Marx’s From Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Karl Marx was a “German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary”. He is primarily known for his economic and philosophical arguments against capitalism and in promotion of socialism. He asserted that society was built from class conflict, and argued that salvation came through humanity rather than religion. His work is massively influential for modern-day political discourse and offers insight on the nature and activity of mankind. See more on Marx here.

Key Terms

Estranged Labor
Alienation
Objectification
Externality
Life Activity
Species-being

The Nature of Work and the Worker

We proceed from an actual economic fact.

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity—and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.

Marx argues that labor itself is a commodity. What might this mean for our ideas about work? Should people be seen as commodities or something else entirely?

This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces—labour’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour that has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realization is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labour appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as objectification .

So much does labour’s realization appear as loss of reality that the worker loses reality to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labour itself becomes an object which he can get hold of only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the dominion of his product, capital.

Connection

Alienation- Workers’ Separation from Their Work

All these consequences are contained in the definition that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world—becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the greater is the worker’s lack of objects. Whatever the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

Marx argues that the greater the product of someone’s work is, the less control they have and the more hostile it becomes to them. Therefore, if people focus on something that is particularly huge, such as believing in religion or working for a massive corporation, they have less connection to the product and therefore are more threatened by it.

Objectification: Working for the Wrong Reasons

Let us now look more closely at the objectification, at the production of the worker; and therein at the estrangement, the loss of the object, his product.

The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is manifested, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.

But just as nature provides labor with the means of life in the sense that labour cannot live without objects on which to operate, on the other hand, it also provides the means of life in the more restricted sense—i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the worker himself.

Thus the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life in the double respect: first, that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labour—to be his labour’s means of life; and secondly, that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker.

Here, Marx argues that estranged labor causes mankind to separate themselves from the act of work itself. Work is no longer a means to their own survival, but rather something that people must do for someone else.

Thus in this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labour, i.e., in that he receives work; and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. Therefore, it enables him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second, as a physical subject. The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.

(The laws of political economy express the estrangement of the worker in his object thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the mightier labour becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labour becomes, the duller becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature’s bondsman.)

Marx argues that estranged labor deepens the roots of class tensions. It dehumanizes workers, and the more work they do and the more goods they produce, the less dignity they hold. According to Marx, this is an unavoidable reality of capitalism.

Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production. It is true that labour produces for the rich wonderful things— but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty—but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labour by machines—but some of the workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into machines. It produces intelligence—but for the worker idiocy, cretinism.

The direct relationship of labour to its produce is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the man of means to the objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence of this first relationship—and confirms it. We shall consider this other aspect later.

When we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labour we are asking about the relationship of the worker to production.

The Alienation of the Activity of Labor Itself

Till now we have been considering the estrangement, the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects, i.e., the worker’s relationship to the products of his labour. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production—within the producing activity itself. How would the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity of production. If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself.

The Alienation of the Activity of Labor Itself

First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague.

Key Term: Externality is the idea of work being separated from the worker. It is no longer intrinsically motivated, but an external coercion. Connection: Here, Marx considers this type of work an instrumental rather than intrinsic good. An instrumental good is something that is useful only to the extent that it allows you to get something else, while an intrinsic good is something that you pursue for its own sake.

External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates independently of the individual—that is, operates on him as an alien, divine or diabolical activity— in the same way the worker’s activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But in the abstraction which separates them from the sphere of all other human activity and turns them into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal.

Here, Marx argues that when people are working for someone other than themselves, even survival seems to feel foreign. People feel like they are living to work, and these functions all become mere means to being able to work more.

We have yet a third aspect of estranged labour to deduce from the two already considered.

Man is a species being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object (his own as well as those of other things), but—and this is only another way of expressing it—but also because he treats himself

as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.

In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life-activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It turns for

him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.

For in the first place labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need—the need to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life- engendering life. The whole character of a species—its species character—is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.

Key Term: Marx defines LIFE ACTIVITY as as the purpose of life, or what people are living for.

Key Term: Species Character- the nature or purpose of a species. It can be compared to people’s purpose or what they live for.

The animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life- activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being. Or it is only because he is a species being that he is a Conscious Being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life-activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.

Here, Marx argues that estranged labor changes people such that they choose their species life, what they have control over and how they spend their time, as a mere means to survival.

Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes man’s species life a means to his physical existence.

The consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by estrangement in such a way that the species life becomes for him a means.

Illustration: Most people think of eating as a means of survival, thereby allowing them to live to complete a greater purpose (such as having hobbies, starting a family, etc). With estranged labor, however, people work in order to get food, which will allow them to survive so that they can work more. This creates a viscous cycle stripped of meaning.

Summary: The Dangers of Estranged Labor

Estranged labour turns thus:

(3) Man’s species being, both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man’s own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being.

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life-activity, from his species being is the estrangement of man from man. If a man is confronted by himself, he is confronted by the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labour and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labour and object of labour.