Alienation in the Modern Society

Karl Marx’s theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves. Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being’s life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class.

The theoretical basis of alienation is that a worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of these actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realised human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie–who own the means of production–in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.

The theory, while found throughout Marx’s writings, is explored most extensively in his early works, particularly the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844³, and in his later working notes for Capital⁴, the Grundrisse⁵. Marx’s theory draws heavily from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel⁶, and from The Essence of Christianity (1841) by Ludwig Feuerbach. Max Stirner extended Feuerbach’s analysis in The Ego and its Own (1845), claiming that even the idea of ‘humanity’ is itself an alienating concept. Marx and Friedrich Engels responded to these philosophical propositions in The German Ideology (1845).

In his writings from the early 1840s, Karl Marx uses the German words Entfremdung (“alienation” or “estrangement”, derived from ‘fremd’, which means “alien”) and Entäusserung (“externalisation” or “alienation”, which alludes to the idea of relinquishment or surrender) to suggest an unharmonious or hostile separation between entities that naturally belong together.

The concept of alienation has two forms: “subjective” and “objective”. Alienation is “subjective” when human individuals feel “estranged” or do not feel at home in the modern social world. By this account, alienation consists in an individuals’ experience of his or her life as meaningless, or his/herself as worthless. “Objective” alienation, by contrast, makes no reference to the beliefs or feelings of human beings. Rather, human beings are objectively alienated when they are hindered from developing their essential human capacities.

For Marx, objective alienation is the cause of subjective alienation: individuals experience their lives as lacking meaning or fulfilment because modern society does not promote the deployment of their human capacities.

Marx derives this concept from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whom he credits with significant insight into the basic structure of the modern social world, and how it is disfigured by alienation. Hegel’s view is that, in the modern social world, objective alienation has already been vanquished, as the institutions of the rational or modern state enable individuals to fulfil themselves. Hegel believes that the family, civil society, and the political state facilitate people’s actualization, both as individuals and members of a community. Nonetheless, there still exists widespread subjective alienation, where people feel estranged from the modern social world, or do not recognize modern society as a home. Hegel’s project is not to reform or change the institutions of the modern social world, but to change the way in which society is understood by its members.

Marx shares Hegel’s belief that subjective alienation is widespread, but denies that the modern state enables individuals to actualize themselves. Marx instead takes widespread subjective alienation to indicate that objective alienation has not yet been overcome.

Marcuse’s analysis of capitalism derives partially from one of Karl Marx’s main concepts: Objectification, which under capitalism becomes Alienation. Marx believed that capitalism was exploiting humans; that by producing objects of a certain character, laborers became alienated, and this ultimately dehumanized them into functional objects themselves.

Marcuse took this belief and expanded it. He argued that capitalism and industrialization pushed laborers so hard that they began to see themselves as extensions of the objects they were producing. At the beginning of One-Dimensional Man⁹ Marcuse writes, “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment,” meaning that under capitalism (in consumer society), humans become extensions of the commodities that they buy, thus making commodities extensions of people’s minds and bodies. Affluent mass technological societies, he argues, are controlled and manipulated. In societies based upon mass production and mass distribution, the individual worker has become merely a consumer of its commodities and entire commodified way of life. Modern capitalism has created false needs and false consciousness geared to the consumption of commodities: it locks one-dimensional man into the one-dimensional society which produced the need for people to recognize themselves in their commodities.

The very mechanism that ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs that it has produced. Most important of all, the pressure of consumerism has led to the total integration of the working class into the capitalist system. Its political parties and trade unions have become thoroughly bureaucratized and the power of negative thinking or critical reflection has rapidly declined. The working class is no longer a potentially subversive force capable of bringing about revolutionary change.

Marcuse evolved a theory over the years that stated modern technology is repressive naturally. He believed that in both capitalist and communist societies, workers did not question the manner in which they lived due to the mechanism of repression of technological advances. The use of technology allowed people to not be aware of what is occurring around them such as the fact that they might soon be out of their jobs because these technologies are carrying out their same jobs quicker and cheaper. He claimed the modern-day workers were not as rebellious as before during the Karl Marx era (19th century). They just freely conformed to the system they were under for the sake of satisfying their needs and survival. Since they had conformed, the people’s revolution that Marcuse felt was necessary never happened.

As a result, rather than looking to the workers as the revolutionary vanguard, Marcuse put his faith in an alliance between radical intellectuals and those groups not yet integrated into one-dimensional society: the socially marginalized, the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other ethnicities and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. These were the people whose standards of living demanded the ending of intolerable conditions and institutions and whose resistance to one-dimensional society would not be diverted by the system. Their opposition was revolutionary even if their consciousness was not.