“The history of …society is the history of class struggles”
This famous opening line of The Communist Manifesto gives a hint to Marx’s outlook on the origins of alienation. History and society are a series of economic clashes in which the individual has little control. This lack of control becomes critical in the period of bourgeoisie development. This tension reaches a fever pitch during this period because “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. “(67) Consequently, “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”(68) This intense drive for greater and greater mechanization to maximize the profits that the bourgeoisie class needs to survive leads ultimately to the mechanization of the worker.” Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the simplest, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him… As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.“(72-73). Thus, the worker is alienated cut off from the rest of bourgeoisie society by being considered as little more than a machinal apparatus.In addition, due to the constant revolutionizing the bourgeoisie class must undergo to maintain peek effectiveness, social forms are also changed to suit this process. “It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, then callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation” (66). To reiterate for emphasis: alienation for Marx is a process that flows from the outside in. The bourgeoisie strips workers of their humanity by valuing money above all else. His alienation then flows inward as the only ties he has with his fellow workers are robbed of all significance other than monetary connections. The solution to this crisis is similarly outward facing: the “organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party “(76) and the subsequent overthrow of bourgeoisie society.This “outside-in” flow of pressures: the economic drive that leads bourgeoisie to turn workers in machines devoid of humanity which in turn causes the workers’ relationships to become mechanical and based solely on money and the idea that this process can only be overturned by a going out and forming a rebellion contrasts with the more introspective personalized view on alienation that Dostoevsky takes.
