Marx's Concept of “Estranged Labor”

Marx's Concept of “Estranged Labor”

Introduction

Estranged or Alienated labor is a concept given by Karl Marx in the context of social criticism. Alienation means an individual or societal condition in which an originally natural relationship (between people and people working, people and the product of their labor as well as humans themselves) should be lifted upside down or destroyed. Karl Marx used the term, finally in a very "worldly" way: the worker who sells his labor power, producing not only for himself, and was, according to the division of labor, only one link in the chain. The work product would be alienated from him, and he is also alienated from his fellow men. In the money to show the alienated essence of existence, the dominant people, which they worshiped to make matters worse still. This use, according to Marx, has become widely adopted (Avinieri, 1968). The extract be presented, in which Marx treated the subject of alienated labor, is from the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," which include formed in 1844 to the early writings of the author. Under pressure from Feuerbach's anthropological materialism he turned already here from Hegel's idealistic philosophy. But since Marx bases his entire argument on an understanding of the essential nature of man, the still existing near to Hegel's philosophical approach is obvious.

In the section "Estranged labor" Marx goes on four different levels of alienation. At the same time distancing itself from the national economic ideology suggests Marx's arguments arc based on the "political economy, current fact", the existing interdependence of workers and production and to the detriment of the worker in terms of power relations in society, to determine the alienation of man from himself of nature. Estranged labor should be understood in its relation to capital.

Discussion

Before the Russian Revolution (1917) no labor party or organization was called "communist" as such. Although, all socialist and democratic parties had the idea that societies should cater to the overthrow of capitalism, go through the abolition of private ownership of major means of production and mark it as, in other words, a communist society. Thus, the Marxist basis of private ownership got formulized. The basis of his argument does Marx's philosophical thoughts on the essentiality of the people. He sees man as part of nature with which he stood in mutual interaction. As the inorganic body of man, he understands everything that the human body is not what the man, but by his life activity (work) makes their own. The conflict between man and nature thus find place in two respects: 1 nature as a direct means of life of its physical existence and as a matter of his life activity of working.

The specific of the people is in contrast to the animal that he has a consciousness (universality of man), which allowed him to determine his life activity itself. With this understanding of man as a free being, Marx represented different levels of alienation (Fromm, 1961).

According to Marx, the worker becomes all the ...