Revising Karl Marx’s Concept of Alienation Through the Agile Approach

The twentieth century demonstrated the undoubted correctness of Marx’s theory of alienation. Many of the problems he pointed out reached their climax at the end of the twentieth century and became the focus of attention when management realized them as an obstacle to development in the most innovative sectors of the economy. On the other hand, non-capitalist production showed similar dysfunctions associated with alienation. All this shows that alienation, which Marx considered a product of capitalism, is, on the whole, a property of the industrial system and the requirements that it makes to organizing labor, to the place and role of the actor in the production system. Post-industrial society is freed from alienation in labor due to new approaches to management and work motivation, agile transformations in particular. The article presents the results of a theoretical review of Marx’s theory of alienation. The author analyzed the methods of overcoming alienation used in agile companies. The results of expert interviews are presented in the article. The informants were 11 experts in the field of agile transformations: heads of companies that have implemented agile transformations of large oil and gas enterprises, banks and a number of other large corporations; external consultants on setting up agile business processes in startups; agile coaches of IT companies working in-house. Based on the conducted expert interviews, the author demonstrates the ways a modern company, in the postindustrial era, changes its approach to management, overcoming the aspects of alienation Marx wrote about, but at the same time remains within the framework of the capitalist system and private ownership on the production means. Based on the results of the analysis of the interviews, the following methods of overcoming alienation modern companies use are distinguished: 1. Increasing teams’ autonomy: instead of external control over the work process, agile companies practice setting high-level tasks for teams. Such practices collectively are a way to overcome alienation from the work process. 2. Teamwork on the project. In an agile company, the work unit is not an individual, but a team. The management model, built on the principle of teams’ self-organization, implies constant communication, and team responsibility contributes to the development of mutual assistance and support. Thus, the alienation of people from each other in the production process is overcome. 3. Having a clear and shared work purpose. 4. Authorization of the result: it ceases to be anonymous due to the fact that instead of a structure with a team of functional departments, employees work in small groups on an autonomous product.

Keywords

Authors

References