The contributions of the analysis of alienation to the social critique of labour in neoliberal capitalism

Abstract

From a sociological perspective, this paper attempts to contribute to the discussion on work and democracy led by Axel Honneth. Through Honneth’s analyses, this text focuses particularly on the concept of alienation. The central argument is that the analysis of alienation can provide critical insights into the limitations of democratic practices within contemporary organizations of work. The paper draws on empirical and theoretical debates in sociology to demonstrate the concept of alienation as a lens for analysing the complex relationships between labour and democracy.

At a time when globalized capitalism manifests its omnipotence over workers and a global pandemic calls into question what work is essential for society, the debate on work and democracy led by Axel Honneth has been more than welcome. This discussion took place during the Benjamin Lectures, which were conducted by the Centre for Humanities and Social Change at the Humboldt University in Berlin from 16 to 18 June 2021. In these lectures, Honneth focused on the relationship between work and democracy, the specific norms of democracy and the effects of capitalism in its current forms. These lectures have drawn a theoretical path that links the social critique of work with the critique of the precariousness of democracy and the perspectives of emancipation that were renewed by this critique. The quest to revitalize the link between work, democracy and social emancipation seems to us to be one of the major contributions of Honneth’s thought, especially since this link has been dilated over time as Honneth (2012: 56) himself expressed it: ‘Disappointed intellectuals, who 40 year ago still placed their hopes in the humanization or emancipation of labour, have turned their backs on the world of work in order to focus on other topics far from the realm of production’. While the level of his analysis has evolved over time, we can clearly recognize that from his article ‘Work and Instrumental Action’ (Honneth, 1995), first published in 1980, to his most recent work, including what was presented in the Benjamin Lectures, he has never abandoned the thesis of an essential relationship between work and democracy in his social theory.

Once the importance of work and working conditions is underlined for society’s democratic life, we wonder which main criteria we should emphasize to criticize current labour relations. In his lecture, Honneth indicates three main normative critiques of labour relations under capitalism. The first was formulated in the theory of alienation. The normative idea that remained is that work must somehow give workers the possibility to realize and express their abilities. The second paradigm emphasizes the dimension of the collective or social cooperation of activity. This tradition criticizes the dimension of isolation and fragmentation of the labour process under capitalism. Despite their differences, these two traditions, according to Honneth, have one common feature; both assume that work is intrinsically good. The critique of this last point is the crux of Honneth’s theory of labour and democracy. Versus this idea, Honneth supports the third tradition, which claims that ‘the purpose of labour is indirectly serving a goal, that is, as having only a contributive value towards the goal of this last tradition, which is the political will formation of all citizens of a community’. ¹ Since labour is not intrinsically good, according to this paradigm, intrinsic value is sought in the full and effective involvement of all members of society in the practice of democratic self-determination. This last paradigm has a particular reference to Durkheim’s theory of the division of labour. It has been partly explained in Honneth’s book ‘Freedom’s Right’, in which he seeks to establish a fundamental link between the horizon of a democratic social life and the cooperative model of work.

For Honneth, the first two arguments are not suitable for a critique of existing labour relations because they have the idealizing tendency to substantially overestimate the plasticity and flexibility of socially-necessary labour. Hence, he suggests that the third model of critique of capitalist labour relations is the only one that cannot be qualified as baseless perfectionism. However, we wonder if one model should definitely exclude the others, since all three models lead to social criticisms that target different angles of current societal norms. Furthermore, it does not seem to us judicious to discard the different critical theories of work so hastily if we want to analyse current work conditions under capitalism. In that regard, this paper will pay particular attention to the concept of alienation and how it provides non-negligible arguments to the critique of current labour relations and democratic debates.

