Mars’s theory of Alienation

The alienation of humankind, in the fundamental sense of the term, means the loss of control its embodiment in an alien force which confronts the individuals as a hostile and potentially destructive power. When Marx analysed alienation in his Economic and Philosophic manuscripts of 1844, he indicated four principal aspects of it the alienation of human beings form: (1) nature; (2) their own productive activity; (3) their ‘species being’, as members of the human species; and (4) each other. He forcefully underlined that all this is not some ‘fatality of nature’ as indeed the structural antagonisms of capital are characteristically misrepresented, so as to leave them in their place but a form of self-alienation. In other words, not the deed of an all-powerful outside agency, natural or metaphysical, but the outcome f a determinate type of historical development which can be positively altered by a conscious intervention in the historical process, in order to ‘transcend labour’s self-alienation’.