Employee loyalty and Marx
Sunday, May 20, 2007 11:56 am
I’m trying to keep my blog under wraps until I get all the kinks out of the design. Until then, I’m going to post old things I’ve clipped from my bloglines.
I read this article about how Employee loyalty isn’t gone, it’s just different. Does it even exist? It comes down to being loyal to yourself, or loyal to your job. That line is fuzzy when you work, say, at a dry cleaners or a bronze casting studio where you work intimately with the bossman (or bosslady) and the work becomes personal. To me, I don’t like to alienate “work” from “self” which is what happens in most capitalistic societies. If you work, that “work” becomes a part of you, whether you like it or not because you’re investing a part of yourself into it, whether you’re a CEO or soldering circuits at a refrigeration company. No matter how much you may detest that work, you are claiming it as a part of who you are by putting your time into it. Capitalism turns us into a number that doesn’t matter who does the work, as long as it gets done… it makes us compartmentalize our selves more or less. If you don’t get what I mean, just read Marx’s theory of alienation:
“In a nutshell, Marx’s Theory of Alienation is the contention that in modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense.”
I’ve been fortunate enough to hold jobs that enriched my life instead of made myself feel more dead inside. If another job came along that offered me that personal satisfaction as well as paid me more, what should keep me from taking it? Nothing. Because I’m not a communist.
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Posted by RayAna M Park in : Careers, Marx
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