What is the cause of alienation?

Labour is alienated under capitalism (Picture: Danijel-James Wynyard)

Alienation is often used to refer to a set of feelings most people have experienced.

One health website describes the symptoms of alienation as feeling isolated from friends and family, feeling helpless and that the world has little meaning.

But these feelings are not symptoms of individual weakness or psychological disorders. They are symptoms of the way capitalism impacts on our lives.

The thing that makes us distinct from animals is our capacity to work together to produce what we need to live. We have unlimited potential to develop new ways of creating and communicating, new technologies, new treatments.

But the drive to accumulate ever greater profits means that potential can never be realised within this system.

Human creativity is directed away from making our lives better and towards producing piles of useless commodities.

Resources are pumped into developing military technology. And we are trapped into living in ways that are destroying the planet.

The economy, the financial markets, wars and imperialism, the broken nature of our everyday lives  all seem beyond our control.

But there is nothing natural or inevitable about feeling powerless. The system breeds such feelings and then weaponises them to keep us passive and open to hostility to others.

Karl Marx’s theory of alienation reveals how human activity creates society and how we have the potential to create a different future.

Marx identified four specific ways in which alienation pervades capitalist society. Workers are alienated from the things they produce, which are owned and distributed by the bosses.

Workers produce cash crops for the market when they are malnourished, build houses in which they will never live, produce shoes they cannot afford to wear.

The workers are paid less than the value they create. A proportion of what they produce is appropriated by the boss.

Workers also put creative labour into what they produce, and that creativity cannot be recovered. So work does not stimulate us but burns up our energies and leaves us feeling exhausted.

The second element of alienation is a lack of control over the process of production. We have little say over the conditions in which we work and how our work is organised, and how it affects us physically and mentally.

The bosses might pay lip service to wellbeing. But they and their managers are driven to make us work harder, longer and faster in conditions that make us sick.

Machines and technology do not serve us—we serve them. Our individual skills and abilities are crushed, our insights are discarded. Conformity is more valued than creativity.

Thirdly, we are alienated from other human beings. Capitalist society creates competition between workers.

This pressure means we see others as objects in our way and queue-jumpers who have unfairly snatched more than they deserve. 

We are often connected to others through the buying and selling of commodities, rather than forming a personal connection.

Finally, we are alienated from what it means to be human. We have the potential to work and plan collectively to meet our needs and those of the natural world. But the system impels us to care only about ourselves and to see other people as the source of our problems.

Alienation pervades every aspect of society and our lives. People constantly try to carve out spaces where they feel in control and can express themselves, where they make connections and feel part of something that matters. Not even the super rich can escape from alienation as individuals. But capitalism also pushes working class people to unite.

Resistance can confront that pervasive sense of powerlessness and begin to challenge the roots of alienation in capitalism’s drive for profits.

When we resist, we get a glimpse of our power. Working class action can tear down the prison walls of alienation.