What we may expect from work

Abstract

In his critique of contemporary working conditions, Axel Honneth rejects Marx’s concept of alienation for three main reasons: (1) The concept is allegedly tied to industrial labor as the standard model of work. (2) The ideal of unalienated labor seems to be too demanding in its aspiration to the full development of all human potential. (3) The level of analysis is so fundamental that the critique loses the “ends in view,” that is, the feasible almerioation of actual working conditions. I argue that these three challenges can be met by a more charitable reading of Marx. Moreover, alienation helps us to identify structural reasons for the failure of approaches to improve working conditions in recent decades and provides analytical tools for the current crises of democracy.

Introduction

In German Idealism, work gained an unsurpassable significance. Especially for Hegel and in his footsteps for Marx, work meant the appropriation of nature in a way that far exceeds the predominantly legal appropriation Locke had in mind. According to this school of thought work not only produces the means to sustain and develop life but also constitutes all knowledge. Hence, it constitutes the “world” as entirety of all that there is to know. Furthermore, work is the self-appropriation and formation of the working human subject. Thus, it is the subject’s activity of self-constitution and as such pivotal for the (full) development of human potential.

Failed aspirations

This philosophical view of work contrasts starkly with workers’ reality in the era of early industrialization. Reports of mental, social, and physical deprivation in the factories and workhouses of the 19th century were, already at the time, widely known. They describe a situation that could not be further away from the development of human capacities, and the creation of meaning. This divergence of aspiration and reality led Marx in the famous Paris Manuscripts of 1844 to the reconceptualization of “alienation.” There, Marx calls alienation an act that, at first, was an act of appropriation in the philosophical though not in the legal sense but went completely wrong and ended up in a situation of dispossession and deprivation. Alienation, according to Marx, entails a severe loss of the connection to the world, to humankind, to one’s own capacities, activities, and the products thereof. In other words alienation describes the failure of appropriation both in the legal and in the philosophical sense.

About a century later Dewey (1939) added his voice to the philosophical idea that work is ultimately about “the production of human beings” (p. 430). For those working it should provide opportunities “to find themselves and then to educate themselves for what they can best do in work which is socially useful, and such as to give free play in development of themselves” (Dewey, 1939: 428).

The reality was still different. And Dewey (1939) was not very optimistic regarding the prospective developments of societies. In the capitalist part of the world, the “inherent exigencies of the social-economic system” (p. 430) caused severe social pessimism: “Even if there were a much more widespread, and searching concern with the capacities of individuals, and much more preparation of them along the lines of their inherent fitness and needs than now exists,” he asked, “what assurance is there in the existing system that there will be opportunity to use their gifts and the education they have obtained?” (1939: 429). The fairly new societies of the Fascist and Soviet type—claiming to overcome social isolation of the working individuals, and in the latter case also to root out alienation—on the other hand misinterpreted social planning as following “fixed blueprints imposed from above and therefore involving reliance upon physical, and psychological force to secure conformity to them” (1939: 431–432).

In contrast to both capitalism and the planned societies, as exemplified by Fascism and the Soviet system, Dewey proposed his idea of a “continuously planning society” which not only reflects upon means but also is free in the choice of ends and releases “intelligence through the widest form of coöperative give-and-take.” To him “social planning” is “an operative method of activity, not a predetermined set of final ‘truths.’” (Dewey, 1939: 432) The emphasis on the processual aspect of planning, and on cooperation shows the close connection of social planning to work if the latter is free from external coercion; be it in the form of economic inherent necessities, the rules issued by a party apparatus, or the impositions of a bureaucracy. Work could have the potential to produce not only human beings, but “free human beings associating with one another on terms of equality.” (Dewey, 1939: 430) In this sense, work could be a school of democracy that teaches people how to cooperate on equal terms in a free association.

