Karl Marx (1818-1883) utilizes the rhetorical strategy of explicit word usage to convey his message dealing with alienation. In his early writing on "Alienated Labour," there is a clear and prevailing focus on the predicament of the labourer. In my eyes it is an attempt to draw a stark distinction between property owners and workers. The purpose of this paper is to view Marx's concept of alienation and how it affects a particular individual. To do so we will look at what Marx means by alienation, the different sorts of alienation that he uncovered, and the relationship between the capitalistic, class society and alienation itself.
             According to Oxford's English Dictionary, alienation is defined as "estranged or to make hostile"(19). This is only the beginning of what "alienation" means to Karl Marx. "Marx's philosophy, like much of existential thinking, represents a protest against man's alienation, his loss of himself and his transformation into a thing; it is a movement against the dehumanization and automatization of man inherent in the development of Western industrialism"(Fromm, V). Marx was a believer in an inevitable revolution between capitalists, and the workers employed in their industries. He believed that the actual cost of any product is simply the price of material and most importantly, the labour employed to create it. However, the owner of the industry does no labour in creating the product, but rather buys a labourer and sells the results of that man's work. Marx therefore considered any profit made in the sale of the product to be stolen from the worker. With this in mind, we turn to Ma!
             rx's actual concept of alienation according to author Erich Fromm. "Alienation (or "estrangement") means, for Marx, that man does not experience himself as the acting agent in his grasp of the world, but that the world (nature, others, and he himself) remain alien to him. They stand above and against him as objects, even though th...