“The devaluationof the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.”

Thus Marx summarized the phenomenon he dubbed Alienation, that is, the state of social, mental and productive disharmony that exists when the basic social expression of humans, as well as the only concrete link humans have to their reality, their labor, is utilized with instruments which the worker does not own, produced to a design which he did not formulate, and given up to a proprietor whose exchange—the wage—does not satisfy, and indeed whose proportional value to that of the worker’s labor, from-which he is estranged, is but a fraction.

Marx begins, unlike so many, from the supposition that man lived, for the vast majority of his history, in a form of primitive communism – that is, hunter-gatherer society where-in no conception of private property, or control over the…