Karl Marx on alienation. Karl Marx believed that work, at its best, is what makes us human. It fulfills our species essence, as he put it. Work allows us to live, to be creative, to flourish. However, the reality in 19th century Europe was that work destroyed workers, particularly those who had nothing to sell but their labour.
To the mill and factory owners, a worker was simply an abstract idea with a stomach that needed to be filled. The workers had no choice but to toil long hours for a pitiful wage. What was worse, their labour alienated them. Alienation is a disorienting sense of exclusion and separation. Factory labour, under capitalism, alienated the workers from the product of their labour.
They made stuff they couldn't afford to buy. which disappeared to shops in far-off places to make money for people who paid them next to nothing. The factory production line split jobs into meaningless tasks that made the hours at work tedious, empty and bleak. They became cogs in a gigantic machine.
Workers lived for the few hours at home when they could eat, sleep and relax. The rest of the time, they weren't fully alive. This work also alienated them from each other. The only way out of this drudgery, Marx argued, was for the workers to organize and revolt.
They needed to seize the means of production, leading to his famous rallying cry, Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.