An operational conceptualisation of alienation

Honneth starts his critique of the paradigm of alienation from a very idealistic definition: according to him, this paradigm is based ‘on the model of the crafts or artistic creation’. Non-alienated labour would be ‘the objectification of one’s own intentions in the self-made product’. Honneth argues that even if alienation allows us to understand or express specifically human capacities without necessarily having to embody or objectify them, it is not sufficiently suitable for a plausible critique of current labour relations. He states that since analyses through alienation consider that work can be perceived as intrinsically valuable activities that are performed solely for their own sake, alienation completely ignores the need for many tasks which resist the desire for objective self-fulfilment and expression. According to Honneth, the analysis through alienation has the tendency to idealize and overgeneralize the search for quality of work organization in order to be experienced as an expression or realization of typically human capabilities. Additionally, the paradigm of alienation does not propose ‘further analysis on whether or how this should be possible given the task and structure of the activity’. Honneth has another critique on this paradigm. He states that there is a strong ‘emphasis on individualism of the idea that in the future work should be free of all alienation’. Since efforts to improve working conditions focus on the ethical well-being of the individual worker by their self-realization or their personal improvement, the paradigm of alienation fails to account for how working conditions affect the social life, such as family life, civic engagement, or participation in the public discourse.

In this paper, we defend the idea that alienation is still relevant if one wants to understand the impacts of the organization of work on workers as well as on a larger scale, the dispossession of power in the current era of neoliberalism. Certainly, the concept of alienation itself is relatively problematic not only due to its manifold uses over the decades but also because of the criticisms it has been subjected to related to each of these uses. Even in Karl Marx’s Manuscripts 1844, the conceptualisation of alienation remains relatively vague because Marx attempts to identify a set of problems. With this concept, Marx seeks to explain the relationship between labour and private property as well as to illustrate the domination of capital and the subjective experiences of workers. Nevertheless, despite a broad conceptualisation, Marx’s critique via alienation seeks to outline the way in which the capitalist mode of production imposes itself on human beings by depriving them of control over their activities.

Regarding the sociology of work, especially from the 1950s onwards, the concept had frequently been mobilized (e.g. Melvin Seeman, Georges Friedmann and Pierre Naville, Robert Blauner and Charles Wright Mills). However, in the 1970s, the concept of alienation, which ‘sociologists of work frequently call upon to understand, explain and denounce the loss of self at work’ disappeared from the sociological lexicon (Lallement, 2007: 242). Since then, part of sociology is sceptical of this concept. It is considered very vague and obsolete because of its references to a type of social criticism corresponding to a typical organization of labour and mass consumption.

However, recent studies about the world of work show that the critical analysis of alienation is not limited to the phenomena typical of the Keynesian-Fordist period of capitalism (Renault, 2006). Various contributions aim to inspire new discussions about alienation and new models of social critique. For example, philosopher Haber (2007, 2009, 2013) over the course of three books, sought to re-evaluate this concept to show how it could be ‘reactivated’ today. Similarly, Jaeggi’s (2014) book Alienation which was published 1 year before Haber’s first book is another example of this renewed engagement. Based on Jaeggi’s model, alienation refers to an impedance or disturbance of the processes of appropriation of the world and oneself in social relations or activities. She describes relations of appropriation as ‘a form of praxis, a way of relating practically to the world’ (Jaeggi, 2014: 38) and that is, why they can be impeded or failed depending on one’s social conditions. She mentions two dimensions of alienation: the problem of a loss of meaning, and that this meaninglessness is intertwined with powerlessness and impotence. She describes powerlessness as ‘the inability to exert control over what one does – that is, the inability to be, individually or collectively, the subject of one’s actions’ (Jaeggi, 2014: 12).

Following this critical approach, different sociological works give descriptive and explanatory uses to alienation. For instance, Hartmut Rosa mobilizes it to explain the relationship between acceleration and alienation. ² Paugam (2000) calls upon it to criticize the precariousness, and Jacquot (2016: 208) uses it for the purpose of analysing contemporary work conditions. Hence, despite the plurality of approaches concerning alienation, particularly in sociology, the questions related to the meaning of work and power at work are the most important foundations of research about work conditions or pathologies at work. For instance, sociologist Fabienne Hanique (2004), in her book Le sens du travail (The meaning of work), explains that through the processes of modernization of firms and managerial injunctions there is an alteration of shared values and a loss of meaning, which translates for workers into forms of suffering at work. Similarly, the psychology of work describes power as ‘a very effective way to suffer less’ for workers (Molinier, 2006: 12).

