The Role Of Alienation In The Workplace

In a workplace environment, a worker can feel alienated for a multitude of reasons. One reason is because they do the same monotonous thing every day. It can also be the realization that your work is not unique from the others and that you can be replaced at any time, like a piece in a machine that has gotten rusty or stopped working. It is the feeling that you have you are forced to not have a unique identity in order to fulfill your duties. Carl Marx writes, “Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of human fantasy, of the human brain and heart, reacts independently as an alien activity of gods or devils upon the individual, so the activity of the working is not his own spontaneous activity” (pg. 57). What Marx means by this is that the employer takes all control away from the worker and makes them produce their product exactly the way the employer wants.
I feel like I experienced alienation during my first two years in high school. During those first two years, everything was basically decided for me. What classes I should take, when I should take them, when I should eat. And I hadn’t really been taught anything about self-expression at this point. I had only been taught that it was important to fit it. It is a lesson which I feel is taught all too often in our society as it seems to encourage the notions of alienation at a young age. “We arrive at the result that man (the worker) feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions” (Marx, 57). This quote is fairly accurate to how I felt. I monotonously went about my days for about two