Marx White Collar Essay

Fourthly, the workers are alienated from other workers or producers. If labour can alienate the workers from their own product, from production and even from themselves, it can also alienate the workers from one another. Marx believes the capitalist is responsible for this alienation too, since they created a labour market where the workers compete with one another and treat each other as objects.
In brief, Marx asserts, workers within capitalism have no opportunity to determine the directions of their lives, as they are bound to the production system where they have to sacrifice their rights over their lives in exchange for wages. While Marx concentrated on primary and secondary industry, alienation is not limited to these sectors, and, in the rising importance of service work, social theorists have discerned new forms of work alienation.
C Wright Mills’ book, White Collar (1951), is the classic text that brought Marx’s insights to the case of service work. According to Mills:
In a society of employees, …show more content…
Production labour produces products that are quantifiable, to which workers do not necessarily have to attach emotion or feeling. For the service workers, their produce is not directly definable or countable, and the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself. Because it is not enough to serve meals on the Delta aeroplane, because it is customers who must be served, and because it is effective service only when the customers feel not like customers but like ‘people’, the production of the service workers is ‘a state of mind’, or, more accurately, a state of being. Nevertheless, before the workers can achieve this ‘state of mind’ in their customers, they often first need to suppress their own feeling, to manipulate their own state of mind and being. This work on self, and being, is a form of labour that sets apart service and emotional labour from mental and physical