Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Robert M. Young Online Writings

SCIENCE, ALIENATION AND OPPRESSION

Neither 'alienation' nor 'oppression' is in any sense unique to the modern era or to the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath. Yet most would say that the resonances of both concepts are primarily Marxist and derive from the critique of the capitalist mode of production developed by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and various Marxist writers from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. These resonances are quite appropriate, and in a short essay it would be folly not to concentrate on Marxism. But at least three gestures must be made before pursuing this restricted brief. Firstly, practically every religion, culture and philosophical tradition has its own story of how humans came to be estranged or alienated from the gods or a god, from a bountiful nature and from one another. By the same token the subsidiary concept of oppression — the power that some people have over others — is ubiquitous and may be seen in emperors and subjects, masters and slaves, chiefs and Indians, lords and serfs, capitalists and workers, conquerors and the conquered, men and women, parents and children, straights and gays and whites and blacks. Thus some sense of alienation and of oppression has been in need of explanation wherever there has been dlsharmony among people. The Judaeo-Christian tradition locates the origins of these phenomena in the temptation of Eve by Satan. It was in the wake of partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil that humans experienced self-estrangement, poverty, shame, the pain of childbirth, thorns, human labour, human - including sexual conflict and death. It was thus that Adam and Eve came to be driven out of harmony with themselves, with each other and with nature — and out of the Garden of Eden. It was their son Cain who slew his brother Abel an was made the first fugitive and vagabond. He was driven from the presence of the Lord and 'dwelt in the Land of Nod, on the East of Eden'.[1] The Christian path to de-alienation (overcoming original sin) is said to have been brought about by the Incarnation and Crucifixion through Christ's redemptive suffering. Similarly, in the Western philosophical tradition people offended the gods — Greek and Roman — and could never adequately propitiate them. As a result, human knowledge came to be acquired in mediated ways, glimpsed as shadows in a cave, rather than directly and intuitively. However, there is no need to look even this broadly or to still other cultures in the Middle East, Far East, the Americas or Australasia. Marx's early writings take us to his own immediate predecessors, Ludwig Feuerbach and G. W. F. Hegel, and to conceptions of the alienation of the human spirit from knowledge of essences, from plenty, from the deity and from social and sexual harmony. Alienation was estrangement, separation and objectification. All of these find their modern classical expression in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind. But even if we take this beginning, it quickly proliferates figures and traditions. Most conceptions of alienation have several dimensions of distressing separation and estrangement — from self, from one's fellow humans, from nature, from one's labour, one's product, one's humanity and from the deity or gods. A wider history of the post-Hegelian concept would embrace the writings of at least the following figures, most of whom interacted in important ways with Marxism: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, Tillich, Fromm, Fanon, Illich, Whyte (The Organisational Man), Arendt, Marcuse and writers on liberation theology. If one were to pursue these positions in anything approaching a systematic way it would lead to careful discussion of phenomenology, existentialism, the sociology of work, the histories of colonialism, racism, imperialism, patriarchy and feminism. Each of these in one way or another intersects with the scientific world-view, especially the alienation from nature in a sharp dichotomy in philosophy and in the philosophy of science between the knowing subject and the known object. The entire Hegelian tradition (including humanistic Marxism) juxtaposes to these a more interactive or dialectical concept of I/thou to I/it. It could be argued that in each and every case of alienation and oppression the requisite distancing could not occur without a psychological and philosophical split which projected away from the self an alien Other, be it nature, other persons, or any cut-off object. The movement from Hegel to Marx can be summarised as follows:

Feuerbach criticised Hegel's view that nature is a self-alienated form of Absolute Mind and that man is Absolute Mind in the process of de-alienation. For Feuerbach, man is not a self-alienated God, but God is self-alienated man — he is merely man's essence abstracted, absolutised and estranged from man. Thus man is alienated from himself when he creates, and puts above himself, an imagined alien higher being and bows before him as a slave. The de-alienation of man consists in the abolition of that estranged picture of man which is God... Marx agreed with Feuerbach's criticism of religious alienation, but he stressed that religious alienation is only one among the many forms of human self-alienation.[2]

Some of Marx's earliest writings were reflections on Feuerbach. He roots his analysis in practical activity and foetuses on the human labour of production within capitalism, in which the capitalist owns the means of production and the labourer sells his or her labour power. Here is the classical source of Marx's concept of alienation:

