Critically explain the salient features of 'alienation' as propounded by Karl Marx

Salient features

First, the worker is alienated from the product. The object that labour creates belongs to the capitalist. The more the worker produces, the richer the alien world of commodities becomes. Second, the worker is alienated from the process of work. Labour is external, forced and controlled. It is not a free expression of skill. The working day is sold, and the method of work is dictated. Third, the worker is alienated from species-being. Marx, drawing on Ludwig Feuerbach and then turning him around, held that human beings are distinguished by conscious, creative production. Under capitalism this becomes a means of mere survival. Fourth, people are alienated from one another. Class antagonism and competition replace cooperative production. The capitalist is also caught in the logic of capital, though the worker bears the heavier loss.

• These features rest on a definite structure: labour power is a commodity, surplus value is extracted, and the means of production are privately owned. Alienation is therefore not a complaint about machines as such. A craft worker under a master could be unfree, but Marx’s type is the wage worker in a system of commodity production. In later writings the language of exploitation, surplus value and commodity fetishism carries much of the same insight in a more economic form. Commodity fetishism says that relations between people appear as relations between things.

Critical explanation

Critics say the 1844 texts are philosophical and that the later Marx dropped the word. Louis Althusser drew a sharp line between early and late Marx. Others, including Istvan Meszaros and many labour sociologists, see continuity. Harry Braverman’s deskilling thesis extended alienation into twentieth-century scientific management. Feminist writers argued that unpaid domestic labour is also alienated and that Marx’s worker is silently male. In India, bonded labour, caste-based occupation and informal work complicate a factory-only picture. A. R. Desai and later Marxist studies of Indian capitalism still find the core: people do not control the conditions of their labour.

The idea can be stretched into a vague cultural mood. That stretch is a weakness. The strength of the concept is its link to property and wage labour. Automation and gig contracts change the form. They do not automatically restore the worker’s control over product and process.