The Politics of Authorship, Part 2

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# The Politics of Authorship
### Part 2: Craft, Labor, and Alienation September 19, 2022

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# Authorship - Craft vs Industrial Production 
![Master Violin Maker Xian Baokang](Xian-Baokang.jpg# w-90pct) Master Violin Maker Xian Baokang

![Violin Mass Production](violin_factory.jpg# w-75pct) Fengling Violin Factory

???

Discuss difference between master craftsperson and factory worker in terms of "authorship" of a violin

Marx from "Precapitalist Economic Formations" (1857)

> "Individuals behave not as laborers but as owners – and as members of a community who also labor. The purpose of this labor is not the creation of value, although they may perform surplus labor in order to exchange it for foreign labor – i.e., for surplus products. Its purpose is the maintenance of the owner and his family as well as of the communal body as a whole. The establishment of the individual as a worker, stripped of all qualities except the ability to produce value, is itself a product of history."

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# Karl Marx 
## on the Estrangement of Labor under Capitalism

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# Key Claim &#35;1: The Essence of Labor

> The "essential relationship of labour" is "the relationship of the worker to production." (326)

# Key Claim &#35;2: _Commoditized Labor Disempowers_

> The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces. (323)

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# Key Claim &#35;3: _Nature as the **Means of Life** of Labor_

* Nature is the "means of life" of labor in an ontological sense:  "labor cannot _live_ without objects on which to exercise itself." (325)

* It is also the "means of life" of labor in a more narrow sense: it is "the means of physical subsistence of the _worker._" (325)

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# Key Claim &#35;4: _Workers are Alienated_

* Alienated from the **products of their labor**.
    > The product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an object, it is the _objectification_ of labour...[T]he worker is related to the _product of his labor_ as to an _alien_ object. (324)

* Alienated from their **labor itself**.
    > [L]abour is _external_ to the worker, i.e. does not belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. (326)

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# Key Claim &#35;4, continued: _Workers are Alienated_

* Alienated from themselves and each other, from their **species being.**
 > [P]roductive life is species life. It is life-producing life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, resides in the nature of its life activity, and free conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man. (328)

> Estranged labour reverses the relationship so that man, just because he is a conscious being, makes his life activity, his _being [Wesen]_, a mere 'means for his _existence_. (328)

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# Key Claim &#35;5: Who Owns Labor?

> If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, and if it confronts him as an alien power, this is only possible because it belongs to _a man other than the worker_. (330)

> Thus through _estranged, alienated labour_ the worker creates the relationship of another man, who is alien to labour and stands outside it, to that labour. The relation of the worker to labour creates the relation of the capitalist - or whatever other word one chooses for the master of labour - to that labour. (331)

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# Discuss:  "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs"

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# For Wednesday

* Read *Practices of Looking*, Chapter 3 (pp. 89 – 113)

* Begin identifying visual artifacts for your Time Capsule blog assignment