Alienation
Authors: Dahms Harry F. 
Published: March 2012

Abstract

Alienation is both a phenomenon and a concept that has accompanied the formation of modern societies from their very beginning. Recognized first by Hegel, and theorized especially by Marx, the central theme of efforts to circumscribe the meaning of alienation, and its role in the modern world, is that the proliferation of market economies based on the capitalist mode of production altered the very nature of social, political, cultural, and economic reality. As Marx described it, under conditions of industrialization, division of labor, and mass production, alienation is the process by which the relationship between the individual (as a worker) to her work, to herself, to her species, and to nature undergoes a qualitative transformation. Individuals are becoming separated – “alienated” – from the reality of which they were a part. However, as the spread of alienation is a dynamic process, the separation which the first generation experienced as painful, disorienting, and exceedingly challenging, did not end there. For instance, former agricultural workers who were socialized to employ modes of thinking and adhere to norms and values derived from agricultural ways of life, were forced to adapt to the realities of industrial labor, either in mines or in factories, and were forced to conceive of new ways to meaningfully interpret reality. Thus, alienation denotes the process by which each generation of workers is faced with the need to assimilate to successive stages of a continually mutating world, which their descendants in turn experience as the new normalcy. Indeed, in order for the capitalist mode of production to sustain itself and to continue to proliferate, it must continually transform the social world further. Thus, each generation internalizes the level of alienation reached by the previous generation, through the process of socialization. Concurrently, the degree of separation from work, self, nature, and the species continues to increase, and the ability to access reality outside of the system of compounded alienation is diminished. In other words, from the perspective of Marx's theory of alienation, the formation of modern societies resulted from an ongoing process by which human beings are being removed further and further from material reality – both figuratively, as the declining ability to experience anything outside of the system of alienation as real, and literally, as with regard to the natural environment. According to the theory of alienation, which was refined further throughout the twentieth century, the very ability to relate to reality beyond its mediation through adaptations to compounding layers of alienation keeps weakening – in ways that individuals experiencing everyday life as normalcy
constitutionally
are incapable of discerning. In principle, this process should continue until the links between humanity, its process of self‐sustaining and self‐constitution (“labor”), and its ability to experience itself as a reality
sui generis
that is selfaware and self‐reflexive as a species, and nature, becomes entirely “virtual,” with
simulations
(as in Baudrillard 1994 [1981]) increasingly being interpreted as the essence of human existence and of reality.