Alienation

[Vlad tdf]

can someone explain me alienation please ;)




Sorry if it sounds stupid

[shorelinetrance]

bourgeoisie own the means of production, they hire workers to work for them, the workers make goods and the capitalists keep what the workers produce, thus alienating the workers from what they produce.

before the industrial revolution, workers had their own means of production, and could keep what they produced, but with the introduction of big machines, the machines could turn out twice of what a worker could do in a day, and the worker had no choice but to sell himself out to the capitalist for a wage.

alienation is a central theme of capitalist exploitation.

[An archist]

Another form of alienation also comes from the automatisation of the work, in the pre-industrial period, goods were completely produced by a small group of people who mostly worked together. Fordism introduced the assembly line: workers were only responsible for a small part of the production process, they didn't feel like they were making a car (for example), they were just putting two tires on it.
This alienated workers even further from their work.

[mikelepore]

Recommended reading on this topic: Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm , particular the chapters entitled "Estranged Labour", http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm , and "The Power of Money", http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm .

[Vlad tdf]

thank's alot :D

[rouchambeau]

bourgeoisie own the means of production, they hire workers to work for them, the workers make goods and the capitalists keep what the workers produce, thus alienating the workers from what they produce.

before the industrial revolution, workers had their own means of production, and could keep what they produced, but with the introduction of big machines, the machines could turn out twice of what a worker could do in a day, and the worker had no choice but to sell himself out to the capitalist for a wage.

alienation is a central theme of capitalist exploitation.It's kind of like this, but there is a little more to alienation than simply getting less than what you worked for.

People define themselves through shaping the external world. What estranged labor (a.k.a. alienation) does is ensure that the worker does not control what she has produced. Their products (commodities) now appear to have a will of their own and act autonomously. In this sense, the worker is alienated from herself.

If you get a job (assuming you haven't had one yet), you might begin to feel it too. It's a fairly overwhelming and confusing feeling when it hits you.

Here is Marcuse's work "The Foundations of Historical Materialism": http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/historical-materialism/index.htm
He explains alienation, and a few other things, very clearly in this essay.

[mikelepore]

A little historical background. Hegel taught that all of human history was some kind of unfolding that takes place because the Absolute (God) has some characteristic that's estranged or distanced from itself, struggling to know itself. I don't know the German words too well, but I think they were Entfremdung and Verfremdung, meaning alienation or estrangement. Feuerbach came out of that Hegelian tradition but changed the premise to be: there is something estranged from itself, but it's when human beings abstract the essence of what they think is perfect in themselves and then they use this image to invent a God that we have to bow to, making perfection or God into a Frankenstein's monster. Marx changed that again: we have estrangement from ourselves, but it's mainly caused by our daily productive activities being under someone else's control, we're outsiders in our own workshops, our own mental and bodily motions get turned into an oppressive power, our own creativity is used as a weapon against us. Money becomes a replacement for authentic characteristics, for example, a coward who has money can buy bravery, money dictates what beauty is believed to be. This is "the young Marx", recently out of college, before meeting Engels, and about three years before the Communist Manifesto.