Alienation and Contemporary Social Movements

Abstract

For Karl Marx, in his writings on alienation, workers not only suffered from the objective realities of poverty, squalor, and poor health, but, neither owning their tools nor the products of their labor sold for wages, were alienated, estranged from themselves, their full human potentials, and Nature. They were powerless, without freedom. They were denied recognition, objectified, rendered dehumanized things, simply costs of production. Marx expected such conditions would lead to mass mobilizations to overthrow capitalism. But by the time the 1844 Manuscripts had been discovered in the 1920s, capitalists, responding to worker's actions, pressures, and demands, had provided higher wages, along with benefits and entitlements that quelled working‐class discontents. Then came eclectic powered tools and machines, interchangeable parts, and continuous assembly lines enabling mass production that, pioneered by Ford, came to be known as “Fordism.” Better wages for workers enabled mass consumption, workers could own cars, however modest, and the “new” electric appliances; revolutionary fervor waned.