Marx Alienation

In Marx's writing he thoroughly explains alienation: the process in which people become foreign to the world they are living in. Marx discussed four types of alienation. Alienation from

Karl Marx believed that there are four aspects of a man's alienation that occur in a capitalist society. The product of labor, the labor process, our fellow human beings, and human nature are the four specific aspects of alienation that occur in a capitalist society.

Karl Marx describes alienation in The Communist Manifestos, as our labor becoming just a product instead of an expression of our personalities. Our humanity is taken away by the capitalism when we are alienated from our labor. There are three different types of alienation defined by Marx, alienation from the fruits of our labor, alienation of the laboring process, and alienation from our “species-being”. Marx gives a few solutions for alienation including job training programs and caps on working hours.

Marx explains his views in The German Ideology as he states, “For as soon as division of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape” (Marx: GI, 159) Here Marx is specifically describing how division of labor causes alienation among the worker and makes them estranged to the work that they are producing and society as whole. According to Marx, the worker suffers four types of alienation: alienation of the worker from other workers, from their product, from the overall production, and alienation of the worker from himself. (Marx; EL, 74 ). Alienation creates an inequality for the workers as humans we live in order of making work that pertains a value to the individual. Marx believes that labor is essential to human beings self-conception, labor is a form recreational growth however, through division of labor man becomes alienated from the experience of producing something personal that attains value to them and not just the

Marx’s theory of alienation is concerned primarily with social interaction and production; he believes that we are able to overcome our alienation through human emancipation.

Within a world of economics, we are nothing without wealth. Although, the product of labour has its consequences, for instance, if one puts their minds set only on funds, they become devalued as a person and hence become more of a commodity to society. The worker’s loss of reality is the foundation of their alienation (Marx, 1844). In the interest of economic hardship, Marx developed four types of alienation for workers in society that depicts different representations of estrangement against the working class. The first type, is alienation from the product, the products do not belong to the propertyless worker, and the more the worker produces the product the less the worker has. Workers who are isolated from their own labour process is the

Alienation, a term used to describe the feeling of no connection with others or the separation from former attachment. When it comes to sociologist aspect, especially on Marxism, this term describes the stage of losing one’s identity. To Karl Marx’s belief, Alienation means the loss of control over the process and product of work (Bell, 1959). Thus, under the capitalism, workers are alienated by the production system.

Alienation is Marx’s term for, in a capitalist society, people having distances with others due to lack of common value and integration and lack of connections to the products that they produce, and usually expresses as communication breakdown and absence of social relationships. Alienation is produced by social division of labor immobility and rationalization. When bureaucracy and rational-legal authorities obtain dominant power after currency becoming the legal exchange tool for transactions in capitalist market, rationalization has been extended into all division of society. And employees who work in bureaucratized company are easier to grow alienation because of the lack of sensibility of rationalization. Alienation is important to study sociology because it is applicable to explain social relationships in a capitalist society as it is related to capitalism, rationalization, and explain the reason why proletarians usually fail to recognize their rights. Marx implies a possible solution is making a revolution as people cannot end alienation by “changing their perception of ration” to oppose to Hegel’s idealism (Turner, Beeghley, and Powers 51; 121).

The concept of alienation plays a significant role in Marx's early political writing, especially in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1848, but it is rarely mentioned in his later works. This implies that while Marx found alienation useful in investigating certain basic aspects of the development of capitalist society, it is less useful in putting forward the predictions of the collapse of capitalism. The aim of this essay is to explain alienation, and show how it fits into the pattern of Marx's thought. It will be concluded that alienation is a useful tool in explaining the affect of capitalism on human existence. In Marx's thought, however, the usefulness of alienation it is limited to explanation. It does not help in

Marx argues that capitalism creates alienation and made this is a main critique of capitalism. Although he did take inspiration from Hegel’s philosophy, his idea of alienation was different in the respect that the “spirit” is not alienated from itself, but it is people who are alienated from their work or from each other (Ball, Terence, Richard Dagger, and Daniel O’Neill 142). There are four factors in which Marx believes the workers are alienation. The first is that they don’t own the means of production or what they produce so in turn they are alienated from the product of their labor (148). Second, there is no satisfaction in their labor because mass production kills creativity (148). Third, the workers power to create and enjoy beauty is destroyed so they are alienated from their human potential (149). Lastly, capitalism alienates workers from each other because they are forced to

Alienation, in Marxist terms, refers to the separation of the mass of wage workers from the products of their own labor. Marx first expressed the idea, somewhat poetically, in his 1844 Manuscripts: "The object that labor produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer."

Topic: One of the essential elements to Marx’s alienation concept is that of people or workers being alienated from each other under capitalism, it is still relevant in explaining the problems of the modern world.

The focus of Marx’s philosophical writings about social structure is alienation. He believes that social or psychological alienation arises out of economic or material alienation. In other words, consciousness is determined by material conditions. He states that the alienated person feels a lack of meaning in his life, or a lack of self-realization. There are three types of alienation. The first type of alienation is alienation from oneself. The second type of alienation is alienation from his fellow human beings, and the third type of alienation is alienation from the world as a whole.

The theoretical relevance of Marx’s theory of alienation has been the subject of much contention since the posthumous publication of his Economic and Philosophical manuscripts in (). While the notion of alienation, along with its distinctly Hegelian underpinnings, has frequently been dismissed as a youthful error in comparison with Marx’s supposedly more ‘mature’ work, I argue that it is fundamental to his critique of capitalism. As Sayers (p.xi) notes, “After his early period, Marx did not often use the term - it and much other Hegelian language is for the most part abandoned. Nevertheless, the concept of alienation is implicit throughout Marx’s work, and it continues to provide a major basis for his understanding of capitalism and for his critique of the impact of the market”. It is important to relate Marx’s philosophical project back to the always-implicit notion of alienation as a set of relations between people and as a mode of being in the material world specific to capital(ism), otherwise there is a risk of overlooking the human relationships that underpin the capitalist mode of production. As Ollman () points out, “By dismissing the essential human relations, the basic relations of alienation which underly capitalist production, its surface relations become everything” (p.202). So, in dismissing the human relationships that maintain a given mode of production, it is reified - thus, any critique that does not take this into consideration fails to address the matter

The theory of alienation developed by Karl Marx depicts the estrangement of people due to living in a capitalist system of production. Through the manuscript “Estranged Labor” from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes his theory of alienation and specifies on the four types of ways in which the worker is alienated. A vivid example of Marx’s theory of alienation can be seen through Charlie Chaplin’s comedy film Modern Times. In his film, the central idea of the theory of labor alienation and how the worker is affected by the alienation are depicted. The notion of alienation depicted in Marx’s “Estranged Labor” is also depicted in Chaplin’s Modern Times.