What Is Alienation? | Socialism 101

If you’re a working person, then you’ve no doubt experience the sensation of being

a “cog in a machine” at some point.

The feeling of detachment and disconnection in your daily life.

Living for the weekend because the majority of your life is spent toiling for your capitalist

overlord – barely making enough to scrape by, while your boss grows rich off the back

of your labour.

The little time you can find outside of work is your only opportunity to truly live.

Marx summed it up in 1844 when he wrote that “The worker [therefore] only feels himself

outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.

He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.

His labor is [therefore] not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor.

[…] As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal

functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up,

etc.; and in his human functions [at work] he no longer feels himself to be anything

but an animal.”

Here, Marx is referring to the concept of “Alienation” or “Estrangement” - a

point that hits hard for a lot of working people who experience this sensation of being

chewed up and spit out, day after day, by the capitalist system that we’re living

under.

It’s also a topic that has been heavily debated among Marxists for reasons that will

become clear later on in this video.

So, what is alienation?

What are workers alienated from exactly?

And why is this a subject of such intense, heated debate among Marxists?

Let’s find out.

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What is Alienation?

Now, when talking about “alienation” this broadly refers to “detachment”, “estrangement”,

or “disconnection” from something.

Alienation has occurred in various ways under all class societies, including slave society