Has the Industrial Revolution caused alienation and exploitation in urban areas? SOCL 412 The affects of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are still being felt in societies today. The transformation turned the Western world from a largely agricultural to an overwhelmingly industrial system. With this shift, there were large numbers of people who left their farms and agricultural work, for the vast amount of industrial occupations that were opening up. With the huge influx of people to cities, situations developed that previously did not exist, situations such as urbanization, alienation, and exploitation. In my paper I hope to show how the industrial revolution has caused alienation and exploitation in urban areas. Marx was concerned about four components of alienation, first, the workers in a Capitalist society are alienated from their productive activity. An example of this would be someone who is working in an assembly line; they are only producing one part of the final product, such as the engine. As a result the worker is not being fully connected to their work because they will not feel the overall impact their labor had on the final product. The second form of alienation Marx describes is how workers are alienated not only from their productive activities but also from the object of those activities--the product. An example of this would be how people are judged by the clothes they wear, or the cars they drive, none of which they produce themselves, than by what they actually produce in their daily lives. The third type of alienation would be how workers are alienated from their fellow workers. This could be described in terms of how people are often forced to work side-by-side with strangers in factories, or possibly working with friends, but the nature of technology forces isolation. And the final component described by Marx is how workers are alienated from their own human potential. “Instead of work being the...