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Few philosophers viscerally strike a chord with their readers, regardless of the subject in question. Yet there is something within Marx's essay, Alienated Labor, that is able to communicate directly to working people laboring even over one-hundred and fifty years subsequent to its publication. There is good reason for this: Marx elucidated a theory of labor in which workers become subservient to the objects they produce, a theory where people are not exalted by their …

…its production. Neither the mined coal nor the software programmed belongs in the least to those responsible for its existence and value. In addition, the more coal one mines or the more efficient the program, the greater the value of the product and consequently the greater the degradation of the value of its creators. In each scenario, the product of labor is alien to laborers and serves only to attenuate the life of its creators.