I was so excited when I first started my freshman year of college at Evergreen Valley Community in 2011. Little did I know I would feel alienated as a college student. Alienation occurred the minute I became a full-time student. As per Karl Marx (Morrison:120) Alienation is a break in our own connection to our external world around us and it happens in these four different ways. What are natural relationships to the product, productive labor, to other humans, and our own species-being is no longer what it used to be. As modern society develops, human beings begin to feel that society is not of their own making and that it no longer reflects their being of nature but instead appears to be alienated. The idea that society starts out as an extension of human beings that reflect their nature, and then ends up as something apart and external is something I can relate to as a college student. This paper intends to identify and explore the relationship between my experience as a college student and Karl Marx's theory of alienation. This paper closely compares Marx's theory of alienation with the comparison of how I ,as a student, feel alienated from my product of my labor, the activity of production, from my own species- being and from other students. .
The first type of alienation discussed by Marx is product alienation. This takes place when humans begins become disunited from the things they produce and lose control over their product. Before people will produce things and form relations with what they produce since what they produce had value and belongs to them directly. What people produce was also sustaining their life and existence. Marx went to argue that product alienation alters the individual's social relation to what they produce and to the natural world. ()As a student, I feel alienated from my product of my labor. For example, professors usually assigns me to write papers and even though I write my own paper I feel estranged from the papers that I write because both the paper and the means of writing the paper is not something I want to do or something I need to do in order to sustain a living.
