A Prime Example Of American Culture That Marxist Theory Can Be Applied To Is NAF

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Term Paper Title	A Prime Example Of American Culture That Marxist Theory Can Be Applied To Is NAF
# of Words	1760
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	7.04

     A prime example of American culture that Marxist theory can be applied to is NAFTA. The North American Free Trade Agreement can be used to highlight almost, if not, all of Marxist thought. It's a prime example of most of the things Marx hated about capitalism. . In Marxist terminology it can serve as a prime example of alienation, the value of labor and work, and the division of labor along many different lines.
     In original Marxist theory the term alienation refers to a few specific types of alienation that Marx identified. The first of these is alienation of worker from owners, or alienation of bourgeois from the proletariat. The capitalist owners have their priorities, namely profit and are willing to stretch their workers thin in order to accomplish this. This obviously will lead to a gulf between worker and employer because the worker needs to be able to enjoy his job, according to Marx, at least in some way or on some level. The owner's desire for profit and efficiency is often not compatible with the working environment being conducive to happy workers. The owner's desires often lead to workers feeling too much pressure on time and quantity of production. Another important aspect of capitalism is the way in which employers keep a constant staff, even when their demands are largely unreasonable. They know that people will always need jobs due to machines taking many of the jobs so they can constantly find employees who will work for less than their current ones. This leads to the second type of alienation in Marx's view, that of worker from worker.
     Alienation of worker from worker can be caused by many different factors. In the above mentioned situation, workers get bitter towards workers who are willing to "steal" their jobs from them and take, often times, much lower wages. This causes workers to fight amongst themselves and compete over jobs and ethics of "job-stealing", instead of banding together against the capitalist owners. This alienation as Marx describes it is a dividing factor of the whole species. He says, "First it estranges the life of the species and individual like, and secondly it makes the individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form" (Estranged Labour, 75). What he's describing here is the workers loss of his own humanity, due to not feeling connected to anything...his work, his co-workers, his product...anything. Another large source of the alienation...

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