What Does Marx Mean by Alienation? Do You Find His Account Convincing?

What does Marx mean by alienation? Do you find his account convincing?

To begin with I am going to take the definition of alienation from Microsoft's

Encarta (http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary), to give a basic outline of alienation and then I

will discuss Marx's alienation and then later on in the investigation I will see how similar

Marx's application of "alienation" is.

Encarta defines alienation as, 1. estrangement: the process of causing somebody to

become unfriendly, unsympathetic, or hostile, or somebody's estrangement from or

unfriendly attitude toward somebody else 2. withdrawn state: a feeling of being isolated or

withdrawn, or of not belonging to or sharing in something.

This led me on to ask, what does Marx apply the term of alienation to? From that point

onwards in reading numerous passages of Marx I found that there are numerous ways

that alienation can be applied from an interpretative view to numerous accounts of Marx's

work. So barring the Encarta definition and my own probes into various pieces of Marx

I have decided to stick to what Marx himself has stated as alienation Ð'- and how it works

according to Marx.

In the Economic And Philosophic Manuscripts 1844(The Marx Ð'- Engels Reader)

Marx first mentions alienation in the following statement,

"The less you are the, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is

your alienated life the greater is the store of you estranged being"

Here I think the most important part is the word "express", because in terms of life each

person wishes to express themselves to their maximum limit. I think that no one wants to

have a "store" of isolated being, because it would mean that one is holding something

back.

Marx then goes on to say about alienation that,

"Everything the political economist takes from you in life and humanity, he replaces for you

in money and in wealth, and all the things you cannot do your money can do"

Here we see the substitute for lack of expression; it is picked up and adapted in terms of

Money, for money seems to nullify the lack of expression.

Alienation is then the breakdown of the natural interconnectedness or expressiveness. The

capitalist system seems to impose a dominant controller who severs man's natural

connection with the world. The point of connectedness leads me onto my next point on

what I feel was the main influence on Marx's work which is that of Marx being a follower

of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich "Hegel" and it would seem that a large part of his ideas

stemmed from Hegel. This is because the current philosophy of Marx's time was Hegelian.

Of which one aspect illustrated in the relationship of a master to a slave, to which Marx

seems to have echoed in terms of the capitalist and the worker.

Hegel's theory can be considered in this manner Ð'- suppose we have two independent

people, aware of their own independence. Each sees the other as a rival, - each being a

limit to his power over everything else.

The situation is therefore unstable. A struggle occurs, in which one conquers and enslaves

the other. The master/slave relationship is not stable. Although it seems at first the master is

everything and the slave nothing, it is the slave who does the work and by his work

changes the natural world. In this assertion of his own nature and consciousness over the

natural world the slave achieves satisfaction and develops his own self-consciousness, while

the master becomes dependent

on his slave. The ultimate outcome, or the greatest

outcome of the situation would be the liberation of the slave and the overcoming of the

initial conflict between the two independent beings.

In the shadow of the slave and the master is Marx's application to the worker and the

capitalist this has been shown in Marx's "estranged labour" or alienation (The Marx Ð'-

Engels Reader) (Page 96), where the products of the worker no longer belong to the

worker, instead they belong to the capitalist. This is where a paradox occurs, the better the

worker produces, the richer he makes the capitalist, and the richer he makes the capitalist

the more the capitalist has power over him.

Because Marx was writing at the beginning of the industrial revolution he saw the situation

that continues to this day. As a result the of the revolution the relation of a worker to his

product had changed. In the old system, the worker produced a finished product, and he

could be proud of it and paid for it. But under the new system of capitalism, products are

produced by machines, and the worker may never see the final finished product. And

rather

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