Marx's Idea of Workers' Alienation From the Production Process

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Alienation is a process in which humanity is progressively turned into

stranger in world created by labour. (A. Swingewood 2000 p32). It

succeeds in creating vast accumulations of wealth at one pole of

society, an increase in value of thing achieved only at the cost of

progressive defaulting human life itself. Alienation however, occur

only when humanity having externalised itself, encounter it’s own

activity, it essence, operating as an external, alien and oppressive

power.

Comphrensively, Alienation is the process where by people become

foreign to the world they are living, we can also say, is the

transformation of people own labour into power which rules them as if

by a kind of natural or supra- human law. The origin of Alienation is

FETISHISM-, which means the belief that inanimate things (COMMODITIES)

have human powers that will be able to govern the activity of human

beings. [Estrangement &Alienation].

Marx points out, that Alienation is the human labour, which created

culture and history. The formation of an exchange economic is the

outcome of a historical process, and capitalism is a historically

specific system of production. (Anthony Diggens 1987 p10). Marx

analysis of Alienation in capitalist production start from a

contemporary economic fact, the fact that capitalist advances, the

more impoverished the workers become.

The owner of land and capital makes capitalist mode of production

possible with their enormous wealth. The main point of Marx’s

discussion is that, in capitalism, the material object s which are

produced become treated on a par with worker himself- just as they are

on a purely theoretical level. The worker becomes an ever-cheaper

commodity, the more goods he produces. [Marx] (Ibid p11).

The Worker lacks control over disposal of his product, since others

appropriate what he produces, so that he does not benefit from it. If

the product of labour is alienated, the product itself must be active

alienation. (Ibid p12). Alienated of labour reduces human productive

activity to the level of adoption to, rather than active mystery of

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