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ALIENATION-MARX

Alienation
The Marxist concept in which I felt most comfortable discussing is alienation. Alienation may be described as a condition in which men are dominated by forces of their own creation, which confront them as alien powers. The notion is important to all of Marx's earlier philosophical writings and still informs his later work. Man becomes foreign or alienated to the world he is living in because he basically can not control the material possesions of his own life. Man in a capitalistic society is alienated from himself , and the natural world in which he lives.
Workers create products by mixing their own labor in with natural resources to make new things that have greater economic value. Therefore the labor itself is objectified, its worth turned into an ordinary thing that can be bought and sold on the open market, a mere commodity. The labor now exists in a form entirely external to the worker, separated forever from the human being whose very life it once was. This is t...

Posted by: Carlos Hernandez

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