Karl Marx on Human Labor and Alienation In his university studies in Germany, Marx was primarily concerned with

philosophical issues, specifically the philosophy of Hegel and his followers. In his early journalism he had discussed the plight of the Moselle wine growers, and the problem of Prussian wood thefts. In the latter, Marx came to the view that the state was serving the interests of private property owners, rather than the general interest. He had not yet developed the idea that the state is the instrument expressing the power of the dominant social class. While Marx also began to consider the proletariat as an important class, with communism as a goal, his approach was more philosophical than political.1 Like Hegel Marx saw historical development happening in things; but it was not spiritual like that of Hegel but it was rather material in nature. According to Marx the key to all history lay not in the individuals idea but in the economic conditions of his or her life. In line with this Marx notion of alienation is not metaphysical or religious in nature, but social and economic.2 One of Marxs most important intellectual influences was the philosophy of George Friedrich Hegel (17701831). Hegels signature concept was that of the dialectic, a word that originally referred to the process of logical argumentation and refutation. Whereas earlier philosophers had treated dialectic as a process for arriving at true ideas, Hegel maintained that ideas themselves evolve according to a continual process of contradiction and resolution and that human history is driven by this dialectical evolution of ideas. Hegels influence on Marx is evident in Marxs belief that history is evolving through a series of conflicts in a predictable, unavoidable direction. Hegel also influenced Marx in his characterization of the modern age. Hegel once famously declared that man is not at home in the world, by which he meant that while human beings had achieved an unprecedented degree of personal autonomy and self-awareness in the modern age, this accomplishment had resulted in the individuals alienation from collective political and cultural institutions.3 Marx on Human Labor, Human Nature and Society For Karl Marx, human dignity is to be found in human labor. Human labor transforms nature into a meaningful whole. Labor also transforms man by giving his life meaning and purpose, for through labor man expresses his creativity.4 Marx looks on human labor as one of the chief ways in which humans are distinguished from non-human animals. Non-human animals have a life activity in that they produce, but only for survival, and only in an instinctual manner. In contrast, humans are creative and make their life activity and labor the object of their own wills and consciousness. Karl Marx views of human nature lie in his ideas of labor and society.5

1 2

http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/s3002.htm. (Accessed 30 July 2013) nd Vincent Barry, Philosophy: A Text with Readings, 2 . Ed., (California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1980), 196. Cited hereafter as: Barry, Philosophy: A Text with Readings. 3 SparkNotes Editors. SparkNote on Karl Marx (18181883). SparkNotes LLC. 2005. http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/marx/ (accessed August 1, 2013). 4 Christopher Ryan B. Maboloc, Philosophy of Man: The Existential Drama (Manila, Rex Bookstore 2009), 22. Cited hereafter as: Maboloc, Philosophy of Man. 5 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Harold J Laski, An Introduction to the Communist Manifesto (New York, Random House, Inc., 1982), 176.

According to Professor Stevenson, Marx offered a general description of the human nature, that humans are active, predictive beings who distinguish themselves from other animals by the central overriding fact that they produce their own means of subsistence. Indeed, according to Marx, not only is it natural for humans to work for their livings, but right as well. Thus, by Marxs account, the life of the productive activity is the right one for the humans.6 Marxs view on human labor lead him to say that everything in man is determined by the material conditions of his life. Marx held the idea that mans nature lies within the very heart of society and labor. Human nature for Marx is dependent on the progressive change of labor and society. According to Marx, without labor, nature per se has no meaning and value. In other words, without labor and society there can be no human nature. For Marx human nature is derived from labor. Since nature is perceived by Marx as the totality of human activity and considering that labor is in itself a human activity, in fact, the highest form of activity, then, human nature derives its existence from labor. Marx argues that man is man only in the context of labor.7 In line with this, Marx did believe that there are universal laws operating in history, but that these laws are economic in nature. Moreover, there is a causal connection between the economic structure and everything in society such that the mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. In a word, the economic structure is the real basis by which everything else about society is determined.8 Meaning of Alienation [German, Entfremdung, from fremd, alien or Entusserung, from entussern, to make outer or external, which is associated with Latin, alius, another. Also translated as estrangement] A state in which a thing is separated, through its own act, from something else that used to belong to it, so that this other thing becomes self-sufficient and turns against its original owner. Alienation is explicated by Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx. For Hegel, the development of the absolute idea is a process of alienating or eternalizing ideas in the natural world and then de-alienating or recovering them at a higher stage. Each category develops into its contrary, which is originally contained in it. It thus enters a state of alienation, followed by reconciliation into a higher unity. This unity itself proceeds to further alienation. Nature is an alienation of the absolute idea. Each individual will be alien to social substance and also to his particular self although he is identified with the universal substance. The process of alienation and de-alienation corresponds to the process of the growth of human knowledge. Feuerbach held that God is nothing but the alienated human self. Marx claimed that alienation is a universal phenomenon of capitalist societies, rooted in the alienation of workers from the products of their labor. In capitalism these products take the form of commodities, money, and capital.9 For Marx, the main aspect of alienation is the separation of work or labor from the worker, and separation of the products of labor from the worker. Both end up being taken by employers and
6 7

