Understanding Alienation: Marx’s Perspective on Society
Understanding Alienation
Alienation. The word comes from alienus, which means something foreign or strange. It is the act by which property is transferred from one person to another. For Marx, alienation is when a man becomes a stranger to himself, becoming other. For Marx, man is a concrete being who feels alienated by being deprived of the fruits of their labor, becoming a commodity, as is the product he produces. The worker is considered as a mere labor force involved in the market, i.e., as a mere commodity. This alignment, caused by economic factors, causes all other alignments or denatured human states.
Social-Political Alienation
There are different social classes, even though all men are equal. There is a dissociation between society and state. The modern state is but “the organizational form of the bourgeoisie as a guarantee of their property and their interests.” The modern state is “gradually purchased, in fact, by private owners, surrendered completely to these by the system of public debt and whose existence depends entirely on commercial credit granted to private owners.”
Ideological Alienation
Ideology takes on the meaning of a distortion of reality that serves as a justification of the contradictions of society to mask and thus prevent any transformation.
Religious Alienation
We must distinguish between religious alienation, since religion serves to justify social injustice by promoting a world of illusory happiness through resignation. Man is lost in the illusion of a transcendent world as a result of the state of misery that is: it’s like a relief, a sigh of the oppressed creature. Marx accepts the thesis of Feuerbach: Man needs to know, know who he is. Then he faces himself, he proposes himself as object of his knowledge. He casts off a set of attributes which belong to it, puts all those qualities in a being outside himself, it created and called God. God is simply a pure projection of man.
Philosophical Alienation
Philosophical alienation is the only philosophy to interpret and justify reality, preventing its transformation.
Economic Alienation
The subject of the story is man, the concrete, real, living being, trying to be at work. Work is the creative activity of man: the real productive work lives materially. The man, when alienated, will see religious alienation disappear, secondary to economic alienation, which is the root of the other alienations. Man develops their productive activity through work, is projected onto the work products it puts on each product in some of his work. It is where man should be a man. But in terms of salaried work exactly the opposite happens, what happens is the alienation of man. The worker is alienated, separated from itself, because the work product is himself, the same man at work become a commodity that sold in the market. The work under the conditions of private property becomes a mere commodity, the less valuable the greater the amount of them in circulation. The products made by the employee are not returned to him. They have fallen into the hands of a few: the owners of the means of production. The worker sells his labor to another being than himself, which uses the force for making profit is to sell its own personality, to make what he wants: thus becomes another instrument. The owner of the means of production is manipulating the personality of the worker is employed worker sells cosified productive strength. Human relations established between two persons (employer – worker) become conflictive. Relations form two antagonistic social classes whose opposition is irreducible: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.