Quotes About Alienation

In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.

The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.

Money is the alienated essence of man's labor and life; and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.

Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world... of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man's labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.

Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man. Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society. But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.

The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.

Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man's work and man's existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.

In fact, the proposition that man's species nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man's essential nature.

Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.

The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.

Así corno en las religiones vemos al hombre esclavizado por las criaturas de su propio cerebro, en la producción capitalista le vemos esclavizado por los productos de su propio brazo.9

El trabajo es por esencia la actividad carente de libertad, inhumana y asocial, cuya condición y cuyo resultado es la propiedad privada. La superación de la propiedad privada, por tanto, solo será realidad cuando se la conciba como superación del trabajo.

The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest

The less you eat, drink and buy books the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.

But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labour, it is really the consequence, just as the gods in the beginning are not the cause but the effect of man's intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.

E]verything which appears in the worker as an activity of alienation , of estrangement , appears in the non-worker as a state of alienation , of estrangement .

Die Entfremdung erscheint sowohl darin, daß mein Lebensmittel eines andern ist, daß das, was mein Wunsch, der unzugängliche Besitz eines andern ist, als daß jede Sache selbst ein andres als sie selbst, als daß meine Tätigkeit ein andres, als endlich – und das gilt auch für den Kapitalisten – daß überhaupt die unmenschliche Macht her[rscht].

In the so-called Christian State it is true that alienation counts, but not the individual. The only individual who counts, the king, is a being specially distinguished from other individuals, who is also religious and directly connected with heaven, with God. The relations which here prevail are still relations of faith. The religious spirit is therefore not yet really secularized.

More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.

The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it

I discovered suddenly that alienation, exploitation of man by man, under-nourishment, relegated to the background metaphysical evil which is a luxury.