Summary Of Alienation Of Labor By Karl Marx

The Alienation of Labor by Karl Marx discusses how estrangement from oneself is derived from living in a society with stratified social classes. This estrangement from oneself makes people lose their humanity. People begin to lose their drive and the ability to determine their own destinies. They become products of their social class trapped in a cycle set up for them to not be able to escape. This happens during the capitalist mode of production.
Marx discusses a political economy. Political economy is, “what we would call macroeconomics, that is the economics of large systems” (pg 250). Marx argues that there is a connection between many aspects of economics. There is connection between exchange and competition, value and devaluation of property, monopoly and competition, and estrangement and the money system. He claims that the laborers get poorer the more wealth they produce. The more commodities created, the cheaper they become. Marx states that while the value of objects in this world increase, the value of human beings decrease. I find there to be a lot of truth in this even in the world today. Usually the things that we can buy for super cheap come at the expense of exploiting some child laborer working an illegal amount of hours in some factory while
He also criticizes the capitalists in European economics. These people collect factories and raw materials for production, pay their laborers wages to produce goods, and as a result produce a profit due to good calculations. Although he says this is the rational thing to do to make more money, it is exploiting the low class laborers. Labor becomes an object, a type of commodity, instead of something people do. Consequently, laborers become an object and lose their humanity. Labor “made real” “makes unreal” the laborer. The products become more valuable than the person that produce