Karl Marx's Theories Of Alienation
Introduction:
‘Political economy regard the proletarian… like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work- it does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics and the beadle’ (Marx 1844, P.6)
Karl Marx was without a doubt the most influential socialist thinker to arise in the 19th century. He was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, Journalist and revolutionary socialist. He was one of the founders of sociology and social science. He published a number of books; his most famous being ‘The communist manifesto’ and ‘Dan Kapital’.
Marx’s theories about society, economics and politics were known as Marxism. Three areas in which Marx
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Alienation is the process whereby people become foreign to the world they are living in.
Marx has a specific understanding of the very sharp experience of alienation which is found in modern Bourgeois society.
Marx’s declared labour is not carried out with any consideration for the individual’s talents and skills but rather takes place entirely according to the laws of capitalist commodity production. Marx emphasized as modern society grows the worker becomes poorer with the wealth he produces and the more his production extends and increases in power, the worker is becoming a cheaper commodity than what he produces.
In Marx’s writing in1844, he shows how alienation arises from private labour. Marx showed that the specific form of labour characteristics of bourgeois society, wage labour, corresponds to the most insightful form of alienation. Since wage workers sell their labour power to earn a living, and the capitalists own the labour process, the product of the worker labour is alien to the worker. It is not his/her product but rather the product of the
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