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Karl Marx Alienation Of Labor Analysis

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Throughout his life, Karl Marx has altered the way that he views labor and what labor means to society as well as the individual. We can see how in The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof Karl Marx is still concerned about the laborers but is more focused on scientific notions and ideology as well as the economic components compared to what how he focuses on social aspects in The Alienation of Labor. The Alienation of Labor was written first, in 1844. The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof was written in 1867. Over the course of these twenty three years Marx began to shift his focus from what labor means to the individual to a more abstract distanced look at the capitalist system. The Alienation of Labor by Karl …show more content…

This happens during the capitalist mode of the production. Although in The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof Karl Marx still is concerned about the laborers, he is more focused on how the buyers of the products do not acknowledge that the products came from the work of laborers. As Marx says in The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof, “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (pg. 163). Marx, in this work, points out the buyers are naive to where the products come from. We glance past the fact that these laborers are exploited for our gain. In The Alienation of Labor Marx discusses a political economy. Political economy is, “what we would call macroeconomics, that is the economics of large systems” (pg. 250). Marx argues that there is a connection between many aspects of economics. There is a connection between exchange and competition, value and the devaluation of property, monopoly and competition, and estrangement and the money system. He claims that the laborers get poorer the more wealth they produce. The more

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