Alienation literally means “separation from”. This term is often used in literature and Marx has given it a sociological meaning. Marx has conceived of alienation as a phenomenon related to the structure of those societies in which the producer is divorced from the means of production and in which “dead labour” (capital) dominates “living labour” (the worker). Let us take an example of a shoemaker in a factory. A shoemaker manufactures shoes but cannot use them for himself. His creation thus becomes an object which is separate from him. It becomes an entity which is separate from its creator. He makes shoes not because making shoes satisfies merely his urge to work and create. He does so to earn his living. For a worker this ‘objectification’ becomes more so because the process of production in a factory is decided into several parts and his job may be only a tiny part of the whole. Since he produces only one part of the whole, his work is mechanical and therefore he loses his creativity.

A systematic elaboration of the concept appears in Capital under the heading “Fetishism of commodities and money”. But the ethical germ of this conception can be found as early as 1844, when Marx unequivocally rejected and condemned “the state” and “money”, and invested the proletariat with the “historical mission” of emancipating society as a whole. In Marx’s sense alienation is an action through which (or a state in which) a person, a group, an institution, or a society becomes (or remains) alien a) to the results or products of its own activity (and to the activity itself), and/or b) to the nature in which it lives, and/or c) to other human beings, and in addition and through any or all of (a) to (c) also d) to itself (to its own historically created human possibilities).

Alienation is always self-alienation, i.e., one’s alienation from oneself through one’s own activity.  

Mere criticism of alienation was not the intention of Marx. His aim was to clear the path for a radical revolution and for accomplishing communism understood as “the re-integration of one’s return to oneself, the supersession of one’s self-alienation”. Mere abolition of private property cannot bring about de-alienation of economic and social life. This situation of the worker, or the producer does not alter by transforming private property into state property. Some forms of alienation in capitalist production have their roots in the nature of the means of production and the related division of social labour, so that they cannot be eliminated by a mere change in the form of managing production.

Far from being an eternal fact of social life, the division of society into mutually interdependent and conflicting spheres (economy, politics, laws, arts, morals, religion, etc.), and the predominance of the economic sphere, are, according to Marx, characteristics of a self-alienated society. The dealienation of society is therefore impossible without the abolition of the alienation of different human activities from each other.

Alienation in the Marxian sense of the term cannot be overcome by the reorganisation of the economy, however radical the programme of such transformation may be. Alienation of the society and of the individual are integrally connected. Therefore, the de-alienation of neither can be carried out without the other, nor can one be reduced to the other. The concept of alienation is a key tool of analysis in Marx’s thought. According to Marx, one had always been self-alienated thus far. The bourgeoise relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production causing alienation. At the same time, the production forces developing in the womb of bourgeoise society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism and alienation.