Marx Critique

Other sociologists such as C. W. Mills (1956) have also used Marx's concept of alienation and apply it to non-manual workers. This can justify the relevance Marx's article to understanding societies today. Although times have changed considerably, the worst conditions described by Marx still affect many today. The division of labour has vastly expanded, different parts of the working class society now live in different countries and therefore would be affected in different ways.

The last important theme in Marx's article to discuss is the division of labour. The division of labour described in this article leads to a sharp division between work and creativity. For Marx, work is broken down into separate tasks and the creative elements in each process are detached. Labour itself is a commodity and its value is determined by the labour time which went into its creation, for example, the amount spent on training or educating a worker. A highly skilled technician will therefore be paid more than an unskilled labourer. As H. Braverman (1974, p.83) wrote, "In this way, a structure is given to all labour process that at its extremes polarises those whose time is infinitely valuable and those whose time is worth almost nothing". However, this does not mean that the intellectual whose time is valuable escapes from alienation. On the contrary, Capitalists enrich themselves through mental labour in the same way as they do through material labour.

Eugene Lunn explained in his excellent book Marxism and Modernism (1984) that bourgeois society offers artistic freedom on one hand and snatches it back with the other. Marx argued that workers in general which include artists, scientists and intellectuals, could not escape from the conversion of all human creativity into commodities. Firstly this is because artists, like all other workers, are dependent on their ability to make money. Lunn disagreed with Marx's belief; "We cannot reduce art to exchange rates reflecting the pervasive alienation... Although coming increasingly under the influence of the marketplace, art is produced and consumed in relative autonomy and is not identical to factory work or to a pure commodity" (p.17).

In conclusion, throughout the article Marx has successfully explained what causes alienation, but towards the end of "Alienated Labour" Marx asks how man comes to alienate his labour. The section on how alienation is rooted in human development seems to fade away without fully answering the question. For Marx, alienation is present in numerous ways, whether it is from the product of his labour, from the act of producing itself, from his "species being", or from other workers. In spite of the weaknesses, the concept of alienation has proved to be a very useful one. There may be many ways this article could have been improved, for instance, expanding alienation beyond capitalism to incorporate gender roles,