest to your human nature, what moves you to do better, smile more, and feel that you could keep on giving without feeling like something is being taken, is the way to come home to your work. 

Quotations from “Karl Marx: Selected Writings.” Edited by Lawrence H. Simon, 1994