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Marx's formulation of the alienation problematic is grounded in a strategic set of underlying assumptions concerning the human condition. On the one hand, people are seen as the creators of their material and mental world through their labour activity. They are endowed with natural human qualities, creative powers and historically existing potentialities that are essential to human growth. People are, in essence, free, creative, productive beings of praxis in conscious control of their activities and the world they have created. But the material and mental products of human labour (e.g. commodities, ideas, social institutions) assume an autonomous life of their own. They come to rule over people as dehumanizing objects and powers, as alien and hostile forces operating independently above and against the common will of their own creators. People no longer experience themselves as active human agents in conscious control of their life circumstances. Their own productive activities, human creations, social relationships and nature at large remain alien and beyond their grasp. The realization of natural human capacities and potentialities for a genuinely human life in an alienating world of domination and oppression is consequently thwarted, repressed or denied. Alienation is construed as a universal social phenomenon that pervades all spheres of human life in the existing world.(1)
A dialectical relationship is at play in this portrayal of the human condition, i.e., between people's nature as determined by their alienating life circumstances (a negative state of social existence) and their innate capacity to transform those circumstances into a more genuinely human state of affairs (a positive de-alienating process) in the course of history. This depiction of the human predicament--the never-ending dialectic of alienation and freedom--underlies the fundamental problem of human alienation in all types of society throughout the history of humankind.
The full and richer meaning of the alienation problematic cannot be sufficiently understood except within the frame of Marx's more comprehensive system of thought. The main components in his theoretical formulation of the alienation problematic are represented in his ideas concerning human essence, agency and praxis, emancipation, and freedom, and the envisaged future of society. These components are inseparably linked with each other and with the interconnecting methodological themes of historical materialism, totality--a holistic approach to the study of social reality--and the use...