Karl Marx Alienation

Examine the relevance of Marx’s theory of alienation to contemporary examples of labour and consumption.

Karl Marx’s refers alienation as a separation from an individual’s nature as a free producer, creator and the separation from their natural sociality. The idea of losing identity and self-worth in a bourgeois society. The idea of the proletariat having nothing but labour to sell. The idea of a capitalist society where work fulfils individual’s species essence and becomes the reason for life (Daniel little, 2016). Additionally, workers are exploited and made to work for a wage in order to survive, they become wage-workers. In addition, Karl Marx ideology and notion from the alienation theory mainly came from Georg Hegel. However, Marx criticised

Marx believes that work fills our “species essence”, however in a capitalist society; work alienates workers from their own human nature. Richard Schacht discusses Marx’s alienation in his book “Alienation”. Schacht discusses that Marx believes that work becomes a worker’s life; it becomes part of the worker, which results to the worker becoming separated from his or her own essential nature. In addition, the product the worker produces takes over the workers life and becomes the workers life in objectified form. In addition, Schacht then goes to discussing “alienated labour”, the idea of the worker becoming alienated from their spiritual life and human (Schacht, 1970, pp 100-101). In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx highlights that the more the worker puts into the product, the greater the product becomes and the less the worker becomes. Furthermore, in the Foxconn factory, the workers worked in harsh conditions, which lead the workers from physically hurting themselves, in the quote “we all had blisters and the skin on our hand was black”. This resulted in the workers from losing themselves in the process; the factory owners even hired counsellors to help the workers. This is because workers become stressed and miserable and may develop mental health issues for the reason that workers lose themselves in work as Marx discuss in the quote “does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy. However, Marx believes that the worker only lives and is their normal self-when not working, whilst drinking, eating and sleeping although; the rest of the time when the workers are working, they are not alive and are referred by Marx as an “animal” (Estranged Labour, Marxists.org,