Alienation

IN KARL MARX's political theory, alienation is the process through which workers became estranged from their milieu and are rendered powerless through the capitalist division of labor, which cripples the laborer by opposing the functions of the body against the functions of the mind. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Marx goes as far as claiming that this alienation deprives humankind of its very capacity for volition: “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.”

Marx developed the theory of alienation particularly in his early writings, such as “Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right” and The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Marx specifically focused on the experience of alienation in modern bourgeois society and he fleshed out his understanding of the process through his critique of Georg W.F. Hegel. According to Hegel, people create a culture by means of their actions, which are the expression of the spirit. Such culture eventually becomes an entity alien from the people who produce it. Giving a materialist base to Hegel's mystical conception, Marx insisted that it was human labor that created culture and history: “Precisely because Hegel starts from the predicates of universal determination instead of from the real subject, and because there must be a bearer of this determination, the mystical idea becomes this bearer.” What Hegel called the spirit was, according to Marx, a human product.

Thus, the history of humankind is marked by a paradox: people increasingly control nature yet they becomes alienated from and dominated by forces of their own creation. In a capitalist system of production, “man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.” The worker is forced to deny rather than affirm himself in his work, thus capitalist labor amounts to “the loss of his self.” Religion becomes the human response to alienation in material life.

According to Marx, the labor process is an objectification of human powers. Yet, workers are unable to relate to their product as an expression of their own essence and thus fail to recognize themselves in their product. This lack of recognition is the basis for alienation. The specific form of labor characteristic of bourgeois society, wage labor, corresponds to the most profound form of alienation. Since wage workers sell their labor power to earn a living, and the capitalist owns the labor process, the product of the workers’ labor is, in a very real sense, alien to the worker as it becomes the property of the capitalist and not of its maker. Workers cannot say: “I made that; this is my product.” Workers’ alienation worsens during the regime of industrial capitalism where workers are attached to a machine and are themselves a mere unit along an assembly line, performing a meaningless task which is only part of a larger process: “He 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.”

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