Alienated Labor (Essay Sample)

Alienated Labor
Student’s Name
Institution
To be alienated from something is the situation where one lacks wholeheartedly the identification with something and instead regards it as strange and perhaps an obstacle in one’s way. An individual speaks of alienation only in situations where there is a preceding anticipation that one will recognize with the idea in question as one’s own or closely connected to or continuous with one’s self. Estranged labor can be separated into four aspects of alienated labor this include: alienation from one’s action of laboring, from one’s indispensable human nature, and to conclude from the other human beings as an outcome of the character of one’s work. This essay will look at the concept of alienated labor in details.
The alienated laborer normally finds no joy in the work that he does, and he ends at benefiting herself and not the community by her work. Features of alienated labor are objective in that the alienated laborer lacks freedom to choose whether or not to labor and in what traditions to labor and this lack of the freedom of choosing may bring about negative attitude towards the job. One being estranged is not just to endure various unconstructive characteristics in one’s occupational life. Besides, one must act in response to these characteristics by experiencing one’s work as alien rather than as a fraction of one’s life with which one unconditionally identifies (Marx, 1844).
Realization of labor appears to be a diminution that the worker is actually diminished to the point of starvation. Objectification appears to be a loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the most essential objects both in life and the aims of achieving her career goals. In reality, work itself becomes a thing of which he can take possession only with the greatest effort and that he can take possession only with the greatest effort and with most unpredictable interruptions. In most cases, the appropriation of the object appear as the alienation that the more objects the workers produces, the fewer he can own and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital.
In labor alienation, the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an actual alien object. According to this principle, the more the laborer exerts himself, the poorer his inner world become, and the less there is that belongs to him from his labor. In most cases the worker commits himself in the production of the commodity; finally the products no longer owned by him but to the objective. At times, the more the effort the worker, the more, poorer he becomes. What the product of his hand is he is not. The more the value of the products produced the poorer the worker. In the process of externalization of the product makes the work to be an object, that is an external existence, and it exists outside the worker independently, an autonomous power, an alien, and opposed to the worker. The life given to an object conflicts the worker as a hostile and an alien (Marx,1844).
When the worker is forced by compulsion of economic necessity to go to work as a factory worker, he does not only experience himself as unfree but also does not identify himself even halfheartedly with his labor role. Externalization and estrangement are consequences of social structures that oppress people, denying them their essential humanity. Alienation is am objective condition inherent in the social and economic arrangements of capitalism. All the forms of production result in objectification, a process in which people manufacture goods that embody their imaginative talents yet come to set apart from their producers (Marx,1844). Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and in so doing generate alienated labor. Alienation of the worker from the product itself makes the act of production to become meaningless activity; hence it offers little or no intrinsic satisfaction. At times alienation affects the state of the mind and it brings about the feelings of powerlessness, discontent, and isolation at work especially when it takes place within the context of large, interpersonal, bureaucratic social organization.
Alienation of labor makes a worker to become a slave to his objects, in that first he gets an article of labor that is, he gets labor, and secondly, he also receives the means of subsistence. The first one enables him to exist as a worker and the second as a physical subject. The terminus of this slavery is that he can only maintain himself as a physical subject so far as he is a worker, and only as a physical of the worker. Estranged labor turns man’s being both environment and his religious species possessions, into a being strange to him, into a way to his personality reality, it estranges man’s individual body from him, as it does exterior nature and his religious essence, his human being (Marx, 1844).
Externalization of labor makes the worker not to be part of his nature-and not to affirm himself to his work but deny himself, it makes him to feel miserable and unhappy, and he develops no free material and mental power but mortifies his flesh and ruins his brains. The worker feels at ease at the time he is only outside work, and during work he is outside himself. He feels to be at home when he is not working and at the time...