Almost another century later, the realization of the potential that Dewey and the tradition of German Idealism saw in work has made hardly any progress. On the contrary, in his Walter Benjamin Lectures “The Working Sovereign” (2021) Axel Honneth painted a dire picture of work at the beginning of the 21st century. In comparison to the era of Fordism, the general tendencies are—as Honneth notes—that wage labor has become more precarious; jobs are defined rather as projects than permanent positions; job profiles become more and more specialized and accordingly rather narrow—especially in the lower paid ranks; cost-effectiveness prevails in almost all areas over standards of good work, which evolve out of the productive processes; and finally a growing influence of digitalization and algorithms determines the work activities and entails a shift from manual to visual (i.e. symbol-based) control.

Consequentially, the prospects for workplaces to become actually Deweyan schools of democracy are low. Precariousness and the project-character of work aggravate the separation of workers. While the predominance of cost-effectiveness diminishes the experience of self-efficacy. All this undermines—according to Honneth—the trust persons develop with regard to their entitlement to be taken serious or even to be heard in the arena of a democratic public. The one-sidedness and degradation of job profiles as well as the symbol-mediated forms of control and the introduction of digital technologies, the vast majority of which are designed to increase control over workers and force them to maximize performance, exacerbate both the isolation and the subversion of workers’ self-esteem, which is essential for their self-recognition as part of the democratic citizenry.

Honneth’s critique of alienation

As noted above, for Marx alienation designates a process of appropriation that turns into its opposite. This reversal is closely intertwined with a sustained state and feeling of heteronomy that results from alienation and is at the same time its origin. I will come back to that in more detail in a moment. But let me remark first, that it is not important for the sake of Marx’ definition whether a person or systemic constraints is the source of heteronomy. The latter occurs characteristically in economies defined by non-personal media of exchange such as markets. All of the elements that, in Honneth’s analysis (2021), contribute to the degradation of democratic potentials in contemporary work relations aggravate the experience of work as a heteronomous process determined by forces that are external not only to the worker, but also to the productive procedures themselves and their inherent demands. Yet, Honneth explicitly dismisses alienation as analytical tool and critical strategy.

Honneth’s (2021) rejection rests on two arguments. The first argument claims that the diagnosis of alienation builds on a standard model of work that never covered the majority of actual work activities and, today, is no longer tenable. According to this standard model work is supposed to be a craft, or—in the industrialized version—the vestige of a former craft. It produces some material thing and expresses thereby the creative powers either of the individual or the combined worker. Honneth mentions explicitly the focus on industrial production, the production of things, and the neglect of service, and care work that seemed to characterize not only Hegel’s, and Marx’ conception of work but also the sociology of work well into the 1970s and 80s.

The standard model of work seems to fit perfectly with the world—and subject-building power that Hegel and Marx attributed to work. But its disregard of all the work that—although it does not create new stuff—must be done for the sheer reproduction of society makes it rather implausible as a general starting point for non-alienated work. If alienation is a deviation from the standard model, it is hard to see how the analysis of alienation can tell us something interesting about all the works that do not meet the standard model of work from the outset.

The second objection, which Honneth raises against the use of alienation as a conceptual tool, concentrates on the subject—or self-building power of work. For Honneth this entails that non-alienating work actually has to realize the full human potential of the workers. All repetitive and monotonous, all isolating, all mainly laborious work as well as all work that counts as dirty, disgusting, and repellent in society fails to fulfill the requirement for true self-realization, and meaningful work. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine any genuine work, except perhaps the creation of art that could possibly live up to this standard. Again, the concept of alienation seems to suggest a model of meaningfulness, and self-realization that has no conceptual space for the majority of tasks that are necessary to sustain individual life and society as a whole.

Honneth’s first argument: Contra the standard model

In order to evaluate Honneth’s arguments, it is inevitable to have a closer look on how the concept of alienation actually works. In my reading, Marx’ description of alienation refers back to Hegel’s presentation of appropriation in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. There Hegel (2003) states that “my will, as personal and hence as the will of an individual [des Einzelnen], becomes objective in property” (p. §46). Hegel (2003) specifies this objectification of the subjective will as giving “form to something” where “something” refers primarily to some object that is, external to the person whose will is becoming objective (p.§56). Only later does he clarify that the bodies of persons who are taking possession of their own capacities in the process of (self-)formation also count as a place where the will can become objective.

