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Karl Marx/Max Weber Principles

 

            
             Karl Marx and Max Weber have both formed interesting ideas relating principles of life to the workplace. Marx's idea's focused on human alienation and the four types he found to be most prominent. Max Weber described ten characteristics that he found necessary of an ideal bureaucracy. Karl Marx's four types on alienation were associated with the relationship between a human's personal fulfillment and their role as a worker in society. His first type of alienation stated that, "The worker is alienated from the product of his labour, since what he produces is appropriated by others and he has no control over its fate. (Abercrombie)" This statement implies that since the worker doesn't decide what he makes, he was lost an emotional connection with the product of his labour. His second theory stated that, "The worker is alienated from the act of production. Working becomes an alien activity that offers no intrinsic satisfaction, that is forced on the worker by external constraints and ceases to be an end in itself, and that involves working at someone else's bidding as forced labour. Work in fact becomes a commodity that is sold and its only value to the worker is its salability (Abercrombie)." This portion of his theory implies that the worker loses the emotional return from working because he no longer works to fulfill his own desires, but rather those of an overseer. The third part states that, "The worker is alienated from his human nature or his 'species being', because the first two aspects of alienation deprive his productive activity of those specifically human qualities which distinguish it from the activity of animals and thus define human nature (Abercrombie)." Marx is suggesting that because we are alienated from the product we produce and the emotional bond in the manner we produce it, we lose connection with the "human" aspects of life and become much more like animals, who do things only by nature and instinct.


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