29 - Class as a value Relation

Summary

Alienation is not solely an economic phenomenon. As already indicated, the worker's fourfold alienation in the means of production finds expression in all areas of his life. In one listing, ‘religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc.’ are said to be the ‘particular modes of production’ which come under the law of private property. A mode of production, according to Marx:

must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part.

Under capitalism, all such expressions of life are facets of man's alienation by virtue of their internal relation to private property, or world of alienated objects, and fall under its law as the necessary steps to its full working out.

The life activity of the alienated individual is qualitatively of a kind. His actions in religion, family affairs, politics and so on, are as distorted and brutalized as his productive activity. The man taking part in these different activities, after all, is the same; his powers and needs stand at a particular level of their development, restricting all intercourse with nature within certain bounds. Nature, too, the world of objects through which man must realize himself, has developed apace with these powers and dictates from its side what is possible.