How does marx define alienation

Today, the concept of alienation has become part of ordinary language, much used in the media. We may be told, for example, that who groups are becoming alienated from society, or that young people are alienated from mainstream values. With such usage of the concept we get the impression of the feeling of separation of one group from society, but the concept has traditionally been used in sociology, mainly by Karl Marx , to express a much more profound sense of estrangement than most contemporary usage IMO.

Marx applied the concept of alienation to work in industrial capitalist societies, arguing that emancipation for workers lay in their wrestling control away from the small, dominating ruling class. Later, Marxist inspired industrial sociologists used the concept to explore working relations under particular management systems in factories. For Marx, to be alienated is to be in an objective condition which as real consequences, and to change it we need to actually change the way society is organised rather than changing our perception of it.

However, in the 20th century some sociologists stripped the concept from its theoretical origins in order to make the concept more useful for empirical research. Blauner developed ways of measuring these different types of alienation incorporating the subjective perceptions of the workers themselves, arguing that routine factory workers suffered the highest levels of alienation.

However, he found that when production lines became automated, workers felt less alienated as they had more control over their working conditions. It also suggested alienation could be reduced without destroying capitalism. Other sociologists have attempted to apply the concept of alienation to criminology Smith and Bohm, and even the study of health and illness Yuill Alienation is one of the key concepts of Marxism, one of the main sociological perspectives taught across the A-level sociology specification.

This post should be most relevant to the Theory and Methods module, usually taught in the second year. Please click here to return to the main ReviseSociology home page! Hard evidence does exist for alienation but the term itself has been updated since Marx, understandably. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors.

Share Flipboard Email. By Ashley Crossman. Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Crossman, Ashley. Understanding Alienation and Social Alienation. What Is Socialism? Definition and Examples. What Is Communism? The Differences Between Communism and Socialism. What Is a Traditional Economy? What Is Human Capital? What Is Anarchy? Your Privacy Rights. And it is in this sense that we are not without cause, in the latest stages of capitalism, of thinking of ourselves as appendages of a machine.

In a sense, capitalism involves a devolution even behind the work-animal. At least the work-animal is an enslaved total organism. Even a tool or a slave can be used to carry out many different things. But by the time you get to the highest stage of capitalism, human functions can be more dehumanized than that of a tool: you become the appendage of a machine, just part of a tool, a cog in the vast machine of production.

By many routes, then, alienation from the product and from the activity of labour lead up to and involve alienation in its third aspect, alienation from the self or from the human essence. It is not only the product that becomes an alien power.

It is not only that self-development becomes self-denial. Internally related to these others is a loss of self. To alienate my labour-power, to be forced to sell it as a commodity on the market, is to lose my life-activity, which is my very self.

It is to become other than myself. From a Marxian point of view, we are talking about something social and historical rather than something metaphysical or existential.

This is one thing Marxists mean when they talk about de-humanization. There is a further aspect of alienation from self which Marx pays little attention to in his later work, but which receives some mention in the Manuscripts and remains important at an implicit level. And it is perhaps most appropriate to discuss it in relation to alienation from self. This further aspect is alienation from sensuousness. Marx conceives of the history of human labour as, among other things, a formation of the human senses themselves.

The human senses are not passive mechanisms, a blank slate on which the world leaves its mark more or less clearly and strongly. Marx understands sense perception itself to be the outcome of a process of the labour of a historical subject. The sensuous forms in which we perceive things and their relations is therefore the product of the history of an active subject. The sense themselves are not given, once and for all, but open to education, broadening, refining, formation and re-formation. If the senses themselves are a product of the process of human collective self-constitution, it is meaningful to speak of an alienation of sensuousness.

In capitalist society, our life activity is alienated. As a result we engage in inherently sensuous activities, but in an alienated fashion, almost exclusively, that is, for non-sensuous, extrinsic, extraneous purposes. In order to satisfy virtually any need, we must in capitalist society, work through the medium of money. Most of the things we do, we do in order to make money or to put ourselves in the position to make money, or improve our capacities to make money. There is very little, if anything that a human being could imagine wanting, that is not offered to us as a possible object of a cash transaction.

Thus the things with which we are engaged are never approached with an eye to either their own intrinsic value or to their human value in a broader sense. We do not relate most of the time to most things in terms of their intrinsically sensuous and aesthetic reality. The imperatives of capitalist society thus enter into our conscious and semi-conscious experience even at the level of sense and perception itself.

We are taught to literally see and feel things as utilities, as abstract counters in the process of making still more money. We become alienated from what Marx calls our subjective human sensibilities.

Our senses are not so much animalized or brutalized as they are mechanized. If our life-activity were our own, this would necessarily involve the intensive cultivation of our capacity for aesthetic appreciation of sensuous reality. Humans are, after all, according to Marx, the only species that can produce in conscious appreciation of the laws of beauty.

Under alienated labour, sense experience becomes a modifiable sign for things and relations that can be turned into money, the sign of all things. Because our activity is degraded to the level of mechanical subservience to crude needs, or, in reaction to that we perhaps become aesthetes, we regard everything only from the standpoint of the use it can be put.

Or we come to attach a perception of beauty or aesthetic value to that which commands a high price. We can be impressed with the supposed aesthetic value of something because it is expensive. This relation to everything, even the objects of sense and beauty, in terms of its usefulness to the expanded reproduction of capital means we no longer have an eye for the thing itself. Oriented mainly to pieces of the world whose monetary value means that they are essentially interchangeable, we are brought that much more easily to relate to ourselves and each other in this way.

We begin to evaluate ourselves and each other in terms of the amount of money we can make. Or parts of ourselves can be ranked in such terms. We are less able, if still able, to perceive and appreciate the intrinsic qualities of anything, even including ourselves. This dehumanization of the senses, and of perception and of judgement, is not something accidental to the dehumanization of humans.

We are thus led to the fourth aspect, alienation from other people, or from society. Once the traditional community which understood itself as natural is broken down, human beings become essentially potentially useful or threatening objects. One can now have enemies in a new sense. Only with the breakdown of primitive communism does man become a wolf to man.

It does become the central and organizing principle of class societies. In the market it is hard to say that the antagonism of classes becomes more severe, but the antagonism among individuals certainly increases. It is not simply our neuro-physiological constitution or our DNA that makes us behave or act selfishly. We live, according to Marx, in a society in which each individual must see in every other, not the possibility of his liberty, but its limitation.

Every other becomes an obstacle to me, but — and this is important too — a needed obstacle, a customer, a client, a creditor, a debtor, an employer or employee. The other is a rival.