Alienation

Alienation is a Marxist concept used to describe the severance of individuals from their productive activity, their social relationships, and their essential humanity. Although Marxists have mostly invoked it with reference to work and wage labor, alienation can also shed light on consumers' experiences of passivity, indifference, and disconnection in their leisure time. Henri Lefebvre, for instance, wrote that “there can be alienation in leisure just as in work,” and observed that production and consumption were related in a totality in which “we work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work” (1991, 39–40, italics in original). Likewise, Erich Fromm observed, “the process of consumption is as alienated as the process of production” (1955, 120, italics in original).

Karl Marx's notion of alienation was developed in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which engaged Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy to conceptualize how human powers and social creations appear to take an objective form that enchains and seems to rule over the people who have collectively produced them. Fromm traces the history of this notion of alienation back to the Old Testament and its condemnation of idolatry, which leads people to worship idols that they themselves have created. The experience of alienation severs the individual from society, unjustly appropriates the products of human labor, and puts people at the mercy of social forces they cannot control or change. Marx argued that under capitalism, people are alienated in four relationships that he deemed fundamental to human existence: in relation to the products of their labor and social activity, in relation to productive activity itself, in relation to their essential humanity or “species being,” and in their social relations with other people.

Marx contended that in each of these four relations, people living under capitalism are stripped of their essential human needs and capacities for creative work and social connection. All labor involves objectification, but in a capitalist society, “the alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power” (Marx 1961, 96). As the products of labor are expropriated and assume an alien objectivity that confronts and enslaves humanity, people also become alienated from their creative power for productive activity, which Marx believed was essential to human nature. In the form [Page 34]of wage labor, work becomes merely a means of survival where the worker “does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased” (98). People lose touch with the abilities that distinguish humanity from the other animals, and are thus alienated from what Marx called “species being.” Finally, people become alienated from one another in the relationships that comprise the social world, as the relations between humanity, nature, and labor are replicated in the competitive rather than cooperative relations between people in society. “Thus,” Marx wrote, “in the relationship of alienated labor every man regards other men according to the standards and relationships in which he finds himself placed as a worker” (103).

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