Knowra Alienation Alienation Alienation is a condition of estrangement in which people experience their work, its products, their capacities, or one another as foreign or beyond their control.
Wage labour : Wage labour is work performed in exchange for payment, with workers selling their capacity to work to an employer. Workers’ dependence on wages places control over their activity and its products outside their hands.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel : Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher whose idealist system examined consciousness, history, and freedom. Hegel’s account of estrangement supplied a philosophical starting point for later theories of alienation.
Species-being : Species-being is Marx’s term for distinctively human capacities for conscious, social, and creative activity. Alienation includes separation from these capacities when work is reduced to mere subsistence.
Anomie : Anomie is a condition in which social norms weaken or fail to regulate people’s conduct. Anomie concerns weakened normative regulation, while Marxian alienation centers on estranged activity and social power.
Harry Braverman : Harry Braverman was an American Marxist writer whose work analyzed labor processes under monopoly capitalism. His account of managerial control extends alienation into the organization of modern work.
Commodity fetishism : Commodity fetishism is the appearance of social relations among producers as relations among commodities. It shows how human relations can seem governed by independent market objects.
Ludwig Feuerbach : Ludwig Feuerbach was a German philosopher who argued that people project human qualities onto God. His account of religious projection influenced Marx’s early effort to explain estrangement materially.
Labour power : Labour power is a person’s capacity to work, which workers sell to employers under capitalism. The sale of this capacity helps explain why workers do not control their own productive activity.
Existentialism : Existentialism is a philosophical movement emphasizing existence, freedom, responsibility, and the formation of meaning. Existentialist accounts often frame estrangement through individual freedom and meaning rather than class relations.
Erich Fromm : Erich Fromm was a German-American social psychologist and humanistic philosopher who examined freedom and social character. Fromm developed a psychological and humanistic interpretation of alienation in modern society.
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