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Marx Alienation Of Labor Summary

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In the year 1844, Marx wrote the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in which he described the concept of “alienation”. Marx speaks of several alienations of the worker. The first alienation of the worker to the product of labor. When the worker puts their time and energy into the product, they become lesser for it, as the product of labor is literally the objectification of labor as Marx states: “This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification.”. This quote aptly …show more content…

It is in this document that Marx puts to paper one of his most iconic phrases. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Pg 474). Marx is directly stating that history and the history of conflict can be categorized into a dispute between binaries, the oppressed and the oppressors. Marx gives the history and various examples in the following quote: “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in a common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold graduation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. “ (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Pg

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