Karl Marx: Alienation

ey may be objects of his own creation. Alienation is essentially experiencing the world and oneself passively, receptively, as the subject separated from the object"(44). We see that this statement holds true when we read Marx's first manuscript of 'Alienated Labour.' "[W]e have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and to a most miserable commodity, that the misery of the worker increases with the power and volume of his production..."(Bailey Gayle, 31). More specifically, alienation is a state of consciousness resulting from a specific method of relationship between men and objects.
             In Karl Marx's eyes, there are a total of four different sorts of alienation. The first pertains to the alienation of the worker from the object of production. In general, "Labour does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods. This fact simply implies that the object produced by labour, its product, now stands opposite to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer"(32). By this, Marx means that the labourer is alienated from his creation in that once it is created it no longer belongs to him. It becomes property of the employer or capitalist. The objectification of labour is in a sense the finished product that the worker creates. More specifically, the worker performs an act of labour creating an object. His expelled labour is the act that creates the product and is therefore materialized, or brought into existence, becoming objectified and now physically in existence!
             . This object of production now exists externally and independently of the worker. It is this independence of the object that outlines the alienation from the labourer.
             The alienation created by the objectification of the workers labour plays a major part in Marx's analysis, "[h]owever, alienation appears not only in the result, but also in the process, ...

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