Kyle Scott (UCLA), “Unalienated Labor as Cooperative Self-Determination: Aristotle and Marx”

Forthcoming, European Journal of Philosophy

By Kyle Scott

In a well-known essay, G.A. Cohen builds a case for socialism by asking us to imagine a camping trip. A camping trip, Cohen observes, is a thoroughly cooperative venture. When people go camping together, they typically cooperate to perform the various activities that contribute to the success of the trip. For example, while one camper might do the fishing, another might prepare the food, and another might clean up after the meal. But the uniqueness of the cooperative nature of a camping trip lies in the way the very “spirit” of the venture, as Cohen puts it, shapes the motivations of its participants. If the campers are genuinely committed to the success of the trip, then they will be motivated to perform their share of tasks, at least in part, for the sake of that success. Rather than fishing, or cooking, or cleaning in order to secure some isolated individual end—say, better food or cleaner arrangements for oneself—committed campers tend to be motivated by the idea that cooperating together is part of the very point of what they are doing. One reason a camping trip is a worthwhile thing to pursue is because it provides a context for valuable forms of human cooperation. Accordingly, as Cohen says, when people go camping together they tend to cooperate “for its own sake,” or for the sake of that very cooperation. A camping trip takes, as a central part of its point and value, the cooperative character that makes it what it is.

In my recent article, I claim that this idea of intrinsically motivated cooperation, or cooperation for its own sake, is at the heart of Karl Marx’s famous and influential account of unalienated labor. Since Marx’s ideas began to take root in the late 19th century, but especially since the posthumous publication of his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in 1932, a great deal of ink has been spilled in the attempt to elucidate his conception of alienated and unalienated labor, and to understand his reasons for thinking that labor under capitalism assumes an alienated form. For some, Marxian alienation broadly describes the condition of unfreedom involved in having to work for another in order to earn one’s livelihood—what Marx describes as having one’s own activity “belong” to another and exist “externally” to oneself. Others, however, have focused on the sense in which capitalist wage-labor is often experienced as unfulfilling, stultifying, or indeed actively harmful by those who perform it. Still others have emphasized the motivations that typically drive capitalist workers to perform their labor, in which “base,” “egoistic,” or even “demeaning” motivations—fear, greed, self-interest, and the like—seem to crowd out more benign or ennobling motivations, such as generosity, solidarity, or fellow feeling.

This is just a small sampling of some prominent strains of interpretation that have taken hold over many years—each of which, I believe, gets something right. Capitalist labor is indeed alienated because it is unfree, unfulfilling, and motivated by self-interest. However, as many have noted, these features seem rather disparate. It is not immediately clear how, or whether, they form a unified conceptual whole. My claim is that each of these features can be understood as either a cause or symptom of the fact that, for Marx, capitalist labor fails to exhibit the value structure instantiated by the kind of intrinsically motivated cooperation in which Cohen’s campers engage.

Let me elaborate. First, to see what I’m after, consider the paradigmatic sort of activity that Marx regularly describes as alienated, and which Cohen contrasts with the cooperative activity performed on a camping trip. This would be an act of labor—let us say, cooking—that is motivated primarily by a self-interested reward—let us say, a monetary wage. What is the value structure of such an act? Broadly speaking, it is the structure of an act that is only instrumentally valuable. When an individual cooks merely for the sake of a wage, she regards her act as valuable only because it produces, or helps to procure, some further valuable end, separate from that act itself. In this sense, the act of cooking derives its value from something outside of it—namely, a wage, which is a valuable or useful thing entirely in its own right, separate from the value of the cooking that helps to bring it into the worker’s possession. The value of money—its usefulness for acquiring goods, and so on—does not depend on the manner of its procurement. Twenty dollars secured by an hour of cooking is just as valuable as twenty dollars secured by an hour of cleaning, or fishing, or whatever (this, after all, is what makes it money: a “universal equivalent”). What this means is that although the value of the cooking that procures the wage derives its value from the value of what it procures, the value of the wage does not itself derive from the value of the act that helped to procure it. The act of cooking depends for its value on the value of the money paid out in exchange for it, whereas the value of that money does not in turn depend on the value of the cooking for which it is exchanged. So, the relation of value is unilateral, flowing from the end (the wage) to the means (the act of cooking).

