number of commodities he produces and the fewer he can afford to possess for himself. An increase in value in the world of things thus leads to a decrease in value in the world of men. The worker is moreover depersonalized. He is a means not a man. As one interpreter of the Marxian theory of alienation has said,
So, in his labour, man ceases to be a man,
that is, the person who decides the ends,
and becomes a means; he is simply one moment
in the objective process of production, a
means of producing commodities and survalue.
Here alienation is dispossession.
The worker is not only cut off from the product, but is severed from the act of labor itself.
Marx calls the labor "forced labor" as the worker is coerced into it by the necessity to keep his (and his family's) animal needs filled. The other needs peculiar to man are left unfilled. Man differs from animal in that he has will. While animals work in order to achieve basic goals, primarily concerned with survival, man works for personal satisfaction, for enjoyment. When it ceases to be enjoyable, he will divorce himself from it. He will cast it out of his real life. Marx says, "Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague."
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