Marx relies on this model in his account of what is going wrong in alienated work processes. Work is alienated if the will that is objectified in the working process, and the will of the agent of this very objectivation, that is, of the worker, are not identical. This peculiar divergence results when the agents of an objectivation have submitted their will to the will of another person. As Marx (Marx 1975a: 274) writes in one of many characteristic passages on this point: “[T]he external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another.” ¹

Selling one’s labor power in a labor contract is but the most recent social form such submission has taken—bondage, indentured labor, etc. have the same effect. ² The wage-labor contract lends the personal power, which one’s individual will controls exclusively, to the objectives of someone else. During the working hours, the buyer of the labor power has acquired the right to direct the worker’s attention, to limit the scope of their mental and physical activity, but also to demand either personally, or through an agent the exercise of these activities to further his, or her own goals and benefit. This “alienation” of personal capacities, and their actualization in the legal sense of the word entails that personal capacities, and volitions become (in part, and for the time being) alien to the person having them. It is important to note, however, that workers do not adopt the will of the person who bought their labor power to a degree that would lead to the complete erasure of the worker’s own will, or a total identification with the given orders. The workers, as Marx observes, realize the alien will—although usually with inner reservations and not infrequently with a feeling of drudgery—for their own benefit, above all in the form of the contractual wage that sustains the physical, and social life of the worker. The capacities, and volitions exercised in the working process are hence one’s own, and are determined by external imperatives at the same time.

In his analysis of alienation, Marx enumerates the consequences of the difference of the agent’s will and the objectified will. He diagnoses alienation with respect to the relations of the worker to the immediate, and social results of the working process as well as to the capacities available, and realized, and to other people (Marx 1975a: 272–279).

Hegel’s analysis of giving form to something clearly evokes the image of the homo faber that defines the standard model of work. As the reference to (self-)formation already indicates, Hegel could nevertheless include elements beyond classical objects in his argument. In the Marxian account of alienation, however, the ties to the standard model are even looser. By focusing on the relation of the submissive, and the subordinating will, Marx broadens our understanding of the will’s reality. Objectivation is but one of its dimensions. Aspects of alienation other than alienation from the product of work, in particular estrangement from the actual activity and thus from the self, its capacities, and volitions, entail that the self with its activities and capacities is also a domain for the will to realize.

Given such a broad range of alienation, including care work in the analysis of alienated work suggests itself, since care workers are often subordinated to an external dominating will. If we concede that care work produces—among other things—human relations, emotions, communicative connections, and meaning the producer’s relation to all these “products” is subject to a sever feeling of alienation when generated under external imperatives, such as being profitable. Marx (Marx 1975a: 295) states this more or less explicitly by discussing prostitution as “a specific expression of the general prostitution of the laborer.” Like the laborer, the prostitute suffers—emotionally and socially—from the corrupting effects of the alienated relationship to the clients beyond the immediate engagement in prostitution. In the vocabulary of his times, Marx (Marx 1975a: 295) calls this corruption “falling”, and notes that prostitution “is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute ³ alone, but also the one who prostitutes.”

The intensity of alienation as a lived experience in affective, and emotional work contradicts the idea that alienation or its opposite non-alienation remains bound to the standard model of work. Nevertheless, there are reasons for giving industrial work a special attention in the analysis of alienation.

Moishe Postone has argued that alienation only reaches its climax with modern industry. The machines employed in industrial production differ from mere tools insofar as they not just multiply the labor power of the worker. “Unlike manufacture, the powers of the social whole no longer express in alienated form the knowledge, skills, and labor of the collective worker but, rather, the accumulated collective knowledge, and power of humanity, of the species. Hence, [. . .] with the development of large-scale industry, the powers of capital cannot be considered those of the collective worker, but have become greater than the latter” (Postone, 1993: 344). ⁴ They are reorganizing production in a way that leaves workers in a position where they are absolutely unable to produce without the machines and the organization of the factory.