By contrast, the value structure of a pair of intrinsically motivated cooperative acts is bilateral, rather than unilateral, flowing both from means to end and from end to means. To see this, consider a pair of cooperative acts that two individuals might perform on a camping trip. Suppose I catch some fish and you cook the fish for dinner. And suppose we each perform our respective task in the “spirit” of a camping trip—which is to say, partly for the sake of cooperating together in this way. If we are so motivated, then we will not be cooperating merely for the sake of whatever benefits are generated by that cooperation over and above that cooperation itself, such as the relative increase in efficiency that our cooperation might afford. Rather, we will be cooperating because the pattern of our activity possesses a certain value in itself, much like a dance might bear a certain value due to the pattern of movement it displays. In this case, the value of our acts will be mutually constitutive. My fishing will be valuable, in part, because it prospectively lays the conditions for, or helps to bring about, the cooking that you later perform using the fish I catch. And your cooking will be valuable, in turn, because it will be a way of retrospectively “completing” my earlier act of fishing, and thereby cooperating together with me. Here, then, each act takes a central part of its value from the value of the other act: my fishing is valuable because of the way it helps to bring about your cooking, and your cooking is valuable for the way it helps to complete my fishing. Together, the pair of acts constitutes a unitary whole, whose value is irreducible to that which each of its individual parts possesses in isolation.

Notice, here, that the cooperative character of our activity is not simply latent or implicit, but in fact something at which we each explicitly or consciously aim. This, after all, is part of what it means for us to cooperate in the “spirit” of the camping trip, and to act “for the sake of” the cooperation that our activities afford. And indeed, the distinctive value of our cooperative pattern depends on this common feature that each of our acts bears. Compare a similarly cooperative pattern of activities that are not “consciously” cooperative, or which are not performed for the sake of cooperation. Suppose I mindlessly leave the fish I catch on the banks of the river and, unbeknownst to me, you happen upon the fish and cook it up for dinner. Although there may be a sense in which we are still “cooperating” here, the cooperation would nonetheless remain unconscious and accidental. My act of fishing would not aim intentionally at cooperatively enabling your act of cooking; its conditions of success—and value—would thus fail to include the success and value of the cooking that you later perform. This is one reason Marx insists that unalienated labor would have to be “conscious” labor, in the sense that each of us would have to consciously aim at, and be motivated by, the cooperative character of our individual contributions. For all that labor under capitalism may be cooperative, it is not generally consciously cooperative, in that capitalist workers are not typically motivated to perform their work from a consideration of how it helps to enable and “complete” the work of their fellows.

Now, Marx’s insistence that unalienated work must be consciously, as opposed to only implicitly, cooperative, is not simply dogmatic. Rather, this conscious character is a necessary condition for the value structure of unalienated labor, which, as we have seen, is holistic or mutually constitutive. To say that the value of a pair of cooperative acts is mutually constitutive is to say that the success of each act depends on the success of the other. Thus, in the example above, the idea is that my fishing succeeds just in case your cooking succeeds, and vice-versa. But how could this be? After all, fishing is fishing and cooking is cooking. Fishing, it seems, bears criteria of success unique to it: catching fish, etc.; just as cooking, it seems, bears its own separate set of criteria. Marx’s thought, however, is that an activity whose normative criteria would otherwise be “self-contained,” or restricted to the specific nature of that act taken in isolation, can be extended beyond that—and come to fuse together with the normative criteria of other activities—when it is performed, consciously, for the sake of cooperating with others. When each of us take as among our motivations and aims for acting that we cooperate with another and help to constitute the other’s success, each of our individual acts breaks free of its merely individual character, and comes to serve as a constituent in a more general activity which we might call, “fishing-and-cooking-together,” rather than merely “fishing” and “cooking.” It is thus only from the conscious character of our cooperation that a third act—one which is cooperative by its very nature—can be made to blossom forth. 

There is, of course, much more to say about Marx’s theory of unalienated labor, and my understanding of it, than I can say here. (For instance, I have not even mentioned Aristotle, who is the subject of a large portion of my article and, in my view, a central and often unacknowledged influence on Marx’s theory). My hope, however, is that I have at least offered a glimpse of the broad contours of that theory in a manner that may serve to spark the interest, not only of those with a particular interest in understanding Marx’s views, but more generally to any philosophers concerned about the value of the work activities that occupy much of our lives.