_____ is Marx's term for workers' lack of connection to the product of their labor.

• A. Reification
• B. Alienation
• C. Commodity fetishism
• D. Labor exploitation

Answer: (B)

Alienation is the concept. Marx argued that under capitalism workers become estranged from the products of their labor because those products are owned and controlled by others, not by the workers who create them. The act of producing is separated from the worker’s own life and sense of self—the worker doesn’t own or directly benefit from what they make, and the product stands as a separate, exchangeable object. This distance makes work feel meaningless and reduces labor to a mere means of survival rather than a fulfilling expression of human potential. The other ideas describe related but different problems: reification is treating social relations as things, commodity fetishism is valuing commodities as if they have intrinsic social power, and labor exploitation focuses on the unfair extraction of value. The change in connection to the product is what characterizes alienation.