Still, the special role that industrial work plays for the understanding of alienation and its role in modern societies does not entail that industrial work is the sole domain where alienation is experienced. Nor does it imply that homo faber, producer of material things and self-proclaimed master of nature, is the paradigm of non-alienation. But in order to demonstrate that, we need to consider Honneth’s second argument against alienation more closely, that is, whether alienation’s counterpart is the full development of human capacities.

Honneth’s second argument: Contra full human development

In his dismissal of alienation as a fruitful approach in the social theory of labor, Honneth reproduces a pattern of downplaying large parts of reproductive work as per se unsatisfying, dull, and repetitive. Such characterizations are well known from the literature. Simone de Beauvoir provides a classic example in The Second Sex. Through housework, she writes, the wife “realizes herself as an activity. But, as we will see, it is an activity that [. . .] allows her no individual affirmation of herself” (Beauvoir, 2011: 484). The harsh verdict is based on an analysis, which states that female activities of maintenance amount to doing nothing. Beauvoir uses the very expression “elle [the wife] ne fait rien—she does nothing” ⁵ twice. While the first context is about choosing interiors and decorating (Beauvoir, 2011: 484), the second is to “wash dishes, dust furniture, mend clothes that will be dirty, dusty, and torn again” (Beauvoir, 2011: 487). Beauvoir is not implying that this “doing nothing” is an absence of exhausting activity. On the contrary, she explains: “The housewife wears herself out running on the spot” (Beauvoir, 2011: 487).

What brings Beauvoir to her degradation of the activity is the endless recurrence of the task. But it is not the repetition alone which might also be the feature of many production processes that generate things like bread, rubber ducks, or administrative acts. It is the deep-felt lack of “the sense that she is conquering a positive Good” (Beauvoir, 2011: 487) which for Beauvoir distinguishes housework from activities capable to produce individual affirmation of oneself. The maintenance of the household, the infinite struggle against dust, dirt, and stains seems unable to serve as a realization of the will in Hegel’s sense, because it disintegrates in the moment, it is achieved. In Beauvoir’s (2011) words: “this is holding away death but also refusing life” (p. 488).

Hannah Arendt gives a similar explanation when bringing “labor,” “work,” and “action” into a hierarchical order. “Labor,” concept of the lowest rank according to Arendt’s account, designates for her the incessant production for consumption, while “work” aims at generating long-lasting objects. “Viewed as parts of the world, the products of work—and not the products of labor—guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all” (Arendt, 1971: 94). At first sight, this line of thinking seems to make the difference between labor and work entirely dependent on the life expectancy of their respective products (Arendt, 1971). Arendt even mentioned that the activities that produce bread on the one hand and a table on the other do not in themselves allow to distinguish labor from work. However, she invoked this difference with the distinction of homo faber and the animal laborans in mind. In other words, she considers two very different human life-forms; and the supersession of one (homo faber) by the other (animal laborans) is what concerns her most.

The arguable exchange of durable objects with products designed for a rather short-lived period of consumption, whether due to their becoming obsolete or simply old-fashioned, leads—as Arendt claims—to an almost complete takeover of animal laborans as a life-form and of labor as the dominant productive activity. This, she continues her argument, has effects on the laboring human beings. They are all characterized by the endless repetition of what they do, which is described in a way that parallels Beauvoir’s account of the housewife’s doings and the consequences she has to suffer. Whereas homo faber “is indeed a lord and a master [. . .] of himself and his doings [. . .] alone with his image of the future product [. . .] free to produce, and again facing alone the work of his hands [. . .] free to destroy” (Arendt, 1971: 144), the Arendtian laborers aim at sustaining a living for themselves, and their families. It is not important how meager, or luxurious the sustained living actually is. What counts is that the laborers lose the consciousness of building the world according to their ideas. They cannot provide the world with sufficient stability and are detached from a true expression of their creativity. Even the cultivation of land remains labor in the eyes of Arendt (1971) because cultivated land needs periodical work in order to keep its qualities (p. 138).

