Karl Marx Alienation

Marx’s Theory of Alienation This paper will attempt to analyze Karl Marx’s theory of alienation. The paper will analyze what economic factors lead to Marx’s theory, what he meant by alienation, and how this alienation affected a certain class of people who lived and worked in the time of Karl Marx.
It will also compare Marx’s view of alienation with that of Hegel. The paper will also address Marx theory and how it is associated with his theory of commodity fetishism.
Marx’s theory of alienation can be better understood by analyzing the economic conditions that lead up to it. In chapter one of Marx’s “Manifest of the Communist Party,” he details how the economy of Europe, and the newly formed American Colonies moved from a feudal system
That is not to say that there isn’t a certain population around the world that is not alienated from their production. I am sure that alienation exists in many impoverished countries around the world – in sweatshops, or wherever cheap clothing is made for pennies on the dollar, or where the wage is so low the worker can hardly sustain a living. But for people that I know, and for me in particular, though it is there, I don’t consider alienation unless I really think about it. For me, alienation amongst me and my peers come in the form of commodity fetishism. For example, when I am at a party, usually one of the first questions asked when meeting someone for the first time is: What do you do for a living? People either do not care, or are too embarrassed to ask about me personally. My guess is that we have been conditioned, not to be uncaring about the other, but we are more interested in what the other sees in us so we can compare it to what we see in him. Our relationship is based upon our production instead of our species being. We are so interested in the cost, the acquisition, and the manipulation (playing with) the material objects we own that we don’t notice how we, the workers are being exploited by the property owners. As an example I offer the mobile phone. Where I concede the cell phone has its place in today’s society, it was never really needed because we got along just fine without it. The mobile communications industry has done a wonderful job of making people believe they had to have one. They created a need for something almost no one needed, and as a result, thousands, upon thousands of kids between the ages of seven and seventeen walk around with four-hundred dollar minicomputer, that also makes phone calls, and are so engrossed in this product that they barely acknowledge one another as species-beings. They are simply icons on a