What characterizes degradation of work in capitalist society according to Marx ?

Alienation as the core characterisation

• In the 1844 Manuscripts, alienated labour has four moments: from the product, from the act of production, from species-being, and from other persons.
• The product stands over the worker as capital. The more he produces, the cheaper he may become as a commodity.
• The act is external: it is not free creation but a means to a wage, often under a stranger’s eye.
• Species-being, conscious life-activity, is reduced to animal survival. Relations with other workers become competition.

The labour process in capital

• Capital buys labour-power. The working day is a struggle over surplus value, as in Capital.
• Manufacture and then modern industry split the craft into detail operations. The worker becomes an appendage of the machine.
• Harry Braverman restated this as deskilling and managerial appropriation of conception, leaving execution to the worker. That is a Marxist characterisation of twentieth-century offices and shops.

What the degradation looks like

• Loss of knowledge of the whole product.
• Intensification and surveillance of time.
• Replaceability of the person, which weakens bargaining.
• A fetish of commodities that hides the social relation in the thing.

Contemporary files

• Informal and gig work in Indian cities show piece-rates, app ratings, and no product the worker owns, a digital putting-out system.
• Garment lines and electronic assembly repeat detail labour with a largely feminised shop floor.
• SHG home-based piecework can look like self-help and still be degraded putting-out for a merchant.

Limits of the sketch

• Marx also wrote of struggle, unions, and the possibility of associated production. Degradation is the tendency of the wage relation, not a claim that skill never exists.
• Weber’s rationalisation and Durkheim’s forced division of labour name overlapping harms without Marx’s surplus-value core.