Dear Aieman

Alienation is the decreased ability of individuals to think and act for themselves. Alienated individuals have no interest in hearing the opinions of others and only care about what interests you, so are alienated people. An alienated individual might also be someone who has lost his reason, is disoriented and absent from reality.

In psychology: repressed contents of consciousness and also the states of depersonalization in which the feeling of reality and consciousness are strongly reduced

Jacek's citations are definitely helpful. Simply put, alienation (in Marxian terms) is the psychological condition that arises when individuals, or classes of individuals, are detached from their "species-being." What is natural, in Marx's view, were three things: productivity, creativity, and sociality (all of this by the way can be found in the first part of the German Ideology, which is the clearest statement given by Marx). (1) By productivity, Marx meant humans, unlike animals, had to produce to survive. With the appropriation of the means of production (factories; farms; etc), most humans are detached from the productive process. A worker may make one part of the car, but he or she is separated from the total process, from which the value of the good is produced. An artisan, by contrast, begins making the commodity from start to finish and thus imbues it with her sweat, blood, and labor power - thus, value is truest and most overt.

(2) Creativity refers to humans need to innovate new means of production to obtain the most basic needs. In class-based societies, (a) there are no incentives for workers to innovate as employers claim ownership and profit from innovation and (b) bureaucracies stifle the act of creation. Hence, we are detached from this dimension of humanness.

(3) Sociality: social relationships, in Marx's world, are defined by how people produce - that is, the categories defined by the means of production. In capitalist societies, workers and owners objectify each other, as workers sell their labor on the market, and are sold products based on marketing techniques. This objectification process seeps into relationships between workers and, thus, we become alienated from each other. Everything moral, subjective, sensuous, and communally-oriented becomes hidden beneath the wage-based, commodity-oriented system.

(4) Because our identities are shaped by all of these things, we are naturally alienated from our selves. Marcuse called this malaise one-dimensionality. We objectify ourselves, and lose the subjective side. We are dehumanized by market, political, technological, media, and pop cultural forces that place us into a category, shred the emotional-moral dimension, and leave us with a flat, non-natural sense of being.

Alienation is best defined by the outcome it produces. We may all experience varying levels of exclusion, or various periods of exclusion, but we respond in a way that reflects our belief that we are or should be included. But the truly alienated will refuse to participate.