Alienation

The theory or worker alienation was coined by Marx to describe the feeling of separation people have from their own human nature due to the social and economic class they live in (proletariat or working class). For example someone who works at a job they do not care for and is paid far below the value of what they create is sold for may feel disconnected from their work, but they continue to do it because the alternative is to go without work, and thus the necessities of life.

The theoretical basis of alienation is that the worker always loses the ability to determine their own life and destiny when deprived of the right to think or act as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said 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 a unique, autonomous, self-realized human being, in work their actions and goals are dictated by the bourgeoise class, the capitalist class because they own the means of production or capital and so they control the workplace, suppressing workplace democracy. The capitalists will of course pay the worker as little as possible and allow the worker as little say in their work as possible in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.

the transformation of people’s own labour into a power which rules them as if by a kind of natural or supra-human law. The origin of alienation is commodity fetishism – the belief that inanimate things (commodities) have human powers (i.e., value) able to govern the activity of human beings.