Social & Political Philosophy
“Living to Work: Employer Domination Beyond the Workplace”
This paper diagnoses an unacknowledged problem of contemporary work that I call “living to work.” Workers “live to work” in this sense when their off-hours activities are reshaped to enhance employer economic power by boosting productivity and reducing costs. Drawing both on Marx’s understanding of the reproduction of labor power under capitalism and recent republican theories of domination, I argue that economic power amplifies domination by expanding employers’ capacity to interfere in
workers’ lives. When workers engage in activities that strengthen this power, they inadvertently deepen their own domination. This dynamic demonstrates one way employer domination extends beyond the workplace: not through direct intrusion into workers’ free time, but through a subtler restructuring of that time to serve economic ends.
“Alienation and Mutual Recognition in the Care Economy”
I argue that contemporary forms of care work generate a distinctive and intensified form of alienation, even as they open possibilities for genuinely cooperative, unalienated, labor. The paper focuses on what Alison Pugh calls “connective labor”: the work of forging emotional understanding with others to produce socially valuable outcomes. This includes traditional care professions—teaching, nursing, social work—as well as less recognized roles such as chaplaincy, community organizing, and customer-service. Building on the Marxian theory of alienated labor, I extend the classical analysis of industrial production to the relational and affective work that defines the modern care economy. For Marx, alienation arises when labor is regarded as fungible: as merely one interchangeable means among others for producing the same outcome. For instance, on the classic Marxian account, industrial workers are alienated, in part, because their activity is regarded as fungible with machine labor. I argue that this same structure applies with particular force to connective labor, where contemporary management practices increasingly evaluate care work through efficiency metrics, standardized protocols, and quantifiable outcomes—treating the result of care as independent of the manner in which it is given. In this sense, then, care workers, like Marx’s industrial workers, are alienated from their own activity. Yet connective labor also points beyond this condition. Drawing on Marx’s conception of unalienated labor, as well as Hegel’s account of mutual recognition, I argue that connective labor harbors an incipient potential for genuinely cooperative forms of activity.
Post-Kantian European Philosophy
“Unalienated Labor as Cooperative Self-Determination: Aristotle and Marx”
European Journal of Philosophy, 2024
In this paper, I offer an original interpretation of Marx’s conception of unalienated labor, which I frame as a response to Aristotle’s view of work, or technē. Both Aristotle and Marx share a particular conception of freedom as “normative self-determination,” according to which an activity is free insofar as it does not depend for its value on externally valuable things. For instance, when my activity is a mere means for satisfying some need separate from it, it comes to depend for its value on the externally valuable effect—the “needs-meeting”—it achieves. Or, when my activity is only causally—but not normatively—enabled by the cooperative contributions of others, it comes to depend for its value on those externally valuable contributions. On Aristotle’s view, work is unleisurely (ascholos) and servile (doulos) because it is normatively dependent in both of these ways. For Marx, by contrast, work possesses the capacity to “internalize” these external determinants of its value. Unalienated work does this, first, by satisfying “internal” needs, or needs whose satisfaction does not constitute a normatively external effect of the work that satisfies them. The satisfaction of internal needs is valuable because of the manner or way in which they are satisfied. Second, unalienated work would not only be causally, but also normatively, enabled by the contributions of others, in that those contributions would help to make it the distinctively valuable act that it is. Unalienated work would be valuable because, and not despite, its cooperative character. In both of these respects, then, cooperation is essential to make work fully free.
“Different Ways of Being Human: Marx on the Value of Human-Made Things”
This paper develops an ideal of cooperation in social life drawn from Marx’s understanding of the distinctive value to be found in using and appreciating what other human beings have made. I foreground a neglected aspect of Marx’s view: the idea that human-made things, unlike naturally occurring objects or ones produced by machines, can serve as evaluative models for human activities and relationships, by showing us both what and how beings like us can value. Marx illustrates this chiefly through aesthetic examples: encountering a great work of art—a novel, a painting, a composition—can disclose a new way of perceiving and appreciating the world. In such moments, I confront something which, because it arises from human activity, can awaken new capacities of my own human nature: new ways of feeling, responding, and creating. In this sense, human-made products, unlike natural or machine-made ones, can embody and communicate different human outlooks—different “ways of being human.”
“With Oneself in an Other: Hegel on Mutual Recognition and Cooperation Social Life”
This paper offers a new interpretation of Hegel’s conception of mutual recognition, and shows how it articulates a compelling ideal of cooperative relations in social life. At the core of the recognitive relationship, I argue, lies a distinctive evaluative attitude: the mutual acknowledgment, by all parties, that the good of each depends upon the good of the others, and the reciprocal affirmation of this interdependence by all. This attitude is clearest in interpersonal relationships such as friendship and love, where individuals are personally acquainted and confer recognition directly: say, through verbal expressions or gestures. My aim in the paper, however, is to show how, for Hegel, the core structure of such relationships can be extended into more impersonal forms of political and economic life. Citizens in the rational state, for instance, act in ways that outwardly affirm their mutual interdependence, as do participants within certain institutions of work—what Hegel calls the “corporations.” While these more impersonal forms of recognition are frequently regarded as obscure, or thought to be entwined with distinctively Hegelian commitments, I argue that they can instead be understood as continuous with the more familiar interpersonal cases, which have independent appeal. What emerges is a illuminating conception of how the structure of relationships such friendship and love might be extended into the wider dimensions of social life.
Kyle Scott 