The concept of alienation is always in danger of stagnating into the vanity of dry theory. In most cases this is all the concept amounts to; an abstract complaint leading to more abstract complaints. Because alienation is a living tragedy to which man is subjected, the concept should do more than stoke the halls of academic theory. Alienation should first lead to class awareness, and then a motivation to strive toward resolution. Alienation should provide incentive for intellectual struggle toward concrete emancipation. But tragically, this has not been the effect of the concept, instead, it has led to academic jangling and abstraction. There is a real world of suffering behind the concept and it's this world which man must strive to change. This is easy to say, but what is the concrete work of refuting alienation? The simple answer is education. Man cannot advocate for his well-being if he doesn't comprehend what well-being means. And here it's not the concept of alienation which must be integrated into the culture, but as is the answer to so many things, the ability of comprehension itself, which is the very essence of what it means to be educated. If man truly desires to fight alienation such resistance requires qualitative democratic action, which presupposes qualitative education.
"Freedom in this field can consist only of the fact that socialized man,
the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature
rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled
by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish their task with the
least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their
human nature and most worthy of it." Karl Marx, Oekonomisch-Philosophische Manushripte p. 126. Translation in Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and
Social Philosophy, edited by T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel. Marx,
Capital, Vol. III. pp. 954-955.
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