It may be doubted whether cultural landscapes, which have been shaped by centuries of human activity, really lack the stability that Arendt requires for world-making. Yet, if we follow her argument, then in the realm of work there remains solely “the artist, who, strictly speaking, is the only ‘worker’ left in a laboring society” (Arendt, 1971: 127). The characterization of agricultural techniques as labor and the praise for artistic expressions give raise to the suspicion that Arendt’s degradation of labor in general is rooted in a deep-seated preference for an intellectual form of life. Not only does she count the writing of books as an artistic work; she also states that the “immediate source of the art work is the human capacity for thought” (Arendt, 1971: 168).

The contrast of labor and work in Arendt as the difference of female and male self-realization in Beauvoir resonate again with Hegel’s description of the formation and expression of the free will. They also refer to limitations in the degraded activities be it the confinement to the private realm of the house or the inability to relate to one’s own product as a piece of the world that was consciously made and valued as a “positive Good.” Both, the resonance with Hegel and the reference to inherent limitations, suggest that we should follow Honneth in his suspicion that full self-realization is indeed incompatible with almost all tasks that need to be fulfilled for the reproduction of modern society.

Marx, on the other hand, seems less ready to subscribe to the artist as model for a non-alienated life-form. It is true that throughout his life he expressed the need for a truly polytechnic education that would enable workers to adapt to newly developing tasks in modern industries. And he was certainly critical of working conditions that were harmful to mind and body. But there is considerable doubt that this led him to a complete rejection of the division of labor which entails specialization and hence the formation of some capabilities at the expense of others. ⁶ His idea of what might be called “true individuality” rather suggests that there is a particular form of self-realization stemming from the division of labor. In a much-quoted passage from the Mill excerpts, Marx describes two ways to affirm oneself and the other person. The first is Hegel’s way: “In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt” (Marx 1975b: 227). The second way, however, is via the relation which successful production for the needs of another person establishes. This second way affirms the individual’s capability to be part of the human species and the social community of fellow humans. In the light of alienation as alienation from the species and the fellow humans, this way is of particular importance. It allows the individuals to transcend themselves and their limitations without being too demanding with respect to the substantial determination of their actual activities. Full development of human capacities is not the development of all capacities in all human beings but the development of these capacities within the human species based on a division of labor.

This opens the route to reconstruct a model of self-realization in Marx, which avoids the pitfalls of an overly ambitious concept. Elster (1986) proposed such a reading many years ago. ⁷ He decomposed self-realization in two elements: self-actualization and self-externalization (Elster, 1986: 102). Self-actualization refers to the development of the abilities and powers of the individual. It does not entail the development of all abilities and powers an individual could possibly advance but the individual must be free to choose which of them to evolve and turn into a vehicle for self-realization. In order for self-actualization to become self-realization the second element is decisive. The acquired abilities and powers must be deployed and externalized. Externalization allows to judge the performance as “more or less well [. . .] according to independently given criteria” (Elster, 1986: 100).

From the literature on the sociology of work Elster quotes criteria for activities suitable for self-realization. They boil down to the demand that the work “must offer a challenge that can be met” (Elster, 1986: 112f). Autonomy, responsibility, and control over the amount and the organization of work are moments, which enhance the experience of self-realization whereas monotony, repetitiveness, and drudgery are problematic for it. However, if monotonous, repetitive, cumbersome, or disgusting tasks are the source for self-esteem this can extenuate the negative effects. It is essential in these cases that the worker has the experience of “being useful and not a burden on others, even when the task itself is inherently uninteresting” (Elster, 1986: 106). Although, unsuitable tasks for self-realization can be elevated by external appreciation, Elster (1986) sees the greatest potential in activities that include urgent and important decisions, and involve democracy within organizations (p. 118f).

Elster’s conclusions parallel Honneth’s analysis in multiple ways. Even the recipes they propose are often similar, for example, the enrichment of job profiles. So, Honneth’s account is obviously compatible with an account that is not dismissive of alienation as an analytical tool. Yet, if Honneth arrives at the same conclusions without the concept, why should we bother to bring alienation back into the game?

Why alienation?

