The employers then sell these objects, profiting from their sale, and increasing their capital. In this way the workers’ products are used to increase the wealth and power of the employers. Thus the workers are alienated from the products of their labour. They are also alienated from their activity, because they have sold their labour-time to capitalists, who control them and compel them to work long hours of repetitive, mindless factory work. Because workers are no longer able to produce freely in accordance with their imagination—and that was, Marx thought, what distinguishes us from
...more
