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  • Essay / The concept of alienation in the works of Karl Marx

    Karl Marx was very insistent when it came to explaining the nature of society. That is, he claimed that capitalism created a hostile and evil environment in which people had no choice but to trade their souls in order to survive. Of course, Marx never said these words, but the combination of ideas such as alienation and commodity fetishism hint at a harsh critique of capitalism as it was. The central concept behind Marx's theory is his idea of ​​species-being (a theory that assigns additional importance to social interactions in defining an individual's humanity). Marx says that the concept of alienation which is an inevitable consequence of the application of the capitalist structure will undermine the existence of the species to the point where a person will lose his human individuality. A similar idea to that of alienation is commodity fetishism, the theory that describes the exchange of social interactions for tangible economic values ​​when it comes to defining key characteristics of goods production and relationships of work. Marx believed that understanding these concepts was a path to class consciousness – that is, when workers would become aware of the “soul exchange” mechanism in which others put them in a profit and would spark a revolution. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The explanation of Karl Marx's theory of alienation should begin with the being of species. It is appropriate to return to this starting point of Marx's reasoning. In other words, he considered humans in the context of their social environment. Individuality as defined by Marx derived from the people around him and the nature of relationships with those people. According to Marx, the aggregate sum of all social relations either conditions an individual into an empty, empty creature or forms a strong personality with a definite sense of community belonging. This view may seem a little too abstract and vague until one examines Marx's views regarding capitalism and its influence on the key element of human nature. In this regard, one could even go so far as to say that species-being is a theoretical framework for Marx's critique of capitalism in general. Alienation, as described by Marx, is constituted by the loss of the importance of social relationship in the workplace and it ultimately leads to degradation of the personality or, as Marx poetically puts it, trading in one's soul: “Because the worker is alienated from the process of production as well as from the product of his labor, he inevitably becomes alienated from himself. This occurs when a worker does not have the power to make decisions regarding their occupation or production process; they become expendable equipment in a corporate machine run by the capitalist. Such an attitude leads to depreciating the importance of work and reducing it to the status of a simple source of money and other survival assets. In other words, Marx's alienation has little to do with the literal meaning of the word but rather describes detachment from the self. Intangible elements such as life purpose, self-expression and social appreciation cannot exist when they are seen as nothing more than a consumable and interchangeable part of the machine on which they exist. have no control. An important point to make regarding Marx's alienation is that it is closely linked to commodity fetishism. The latter is an approach to market relations which rejects relations between people and, 2015.