Alienation

Alienation (Entfremdung) is Marx's concept for the structural condition of workers under capitalism. In the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx distinguishes four dimensions of alienation: the worker is alienated from the product of her labor (which belongs to the capitalist), from the activity of labor itself (which is coerced rather than freely chosen), from her species-being (the cooperative, creative human nature labor was supposed to express), and from other workers (whom capitalism turns into competitors rather than collaborators).

Marx took the concept from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, where alienation is a moment in the development of self-consciousness, and from Feuerbach, who applied it to religion as a projection of human capacities onto an external God. Twentieth-century Marxist thought — Lukács, the Frankfurt School, the early Sartre — extended the analysis into a comprehensive critique of modern bureaucracy, mass culture, and consumer society. The contemporary literature on bullshit jobs and meaningless work draws on the same tradition.

Marx's analysis of alienated labor draws on Hegelian and Feuerbachian sources but reframes them materially. For Hegel, alienation (Entfremdung, Entäußerung) is a moment in the development of self-consciousness through which spirit comes to recognize itself in what it has externalized. For Feuerbach, religion is alienation: human beings project their own species-capacities onto an external God and then bow before them as alien powers. Marx accepts the structure of analysis but locates alienation in the wage relation rather than in religion or in the dialectic of spirit.

The twentieth-century revival of the concept came through the publication of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts in 1932 and the work of Lukács, the Frankfurt School, and the early Sartre. Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (1923) developed the concept of reification — the structural extension of alienation to all of social life under capitalism. Recent work on what David Graeber called bullshit jobs, on the felt meaninglessness of much contemporary labor, and on the political economy of attention extends the same line of analysis into present conditions.