Marx: Alienation

In one line

Alienation is Marx's account of what wage labour under private ownership does to the human being: it turns the activity that should express what a person is into a mere means of staying alive.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: alienation, in the account Marx set out in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, written in 1844 and first published in 1932, is the estrangement of the worker under a system in which the means of production belong to another and labour is sold as a commodity. He distinguished four dimensions: alienation from the product of labour, from the process of labour, from the worker's own species-being or essential human nature, and from other human beings.

Its place in Marx's system

Setting this out is what distinguishes a Module IV answer from a Module I one.

It is the earliest of the ideas on this syllabus. The Manuscripts were written in 1844, when Marx was twenty-six, four years before the Communist Manifesto and more than twenty before Das Kapital.

It was unknown for most of a century. The Manuscripts were not published until 1932, so the Marx known to the nineteenth century and to the early socialist movements was the Marx of the Manifesto and Capital, without this material. That single fact explains the shape of the debate about him, because a body of interpretation had been built before the early work was available.

The debate it produced. Some readers hold that there are two Marxes, a humanist young Marx concerned with alienation and human nature, and a scientific mature Marx concerned with the laws of capitalist production, and that the second supersedes the first. Others hold that the concept persists in the mature work in a transformed form, appearing as the fetishism of commodities in Capital, where relations between people take the form of relations between things. An answer that names the debate and does not pretend to settle it is the right answer.

Its relation to the rest. Alienation is the human consequence of the arrangement that historical materialism describes structurally: private ownership of the means of production produces the class relation in [Marx: Theory of Social Class and Social Conflict], and alienation is what that relation does to the person inside it.

The four dimensions

Stated here in their systematic order; the worked treatment is in [Work and Alienation].

1. From the product. What the worker makes belongs to another at the moment it exists, and the more they produce, the more wealth confronts them as an alien power and as the source of another's control over them.
2. From the process. The worker does not decide what is made, how, at what pace or in what order, so the activity itself is not theirs. Work becomes external, undertaken under compulsion, and the worker feels at home only when not working.
3. From species-being. Marx's term for the conscious, purposive, creative production which he held to be distinctively human. When labour becomes only a means to subsistence, the capacity that distinguishes human beings is reduced to the level of a means of survival.
4. From other human beings. Workers are set in competition with one another, and the relation between worker and owner is one of opposition, so the activity that ought to be most cooperative becomes a field of antagonism.