y structured one that relies on and perpetuates social control, which in turn perpetuates social alienation. The principal agent of such control and alienation is the fact that labor serves the interest of private property, or capital, with the latter holding all social and economic power. "Division of labour," he writes, "implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another" (Marx, 1978, p. 160). The contradiction takes shape as an unbearable fact of basic human experience--one's own interest in fundamental competition with the interests of all others. That fosters alienation, both in the very center of the social environment and in the very center of individual life.
Alienation is experienced by both labor and capital, according to Marx, but the experience is different for each class. Capital/private property is alienated from labor because it "is compelled to preserve its own existence and thereby the existence of its opposite, the proletariat"
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