The Alienation of Marxists

Karl Marx is widely known today as the foundational theorist of “alienation,” a concept that can now be applied to many of his followers. In a now-viral clip, content creator Nate Friedman asks a DSA leader to make an elevator pitch to his audience: Why is socialism better than capitalism? “Community. Are you tired of being alone, being by yourself with no one to talk to? [Become] a socialist.” The Knicks fever, the World Cup watch parties, the camaraderie he feels walking around Astoria—all are proof points that socialism works. The leader tells Friedman he’s hugged more strangers in the past summer than he ever has in his life, all thanks to Zohran Mamdani.

Marx’s conception of alienation posits that, under capitalism, workers become alienated from the products of their labor. Instead, the owner of the factory who employs them asserts control over something that was made by another’s hand and sells it for his own profit, depriving their workforce of not only its full economic value but any meaningful stake in how it is sold. Since Marxists view laborers and owners of capital as adversarial parties, alienation also reveals a disparity of economic power through which the latter exerts control over the former and reduces them to subjugation.

The sense of estrangement that follows becomes the impetus for revolutionary action that aims to assert worker control over the means of production, thereby ushering in a socialist age. In framing their system as a pathway by which workers may overcome their alienated position, socialists claim to imbue it with a sense of “justice” that corrects a wrong by reasserting collective worker control over economic output. By implication, any who stand in the way of socialism are thus propping up an unjust capitalist elite, making them complicit in the fault that Marx claims to have identified.

This view, that capitalism has alienated us from the natural world, from potential friends, from our own activity, provides a crucial link between an abstract Marxist concept and rising populist movements, most notably the Democratic Socialists of America. Whereas conventional Marxist class theory rests on the premise of material conflict between two well-defined classes (the proletariat versus the factory-owning bourgeoisie), this economic model is anchored to a 19th-century conceptualization of industrial production. Today, assembly lines and steel mills offer little in the way of an entry point to socialist activism for college-educated, unmoored Millennials (save for the old trick of appointing themselves as an intellectual “vanguard of the proletariat”). When a personal sense of alienation becomes the pretext for broader social grievance, this sort of activism becomes a never-ending participatory exercise for the aggrieved, regardless of their actual economic position.