Karl Marx Alienation

When people become foreign to the world they are living in, we begin to create a cycle of alienation. Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement of people from aspects of their human nature as a consequence of living in a society stratified into social classes. We separate actions that belong together and break down production into the simplest of tasks so that the people who are working are distanced from the end product. The process of alienation may increase profits, but at what cost. Yes, it increases profit, but it decreases the humanity of the workers. A worker is alienated by his employer. He can be alienated from himself, from the other workers and from working in itself. The people that benefit from the process of alienation …show more content…
The worker loses the opportunity to create, to be involved with the production, and to do what they desire. The worker is only there to do what the boss says and to make the boss money. This is done by making the tasks that each worker does miniscule and almost irrelevant. By doing this they no longer need skilled workers, and are able to hire anyone and pay way less in wages. The wages are able to be so low, because of the simplicity of the task the worker is performing. As a worker who only puts a screw into a car for example, you are not involved in the production process and you are heavily separated from the finished product. Yes that one screw is important for the final product, but anyone can put in the screw, thus making the worker replaceable.
Workers create things for the market but not for themselves. The workers do not control things; they themselves are the ones being controlled. The bosses have full control of the production and maintain power in the workplace. Work then becomes suitable for machines and not for the people. The work becomes monotonous and tiresome. With this system people often leave work depressed; they don't want to go to work and they separate themselves from work. They earn money to survive however they don't earn enough money to purchase what they …show more content…
The infrastructure basically refers to the base of the system and marks or defines us as the relationship of people to the means of production. The infrastructure is due to the owners wants for the biggest profit there is. To make more profit, a large amount of mechanization and developments occur in the workplace forcing more and more people into waged labor. The act of forcing more and more people into waged labor, once again starts the cycle of alienation.
Both superstructure and infrastructure are of social creation, they are due to social processes and interactions between people and society. They are caused by interactions between people who are constantly evolving. This being said neither superstructure or infrastructure are naturally occurring, they change and evolve just a society nor the people in society do.
This idea of infrastructure superstructure and its relation to alienation is how things change in society. Those who are in charge of the infrastructure, the business owners, the rich and the wealthy are those who most influence the superstructure. They are the ones with the money, with the power and with the