Estrangement

Estrangement refers to a child’s rejection of one parent that one would consider justified. This is actually considered normal behaviour because the child is simply erecting a boundary to prevent unwanted behaviour from his/her parent. A child will become estranged to keep him/herself safe from behaviour that violates their boundaries. This may include disparaging behaviour, exposure to conflict, violence, and abusive language.

Alienation

Alienation refers to a child’s rejection of a parent that is not justified. This is a diagnosable mental condition found in the DSM. Typically, this pathological behaviour is driven by a false or illogical belief fostered by an Alienating parent. The Alienator uses the child as a weapon by undermining their intact relationship with the healthy parent. Alienation occurs when one parent manipulates a child to reject the other parent,  out of hatred, fear, or disrespect.

Alienation vs Estrangement - Lifeline Coaching and Consulting

Kapoor's answer has nothing to do with Marx's analysis of alienation. To understand Marx's analysis read his 1844 Manuscripts. There you will find discussion of four kinds of alienation/estrangement (basically the same thing), all produced by capitalists imposing and controlling work. Here's a passage on these four from my book 33 Lessons on Capital: Reading Marx Politically (2019) pp. 207-8.

1. The alienation of workers from their labor: living labor becomes an alien means for controlling them rather than fulfilling them [What they do on the job is determined by their bosses who set the objective, what will be produced, determines the tools/machines they will use and the division of tasks among them.]

2. The alienation of workers from their product: the products they create become alien to them. Owned by the capitalists, they are separated from them and then used for dominating and controlling them.

3. The alienation of workers from each other: the stripping away of their self-realization within their species means the “estrangement of man from man . . . What applies to a man's relation to his work, to the product of his work, and to himself, also holds of a man's relation to the other man . . .”[1] Thus capital ruptures the interactions between people and forces them to exist and to act according to its directions. First, the domination of their lives by work means that they have, effectively, very little time and energy available for relationships with each other. They are alienated from each other in the simplest sense: being separated. Second, the capitalist imposition of competition and hierarchy pits them against one another, estranges them from one another precisely in so far as their lives are defined only in terms of their relation to capital and not in terms of unmediated relationships between each other – thus the loneliness and separateness of life in capitalist society portrayed in the songs above.

4. The alienation of workers from their “species-being”: therefore work, which was one means of human interaction, one way of fulfilling human species-being as a collectivity, becomes merely a means to insure individual existence. “In tearing away from [humans] the object of [their] production [the product] estranged labor tears away from [them their] species-life, [their] real objectivity as a member of the species.”[2]

Absent are the positive phenomena associated with the interaction of humans with each other in their work and in the sharing of their products such as Marx imagined existing in some society free of capitalist domination:

In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature. I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species . . . in the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature. Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature."[3]

Thus, capital undermines not only our individual self-realization through the transformation of nature, but also our mutual interactions as we carry on these activities communally.

[1] Marx Engels Collected Works (MECW), vol. 3, p. 277.

[2] Ibid.

[3] MECW, vol. 3, p. 228. Note the evocation of reflexive mediation analyzed in Chapter 1.

The Marxian concept of alienation (Entäußerung) or estrangement (Entfremdung) is one of the most discussed notions in the history of modern social and political theory. There is a long history of the term before Marx, from the giusnaturalistic and contractualist tradition to its role played in the work of Hegel and the Young Hegelians; but the Marxian formulation is undoubtedly the most influential. While being present in Capital, and recurring in the Grundrisse, it was explicitly theorised in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, published posthumously in 1932.

Subsequently, alienation became a problematic and deeply divisive concept in Marxist discourse. Some Marxist intellectuals (such as Althusser) disqualified the notion, attributing it to a “young Marx” who was still too much a philosopher and too little a scientist. Others considered it the ground of Marxism itself, without which the critique of political economy would not be conceivable.

The so-called Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts are a series of notebooks written in the Spring of 1844 by a 26-year-old Karl Marx. They deal for the first time with the fundamental works of classical political economy. In these study notes, Marx argued that the political economists, Smith and Ricardo in particular, had rightly identified the subjective foundation of private property as human labour. Private property was therefore understood as objectified labour. However, they did not thematise this work as alienated, estranged work (entfremdete Arbeit). On the contrary, they assumed private property as a natural fact, without justifying the inversion of subject and object that takes place in the capitalist appropriation of the means of production. They did not know how to account for the original expropriation of the human subject in relation to the freedom to consciously dispose of the objectivity of his/her work, that freedom by which we can exercise a reflexive control over ways, ends, and results of our actions.

This unavailability and inaccessibility of one’s objects and actions, this as a loss of freedom, is articulated in four determinations. The first of them concerns the relationship between the worker and the object of work. It appears as “something alien, as a power independent of the producer”.[2] To stand accused is not then the objectification as such, as in Lukacs’ History of Class Consciousness, in the existentialism and in a (wrong) reading of Hegel, but rather a specific historical form of objectification that is loss of the object and object-bondage. The object becomes something autonomous, hostile. This enslavement concerns both the means of production and the means of subsistence. In both cases the subject depends on another person — that is, the capitalist — for the production of itself as a worker as well as for the production of itself as a living being,

The subjects’ inability to dispose of their own creations is analogous to what happens in religious experience. These constant parallels drawn by Marx highlight Feuerbach’s decisive influence on his thought and on the adoption of the very category of alienation. In Feuerbach’s theory of religious alienation, human beings alienate themselves in their own spiritual power, hypostatising them in the figure of a divinity which, from being an artificial object, becomes a creator subject. However, Marxian alienation is above all a material alienation, emerging from within industry, while in Feuerbach and the Hegelian Left, as specified in the Holy Family, the products of estrangement are only ideal phantasmagorias, sheer estrangements of the Self-Consciousness.

Focusing again on Marx’s discourse, this dependence-on, of which the worker is a victim, is better specified in the second determination, that is, the alienation of the worker in the productive activity itself. In fact, this activity (1) does not belong to the being of the worker, not satisfying an internal need; (2) is not voluntary, but done out of necessity, forced labor; (3) is not self-directed, self-managed, as it is owned by another person.

https://criticallegalthinking.com/2021/05/04/karl-marx-alienation/

I would also suggest browsing the following:

J. Ron Stanfield’s “Marx's Social Economics: The Theory of Alienation”, Review of Social Economy, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 295-312.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/29768981

Roberto Nigro’s “Alienation, the Social Individual, and Communism: Marx in the 21st Century”.

https://www.on-curating.org/issue-30-reader/alienation-the-social-individual-and-communism-marx-in-the-21st-century.html#.Yry0mXZBxPY

Very well developed and exceedingly helpful answers by Harry Cleaver ... and by Ahmed T. Hussein .... The person asking the question should be more than amply satisfied, and helped to progress intellectually, by these two answers.

*****

Since RG is a serious intellectual platform to discuss and expound on matters, it is perhaps important to add a twist to the original question: What has finacialization or Finanzkapital done to the Marxian conception of alienation?

To provoke some ideas, I would submit that the ones who were previously 'connected/not-alienated' -- the capitalist and their agents, the managers -- are now, in the era of Finanzkapitalism, also clueless about the hidden operating levers that govern work, the product of work, the inter-individual connectedness of work processes, and the connected of work processes to humanity and human existence (and to nature).

The rantings of Elon Musk, reported in the media, seem as alienated as the silent cries of the woman stitching garments at a sweatshop in Bangladesh.