Alienation

[afrikaNOW]

I was reading the online pamplet how Marxism works, in it it says

Hegel and Feuerbach called the unhappy state in which humanity found itself ‘alienation’ – a term you still often hear. By alienation, Hegel and Feuerbach meant that men and women continually found that they were dominated and oppressed by what they themselves had done in the past. So, Feuerbach pointed out, people had developed the idea of God –and then had bowed down before it, feeling miserable because they could not live up to something they themselves had made. The more society advanced, the more miserable, ‘alienated’, people became.

In his own earliest writings Marx took this notion of ‘alien*ation’ and applied it to the life of those who created the wealth of society:
The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range... With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct propor*tion the devaluation of the world of men... The object which labour produces confronts it as something alien, as a power inde*pendent of the producer...


I couldnt comprehend what marx said, can someone explain alienation to me, or at least what Marx was trying to say. Because i thought i understood it before i read Marx now it confused me

[EusebioScrib]

Yea that is a rather confusing quote. Although I think I finally solved it after some time. Basically, I think it means that the more a worker works harder, conforms more to society, etc the more he becomes alienated.

Alienation bascially means that we are doing something "wrong." We're unhappy becuase we are alienated from something, we don't control some crucial aspect of our lives. We feel powerless to change things we want to. That is alienation. Alienation is seen rampant today.

Alienation derives from a lack of control of our condition. In capitalist society in particular it derives from no control over any aspect of our lives. Our entire existence is reduced to work; production and reproduction of capital.

Alienation, however, will continue past communism, as I see it. Because in communism, we still won't control the entirety of our condition. We will be subject to nature and natural "laws." So we will still feel alienated, although not as much as today, because we will be united a species and will be able to control the direction of our species.

[KC]

In this quote, Marx is using the term "alienation" to describe something that the worker is finding alien to them.



The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range... With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct propor*tion the devaluation of the world of men... The object which labour produces confronts it as something alien, as a power inde*pendent of the producer...

With the increase in the productive forces, the more alien the commodities the worker produces are to him. The worker no longer identifies with the commodities they are producing. Work is looked at by the worker as dead time, as time used to sustain life outside of work. The worker feels alive only when they go home; to them, their life begins the moment they clock out until the moment they clock back in.

[afrikaNOW]

Mmm, thanks for the clarification on the context.