Although the degradation of care work in Beauvoir and of labor in Arendt rests on the invalid assumption that such activities are, as a matter of principle, not suitable for the individual affirmation of oneself, that is, self-realization, there is no doubt that both describe a widespread experience. Women confined to domestic work, wage laborers, trapped in contracts that give them neither self-esteem nor a sense that they are making a meaningful contribution to the reproduction, and development of society, actually suffer from their situation. Elster’s reconstruction of self-realization indicates that the limitations of the activity combined with a lack of social recognition rather than the substance of the tasks are at the heart of this suffering.

When Elster published his paper on self-realization back in 1986, the enrichment of job descriptions, the shift of managerial responsibilities to the workers, and the introduction of semi-autonomous working groups were new developments. Today, we are already facing the downside of these measures. ⁸ The increase in self-efficacy turns into its opposite when economic exigencies or shareholder interests play out. Challenges that can be met are turned into impossible tasks. Margins of maneuver shrink, and the strategic dominance of those who buy labor power over those who sell it becomes vital. The masked alienation structure then reveals itself with all its inherent force, while measures to soften the experience of alienation malfunction.

As noted above, alienation is a failed appropriation process dominated by heteronomy, whether that heteronomy is exercised personally or by systemic constraints. Therefore, times of crisis are the heyday of experienced alienation. We have seen this in recent times, when the dot.com economy crashed and new models of blending work with life, flat hierarchies, project orientation, that were the hallmark of New Work, dramatically lost in attractiveness.

Disappointed illusions about the degree of co-determination, autonomy, and self-efficacy at work also affect what is at the center of Honneth’s interest: the relation of work and democracy. As Honneth convincingly analyses, the experience of self-efficacy is essential for democratic engagement. When alienation replaces self-efficacy as the dominant experience, the prospects for democracy are rather bleak for two contrary reasons. Either workers, as Honneth notes, feel neither entitled nor able to make their voice heard in the general public, or subjects, who have internalized the interpellation to be self-reliant and responsible for their fate, turn to authoritarian policies when unable to meet the ideological challenge.

With regard to the former, alienation is able to provide an explanation why all the concepts developed, all the experiments made, all the efforts undertaken to overcome heteronomy at work necessarily failed. Heteronomy is not an inherent feature of the tasks necessary to reproduce society but inscribed in the economic relations that constitute wage labor and organize the social division of labor in capitalism. Despite all progress concerning the working conditions since the times of Hegel and Marx, overcoming the experience of alienation would presuppose a fundamental shift in basic economic structures such as the wage labor relation or the post hoc evaluation of products (and subsequently the work objectified in them) on markets.

However, the contrary obstacle to the realization of democracy may be the even more dangerous threat that a political theory of work needs to analyze. In their survey of the anti-vaccinationist movement in German phone countries during the Covid-19 pandemic, Amlinger and Nachtwey (2022) coined the term “libertarian authoritarianism.” Libertarian authoritarians insist on their social autonomy, intellectual independence, and personal freedom. They reject governmental measures to contain the pandemic, while indulging in fantasies of violent upheaval, the overthrowing of the government including the killing or incarceration of prominent political figures and experts, and establishing a true democracy that executes their demands as the will of the people.

Radical libertarians are characterized by the fact that they also reject interventions by the state or the community in their lives. What makes libertarians authoritarian is the belief in their supremacy and the inferiority of all, which they declare as enemies. Their authoritarianism manifests itself in a susceptibility to anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories in general that affirm a binary concept of power and urge the libertarian authoritarians to act violently against political enemies who appear as demonic forces (Amlinger and Nachtwey, 2022: 17, 144).

Alienation, I would suggest, is able to explain the existential threat that libertarian authoritarians experience in times of economic and social crisis. Amlinger and Nachtwey see three overlapping causes for the turn of liberals to authoritarianism: a general dissonance between political egalitarianism and effective (especially economic) inequality, a generalization of comparison among individuals in society, and the tension between norms and the possibilities to achieve them. All three causes create psychic insults for those who are not successful or not as successful as they aspired to be, in a society that is widely believed to be based on meritocratic competition (Amlinger and Nachtwey, 2022: 146–164).

