Karl Marx Alienated Labor

In Karl Marx’s Alienated Labor, Marx tells us how people under capitalism are alienated from: the object, oneself, the human species, and other individuals. Through the capitalist process Marx explained “the worker sinks to the level of the commodity the most miserable; and that the misery of the worker is inversely proportional to power and volume of his protection” (§ 1, 58). Marx tells us that when man becomes an alienated commodity he is essentially a slave. The first way that Marx believes man is alienated from his labor, is from the object he produces. Workers in a factory don't feel the same connection to the product they're producing as they would if it were handcrafted. Marx believes that workers feel this way because “the more objects

Stating that “alienation is shown not only in the result also in the process of production” (§ 18, 61) . That when worker “does not affirm himself in his

work but denies himself, he feels miserable and unhappy.” (§ 18, 61) “the workers therefore only feels at ease outside of work, and during work outside himself”
( §18, 62). When Marx says this he is trying to explain that the worker being outside himself actually alienates himself from himself. Because of this the workers work can be viewed as non voluntary forced labor, equating the modern-day workers to slaves.

The alienation of the worker from the rest of the human species is Marx third concern. “Alienated labor also alienates the species from him; it makes species–life the means of individual life. In the first place it alienates species– life and the individual life, and secondly it turns the latter into its obstruction” (§ 26, 63). Other species only produce what they need to survive us life serves only to preservice life. But man knows how to apply the “law of beauty in the treatment of the objective world, therefore, Man proves himself to be generally a species– being” (§ 30, 64). Sense production is actively species life according to Marx then the alien nation of production also alienates the human species–