[nic_wilson]

It’s been a over a decade since I read any Marx but I thought alienation of labor was about the worker being alienated from the value of their labor (e.g. I get paid $10/hr to produce widgets that the employers sells for 10x the input costs and I receive none of that value) - I don’t think it was about the emotional connection the laborer had to the (non-economic) value of what was produced.

[Nomentatus]

The greater point is alienation from other people - i.e. that such production destroys communal life, seperating us and preventing previously normal social relations (harking back to nomad days.) Now, this interpretation presumes no massive distinction between "early Marx" and "late Marx," but academics now reject a brief French-birthed academic fad decades ago that imagined two Marx's, early and late, with different views.

Whether it's easy to get back to that communal (community/communist) life of the very old days "after the revolution" is a whole 'nother question, of course. The history of self-identified communist societies suggests that it's no cakewalk.

So yes, exploitation is a huge part of the problem, but ending that is a means to an end, to community and a more human life. Marx seemed to want to restrict production (to prevent "overproduction" (recessions) not to keep going towards more and more material wealth.

[guiriduro]

My understanding is that (amongst other things) Marxist alienation meant that the fruits of your labour are used against you / your interest / your class (as appropriate.) So the company you work for having a mission you oppose is exactly that. A capitalist who greatly marks up your product to resell would obliquely perhaps also meet that description, because paying you little keeps you dependent and stuck on a low wage (and class), while the capitalist maintains themselves in their class advantage. And with the profit from your labour can pay the gendarmes to beat you if you object in a not-well-organised way to that working relationship.