ABSTRACT
For Karl Marx, the abolition of work is at the centre of a utopian vision. Having attempted to portray what, for Marx, constitutes really free, truly human productive activity, it is necessary to examine Marx's critique of work, or more accurately, work as it exists under capitalism. Alienation is a concept most often associated with Marx's analysis of capitalist labour. Alienation, or estrangement, is best seen as a concept used by Marx to express the ontological distortion of the ideal role of labour, under conditions of capitalist production. Drawing on the work of other observers of industrial labour, Marx characterises work in the mechanised factory as almost the total opposite of the fulfilling, creative, self affirming and pleasurable work. In manufacture, the workers are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory, there exists a lifeless mechanism independent of them, and they are incorporated into that mechanism as its living appendages.