Amlinger and Nachtwey frequently mention economic aspects (including unemployment and old-age poverty) in their analysis and see the internalization of norms such as autonomy, self-reliance, independence, self-realization, continuous self-optimization, flexibility, participation, and so on as substantial part of the problem. Nevertheless, they seem to underestimate the effect of alienation on subjects whose psychic formation is fundamentally grounded in such interpellations when such subjects are confronted with a personal, social, or systemic crisis. It is not a cultural tendency of generalized comparison in modern egalitarian societies or the inability to accept social differentiation (vulgo: envy) that can explain the large quantities of people who denied the sheer existence of the Covid-19 pandemic and rigorously opposed governmental policies. More likely, the contrast between the general social demand on economic subjects to be self-reliant and the measures of public health protection that interfered largely with economic and cultural life and thereby threatened the livelihoods of many people, such as artists, gastronomes, physical therapists, etc., caused a psychological dissonance that was hard to endure. The pandemic, however, was just an incursion of heteronomy from the outside, massively reinforcing the experience of alienation to which all these subjects are exposed through constant economic pressures be it as wage-laborers, freelancers, or (small) business owners. Solidarity with more vulnerable groups of society would have presupposed for them to leave their mindset of individualized responsibility and self-reliance so deeply entrenched in their self-perception. It would have presupposed ending the denial of the very alienation they seek so desperately to escape in order to achieve coherence of their internalized norms and their actual existence. The so called “great resignation” after the pandemic, the mass refusal to return to the old jobs, hints at the fact that indeed underlying structures of alienation came to the fore under the conditions of lockdowns and work from home. As a widespread social reaction the “great resignation” might even indicate an alternative path to acknowledge and confront alienation that is largely preferable to libertarian authoritarianism.

Ends in view

The analysis of alienation suggests that the pandemic was but a catalyst for anti-democratic and authoritarian attitudes and that the threat is much deeper rooted in economic life. But the deep level of analysis, which alienation seems to require, might be a severe counter-argument in Honneth’s eyes. Honneth is very careful to retain a level of analysis that allows for proposals with “ends in view,” that is, with objectives that do not presuppose a completely new or radically transformed social and economic order. People should not be inclined to reject the suggestions he wants to make on the ground that they are too far removed from actual working conditions. The aim is rather to intervene in the current state of affairs at workplaces and to, first and foremost, rely on the—at least verbally—widespread appreciation for democracy.

So, the final question is: Can the alienation approach, too, provide us with directions on how to proceed in the here and now apart from constructing a new socio-economic order that Marx himself not even bothered to sketch? The answer to this question is affirmative in two ways. First, the analysis of alienation demonstrates that there are obstacles inherent to current economic principles, which effectively frustrate the vast majority of ambitions to satisfy the ideological role model of a self-reliant economic subject. As I have argued above, this frustration fuels one of the major authoritarian threats to democracy today. The analysis of alienation hence suggests efforts to replace this ideology by a self-perception more in line with reality.

Second, this does not mean that an analysis of alienation is restricted to the mere reproduction of the given state of affairs. Focusing on heteronomy, it also leads to demands to diminish the effectiveness of the employer’s will. Proposals to “de-commodity” work aim at abating the dependence of the worker. A realist picture of alienation allows for proposals that strengthen social alternatives to wage-labor without surrendering the former wage-laborer to new regimes of control and heteronomy. The promise of the modern division of labor that the workers have a largely unconstrained choice which of their socially useful talents they want to pursue and evolve, remains a pre-condition for self-realization. At the same time, the analysis of alienation reminds us of the unsurpassable limits all de-commodification and democratization of work will face in capitalist economies.

With such ends in view: What may we expect from work? Demands for recognition and satisfactory remuneration are certainly not beyond the limits, nor are working conditions that are not detrimental to the physical and mental health of the workers. But the analysis of alienation reminds us that there is more to expect. Work should give those who are working the sense that they are actually contributing to social well-being. It should allow the workers to evolve their specific gifts that are socially useful and beneficial for the development of themselves. This includes the participation in democratic structures, which shape the conditions and goals of future production and thereby push the limits of self-realization for work to become not only the production of the actual world but also of meaning in the worker’s life.