Karl Marx and Estranged Labor

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Karl Marx and Estranged Labor

Marx on page 327 of his essay estranged labor is describing what to him were

the fundamental conditions of labor under capitalism and why he found them

detrimental to man. It is an essay about how people experience work. Marx

criticizes capitalism by analyzing his theory of alienation.The theme for this essay

was how workers in capitalism are alienated from their work .It covers 4 forms of

alienation in capitalist society.

Alienation is the transfer of property from one to another; foreign strange,

unknown or to separate. Marx explains how labor negatively produces itself and

the workers as a commodity. The object that labor produces confronts the laborer

as something alien and a power independent of the producer. The product of

labor is labor, which has been frozen in an object.

In capitalism the loss of the object is loss of reality for the worker.

These facts are all tied to his concept of alienation. Alienation preceded

private property. It is not the separation between those who own the

material forces of production and those...

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