The Paradox of Low-Wage Work

[para. 1]: "In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx wrote of work and labour as central to human existence. Whereas classical political economy assumed but did not explain the existence of private property, Marx took the estrangement of labour under capitalist social relations as his starting point. The process of alienation was intersectional and multifaceted, including: the estrangement of working people from the products of their labour and the work process itself; from nature and conscious life activity; and from other persons. For Marx, then, the estrangement of labour simultaneously established the conditions for capital’s gain at the expense of labour’s pain: “Accumulation of wealth atone pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.” Contrary to classical political economy’s conflation of capitalism with exchange (i.e. distribution or “the market”), the root causes of alienation resided in the social relations of production, and the instituted compulsions of capital, wherein relations of domination and subordination ruled."