During the current phase of capitalism, the world of work has undergone considerable changes through the destruction of collectives in the workplace and among social relations. Delocalization and de-unionization were aimed at undermining workers’ power; the dismantling of the welfare system and general precariousness followed. In other terms, workers’ power has disintegrated progressively on different scales, from the level of the workplace and the wage relationship up to the broader level of political representation. In the capitalist organization, one’s experience of work becomes, henceforth, a disturbing factor that provokes psychological dysfunction and leads to the formation of pathologies in the cognitive, affective, moral and social life of the subjects (Dejours et al., 2018). Indeed, this situation is intrinsic to the capitalist organization of labour, as various Marxian traditions show. Today, critical studies on the contemporary world of work, through concepts such as alienation, aim to update this critical analysis to strengthen its capacity to question the realities of the field of work in the current period of capitalism. Furthermore, the search for democratic and fulfilling practices at or through work remains more problematic in the contemporary organization of work because this effort is often instrumentalized and is experienced in paradoxical situations where autonomy is closely associated with increased control and where participation is accompanied by a continual decrease in power. For instance, as the objectives imposed by total quality management are impossible to achieve, workers manipulate data to meet the quality or deadline criteria imposed by the given indicators. It means that total quality management, which aims to quantify and measure every dimension of work, strips the experience of work of all its other dimensions and reduces it to a purely quantifiable level. It makes lying at work a necessary and ordinary practice. This type of situation deteriorates the quality of work and risks causing what clinicians define as ‘ethical suffering’ at work (Rolo, 2015: 43–62): ‘Being forced to lie, to defraud or to cheat on inspections places many agents in an unstable position with respect to their occupation, their professional ethics and their personal ethics’ (Dejours, 2006: 135). Finally, today, the Taylorian controls ‘tend to be replaced by individualized social control of behaviour, commitment and loyalty in the organization’ (Courpasson, 1997: 39–40). It is then a question of ‘diverting the dedication and loyalty that animate individuals in their contribution to society by claiming them for the exclusive benefit of the companies that employ them’ (Cukier, 2016).

At this point, we must highlight the difference between our approach to the alienation paradigm and that of Honneth. For Honneth, the crux of the paradigm of alienation for better working conditions rests solely on individual well-being, so good work would be an individual subject. In our opinion, while the paradigm of alienation is based on individuals’ negative social experiences, it exposes the collective dimension of these experiences, which in turn facilitates the criticism of the social structures and conditions that lead to them. It allows us to give a social and, thus, political dimension to the problems that are turned into purely subjective ones by the current neoliberal logic. The modalities of modern managerialism attempt to remove the social dimension of work by reducing it to a subjective issue, so the attack is made on an individual register. This is related to the ‘new liberal common sense’ (Renault, 2004: 13). As Emmanuel Renault (2004: 13) summarizes it, this common sense is based on ‘a three-fold process of transforming political norms into technical norms, of transforming social problems into moral problems and of reducing moral problems to individual responsibilities’. Therefore, a critical study of working conditions must include an overall reading of the ‘decollectivization of salaried work’ (Linhart, 2010: 120), which is accompanied by the depoliticization of questioning the working conditions in society. From this perspective, social criticism in terms of alienation at or by work aims against the ‘depoliticization through moralization and psychologization, as well as individualization’ (Renault, 2017: 108).The paradigm of alienation is far from reducing the scale of analysis to individual well-being but rather a question of politicizing the forms of individual suffering, which management tries, in an ideological way, to individualize and restrict in a moralization ‘which would be specific to companies’ (Linhart, 2010: 121). Workplace studies indicate a means of describing individual suffering as a sum of not only physical pain, the result of the constraints of work on the body, but also of moral, psychological and social suffering. To this end, they are based on an analysis of social reality and its contradictions and find their criteria in social practices, struggles, experiences and self-understandings to which they are connected (Celikates, 2012: 113).

