Alienation (Entfremdung) — A condition in which something that belongs to the subject — their labor, their activity, their very essence — becomes independent, foreign, and even hostile to them. The German term Entfremdung (becoming estranged) is often distinguished from Entäußerung (externalization, the act of putting oneself outside oneself), though the two go hand in hand. In Hegel, especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), alienation is a necessary and productive moment: Spirit externalizes itself in objective forms — nature, culture, institutions — that at first seem foreign to it but which it must recognize as its own work in order to attain self-consciousness. Externalization is thus a stage in the process of returning to itself. Karl Marx takes up the concept but radicalizes it in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: alienation ceases to be a figure of thought and comes to designate a concrete social condition of the worker under capitalism. Marx distinguishes several dimensions of alienated labor: the worker becomes estranged from the product of their labor (which belongs to another), from the productive activity itself (which turns into a mere means of survival), from their species-being (Gattungswesen, what defines them as human), and from other people. Thus, the more wealth the worker produces, the poorer and more dependent they become. The concept became central to Marxist critique and resonates in closely related notions such as Lukács’s reification and commodity fetishism.
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