Alienation/Estrangement (Motif)
Though not an explicit focus of The German Ideology as a text, the concept of “alienation,” also referred to as “estrangement,” appears throughout. One of the core Marxist concepts, alienation refers to the process by which, under the capitalist mode of production, people become fundamentally disconnected from their own activity, their labor, and their capacities. Beyond simply being “separated” from these elements of themselves, capitalist alienation produces a situation in which humans encounter the productive forces they themselves have created as a hostile, oppressive force that dominates them. This form of domination is fundamentally abstract, that is, not rooted in a personal relationship between any particular worker and capitalist. It is specific to the capitalist form of production and division of labor because only under capitalism does society come to be organized by the imperatives of capital itself. And because capital is nothing other than the alienated/estranged product of the collective productive efforts of human knowledge and labor, people themselves come to produce the force that dominates them.
