The Alienation of Capitalist Work

Marx is best known for his two unsparing critiques of capitalism: capitalism is essentially alienating and exploitative.

Capitalism is alienating in 3 specific ways:

1. Workers are alienated from other human beings.
Workers must compete with each other for jobs and raises. But competition between workers brings down wages. This is not only materially damaging to workers, it estranges them from each other.

2. Workers are alienated from the products of their labor.
Capitalists need not do any labor themselves – simply by owning the means of production, they control the profit of the firm they own, and are enriched by it. But they can only make profit by selling commodities, which are entirely produced by workers. Thus, the products of the worker’s labor strengthen the capitalists, whose interests are opposed to that of the proletariat. Workers do this as laborers, but also as consumers: Whenever laborers buy commodities from capitalists, that also strengthens the position of the capitalists.

3. Workers are alienated from the act of labor.
Because capitalists own the firms that employ workers, it is they, not the workers, who decide what commodities are made, how they are made, and in what working conditions they are made. As a result, work is often dreary, repetitive, and even dangerous. Enduring this for an extended period of time means that one can only look for fulfillment outside of one’s work; while “the activity of working, which is potentially the source of human self-definition and human freedom, is … degraded to a necessity for staying alive.” As Marx says, "In his work, therefore, he [the laborer] does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside of work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home.

Source: Karl Marx's Concept of Alienation