The Argument for Alienation

Marx argues that alienated labor is the necessary prerequisite for private property, which then turns around and reproduces alienation. By turning our species being into an individual pursuit of our own individual means of sustenance, we turn away from each other. We stop viewing one another as fellow members of our species, and we begin to see them in terms of the relations of production under capitalism. The wage is but a necessary consequence of labor's alienation. Labor does not appear as an end in itself, but as the servant of the wage. An enforced increase of wages would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave,. And it would not win either for the worker or for labor their human status and dignity.