Alienation and "the Sense of Having"

Reading Response: The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844; On Alienated Labor, by Karl Marx

"We shall start out from an actual economic fact. The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces."

Marx wrote this statement in the midst of the Industrial Revolution when industry was king and people were quickly being reduced as a means to an end. Workers were slaving away on products for which they would never personally benefit, never get to see benefit another person, and in the process of spending so many hours working, were neglecting human relationships and their own creativity - Marx would even say they were neglecting their own "humanness." Take, for example, the man who sits in a factory for twelve hours a day putting heads on pins; all day long, every day of the week, he glues thousands of heads on thousands of pins. He himself will never use all of those pins. He will never see other people benefit from his pins. When he goes home at night, all he can do is eat and sleep in order to rest up for another day or gluing heads on pins. All of this work is being done so that he can receive a paycheck so he can afford food and shelter so that he can continue working, and so the cycle goes. This separation of workers from what they produced Marx dubbed "the alienation of labor" and he was acutely concerned for the condition of his fellow humans as they were being reduced to animals or worse, machines.