On Work: A New Look at an Old Concept in Marx, Lukaćs, and Weber

Abstract

This paper offers a revisit to the philosophy of work in Karl Marx, Georg Lukaćs, and Max Weber. These three influential thinkers in philosophy, sociology, and economics accuse the humongous economic structure called capitalism (i) to have tampered the nature of work (or labor), (ii) by reducing it to a mere apparatus for an unbridled accumulation of wealth, (iii) in a manner that degrades the workers who are now being treated as mere tools in production, and (iv) ultimately ends up wreaking havoc on the objective physical nature that they call “the environment”. This conceptual revisit aims to show (a) how work had been originally received as a practical notion and (b) how the transformation of its inner logic is being facilitated to serve the grand designs of capital. Thus, in the foregoing sections, the paper presents a series of reviews of Marx’s “theory of alienation”, Lukaćs “theory of reification”, and Weber’s take on the “spirit of capitalism”. A synthesis then discusses a “new look”, arguing for the necessity to recover the subject (of work) (a la Spivak and Dejours), in the conclusion.