The concept of the “isolated individual” is a construction of the bourgeois philosophy of individualism, and serves to conceal the social character w… - Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens

The main dimensions of Marx’s discussion of alienation are as follows: ...
1. The worker … has no power to determine the fate of what he produces. ...
2. The work task does not offer intrinsic satisfactions. ...
3. Human relations, in capitalism, tend to become reduced to operations of the market. … Money promotes the rationalization of social relationships, since it provides an abstract standard in terms of which the most heterogeneous qualities can be compared, and reduced, to one another. ...
4. Some animals do produce, of course, but only in a mechanical, adaptive fashion. Alienated labor reduces human productive activity to the level of adaptation to, rather than active mastery of, nature.

Marx rejects as “absurd” the contention made by John Stuart Mill, and many of the political economists, that while production is governed by definite laws, distribution is controlled by (malleable) human institutions. Such a view underlies the assumption that classes are merely inequalities in the distribution of income, and therefore that class conflict can be alleviated or even eliminated altogether by the introduction of measures which minimize discrepancies between incomes.

The main defect of idealism in philosophy and history is that it attempts to analyze the properties of societies by inference from the content of the dominant systems of ideas in those societies. But this neglects altogether the fact that there is not a unilateral relationship between values and power: the dominant class is able to disseminate ideas which are the legitimations of its position of dominance. Thus the ideas of freedom and equality which come to the fore in bourgeois society cannot be taken at their “face value,” as directly summing up social reality; on the contrary, the legal freedoms which exist in bourgeois society actually serve to legitimize the reality of contractual obligations in which propertyless wage-labor is heavily disadvantaged as compared to the owners of capital. … While ideologies obviously show continuity over time, neither this continuity. nor any changes which occur, can be explained purely in terms of their internal content. Ideas do not evolve on their own account; they do so as elements of the consciousness of men living in society.