Question

Explain what Alienation Exploitation are and how they relate – what is Marx’s understanding of the labor Market within capitalism.

Answer 1

For Marx's alienation under the capitalist mode of production is not only a subjective state of mind that one joins, but an empirical mechanism that emerges out of the fact we encounter in capitalist society through labor. In a generalized abstract sense, alienation is the lack of power over an attribute of self, in which the individual is excluded from some sense of agency in relation to the attribute. It is an objective historical mechanism that emerges from the ties and forces of production in the particular mode of production in nature

Alienation derives from a disconnection and lack of control over a thing or process, similar to the sense of alienation that one feels through religion. In the relations of production found in capitalist society, the alienation that Marx refers to emerges. In the capitalist mode of production we consider the requisite conditions for the emergence of alienation. Such circumstances are the fact that workers in capitalist society are compelled to sell their labor-power as commodity to someone else by the need of survival and lack of control over the means of production: the capitalist.

There are four types of alienation of which Marx wrote as relating to the capitalist mode of production: the alienation of the worker from the products of his labor, the alienation felt in the course of production or labor, the alienation from the essence of our species or human nature, and finally the alienation of man from man or society. They can be seen as nesting together with one leading to the other, but they are both facets of one reality: alienated labour.

The first thing to which Marx refers is the alienation felt by the workers through the estrangement from their labor product. The goods produced by workers through their labor are not their own but actually belong to another, and are created for another. The second thing that Marx addresses is the alienation arising from their lack of influence over the labor process or production operation. This division arises because the lack of influence over labor resources means that there is often little influence over the manufacturing process that produced goods.

Marx's third dimension of alienation referred to as alienation from our species-essence / human essence or to our own existence in a reduced context. For the species-essence of Marx the humanity is work itself. Labour is our 'mission of life conscious.' Marx argues that humans are intelligent creative beings by nature, and that we are objectivizing ourselves in the things we make. Marx's fourth dimension of alienated labor can be extracted from the idea that we are alienated from our own human existence or essence which, according to Marx psychological, is also alienated. In capitalist society, alienation thus occurs in the relations of production.