The Marxist Theory

Term Paper Title	The Marxist Theory
# of Words	1762
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	7.05

The Marxist Theory

     A prime example of American culture that Marxist theory can be applied to is NAFTA. The North American Free Trade Agreement can be used to highlight almost, if not, all of Marxist thought. It's a prime example of most of the things Marx hated about capitalism. . In Marxist terminology it can serve as a prime example of alienation, the value of labor and work, and the division of labor along many different lines.
     In original Marxist theory the term alienation refers to a few specific types of alienation that Marx identified. The first of these is alienation of worker from owners, or alienation of bourgeois from the proletariat. The capitalist owners have their priorities, namely profit and are willing to stretch their workers thin in order to accomplish this. This obviously will lead to a gulf between worker and employer because the worker needs to be able to enjoy his job, according to Marx, at least in some way or on some level. The owner's desire for profit and efficiency is often not compatible with the working environment being conducive to happy workers. The owner's desires often lead to workers feeling too much pressure on time and quantity of production. Another important aspect of capitalism is the way in which employers keep a constant staff, even when their demands are largely unreasonable. They know that people will always need jobs due to machines taking many of the jobs so they can constantly find employees who will work for less than their current ones. This leads to the second type of alienation in Marx's view, that of worker from worker.
     Alienation of worker from worker can be caused by many different factors. In the above mentioned situation, workers get bitter towards workers who are willing to "steal" their jobs from them and take, often times, much lower wages. This causes workers to fight amongst themselves and compete over jobs and ethics of "job-stealing", instead of banding together against the capitalist owners. This alienation as Marx describes it is a dividing factor of the whole species. He says, "First it estranges the life of the species and individual like, and secondly it makes the individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form" (Estranged Labour, 75). What he's describing here is the workers loss of his own humanity, due to not feeling connected to anything...his work, his co-workers, his product...anything. Another large source of the alienation in American history is race. For many years racial job discrimination was well known and quite out in the open. It still exists today, of course, but now it's hidden and secretive, which makes it all the more volatile in many cases. There are endless organizations and committees formed to try and put an end to illegal job discrimination of the basis of race, class, gender, even religion, just to name a few. .
     The third type of alienation is that of worker from consumer or product. This involves the workers being payed so little that he cannot afford the very product he makes. In earlier history, craftsman made products originally for themselves and their families, and any surplus they might sell or trade to others. As Marx said in describing the workers view of the their product, they feel that "the object which labour produces -labour's product- confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer" (Estranged Labour, 71). Under capitalism, workers might work in a factory making a car they would never have a chance of affording themselves because their wages are too low. This gives the workers a sense of pointlessness in their work. If they're building the car for people they'll never know, and they'll never truly get to use or even see their hard work being used, then they are likely to lose motivation to care about their craft.
     In applying this to NAFTA, we can see obvious cases of this alienation. When companies move their production facilities to smaller, third-world countries, the worker there is paid so little (much...

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