Marx Alienation Essay

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In his work, Marx presents the process of Alienation. For him, that means that the maker of a product is pretty much forced feel his creation (the product) as something strange and not normal. Marx describes the process of Alienation as “dehumanizing” because it takes away the “human” out of us. We don’t get to do things as we want to do them; we do things as we are told to do and we are constantly kept of a track. In Alienation, we work like zombies and even become robots while working because we are not putting any thought into the process of creating the product nor have any joy while making it. Marx thinks that labor is one of the essential differences that we have with “non-human” animals. We do things because we want to do them and not because we have to do them. He then talks about “Alienated labor” that occurs under capitalism. Working in capitalism can be seen as a positive and a negative thing. It is positive for the employer because he takes the finished good and sells it in order to make profit. He loses money because he pays for the labor of the workers. Working in capitalism is negative for the worker because he is constantly being monitored from his boss and doesn’t have freedom at all. When you work in capitalism you make your boss rich and not yourself. In
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capitalism we often work jobs that we hate. While working that kind of a job we tend to feel “not at home” meaning that we don’t want to be in our work place because we hate every single thing about it and therefore it is a place where we don’t feel comfortable. Later on Marx presents the four categories of Alienation. In the first one, the maker of the product has been alienated from his creation because the finished good belongs to his boss and not to ...

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...he receiver who receives my delivery, and I just feel exhausted especially when I have to drive do deliveries in Detroit and drive back.
3. My routine at work is exactly the same every day I work. I get there in the morning and I put all of the products on a pallet, then I load all of the pallets on the truck I drive and then do the deliveries. That is what I do every single day. My boss considers me as
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someone that gets the job done. I can be replaced at any given moment if my boss is not satisfied with my work.
4. At work I don’t have friends. I have co-workers. We compete for seniority “rights” and the only thing that we talk about is delivery related problems or about products that have been returned from the stores. Each of us is “fighting” for a better position or a better wage and if there is a possibility that one can get it then we become “enemies”.

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