Labour produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces — labour's product — confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object which has become material; it is the objectification of labour. Labour's realisation is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realisation of labour appears as a loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.[3]

Marx concludes that 'the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien objet'.[4] 'The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home'.[5] The worker is alienated from (1) his own act of production within the labour process, (2) the product of his labour, (3) his fellow worker and (4) his own human nature or 'species-being'. Labour, the product, other humans and one's own sense of humanity become alien — over against the self as something strange and threatening. Behind all this, for Marx, lies the concept of private property:

Alienated labour has resolved itself for us into two elements which mutually condition one another, or which are but different expressions of one and the same relationship. Appropriation appears as estrangement, as alienation; and alienation appears as appropriation, estrangement as true enfranchisement.

'We have considered the one side — alienated labour — in relation to the worker himself, i.e., the relation of alienated labour to itself: The property-relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labour we have found as the product, the necessary outcome of this relation of alienated labour. Private property, as the material summary expression of alienated labour, embraces both relations — the relation of the worker to work, to the product of his labour and to the non-worker, and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product of his labour'.[6]Some objectivist Marxists have criticised the use of the concept of alienation, because they wish to purge Marxism of concepts they see as humanistic. They wish instead to use concepts such as exploitation, division of labour and private property (which, as we have just seen, Marx equated with alienation). I have no sympathy with this view and merely report it. The important next step in the understanding of 'science, alienation and oppression' is that for Marxists alienation is the predominant form of objectification in the modern era. This occurs by means of the property relations of the capitalist mode of production. A crucial link for understanding science in terms of alienation is to see the process at a deeper level — one in which objectification occurs in the philosophies of nature and of science in the capitalist mode of production as a world-view, just as it does in the capitalist mode of production as a way of making things for sale. There are at least four ways that the link can be made between science and the scientific world-view, on the one hand, and alienation and oppression, on the other. The first is through the historical relations between scientific revolution, the rise of capitalism and the Protestant revolution. The second is through a conceptual analysis of the scientific world view and the ways in which nature became alienated, objectified and reified. The third is by means of the role of science and technology and the fundamental change in the labour process which occurred in the Industrial Revolution from formal subordination in pre-industrial capitalism to real subordination in machinofacture, leading to ever-subtler forms of pacing, surveillance and control in Taylorism, automation and, most recently, micro-processor-controlled production. Fourthly, the history of oppression both draws on raw materials from colonial countries and sells manufactured goods to them, intensifying human suffering in the form of literal and wage slavery. After the rise of industrial capitalism the same countries, no longer under colonial rule, suffer economic oppression as the falling rate of profit in the metropolitan countries leads to more intensive exploitation. Native workers are used for gathering materials and for actual manufacturing processes, as multi-national corporations increasingly site their factories in Third World countries where labour is cheap and relatively unorganised. Each of these approaches is, to put it mildly, a large topic. Before embarking on any of them, however, it is as well to point out that my brief is to describe the role of alienation and oppression. This means that I am focusing on one side of a profoundly dialectical phenomenon — the interpenetration of good and bad, enabling and controlling, enriching and impoverishing phenomena. In the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century and in our own time science has come to be identified and even equated with progress, reason and human benefit. It would be silly to argue that science is always and everywhere, i.e., inherently, alienating and oppressive. Yet it would be equally silly to say that it is only in the abuse of science that alienation and oppression occur. Science enlightens and brings about progress but also alienates and oppresses. My own view is that we need to be fully ambivalent about science and progress. The close interrelations between the development of scientific instruments and theories in astronomy, navigation, ballistics and mining, as well as between medicine, agriculture and the study of living phenomena; the development of world trade, mercantile capitalism and urbanisation; and the development of a view of the relations between God, the individual and the redemptive value of work are all so intertwined and mutually constitutive that the scientific, capitalist and Protestant revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are a single reconstitution of the world, the world-view and the structure of relations among people and peoples. They have in common a splitting-off of moral value, mind and responsibility — concerning purpose or final causes — from the labour process itself. This occurs in science, in manufacturing and in moral relations. A mechanical world-view comes to replace an organismic one. Fact and value, thing and purpose and body and mind become sharply dichotomised, just as labour power gets separated off from the worker. In this way, abstraction from science and from nature becomes the rule, so that what matters is not the sensuous particularity of persons, processes and things but the value of labour power and of commodities. The same alienation occurs in the scientific world-view. What matters to science is that which is amenable to mathematical handling — matter and motion. These preoccupy the thinkers who are developing the modern world-view. The commodity exchange abstraction, like the abstractions of science, treats objects as shorn of their secondary qualities and the social relations embedded in them and in which they have their being. Both are forms of misplaced concreteness.Marx says in the Grundrisse:

Considered as values, all commodities are qualitatively equal and differ only quantitatively, hence can be measured against each other and substituted for one another (are mutually exchangeable, mutually convertible) in certain quantitative relations. Value is their social relation, their economic quality. A book which possesses a certain value and a loaf of bread possessing the same value are exchanged for one another, are the same value but in a different material. As a value, a commodity is an equivalent for all other commodities in a given relation. As a value, the commodity is an equivalent; as an equivalent all its natural properties are extinguished; it no longer takes up a special qualitative relationship towards the other commodities; but is rather the general measure as well as the general representative, the general medium of exchange of all other commodities... as a value, every commodity is equally divisible; in its natural existence this is not the case.[7]

When Marx writes about the fetishism of commodities in Capital, he is describing an objectification and estrangement which is exactly parallel to that which has happened in the filtering out of the sensuous qualities of nature in the scientific world-view. He writes, 'A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’.[8] He goes on to describe how we can relate to a table for years and continues:

...but as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will... The mysterious character of the commodity-forms consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects... It is nothing but the definite social relations between men themselves which will assume, here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things'.[9]

Science, manufacturing and commerce become preoccupied with what can be treated objectively. The world, the worker and the product get treated as objects, not as subjects. All values other than those amenable to science or to exchange get filtered out. Social relations get reduced to things: they become reified. The features amenable to abstract treatment become the most interesting ones at the expense of their qualities as colours, odours, tastes or beautiful living organisms. Once again, this is what is meant by the misplaced concreteness of the modern world-view. In his classical essay on 'Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat' Lukács comments acidly on the outcome of this process. He says that

the more intricate modern science becomes and the better it understands itself methodologically, the more resolutely it will turn its back on the ontological problems of its own sphere of influence and eliminate them from the realm where it has achieved some insight. The more highly developed it becomes and the more scientific the more it will become a formally closed system of partial laws. It will then find that the world lying beyond its confines, and in particular the material base which it is its task to understand, its own concrete underlying reality lies, methodologically and in principle, beyond its grasp... science is thereby debarred from comprehending the development and the demise, the social character of its own material base, no less than the range of possible attitudes towards it and the nature of its own formal system.[10]

Lukács makes quite explicit the links I have been describing above:

It is any thing but a mere chance that at the very beginning of the development of modern philosophy the ideal of knowledge took the form of universal mathematics it was an attempt to establish a rational system of relations which comprehends the totality of the formal possibilities, proportions and relations of a rationalised existence with the aid of which every phenomenon — independently of its real and material distinctiveness — could be subjected to an exact; calculus. This is the modern ideal of knowledge at its most uncompromising and therefore at its most characteristic, and in it the contradiction alluded to above emerges clearly. For, on the one hand, the basis of this universal calculus can be nothing other than the certainty that only a reality cocooned by such concepts can truly be controlled by us. On the other hand it appears that even if we may suppose this universal mathematics to be entirely and consistently realised "control" of reality can be nothing more than the objectively correct contemplation of what is yielded — necessarily and without our intervention — by the abstract combination of these relations and propositions.[1l]

But here we can see that this results in the assimilation of all human relations to the level of natural laws so conceived. It has often been pointed out in these pages that nature is a social category. Of course, to modern man it must look as if the point of view which we have just outlined consisted simply in applying to society an intellectual framework derived from the natural sciences.[12]

