Question

1. What's the issue with irony, according to Wallace?

2. What, according to Marx, constitutes the alienation of labor?

Answer 1

Ans) 1) irony- By saying "I am not the wise old fish he is downplaying his authority. In reality he is the "wise old fish", so saying he isn't is an ironic understatement.

2) For Marx, alienation under the capitalist mode of production is not just a subjective state of mind, that one enters, but an objective process that develops from the reality that we experience through labor in capitalist society.

- Alienation in a generalized abstract sense, is the loss of control over an attribute of the self, one in which the actor is separated from any sense of agency in relation to the attribute.

- It is a historical objective process that comes into being from the relations and forces of production in the specific mode of production in existence.

- Alienation derives from a disconnect and loss of control over a thing or process, similar to the sense of alienation one experiences through religion.

- The alienation that Marx refers to comes into being through the relations of production found in capitalist society. Within the capitalist mode of production we find the conditions necessary for alienation to emerge. Those conditions are the reality that workers in capitalist society are forced by the necessity of subsistence and lack of ownership over the means of production to sell their labor-power as a commodity to someone else: the capitalist. Vital to the emergence of capitalist alienation is the specialization of labor, the reserve army of labor, and the establishment of routine work flows like an assembly line.

- There are four aspects of alienation that Marx wrote about as corresponding to the capitalist mode of production, those being: the alienation of the worker from the products of their labor, the alienation experienced in the production or labor process, alienation from our species-essence or human essence, and finally the alienation of man from man or from society.

- They might be viewed as being nested together with one leading to the other, however they are just aspects of one reality: alienated labor.