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Subject: Aspects of Society

Title : Alienation

I - Karl Marx

For Marx work was the primary source of human activity and thereby happiness. But he argued that society has created alienated labour, and this has caused workers to be alienated from their ‘real selves’ and alienated from each other. The origin of this alienation is the exchange of goods by barter, in which the products of labour become commodities and thereby “the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object.” In fact, Marx claims, it is not private property that has created alienation, but alienation that has created private property – since if products are mere commodities then commodities can be privately owned.

Thus the worker “does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than wellbeing, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless.” For Marx the economic system forms an infrastructure with two parts – the means of production, whereby
goods are produced, and the relations of production, which in a capitalist society take the form of a division into those who own the means of production and those who do not.

The capitalist infrastructure intensifies the alienation; workers, like products, are reduced to the level of commodities and wage labour becomes a system of exploitation – the labourers are effectively slaves. Additionally, the mechanization of production deprives work of all interest. The worker “becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.”

Furthermore, alienation is intensified by specialization and the division of labour and workers are trapped in their specialized occupation, which is necessarily alienating since a specialized occupation can only express a limited part of human nature. The criticism of his theory is that it is based on the illusion of an alternative – in other words, it is impractical. This criticism is supported by the study by Milovan Djilas who claims that in communist societies the
means of production were controlled by and for the benefit of the ruling elite.
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