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It is normal to treat alienation as an undesirable condition for a human to be in. In Marxism, the polar opposite of alienation is the realisation of man's species-being. By this, Marxists mean the global attainment of a new level of human society in which we do not confront each other as atomised individuals alienated from each other, but as colleagues in a collective human enterprise.
Marx argues that alienation in capitalist societies is due to the fact that in work, we each contribute to the common wealth, but can only express this fundamentally social aspect of ourselves through a production system that is not social but privately owned, for which we function as instruments, not as social beings:
In this work, written in 1844, Marx attempts to show how alienation arises from private labour, from commodity production:
Since wage workers sell their labour power to earn a living, and the capitalist owns the labour process, the product of the workers’ labour is alien to the wage worker. It is not his or her product but the product of the capitalist.
Marxist alienation is closely related to the idea of ' fetishism' - the projection of human powers onto inanimate objects. Marx's Fetishism of Commodities arises because of the obscuring of human relationships behind material interactions, detailed in the first chapter of Capital Vol I. Alienation both drives and is driven by this fetish.
Alienation can be seen a foundational claim in Marxist theory. Hegel described a succession of historic stages in the human 'Geist' or Spirit, by which that Spirit progresses towards perfect self-understanding and away from ignorance. In Marx's reaction to Hegel, these two idealist poles are replaced with materialist categories: spiritual ignorance becomes alienation, and the transcendent end of history becomes man's realisation of his species-being (i.e., our triumph over alienation; the establishment of an objectively better society).
In this light, it may be argued that Marxists who deny a moral component to their theory are mistaken: Marx relies on a foundational moral claim that alienation is bad.
Marx attributes alienation to the social organization specific to capitalism. Critics point out that mass society has its own dynamics, which may be distinct from capitalism. In other words, we may be alienated not as a consequence of selling our labour power to capitalists, but just because any massive, mobile, urban population will be constantly confronted with its own unfamiliarity.
More specifically, our lack of identification with our work may be due, not to the intermediation of the capitalist system of production and wage labour, but simply to the productivity demands made on us by any modern economy.
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