Alienation

Alienation, in the sociological sense drawn from the work of Karl Marx, describes the estrangement that workers experience under capitalist relations of production. Marx set out the concept most fully in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, describing several interlocking dimensions of alienation: workers are alienated from the product of their labor, which belongs to the capitalist who employs them rather than to the workers who made it; from the process of labor itself, which is typically controlled, directed and paced by others rather than by the worker; from their own human potential, or species-being, since work under capitalism tends to reduce a distinctly human, creative capacity to a repetitive means of mere survival; and from other people, as market relations turn cooperative human relationships into competitive ones. Marx argued that this condition follows directly from private ownership of the means of production, which separates workers from control over what they produce and how they produce it, and from the commodification of labor itself, which is bought and sold on the market like any other good. The concept of alienation became a central diagnostic tool for later conflict-oriented and critical sociology examining the psychological and social costs of industrial capitalist production, extending well beyond Marx's own original economic focus.