Karl Marx Alienated Labor Analysis
The main concept of alienated labor was developed by Karl Marx in his early work Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts from 1844 - First Manuscript [Estranged Labor]. As defined, the concept of alienation is profoundly embedded in religions and social and political theories, the possibility that some time in the past individuals feeling like foreigners in the world, however, sooner or later this distance would be overcome and humankind would again harmony with itself and Nature (Encyclopedia of Marxism).
Formed from Private Property, the political economy that is Capitalism divided society into two classes¬ - Property owners and Property-Less workers. By exploitation and estrangement, these classes become further designated as masters
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This is because despite the energy of labor and the being of the labor which are put into the product, that product itself doesn’t belong to the laborer nor do they receive any benefits from the product i.e., ‘the fruits of their labor’. In a sense, the laborer loses something of himself during the time spent creating this estranged object, as it doesn 't identify with it as a meaningful part of its own presence as a person, yet simply as an independent entity alienated to itself. Marx states that the “worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object” (29). Therefore, the more labor one puts into a product the more powerful and estranged the world of products becomes of them. This estrangement can become so acute that the bare necessities of living are taken from the laborer as the more products they produce, the less they possess. Meanwhile, more technological advances, the more the laborer is devalued inciting displacement and more despairing modes of labor. Marx illustrates the disparity by stating that:
Labor produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back into barbarous types of labor
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