A report of World Health Organization {[1]}
says that depression will be the second largest problem among people across the
world by 2020, and that, each year approximately one million people die from
suicide, which is estimated to be double by 2020. This report says that in the
last 45 years suicide rates have increased by 60% worldwide and in 90% of the
cases depression is the cause for suicide, and 30% of all suicides worldwide
occur in India and China. Another report says that in last two decades there is
a 37% increase in the cases of suicide committed in India {[2]}.
In year 2012 there was high rise in the attempt of suicide in the India {[3]}.
Now, look at the below mentioned paragraphs written by Karl Marx in
1844. These are quotable paragraphs in relation to the "Alienation of
Labor". About alienation of worker from his work activity as well as
outcome of his labor (produced product), which leads to the dehumanization of
working class that finally leading a great population of the world to depression:
"the more the worker produces, the
less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the
more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed
becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes
the worker; the more powerful labor becomes, the more powerless becomes the
worker; the more ingenious labor becomes, the less ingenious becomes the worker
and the more he becomes nature’s slave."
"It is true
that labor produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it
produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the worker, hovels. It
produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines,
but it throws one section of the workers back into barbarous types of labor and
it turns the other section into a machine. It produces intelligence – but for
the worker, stupidity, cretinism."
"the fact that labor is external
to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; 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 feels
at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at
home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced
labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means
to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the
fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is
shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself,
is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external
character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his
own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs,
not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous
activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart,
operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an
alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his
spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self."
"As
a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active
in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his
dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer
feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and
what is human becomes animal."
"Certainly
eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But
taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity
and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions."
"We have
considered the act of estranging practical human activity, labor, in two of its
aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to the product of labor as an
alien object exercising power over him. This relation is
at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of
nature, as an alien world inimically opposed to him. (2) The relation of labor
to the act of production within the labor process. This relation
is the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not
belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting
as emasculating, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his
personal life – for what is life but activity? – as an activity which is turned
against him, independent of him and not belonging to him. Here we have self-estrangement,
as previously we had the estrangement of the thing."
"For
labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in
the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain
physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It
is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its
species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and
free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears
only as a means to life."
"The
animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish
itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and
of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination
with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man
immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this
that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that
he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only
because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labor reverses the
relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes
his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence."
"In
creating a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work
upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a
being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself
as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build
themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an
animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It
produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only
under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when
he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom.
An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature.
An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely
confronts his product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and
the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce
in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply
everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms
objects in accordance with the laws of beauty."
"An
enforced increase of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the
fact that it would only be by force, too, that such an increase, being an
anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for
the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labor their human
status and dignity.
Indeed,
even the equality of wages only transforms the
relationship of the present-day worker to his labor into the relationship of
all men to labor. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist."
"From the
relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the
emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form
of the emancipation of the workers; not that their
emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers
contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this
because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker
to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and
consequences of this relation."
(From Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 by
Karl Marx)
