Using Alienation to Understand the Link Between Work and Capabilities

ABSTRACT

The last five decades have witnessed sociologists formulating various scales to measure and assess the degree of alienation of workers. Critical Marxists, however, argue that de-ideologisation and valueneutrality cannot be seen as desirable properties of a reconceptualization of the Marxian notion of alienation. Most Marxist scholars are not in favour of a comparative-quantitative analysis of Marx's theory of alienation. Nevertheless, Sen situates Marx's theory in the category of those which carry out “realization-focused comparison” (as opposed to “transcendental institutionalism”), by comparing societies that actually exist or may evolve. This paper articulates the need for an operationalization of the concept of alienation in empirical terms and calls for a meaningful dialogue between the capability approach to meaningful work and the emerging and significant body of literature on alienation and capabilities. It argues that alienation, translated to the capability vocabulary as “impairments in responsible agency to attain the capabilities one has reason to value” may also be mapped onto failed social relationships. Even when we do not limit the concept of alienation to the system-anti-system binary, we need to understand it in the context of the failures of economic institutions existing in the contemporary world.

KEYWORDS:

• work
• meaningful work
• alienation
• capability
• labour
• responsible agency

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous reviewers wholeheartedly for their encouraging and substantive comments. Their feedback has been central in drafting the revised version of the paper. I thank Achin Chakraborty for painstakingly reading and commenting on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sen (1999) categorically distinguishes Marx from the precapitalist, anti-market radical thinkers and points out that Marx approved of the freedom of employment offered by the capitalist society. Both Sen and Nussbaum draw heavily from Aristotle, Smith, and Marx in their conception of substantive human freedoms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simantini Mukhopadhyay

Simantini Mukhopadhyay is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK), India. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Calcutta. She received the CICOPS Scholarship to visit University of Pavia for 12 weeks in 2022. She was also a recipient of the SPANDAN Grant supported by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2020 for undertaking a study on Intersectional Inequalities in Agriculture-Nutrition Pathways in India. The areas of her research interest are income inequality, inequality in the non-income dimension, and foundational issues in the capability approach.