Philosophy

The chair you build on the factory line stops belonging to you the moment it's finished

Marx argued that wage labour under capitalism estranges workers from four things at once: the product they make, the act of making it, their own creative nature, and each other. The thing you produce becomes 'an alien object exercising power over you,' owned and sold by someone else, so work stops expressing who you are and starts erasing it.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — written 1844, first published 1932
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