So Marx describes 4 ways in which workers can be alienated (are alienated) in capitalism. There is alienation between the worker and both the product and activity of production. The worker is also alienated from human identity and also from other men. It is a little hard for me to understand the third alienation, maybe because I don't fully understand Marx's concept of species-being, but I do understand the gist...I think. I believe that this alienation occurs because by producing things/ and working for someone else as a means of survival is not in line with some element that makes us a species-being, or human. This leads to an estrangement between the worker and the human identity. I wonder if there is a 5th alienation, however, between the worker and their personal identity? I'm not sure what theories of identity were out so I'm not sure if for Marx it is different from human identity, but I would think that because a worker does labor for the sake of another being that this might also alienate them from aspects of their personal identity as well. It might, however, be the case that being a worker in general makes up ones personal identity.
Capitalism is pretty interesting when you think about it. I've always seen the system we live in to be pretty natural, but as has been shown in class, capitalism makes it so that the majority of wealth belongs to a minority of people. What was triggered in my mind was the conception of the mountain. On this mountain there is a single type of person at the top, in this case the rich, white, heterosexual man. The other types of people (non-white, non-female, non-heterosexual, etc.) are all trying to reach the top of the mountain but the person at the top throws things to keep the others down. Capitalism seems to be like this. After comparing this to what little I know about communism, I wonder if the "top" is considered valuable only because the ones at the top established this as so.
Capitalism is one of those tricky things about America. We're fed plenty of propaganda from an early age to make us believe that capitalism is the only just way to run a society, but on closer inspection it starts to seem less than perfect. By it's very nature it encourages gross differences in standard of living between the opposite ends of society. It's hard to say that those at the "top" as you way aren't valuable for any more reason than their own definition of it, after all, people at the bottom are often forced to live in relative squalor, as no human would really want, but I would say that communism is a more ideal system in theory for society as a whole. Unfortunately, communism is just too prone to corruption by what history has shown human nature to be time and time again. In the end, imperfect capitalism ends up being more successful for the people if for no other reason than that it gives people hope of moving up in the world, even if the reality is that it is limited to the select few.
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