Exploring Theories of Alienation and Productivity: Marx, Mead and Reese

In Dr. Reese's Alienation: Extending an Interactionist Conceptualization, he compares and contrasts Mead's concept of "naturally productive humans" (Reese 1997, 62) and Marx's concept of "alienated labor" (61). Reese makes the connection between Marx and Mead; that they are similar, yet exact opposites in the sense that capitalism has changed the way Americans live today. Reese states, "Humans were no longer free to pursue their natural needs (Mead's impulses) (62). Reese join Marx, in the idea that through capitalism "humans were confronted with unnatural constraints" (62). Reese uses the term "a commodity fetish" (62) to explain how capitalism has manipulated Americans into thinking they must work because capitalism has "made labor unfree first by creating artificial, consumer needs and... mandated involuntary participation in wage-labor" (62). Reese is doing what Ritzer suggests that a contemporary theorist is supposed to do, when he compares and contrast's two master theorists and gives his own insight.

Reese then discusses Mead's concept of manipulation by stating that the "process of labor, compelled to conform to the forces of mass production, dictated that human labor... was neither a free nor a creative refinement of naturally occurring things into fulfilling objects" (63). Reese uses this idea and compares it to Marx by using a direct quote from Marx stating "Just as alienated labor transforms free and self-directed activity into means, so it transforms the species life of man into a means of physical existences" (63). Reese then uses another direct quote from Marx to show the process of alienation; "the more the worker produces the less he has to consume; the more value he creates the more worthless he becomes; ...the more the work manifests intelligence the more the worker declines in intelligence and becomes a slave of nature" (63).