Alienation And Social Alienation In Marx's Estranged Labor

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ESTRANGED LABOR:
Estranged Labor is a part of Marx’s work included within his book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. His focus in this part of the book is to explain how the capitalist system causes the alienation of workers, the proletariat. This essay is going to explain Marx’s idea regarding the main senses in which workers are alienated and its relation with private property.
Despite the fact that Marx does not explicitly define alienation in Estranged Labor, a deep read of his work allows us to understand what he means by it and the complexity of this term. Social Alienation can only be understood as a mechanism of the capitalist system and it implies an estrangement of people from most aspects of their lives. Due to their unavoidable membership of capitalism, …show more content…

Human nature is our ability to shape the world we live in a conscious way. In relation to this, our human identity is fulfilled when we, as human beings, control the subject of labor. That is the ideal situation that all workers should experience. Nevertheless, under the capitalist system, their labor is forced. They are coerced to work without taking into account any of their personal interests or collective inclinations. Marx explains this process by explaining the differences between animals and humans. Whilst animals immediately have their life activities, humans have conscious life activity. The fact that humans are conscious explains why we can have free activities and animals can’t. However, as Marx clarifies “Estranged labor reverses the relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence”. This alienation of the worker from himself happens because under capitalism, the workers are estranged from their natural essential identity and life purposes as human

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