Alienation, from this perspective, is not an idealized concept but a practical one. It is a process which allows us to improve social critique anchored in practice at a time when there are more complex forms of this same alienation in the contemporary work organization. The way the workers described their negative experiences is worth analysing to conduct a general social critique of society. That is why it is essential to emphasize that the description of experiences of alienation and the analysis of the socio-organizational factors in which these experiences are inscribed relate to the ‘democratic intuitions’ (Ferreras, 2007, 2012) contained in negative social experiences. These democratic intuitions are a pre-theoretical moment that constitutes the empirical basis of social criticism. Even if these criticisms are not always expressed in an explicitly political vocabulary, they imply descriptions of negative experiences, so they are endowed with a rich critical potential. In other words, studies of alienation imply in a direct or implicit way a reference point regarding democratic practices and social emancipation. That means the paradigm of alienation indicates an existence of expectations for other forms of work and of a non-public potential for conflict, of demands for other ways of working and living together and of demands for transformation. These demands are often maintained within negative experiences. Honneth suggests that ‘the consequences of working conditions for social life as a whole are completely ignored by the paradigm of alienation’. To us, this paradigm is hermeneutically rich. It indicates that a series of structural blockages hinder the necessary conditions for emancipatory social forms. Simply put, the dysfunctions of democratic and societal life hinder emancipatory practices. Hence, it pushes us to think of certain phenomena together and to underline their links. Outside the context of alienation these phenomena can appear dispersed and dissociated. In this sense, the issue of the indebtedness of wage earners and its link with alienation will be invoked in order to show the extent to which this paradigm still provides rich analyses in the current era of capitalism.

Working in the shadow of finance: Workers’ indebtedness as a lever to the experiences of alienation at work

Individual indebtedness has become an important feature of the present era, which tells us a lot about the working conditions in neoliberal capitalism. Since 2005, the issue of ‘over-indebtedness’ has been included in the ILO’s ³ decent work strategy. According to the ILO, over-indebtednesses should be considered a source of vulnerability for workers in times of increasing financialisation.

However, the relationship between working conditions and debt is quite complex. It is composed of several other forms of precariousness present in society. Focussing on the disciplinary power of debt, the analysis of workers’ indebtedness contributes, for instance, to an explanation of why workers consent to alienation at or by work. The analysis of workers’ indebtedness reveals a link between the ‘managerial politics of fear’, ⁴ which stems from the ‘blackmail of unemployment and debt’ and the acceptance of different experiences of alienation. The fear of losing one’s job reinforces, for example, the consent of workers to the performance of excellence, which contributes to lying about work. They hide occupational illnesses or accidents (for fear of being dismissed) or quality defects (for fear of failing in the face of numerical objectives). They contribute to the denial of their daily reality. The constraints linked to debt and the threat of precariousness increase the dispossession of workers’ power in the face of managerial techniques.

On the other hand, indebtedness gives important material not only about consent to experience of alienation on work but also by work because it brings to light substantial points regarding individual’s dependence on salary and, thus, on employment. While in recent years, different researches, especially concerning the concept of ‘bullshit jobs’ (Graeber, 2018), ⁵ show how there are more and more jobs that have no meaning or utility for those who work them, the phenomenon of debt nevertheless makes employees more and more vulnerable to risks such as changing jobs. Since the risks are shifted ‘from employer to employee’, ‘from government to individuals’ and ‘from financial institutions to households’ (Bryan and Rafferty, 2018: 29–32), the room for manoeuvre for the ‘indebted man’ (Lazzarato, 2012) is reduced by various constraints. This situation plays an important role in the employee’s relation to their work; especially for those employees who are already burdened by student or real estate loan, as their household’s budget becomes increasingly more fragile. The risk then exerts greater pressure on those who are indebted. The precariousness of workers’ subjectivity is, thus, reinforced by the wage relationship.

Additionally, the phenomenon of employee indebtedness as a structural dimension of alienation provides some important data for understanding the practice of overtime work. Especially in low-wage countries with high inflation and depreciated wages, the use of credits seems indispensable for wage earners. Nevertheless, repayment requires them to make additional efforts. Overtime work becomes one of main solution for workers’ struggling with debt repayment. Debt expands labour subordination to capital by making work more precarious, and employees are required to make more sacrifices (Karacimen, 2015: 322). However, these sacrifices exhaust the possible social meanings of work, that is, to say, the meanings that workers can attribute to work from a social perspective. The overburdening of personal time through work becomes a form of social suffering for workers and their families. Overtime work ultimately deteriorates their work experience as well as their life conditions. It annihilates their social life and leads to a generalized feeling of powerlessness and suffering as formulated by Pineault (2014): today, wage earners are not only ‘exploited and alienated, but now also indebted. Three phenomena which, moreover, reinforce each other’. . .

