Essay About Marx Mean And Point Of Connectedness

What Does Marx Mean by Alienation? Do You Find His Account Convincing?
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What does Marx mean by alienation? Do you find his account convincing?
To begin with I am going to take the definition of alienation from Microsofts
Encarta (
will discuss Marxs alienation and then later on in the investigation I will see how similar
Marxs application of “alienation” is.
Encarta defines alienation as, 1. estrangement: the process of causing somebody to
become unfriendly, unsympathetic, or hostile, or somebodys estrangement from or
unfriendly attitude toward somebody else 2. withdrawn state: a feeling of being isolated or
withdrawn, or of not belonging to or sharing in something.
This led me on to ask, what does Marx apply the term of alienation to? From that point
onwards in reading numerous passages of Marx I found that there are numerous ways
that alienation can be applied from an interpretative view to numerous accounts of Marxs
work. So barring the Encarta definition and my own probes into various pieces of Marx
I have decided to stick to what Marx himself has stated as alienation Ð- and how it works
according to Marx.
In the Economic And Philosophic Manuscripts 1844(The Marx Ð- Engels Reader)
Marx first mentions alienation in the following statement,
“The less you are the, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is
your alienated life the greater is the store of you estranged being”
Here I think the most important part is the word “express”, because in terms of life each
person wishes to express themselves to their maximum limit. I think that no one wants to
have a “store” of isolated being, because it would mean that one is holding something
back.
Marx then goes on to say about alienation that,
“Everything the political economist takes from you in life and humanity, he replaces for you
in money and in wealth, and all the things you cannot do your money can do”
Here we see the substitute for lack of expression; it is picked up and adapted in terms of
Money, for money seems to nullify the lack of expression.
Alienation is then the breakdown of the natural interconnectedness or expressiveness. The
capitalist system seems to impose a dominant controller who severs mans natural
connection with the world. The point of connectedness leads me onto my next point on
what I feel was the main influence on Marxs work which is that of Marx being a follower
of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich “Hegel” and it would seem that a large part of his ideas
stemmed from Hegel. This is because the current philosophy of Marxs time was Hegelian.
Of which one aspect illustrated in the relationship of a master to a slave, to which Marx
seems to have echoed in terms of the capitalist and the worker.
Hegels theory can be considered in this manner Ð- suppose we have two independent
people, aware of their own independence. Each sees the other as a rival, – each being a
limit to his power over everything else.
The situation is therefore unstable. A struggle occurs, in which one conquers and enslaves
the other. The master/slave relationship is not stable. Although it seems at first the master is
everything and the slave nothing, it is the slave who does the work and by his work
changes the natural world. In this assertion of his own nature and consciousness over the
natural world the slave achieves satisfaction and develops his own self-consciousness, while
the master becomes dependent
on his slave. The ultimate outcome, or the greatest
outcome of the situation would be the liberation of the slave and the overcoming of the
initial conflict between the two independent beings.
In the shadow of the slave and the master is Marxs application to the worker and the
capitalist this has been shown in Marxs “estranged labour” or alienation (The Marx Ð-
Engels Reader) (
worker, instead they belong to the capitalist. This is where a paradox occurs, the better the
worker produces, the richer he makes the capitalist, and the richer he makes the capitalist
the more the capitalist has power over him.
Because Marx was writing at the beginning of the industrial revolution he saw the situation
that continues to this day. As a result the of the revolution the relation of a worker to his
product had changed. In the old system, the worker produced a finished product, and he
could be proud of it and paid for it. But under the new system of capitalism, products are
produced by machines, and the worker may never see the final finished product. And
rather