Marx’s concept for the estrangement of the worker from their own human activity under capitalism. Developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (“Estranged Labour”).
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You reproduce yourself as a thing-for-sale, ever cheaper/more productive/dispensible.
Marx identifies four dimensions/aspects of alienation, each following from the previous:
Alienation from the product of labor
The product of your labor becomes the very force that dominates you.
Under capitalism, the total output of all workers (factories, infrastructure, technology, accumulated capital) confronts the working class as an alien power that controls them.
They built all of it, but it belongs to the capitalist. It gets sold, generates profit, that profit buys more machines, those machines replace you.The more productive they are, the more powerful it becomes, and the weaker they become relative to capital.
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The worker pours their life into the object, and that life now lives in the object, not in the worker.
Through Bach’s lens (real): capital gets implemented. It acquires causal structure: factories, machines, supply chains, legal systems. It acts on the world. It hires and fires, builds and destroys, reshapes cities and governments. The worker, meanwhile, gets de-implemented. Deskilled, interchangeable, stripped of autonomous causal power. Capital becomes more real (more causal structure, more degrees of freedom), the worker less so.
Same pattern as the religion analogy Marx uses: God is a human creation that gets implemented through institutions, buildings, armies, law. The more causal structure God acquires, the less the believer retains.
Alienation from the act of production
If the product is alien, the activity that produces it must be too. Work is not self-expression but self-denial. The worker feels at home only when not working.
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The appendage to the machine is the extreme form: the machine strips work of all content, the worker merely serves an automated process.
3. From species-being (Gattungswesen)
What distinguishes humans from animals is conscious, creative, universal production. Animals produce one-sidedly, under immediate physical need. Humans produce freely, universally, “in accordance with the laws of beauty.”
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Estranged labor degrades this free activity to a mere means of physical survival. What makes us human becomes instrumental.
4. From other people
All the previous dimensions express themselves in how people relate to each other. Estrangement from one’s own nature means estrangement from others.
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Competition replaces cooperation. Social relations become market relations. People view each other “in accordance with the standard and the relationship in which [they find themselves] as a worker.”
" alienation is the general condition of human estrangement; reification is a specific form of alienation; and commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification"
Alienation and private property
Marx inverts the usual assumption: private property appears to be the cause of alienated labor, but it is its consequence. Alienated labor produces the relation of the capitalist to labor. Private property is the product, the result, the necessary consequence of alienated labor. The relationship then becomes reciprocal: private property perpetuates alienation.
Alienation from science
Link to originalCapitalism and Science
Capitalism does not make halt before the cultural or scientific world - It tries to put a common mindset into the masses, which is aligned to the establishment. Captial has an interest to cannibalise the will of the lower classes into supporting capitalism, which is reflected also in the scientific / academic community.
The profit economy transforms every research institute into a factory with its publish or perish mentality.
→ Loads and loads of pointless papers. The same work over and over again without any innovation.
Transclude of reason-in-revolt#^79e056People in the scientific community are extremely overworked, and forced to sell their labour power for really cheap, … The work for an endeavor of new knowledge turns into a work for survival, as academia is turned into a factory.
In an attempt to survive, the try to abide by the system’s rules. Try to follow what other researchers or companies push (see e.g. LLM craze, Quantum (without any actual breakthroughs), …).
Companies decide what research to pursue. Science, education, art, … are not free under capitalism.
marxist economics
labour power
Communism - The higher stage of communist society