Alienation is directed connected to capitalism, even if both the capitalist and the worker both experience it the worker is on the higher end
Swain 19 Swain, 2019, Dan, Professor of Life Studies at the University of Life Sciences Prague Alienation or Why Capitalism is Bad, Chapter 4 - IShone
Marx did not see alienation, as some others have: as an inevitable product of modern technology or mass society. Rather, he saw it as connected to a particular form of economic organization: capitalism. He believed that it could be overcome, or at least minimized, in an alternative society. Moreover, he believed that alienated workers had an interest in confronting and challenging their alienation and that through this process such an alternative society might emerge. These points, too, provide fertile grounds for debate. We have already discussed the importance of the concept of alienation in the context of the Cold War and the debates concerning the nature of the official Communist regimes but more generally the notion of Communism as an unalienated, or at least less alienated, society can provide a touchstone for practical political debates. In particular, to the extent that alienation has its roots in forms of workplace organization, it suggests that alternatives that leave workplace hierarchies substantially intact are unlikely to be sufficient. It cautions against an overidentification of Communism with nationalization and state control, at the expense of sustained consideration of questions of social domination and empowerment. At the same time, Marx’s insistence that lack of control at work is fundamentally rooted in capitalist relationships of production and exchange provides a challenge to accounts that believe we can empower people while leaving such relations fundamentally intact. If a focus on alienation can tell us something important about alternatives to capitalism, it also suggests something about the process by which such a society comes to be. In particular, it suggests an idea of revolution as an activity of “de-alienation.” On this understanding, revolutionary transformation involves a process coming to recognize oneself in the world through the process of changing it: and in particular recognizing what appeared as alien, external forces as human activity. Marx seems to have believed that this kind of process took place to a certain extent “naturally” as workers are forced to organize to defend their own interests in necessarily antagonistic relationships with their exploiters. Here it is important to note that, while Marx sees both workers and capitalists as alienated, there is an important difference: The worker stands on a higher plane than the capitalist from the outset,since the latter has his roots in the process of alienation and finds absolute satisfaction in it whereas right from the start the worker is a victim who confronts it as a rebel and experiences it as a process of enslavement.
