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Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves. Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being's life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class .
Marx explains that if the product of labor does not belong to the worker but to another person, this alienation arises because the worker’s activity is controlled by someone else. [ 36 ] The key point, Marx concludes, is that private property, which seems to precede alienated labor, is actually a consequence of it. [ 37 ]
István Mészáros, Marx's Theory of Alienation (1970). Sections can be read online. Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971). Many chapters, including some directly relevant to human nature, can be read online. John Plamenatz, Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man, (1975).
Self-estrangement is the idea conceived by Karl Marx in Marx's theory of alienation and Melvin Seeman in his five logically distinct psychological states that encompasses alienation. [1] As spoken by Marx, self-estrangement is "the alienation of man's essence, man's loss of objectivity and his loss of realness as self-discovery, manifestation ...
“Marx coined the term ‘alienated labor’ in the 1840s to describe how labor produces surplus profit that goes into the capitalist’s pocket.”
In addition to critiquing alienated labor, Marx offers a glimpse of unalienated labor, particularly in the Notes on James Mill. Here, Marx imagines labor that expresses human potential and fulfillment. He identifies four dimensions of unalienated work, paralleling the four aspects of alienation. [116]
For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour – one's capacity to transform the world – is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature and it is a spiritual loss. [239]
Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It refers to the difference between human labour in general as economically valuable worktime versus human labour as a particular activity that has a specific useful effect within the (capitalist) mode of production .