Marx and Alienation

Essay by vtblackCollege, UndergraduateB, July 2006

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The four ways in which Marx contributes alienation of the modern worker to the exploitative social institution of capitalisms, still nearly a century after its conceptualization have a profound impact in the modern world. Marx believed that the more a society becomes industrialized the more its workers will become alienated from there work thus themselves. I personally would definitely agree with this assessment due in part, the way society is set up today. Theirs an abundant supply of unskilled labor here in America. The devaluation of the American worker is undercutted by the influx of cheap unskilled poorly educated immigrants which Corporations and Business recruit to exploit. Marx visualized the more a society developed into a capitalistic society the easier it would be for businesses and corporations to replace its workforce, thus pitting workers against each other. If you really look at it, Gone are the days of union solidarity.

America has developed into a metaphoric "big fish gets the worm" type society. Marx felt that under the system of capitalism workers will ultimately lose control over products they produce. (1) "Alienation in the domain of work has a fourfold aspect: Man is alienated from the object he produces, from the process of production, from himself, and from the community of his fellows. The object produced by labor, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. . . .The more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself. However, alienation appears not merely in the result but also in the process of production, within productive activity itself. . . . If...