Contextualising Marx’s concept of Alienation in Mines.

Alienation is a state in which a person has the feeling of loneliness, Strangeness, estranged, worthless, meaningless or sense of having no belonging in the surrounding. This estranged situation, for some thinkers, is purely psychological, for someones, it is an intellectual phenomenon but for Karl Marx, it is a material and social process which affects human beings. During my fieldwork in a Tribal village of Rajasthan I got a chance to interact with the mine's workers, the workers are bound to sell their strength, skills, and power to the Mine owners, the process of alienation starts as the workers have no control over their product of labor or even on the labor, so they got estranged from it and fall prey to alienation.

In Marx concept, there are Mainly two classes: The working class and the capitalist class. the Capitalist class is non-workers, they control workers and makes profits by using their labor. But in the Indian context,t the situation is not that simple, and if we are looking at the tribal village the situation becomes more complex. The working class here is Tribes and the capitalist class is mainly upper castes, and having strong support from the state government.

The Dominant Upper caste owns Mines and Machinery and uses Local and Non-local Tribal people as Workers, Most of the mines are working on the Tender system, they Don't provide enough safety, wages and health facilities to the workers, they work more than 12 hours and have only one holiday in a month. Most of the workers neither know the owner of the mines they are working in nor the people who buy this product.

The workers put everything to their job but don't get anything in return, The design of the product and how it is produced are not determined by the workers, its decided by the owner of the mines, the activity of the worker to produce is seen as an exchange value, so by this way the owner controls the labor with an exchange value, they pay minimum wages to maximize their profits. so in this way workers feel Alienation from the product. In Mines, every worker has to do a different job, its endless sequences of discrete, repetitive motions their labor power reduced to wages. therefor the work is not voluntary but forced labor as to survive the workers has to work, their men of survival are based on monetary exchange, therefore They have no other choice than to sell labor power, it creates Alienation from the Process. In mines the labor of the worker is reduced to a commercial commodity that can be traded in the competitive labor market, rather than as a constructive socio-economic activity, it creates Alienation from the Process, because of the competition among workers they compete with each other for higher wages, due to this the Worker starts alienating from other workers and in place of fighting against the owners they start fighting against themselves. The workers don't get enough time for their family, they work around 12 hours in mines, they only get 1 holiday in a month, the production inside the mines don't give them any kind of satisfaction, when they work they don't feel their own self, so they get alienated from their own self while working in the mines.