Karl Marx: Alienation
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
It is the goal of the capitalist to profit from the objectified labour of the worker. Today, men are alienated from their object of production, from the production process, from their species being, and finally from other men. According to Erich Fromm, "Marx assumed that the alienation of work, while existing throughout history, reaches its peak in capitalistic society, and that the working class is the most alienated one"(50). Capitalists or employers are basically separated through competition. As we see here, Marx is defining all the characteristics of a capitalistic society in relation to alienation. This obliterates our intellectual advantage over animals. ------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**Works Cited Bailey, Gordon, Noga Gayle. We, as a human race, see ourselves as a group of people. The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy. To do so they compete with each other to find and recruit the cheapest commodities (workers) possible. [Alienated labour] also takes away his species life, his real objectivity as a species being, and changes his advantage over animals into a disadvantage insofar as his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him"(36).
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