Enslavement of Modern Man-Polisci: Marx and Rousseau

The Enslavement of Modern Man A recurring idea throughout history when dealing with philosophy is the enslavement of modern man. Many philosophers such as Marx and Rousseau believe that the modern man is enslaved, despite ideas that we are all free people, and that we accept the fact that we are enslaved. In order to properly take this thought head on, we must concentrate on property and the division of labor. Without property, there would be no division of labor, thus the modern man would not be enslaved, and we would all truly be free. One may ask, “How are we enslaved if the Constitution declares us free?” Karl Marx and Jean-Jacques Rousseau would answer this question by explaining that property creates different classes, which ultimately puts people against one another. In this case, the human race is no longer united; it becomes separated into the free men and the enslaved men. The enslaved men or proletariat class, of course, would be the men who are not free. Although they may have a freedom by law, which must be obeyed, they are not free because the other men, the bourgeois class, enslave them. Marx best explains how we become enslaved in his work, Estranged Labour. “The whole of society must fall apart into two classes---the property-owners and the property-less workers (Estranged, p. 70). Marx explains that the workers, or property-less become a slave of his object, or his work, because that is all he has. The labor that is done by the property-less becomes enslaving because it benefits the property-owners in marvelous ways, but does exactly the opposite for the workers (Estranged, p. 73).
First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. (Estranged, p. 74)
This quote best explains the idea of how the modern man is enslaved in the first place. Because of property, comes division of classes. The men that own property do not need to work, the men who do not own property need to work in order to make up for their missing wealth. These men may not want to work, but feel it necessary to work to try to become somewhat equal to the property-owning bourgeoisie. These men work for money and possible wealth, not for love of what they do. “What can be the chains of dependence among men who possess nothing (Rousseau, p. 58)?” Marx and Rousseau might say that modern man has become this way because modern man, early in life, came out of a natural, savage state and wish to dominate one another. “Each one began to look at the others and want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly regarded. And this was the first step toward inequality… (Rousseau, p. 64).” We all wanted to be the best at something, so the first man to declare he owns land, or private property (which before belonged to all men), is now better than all other men whom did not own land. Rousseau writes, “the first person who, having enclosed a plot of land…was the true founder of civil society,” simply meaning, the originator of the idea to create private property, is the creator of the enslavement of modern man, because that is what civil society is today. This is essentially where class division was born. Once this primary declaration of private property occurred, this is when property-less must work to try to achieve the same level of success, or publically esteemed, just as the property-owners. Marx’s ideas in Estranged Labour tie right in with Rousseau’s ideas when Marx writes, “If his own activity is to him an unfree activity, then he is treating it as activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion and the yoke of another man (p. 78).” This is stating that man is not attempting to become equal with one another because he truly wants to, he is only doing it because he feels as if he has to keep up with the ones who are self-proclaimed to be better. Modern man does not wish to be left at the feet of the “better” man, yet in giving in an admitting there is a better man, he is already a slave to the bourgeoisie. It seems hard to believe that if society knows that the modern man is enslaved, why do we accept this fate and become complicit in our own enslavement? Marx declares, “In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality (C. Manifesto, p. 10), meaning that the modern man has no independence because we are all stuck in this cycle of enslavement, based on need. Since the first man that declared private property, as Rousseau put it, we have been stuck in a system of trying to dominate and gain power, or advantage over one another. As modern man, there is a need to socialize and a need to dominate. We are constantly thinking of how we can deceive another man in order to fulfill this need to be better than one another. We are ultimately enslaved by this necessity to dominate, which coerces the property-less to work to gain dominance. By working, the modern man:
Changes the forms of materials furnished by nature, in such ways as to make them useful to him…this division of product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged (Fetishism, p. 321-322).
This is where we get stuck with not only a need to gain dominance, but now we have a deeper dependence on one another. We wish to gain a certain power over another man, yet we are stuck enslaved to them because we rely on them for exchange. “Living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor (C. Manifesto, p. 10).” Modern man works only to increase his wealth, not because he wants to work and loves it, but because it is the only way to begin in the process of attempting to dominate. If modern man works to create something, someone else will then become dependent on him for that item, which makes him dominant. He is still then, dominated by those that supply his materials and needs. The cycle continues as such, making everyone, except the bourgeois, the ones at the very top, enslaved with no way out.