Marx made full use of this idea in his analysis of the contemporary economic system, characterized by the conflict of interest between the working classes and the capitalists, the owners of the ‘means of production’ (i.e. the factories). His sympathies lay firmly with the current underdogs, the workers. The crucial thing was that they, needing to make a living and having nothing else to sell, were selling their labour—working in return for a wage. Not much of a wage, because those buying their labour had no interest in paying them any more than was necessary to keep them working. This ensured for them and their families a life of acute and degrading poverty.
But another, more spiritual, feature of the situation was pressing heavily on them too—the fact that the work they were doing was not really their work: ‘the work is external to the worker, it is not a part of his nature . . . not the satisfaction of a need, merely a means to satisfying other needs . . . in work he does not belong to himself but to someone else’. The unsatisfied need is the need to express oneself in what one does.
Diagnosis is one thing, a cure is another. It turns out to be just as possible to experience alienation when the work one is doing is not one’s own but the State’s as when it is not one’s own but the company’s. That much identification with the interests of the community, when the community is a large and complex one, is not easily achieved or maintained. And even if it were, that would just help to make work endurable. If what you do is stand by a conveyor belt tightening the lids on jars of marmalade it may make things less intolerable to be doing it for Mother Russia than for the Global Marmalade Corporation. But that does nothing whatever to make it something positive, an expression of your personality or skills or a means to the development of your potential. Nowadays we speak of ‘job satisfaction’. Not all of us get it—the problem hasn’t gone away.Women
We have been bounding from topic to topic, person to person, across the globe and three millennia like a package tour gone mad. But nobody has been introduced to philosophy until they have seen, in at least one case, a little more deeply into some philosopher’s mind. We have seen a good deal of Descartes. And we have had a glimpse of two famous works by John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism and On Liberty. The first told us that the Good was happiness, the second that happiness requires individual freedom. His almost equally famous essay The Subjection of Women (1869) tells us that that means everyone, not just adult males.
The practical politician in Mill takes aim at a quite specific and (in theory at least) easily remedied abuse: ‘the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; . . . it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality’. Present family law, he argued, amounted to the enslavement of wives. He meant the word quite literally, as his account of the legal position shows. What he wants changed, however, is the entire package of practices and opinions which deny women equal educational opportunities and then equal access, on merit, to all occupations and positions of influence.
Any major philosophy needs potential beneficiaries, even in cases where the benefit may be imaginary. In seeking to improve the lot of women Mill has plenty of beneficiaries to appeal to. But he believes that the constituency for his views is a hundred per cent of mankind, not just fifty. He writes about the injustice to women and the damage done to their lives by existing conditions, but he writes almost as much about the loss to everybody. The suppression of women’s talents is ‘a tyranny to them and a detriment to society’. History tells us a good deal about what women can do, because women have done it. It tells us nothing about what they can’t do, and it never will until they are routinely given the opportunity. Mill also believes that men are damaged as individuals, often in ways they are not likely to notice (which is itself part of the damage). For it is not good for anyone to be brought up to believe themselves superior to others, especially when it happens, as it frequently does, to be others whose faculties are in fact superior to theirs. On the other hand, harsh though it may sound, living one’s life around a close relationship with someone of inferior ‘ability and cultivation’ is detrimental to the superior party. Yet many men find themselves in just this situation, married to women whose limitations are no less real just because they are an enforced artificial product of a thoroughly pernicious system. Those men may think they are winning, but the truth is that everyone’s a loser.
Thank goodness things have improved since 1869. A bit. In some parts of the world. For the time being.
Given our topic it would be strange to draw attention only to something written by a man. But there is an obvious, indeed almost obligatory, place to turn. Simone de Beauvoir’s massive The Second Sex (1949) has been the
