Marx's theory relies on Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity
(1841), which argues that the idea of God has alienated the
characteristics of the human being. Stirner would take the
analysis further in The Ego and Its Own (1844), declaring that
even 'humanity' is an alienating ideal for the individual, to
which Marx and Engels responded in The German Ideology (1845).
Marx's Theory of Alienation is based upon his observation that
in emerging industrial production under capitalism, workers
inevitably lose control of their lives and selves, in not having
any control of their work. Workers never become autonomous,
self-realized human beings in any significant sense, except the
way the bourgeois want the worker to be realized. Alienation in
capitalist societies occurs because in work each contributes to
the common wealth, but can only express this fundamentally
social aspect of individuality through a production system that
is not publicly social, but privately owned, for which each
individual functions as an ins