Marx's theory of alienation

the long version

"The alienation of humankind, in the fundamental sense of the term, means the loss of control: its embodiment in an alien force which confronts the individuals as a hostile and potentially destructive power. When Marx analysed alienation in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he indicated four principal aspects of it - the alienation of human beings from: (1) nature ; (2) their own productive activity ; (3) their 'species being', as members of the human species; and (4) each other. He forcefully underlined that all this is not some 'fatality of nature' - as indeed as the structural antagonisms of capital are characteristically misrepresented, so as to leave them in their place - but a form of self-alienation. In other words, not the deed of an all-powerful outside agency, natural or metaphysical, but the outcome of a determinate type of historical development which can be positively altered by a conscious intervention in the historical process, in order to 'transcend labour's self-alienation'." -- From preface.