Write short note: Alienation. (200 Words)

To Karl Marx, labor or work i.e. production of goods and services holds the key to human happiness and fulfillment. Work is the most important and primary human activity. In his earlier writings, Marx developed the concept of alienated labour. 

Alienation refers to the estrangement of individual from themselves and others. The process of production is one of objectification whereby men make material object which embody human creativity and yet stands as an entity separate from their creators. Alienation occurs when once objectified, man no longer recognizes himself in his product which has become alien to him and is no longer his own. It stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. Marx saw alienation both as subjective state as people feeling of alienation and as a structural category which described the social and economic arrangement of capitalism.  

According to Marx, it involves 4 aspects: Worker's alienation from the object he produces, from the process of production, from himself and lastly from the community of his fellow men. He argues that while labor may produce beauty, luxury and intelligence, for the worker it produces only the opposite i.e. deformity, misery and idiocy.

However, Marx misjudged the extent of alienation in average worker. the great depth of alienation and frustration which Marx 'witnessed' among workers of his days is not typical of today's capitalism. Today, workers tend to identify increasingly with a number of meaningful groups e.g. religious, ethnic, occupational or local. In contemporary times, alienation is more from bureaucracy and mass society that economic exploitation.