This essay recalls the notion of alienated labor, given its heuristic value to understand more deeply the interconnections between the fundamentals of labor and the current challenges to the social and environmental crisis. Current questions about labor lead to the approach of social precarization, loss of rights, damage to health and the environment, evidence in itself, of a profound social alienation. From a brief historical overview of urban-industrial capitalist societies - which highlights the growing disagreement of social times with the cycles of nature and the plasticity or biopsychosocial limits of individuals - it is proposed to reconsider the four aspects of Marx's alienation concept. The interconnections between alienation and the Bourdieusian concept of habitus, between social precarization and environmental destruction are finally summarized in the notions of social unbelonging and uprooting in relation to nature, processes characteristic of the contemporary civilization.
alienated labor; labor and environment; work and health; precarization of work; flexibilization and social precarization