He then points out that this way of thinking led, according to Marx, to thinking of nature and humanity in commodity terms: 'After Hegel had clearly recognised the bourgeois character of the "laws of nature"', Marx pointed out that 'Descartes with his definition of animals as mere machines saw with the eyes of the manufacturing period, while in the eyes of the Middle Ages, animals were man's assistants'; and he adds several suggestions towards explaining the intellectual history of such connections. Tonnies notes the same connection even more bluntly and categorically: 'A special case for abstract reason is scientific reason and its subject is the man who is objective and who recognises relations, i.e., thinks in concepts. In consequence, scientific concepts which by their ordinary origin and their real properties are judgements by means of which complexes of feelings are given names, behave within science like commodities in society. They gather together within the system like commodities on the market. The supreme scientific concept which is no longer the name of anything real is like money, e.g., the concept of an atom or of energy'. Lukács concludes: 'What is important is to recognise clearly that all human relations (viewed as the objects of social activity) assume increasingly the objective form of the abstract elements of the conceptual systems of natural science and of the abstract substrata of the laws of nature'.[13] I have gone to some lengths to trace the connections between the scientific world-view, the fetishism of commodities and the concept of alienated labour, since there have been writers (both Marxist and non-Marxist) who have failed to see the warrant in Marxist writings for these connections.[14] The scientific world-view was increasingly linked to people's daily lives by the union of science and technological rationality to the process of manufacturing as the history of capitalism moved from manufacture to machinofacture — from the system where outworkers made things with their own instruments to where the means of production were owned by the capitalists and were concentrated and brought near to sources of power. Formal subordination of workers through quotas and prices was progressively replaced by real subordination by control of the actual movements of the workers through pacing by machines. In one of the most important passages in the history of thought, Marx puts forward a conception of the history of technology as a moving resolution of forces with science at the heart of capital's control.

It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt. We would mention, above all, the self-acting mule, because it opened up a new epoch in the automatic system. Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam-hammer, gave the following evidence before the Commission on Trades Unions, with regard to the improvements in machinery he himself introduced as a result of the wide-spread and long-lasting strikes of the engineers in 1851. "The characteristic feature of our modern mechanical improvements, is the introduction of self-acting tool machinery. What every mechanical workman has now to do, and what every boy can do, is not to work himself but to superintend the beautiful labour of the machine. The whole class of workmen that depend exclusively on their skill, is now done away with. Formerly, I employed four boys to every mechanic. Thanks to these new mechanical combinations, I have reduced the number of grown-up men from 1,5OO to 750. The result was a considerable increase in my profits." (10th Report of Commissioners on Organisation and Rules of Trades Unions, 1868)

Ure says this of the colouring machines used in calico printing: "At length capitalists sought deliverance from this intolerable bondage' (namely the terms of their contracts with the workers, which they saw as burdensome) "in the resources of science, and were speedily re-instated in their legitimate rule, that of the head over the inferior members." Then, speaking of an invention for dressing warps, whose immediate occasion was a strike, he says: "The combined malcontents, who fancied themselves impregnably entrenched behind the old lines of division of labour, found their flanks turned and their defences rendered useless by the new mechanical tactics, and were obliged to surrender at discretion." Of the invention of the self-acting mule, he says: "A creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes... This invention confirms the great doctrine already propounded, that when capital enlists science into her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility."[15}

This is oppression.The subsequent phases of this process can be seen in the history of machinofacture as new inventions occurred in the factory system, for example, in mass production and in the moving assembly line (derived from meat packing). The next phase in direct control of workers was the development of 'scientific management’ at the hands of Frederick W. Taylor. His aim was to apply the methods and assumptions of science to the most detailed movements of workers — all of this in the name of efficiency. His research was the fountainhead of all forms of work-study and direct control over the labour process. His aims were quite explicit:

To prove that the best management is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules and principles, as a foundation. And further to show that the fundamental principles of scientific management are applicable to all kinds of human activities, from our simplest individual acts to the work of our great corporations, which call for the most elaborate co-operation... It is hoped, however, that it will be clear to other readers that the same principles can be applied with equal force to all social activities: to the management of our homes; the management of our farms; the management of the business of our tradesmen large and small; of our churches, our philanthropic institutions, our universities and our governmental departments.[l6]

The full implementation of this vision depended on subtle and ubiquitous means for surveillance, pacing and control. These are only becoming fully available in the wake of the development of micro-processor-controlled manufacturing. Therefore, the goals set by Ure and by Taylor are only in sight of fulfilment as the twentieth century draws to a close. The theoretical elaboration of this vision, in conceptions based on the management sciences, systems theory and what has been called by James Martin The Wired Society, is in prospect unless a fundamentally different approach is taken to the union of the scientific world-view with the capitalist mode of production. In what follows I shall only be able to give an example of the other dimensions of the relations between science, alienation and oppression. In what I have said above I have attempted to lay out the most general features of these relations. The tracing of the connections between those and the particular examples listed below would far exceed the space available. The essential link between the scientific world-view and human alienation and oppression occurs through the labour process in both theory and practice. The theory is that of technological rationality and the practice is a technology-driven form of work. The most eloquent critique of this has been made by Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (to which the reader is most sincerely referred). Marcuse says,

