Karl Marx's Theories Of Alienation

Karl Marx lived in the time of the Industrial Revolution; this was the source of his many ideas and critical views on his society. As his first real was job was a journalist he reported on the social injustices of industrialisation. He noticed that many people were in abject poverty living in atrocious conditions – bad nutrition, no sanitation and extremely limited medical care are some of many examples.
Marx’s theory of Alienation focuses on the labour cog in the capitalist mechanism. The word alienation means when things are not themselves, so in Marx’s context it refers to when humans are not themselves. In other words his theory describes the alienation of people from parts of their human nature due to living in a society divided into social classes. Capitalism according to Marx alienates the workers in four different ways.
The first is how workers are alienated from the products they make. What Marx means by this is that although labourers manufacture the product they …show more content…
In the context of the industrial revolution, the wages of the workers were very small and their privileges were the least of their employer’s concerns. This idea of oppressive labour is important but society is very different now than it was in Marx’s. Workers have rights, are paid better and work in better conditions. This does not at all distract from the fact that there are businesses around world that abuse and mistreat their workers like in China but we cannot deny that conditions of work are better now. In the past, workers were considered just to be objects with a certain usefulness that produced products and profits. Talking more about China, although the workers are paid poorly they are not attached to the products they make which is what Marx thinks. Leslie Chang says that they do not care who buys the products they make. She feels that it is what the workers spend the money on and what emotions they feel is what matter, not what products they