Hey Joe! Where you goin’ with that… I mean good to see you again!
OK, I’ll try to keep the answers short and sweet, simply because I got a boatload of housework to do before some good friends come over early this afternoon.
So - first things first. Alienation is not just the from the pleasures of labor, it is from the control of the products of his labor. Someone else decides what he is to make or what services he is to perform; someone else decides when and where he is to work, and for how long; someone else decides how much he is to receive in wages for his ability to work; and lastly, how much the products of that work are to be sold for and to whom. The worker has no control, save that of quitting and finding another job that may not be quite as intolerable, over the conditions of his work and the products he makes. That is alienation in as small a nutshell as I can fit it.
I can’t say much of anything definitive about Marx getting into a duel because I can’t put my hands on the biography of him I have at the moment. But I’ll look around and see if I can find something. On that subject, however, I can note than after he moved to England, a couple of old associates from Germany came to visit him and they, along with Engels, went out on a pub crawl one night. Thoroughly drunk, they got into a brawl with a group of Odd Fellows (that was the name of their association) which ended up in a fit of throwing paving stones at streetlamps. The cops showed up but they got away, apparently thanks to a quick burst of speed on Marx’ part.
The buying and selling of labor power is simply the payment of wages. The means of survival - food, clothing, lodging, etc. - are all commodities, which means they have to be bought and sold before they can be used. Which means you need money. Now, since the average worker doesn’t own much of anything by which he can make money besides his ability to work, he has to sell that on a regular basis (i.e. agree to perform work for a capitalist for a set amount of money paid out periodically) in order to earn the money he needs to survive. Which, in turn, means that the ability to work has itself become a commodity. The capitalist, on the other hand, views wages as a cost of production, and it is in his interests to keep that cost as low as possible in order to realize as much of a profit as possible. He can do that by keeping wages down, lengthening the working day, or speeding up the pace of production - or a combination of the three. Notice that the last two options - a longer working day or more intenive production - do not automatically mean an increase in wages for the worker, unless they organize and fight back.
Reification is a fun little subject. It basically means that more or less abstract, intangible concepts (like the market or capitalism) which owe their existence to the way society is structured, are given an independent physical incarnation and are therefore assumed to be unchanging and unchangeable. It is impossible to say that reification is solely a product of capitalism, or that capitalism is solely a product of reification, since that is an artificial separation of the two. Reification existed before capitalism (although it wasn’t named as such until modern philosophy did so), you can see it in the arguments that fedualism - an earlier social arrangement - had been ordained by God as the natural order of things. Capitalism depends on reification to present itself as The Way Things Are and Ought To Be, but so did every other previous form of class society. The two concepts are mutually interdependent and influence and bolster each other, and it’s simply impossible to say “one is the product of the other”.
Welcome to your first glimpse of the dialectic in action. 
False consciousness - another fun subject. False consciousness is far broader than simply the matter of voting - it’s really a shorter name for an imperfect understanding of the world, and that only based on lack of information and analysis thereof. “Ah,” one thinks, “the world is thus and so, and I will base my actions on this understanding of the world.” False consciousness means you’re going to run up against something that will completely contradict everything you understood to be true. At that point you can either ignore it and continue to believe the world is as you understand it, or you can stop and take the time to analyze why your experience directly contradicts your understanding and therefore refine it. Something not a whole lot of us have the time to do, unfortunately.
How would that apply to voting? Well, IMHO it means that people here in the US start out believing, based on their experience, that voting is the main route to changing things. So people vote for whatever candidate seems to stand closer to their own political viewpoint and who seems to have the greatest chance of winning. But if their candidate loses, or proves to be a horrendous disappointment once in office, things really haven’t changed. A contradiction between experience and understanding. In the first case, people can try to vote the incumbent out next time around and get “their” candidate in. In the second case, however, we have a larger problem. The candidate we thought would bring about the change we wanted has failed to do so. And there seem to be two general reactions to this:
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The people who hate the other party more will provide rationalizations as to why the change failed to come about, and continue to “hope for the best” by casting their votes for the same party again and again.
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The people who feel that neither party really reflects their political interests but who don’t hate the other party more will grow disgusted with both and refuse to vote, period. (The voter turnout for the 2000 Bush-Gore election strongly bears this out.)
Either way, the idea that voting is the best path to change remains unchallenged, and an individual’s understanding of the world is not expanded and refined. Consciousness remains false. If, on the other hand, individuals think “Well, perhaps we need our own party that genuinely reflects our interests and is committed to seriously representing them”, and then go out and actively try to organize such a party, their understanding of the world changes. They have now reached a conclusion that real change requires real activity outside the voting booth. The consciousness of the individuals involved has been expanded and refined. Not completely, mind you; there are numerous approaches to political activity and further experience will continue to challenge their understanding as to what sort of activity is necessary and correct.
So it’s really not a case of “acting contrary to what’s best”, because the conclusion that this is not what’s best has already been reached. False consciousness can only be combatted by actively trying to determine what is best when the old way of doing things finally proves inadequate.
