Liberation For the 99%
face poverty and alienation as a result of the state of affairs. The first form of
estranged labor emerges because the worker sees the object his labor produces as
alien and hostile to himself because he sees it as a power independent from the
producer. Consequently, the object that labor produces is an expression of the
objectification of labor. 7 The worker puts his life in the object since, without the
sustenance that producing the object provides, he would ultimately starve; because
workers do not own property, they must sell their labor to survive. Not only do
propertyless workers not own property, but they also do not own the means of
production, and, therefore, the worker does not reap the fruits of his own labor. The
more the worker produces, the more alienated they become because everything that
he produces belongs to a world that he himself is excluded from; the worker cannot
possess what he helps create. The second form of estranged labor relates to the act
of production itself, labor, which he is forced to sell to fulfill the ‘needs external to
it.’ Marx claims that the activity of production is another expression of the worker’s
alienation because the worker only feels “like himself outside of work, and in his
work feels outside himself.” So, the act of labor represents his loss of self. The third
form of estranged labor manifests in the worker’s alienation from human identity
because work becomes the purpose of life for the human species, and the fourth is
the expression of estrangement from “man to man” in which the worker alienated
from and hostile towards the capitalist for appropriating the product of his labor. 8
Further support for Marx’s account of the different expressions of estranged
labor can be identified in the United States' mass exploitation of undocumented
migrants and members of the working class abroad. Specifically, I argue that the
capitalist system deliberately perpetuates xenophobia and racism abroad in order to
accomplish the following goals: 1) Desensitize members within the proletariat class
itself to the inhumane exploitation of undocumented migrants. 2) Maximizing the
7 Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader , 72. 8 Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader , 76.
Volume VI (2023)
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