The scientific concept of a universally controllable nature projected nature as endless matter-in-function, the mere stuff of theory and practice. In this form, the object-world entered the construction of a technological universe — a universe of mental and physical instrumentalities, means in themselves... Only in the medium of technology, man and nature become fungible objects of organisations. The universal effectiveness and productivity of the apparatus under which they are subsumed veil the particular interests that organise the apparatus. In other words, technology has become the great vehicle of reification — reification in its most mature and effective form. The social position of the individual and his relation to others appear not only to be determined by objective qualities and laws, but these qualities and laws seem to lose their mysterious and uncontrollable character; they appear as calculable manifestations of (scientific) rationality. The world tends to become the stuff of total administration, which absorbs even the administrators. The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it. And the transcending modes of thought seem to transcend Reason itself.[17]

Which example should one choose? Here are some candidates: the role of military research through 'research and development' from nuclear physics to higher mathematics, optics, chemical and biological warfare, containerisation and high resolution photography; the management-based research and development policies pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation including the international organisation of hygiene and tropical medicine, the Green Revolution, primatology, the social sciences and molecular biology; behavioural control in drugs (an industry providing a topic in its own right), conditioning, cerebral implants and psychosurgery; management sciences and operational research; the new technologies and property relations of genetic engineering, fertilisation and childbearing; and, finally, Social Darwinism in international relations, in business and in social theory. I trust that the large domain of the concepts of alienation and oppression vis-a-vis science will begin to become apparent. The example I shall sketch is the global assembly-line in micro-processor production. The history of information transmission from telegraphy to wireless telegraphy to the thermionic valve and then to transistors and micro-processors is itself almost wholly constituted by patronage from the military and the financial community. But what is so striking about the current manufacturing of these ’computers on a chip' are the conditions which, in their way, recall the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because of the falling rate of profit in the United States, American corporations set up factories in the Far East, sinking the shallowest roots in the community so that they can up the stakes whenever the labour force becomes uppity. Young women are recruited from villages and given very close work. Their eyes do not last long and they get called 'granny' in their early twenties. The companies develop programmes to develop metropolitan tastes in clothes perfumes, jewellery and gadgets, thus binding the young women closer to long hours and lower wages. Health conditions in the 'clean rooms' are bad and various toxic substances are abroad, even with special clothes and ventilation. When the women are too ill or their sight goes, they lose their jobs and many find their way into the only other lucrative trade that is available in the urban setting: prostitution. These are the conditions and the human costs by which the micro-processors at the heart of so many gadgets get made, for example, watches, hi-fi systems, home computers and computer-programmed washing machines. These working conditions and labour relations also exist in free trade zones in the First World, e.g., on the California/Mexican border and in Eire, but there are, in those places, some regulations which partially ameliorate what I have described as quite normal in South-East Asia. [18]In order to oppress other people, they must be seen as alien. The scientific world-view separates matter from mind and fact from value, while the capitalist mode of production separates the worker from the finished product and the work from the worker via the wage. Both senses of value — the moral and the economic — get separated off from the human. Much human benefit has been derived from science and from capitalism, but these are rather like a saving clause in a bad treaty.

NOTES

1. Genesis, Chapters 3 and 4 to verse 16.2. G. Petrovic, 'Alienation', in T. Bottomore et al., (eds.), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Oxford, 1983), pp. 9-15, at p. 15.3. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow, l961), p. 69.4. Ibid., p. 70.5. Ibid., p. 72.6. Ibid., pp. 82-3.7. K. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (rough draft) (1857-8) (London, 1973), p 141.8. K Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, 3 vols. (London, l976), vol. I, (1867), p. 163.9. Ibid., pp. 163-5.10. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923) (London, 1971), pp. 104-511. Ibid., p. 129.12. Ibid., p. 130.13. Ibid., p. 131.14. See R. Young, 'Science is Social Relations', Radical Science Journal 5 (1977), 65-129.15. K. Marx, Capital, (1867,1976), pp. 563-4.16. F. W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) (New York, l967), pp. 7-8.17. H. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: the Ideology of Industrial Society (1964), (London, 1968), Pp. 136-718. Pacific Research Center, 'The Changing Role of South East Asian Women: the Global Assembly Line and the Social Manipulation of Women', Special Joint Issue of Pacific Research and S. E. AsiaChronicle (Mountain View, Calif., 1978-79).