1: to remove from customary environment or associations

2: to arouse especially mutual enmity or indifference in where there had formerly been love, affection, or friendliness (www.m-w.com).

2: an act or process requiring labor (task)

3: a product of labor (www.m-w.com).

Therefore, we can conclude that estranged labor is the removal of the process or product of a labor or task from its natural place in nature. But what does Marx mean by this?

The worker’s labor becomes the death of his “being” as it has allowed his spiritual side to diminish to the point where man is no longer any different from the animals.

x is talking about, we must look back at his dialectic. This part of Marx’s theories derives from two men, Georg Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach. Hegel and Feuerbach were on the opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Hegel was an Idealist Philosopher who believed that the human conscience developed separate of the outside world. Feuerbach on the other hand was a Materialist Philosopher who believed that everything was defined by the material world. Marx takes the middle ground here. He states that while it is true that the conscience develops separately and the material world does define much of a society, you cannot have one without the other. Here Marx uses Hegel’s ideas of the thesis and antithesis. Hegel states that for every idea there is a contradiction and it is the synthesis of this idea (thesis) and its contradiction (antithesis) that creates greater understanding. Marx believes that the conscience and the material world are the thesis and antithesis and that their synthesis leads to the advancement of a society.

To Marx, a species being exists in two planes; the physical and the ideal or spiritual. In the physical world, man is concerned with food, safety, and procreation like any other animal on the planet. While in the ideal world, he is concerned with the spiritual or theoretical growth of not only the individual but of the society on a whole. The spiritual half of the species being is also man’s connection to nature. For a human being to survive and grow, both his physical world and his theoretical world must be balanced.

In conclusion, we find that the idea of estranged labor is Karl Marx’s diagnosis for the ails of the Capitalist system. Though I agree with him that the idea of estranged labor does lead to many of the problems and woes of the working class

Some topics in this essay:
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