The examples concerning overtime reveal that the issue of debt implies new analyses about the experience of work in the era of neoliberalism. The indebtedness of workers goes beyond the analysis of the wage only in the instrumental sense: ‘the content of money here is not labour but existence, individuality and human morality; the material of money is not labour time, but the time of existence’ (Lazzarato, 2012: 60). As a socioeconomic relation, debt is deployed in the relationship that individuals maintain with the world in their present and debt determines their future. From this perspective, debt can be translated as an experience of alienation because it contributes to the weakening of the position of each individual and to the precariousness of their subjectivity.

Debt as an experience of alienation and its relationship with the future

All types of debt – credit cards, mortgages or consumer loans – are based on the waged work that is, to be done in the future. As noted by John Holloway, ‘credit is always a gamble on the future. In borrowing, capital commits a portion of surplus value not yet produced’ (Holloway, 1995: 17). Therefore, ‘debt always has a certain relation to time, and credit can be conceived as an anticipation of the future that goes beyond the limits of the present’ (Bissonnette, 2017a: 118). Hence, the analysis of the socio-political content of credit systems immediately opens various debates on the horizon of individual and social possibilities. Since the futures shaped by debt, current and future behaviour are calculated according to it (Lazzarato, 2012: 46). It is in these terms that indebtedness is considered a specific experience of alienation. It prevents individuals from shaping their future and the relationships that they want to be in. This situation creates ‘a specific kind of powerlessness, such that we are then turned into passive objects at the mercy of unknown forces’ (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 134).

Consequently, the accumulation of debt intensifies the instrumental dimension of work and reinforces the subordination of workers to the company as well as to the financial world in the future. The power relationship between creditor and debtor is, therefore, a determining factor in a possible social transformation in the future. In other words, the compromises that underlie debt and the constraints it generates ‘limit the “field of possibilities”’ (Groux and Levy, 1993: 203) of individuals both in the political arena and in the workplace. For instance, indebtedness increases the vulnerability of workers; the slightest hazard to their employment, such as downgrading or reducing their overtime has expensive consequences. Risk-taking, like protesting at work, is becoming more costly for indebted workers, especially in the context of high unemployment. Alienation then translates into the impossibility of controlling one’s actions and the impossibility of transforming the social world. Being trapped by perpetual debt, the subjectivity arising from these experiences is then deprived of the power to choose, control and transform the social framework of their work and their lives. The fear of a threatening future overwhelms one’s ability to cope with its uncertainty in the present and lowers one’s aspiration for the future as Jean-Philippe Deranty explains: ‘More deeply, the strategic use of fear produces a counter-narrative that reinforces the circle of the destruction of hope, that is, the vicious circle whereby social and individual hope feed off each other’s destructions’ (Deranty, 2008: 461).

Moreover, through the individualizing aspect of the debt phenomenon, the accumulation of capital is largely depoliticized. Indebtedness ‘designates an individualizing condition, where the extortion of surplus value in the form of compound interest takes place within the life of the debtors, in solitude and isolation’ (Bissonnette, 2017a; see also Federici, 2014; Hayes, 2000). The workers are overwhelmed by feelings of guilt, the fear of being judged by their family and peers, and the urgency of daily life. They seek individual solutions, so they work harder and take out new loans. The ‘morality of debt’ (Bissonnette, 2017b) leads to an accumulation of debt. By placing moral blame on the debtors, they are less likely to demand higher wages and other social rights. Finance and its fundamental mechanism, debt, operate ‘as factors of depoliticization’ (Bissonnette, 2013). The dynamics of indebtedness under the domination of capital lead to the acceptance of experiences of alienation for wage earners, which leads to the ‘de-democratization’ (Brown, 2007) of society in neoliberalism.

For this reason, the analysis of debt through the concept of alienation at work allows us to contextualize and re-politicize debt. Unlike an approach that seeks to focus on the psychological dimensions of indebtedness, such as compulsive spending behaviours (Duhaime, 2004), or debt incurred from a personal trajectory, such as illness or temporary unemployment, we focus on the structural dimensions of indebtedness. The structural dimensions of indebtedness are studied in relation of production, by highlighting its structural aspects and by questioning individual responsibility and describing the collective basis of the experience of alienation. Finally, debt illustrates the way the paradigm of alienation has the normative capacity to criticize current working conditions on a large scale by conceptualizing different phenomena together and highlighting their links, which can be used to formulate different democratic actions to achieve social emancipation.