The concept of alienation in Marx

The concept of alienation in Marx refers to what he sees as the impact on the individual of the dehumanizing processes of capitalism, such as the division of labor and commodity fetishism. Although he was idealistic in his belief that communism would do away with such alienation, Marx is accurate in his critique of capitalism and its alienating effects. The individual to Marx becomes a part of a machine producing things, and in effect becomes a thing himself, alienating him from his true self, from the tools he uses and the product he makes, and from his fellow man. He becomes an "alien" with respect to his own humanity.

The bourgeoisie who control the relations of production in capitalism, says Marx, are engaged in a search for greater markets and profits which inevitably turn individual man and humanity en masse into things whose relations are based on money. The bourgeoisie "has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment,'" has "reduced the family relation to a mere money relation" (206).

Marx argues that even the bourgeoisie, the capitalists themselves, become alienated by this process of dehumanization in which all relations are based on exploitation and money. The capitalists are just as dehumanized as the workers, although Marx has no time for sympathy for the capitalists who, he says, will fall before the forces of revolution they themselves have created. Alienation, in that sense, is a force for good because it

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which can liberate through revolution. The social relations under capitalism consist primarily of the capitalist and worker classes. The process of capitalism inevitably aggravates the division between the classes, which, in Marx's thesis, is in the short-term negative but in the long-term positive. The social relations between the classes must become intensely aggravated in order to bring about revolutionary conditions. The workers as a class must become intensely alienated before they are willing to risk everything (or whatever little they have under capitalism) for the cause of revolution and liberation. Alienation must become a part of an awakening process for the worker class: The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat . . . cannot stir . . . without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being blown to pieces (216). To Marx, the social relations are associated with commodity fetishism and resultant alienation. What occurs as a result of the worker's becoming increasingly mechanistic in his work, because of the division of labor, is an investment of commodities--the products made by the worker--with the

Category: Economics - T