Barry, Philosophy: A Text with Readings, 198. nd Eddie R. Babor, The Human Person: Not Real but Existing, 2 ed. (Quezon City: C&E Publishing, Inc.), 105-106. 8 Barry, Philosophy: A Text with Readings, 197. 9 Nicholas Bunnin and Jiyuan Yu, Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy (Australia: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004), 21-22.

controlled by them, dominating the worker. Marxs view of alienation can be found in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844). The manuscripts cited in this work are taken from: Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Karl Marx: Early Writings. T.B. Bottomore, 1963. Marx borrowed his concept of alienation from Hegel, and also from Feurbach. For Hegel alienation has its roots in a distinction between a subject and supposedly alien object. For Marx, the human can be considered the subject; and Nature, that is the human created world, can be viewed as an object. Accordingly humans are alienated from Nature, from the world and the social relations they create. Marx at one point traces the roots of alienation to the ownership of private property. Elsewhere he says that private property is not the cause but the effect of alienation. Whatever is the cause or effect it is clear that for Marx alienation is associated with economics, with the ownership of private property. Specifically, alienation consists of individuals not fulfilling themselves in work. Rather, because the work is imposed on them as a means of satisfying the needs of others, they feel exploited and debased. Even those who are paid well still feels alienated because insofar as the fruits of their labor are enjoyed by someone else, the work, ultimately proves meaningless to them. In his manuscripts, Marx summarized alienation as the separation of the individuals from the objects they create, which in turn results in separation from other people and ultimately from oneself.10 For Marx, as for Feuerbach, religion was illusion and while religion claimed to create happiness, the solution to human suffering and problems was not to improve the religious illusion (as Hegel had claimed) but to remove the cause of the human suffering in the material world. For Marx the idea of God controls how people act in the world, rather than people realizing that they themselves have fabricated the notion of God. Marx claimed that philosophy could be just as alienating as religion by putting "the Idea in place of God", and so long as philosophy viewed the development of ideas as the sole history, this was an alienation of human history. He further developed the concept of alienation from a critique of religion to a critique of the state. Marx's great contribution in the Manuscripts was to show how alienation is rooted in human labor and the material world. That is, it is not initially an individual problem or state of mind, but is an objective, observable feature of the manner in which human labor is organized and exercised.11 Alienated Labor In his Manuscripts, Marx is referring to alienated labor, or economic alienation. Thus, according to Marx the most apparent form of alienation is material or economic. Alienated labor forms an important basis for Marx's later analysis of the labor process and surplus value. Marx drew on the importance of labor in Hegel's writings, labor as the source of value in much of British political economy, and combined these with ideas on human potential from the Enlightenment thinkers and early socialists. The result is an analysis where human labor and the labor process is always a key component of Marx's analysis. For Marx, alienation can only be overcome by replacing capitalism by communism. The concept of alienation gained wide currency in the twentieth century, largely due to the influence of Marxs

10 11

Barry, Philosophy: A Text with Readings, 201. http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/s3002.htm. (Accessed 30 July 2013)

Economical and Political Manuscripts, which was written in 1844 and published in 1932. Neo-Marxists, especially Lukcs, used the notion to provide a new interpretation of Marxism. Marx begins his analysis of alienated labor by noting what happens to workers under capitalism. As the worker creates wealth, this wealth is created for the capitalist and not for the worker or direct producer, and the condition of the worker deteriorates. The worker produces commodities, out of these commodities capital is created, and capital comes to dominate the worker. The worker him or herself becomes devalued (worth less lower wages) as a result. In Quote 3, Marx notes:
We shall being from a contemporary economic fact. The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces and the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more goods he creates. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation to the increase in value of the world of things. Labor does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods. (Manuscripts, p. 13)

Four Aspects of Alienation or Estrangement In the Manuscripts, there appear to be four aspects to alienation, for Marx. Following are the four aspects of alienation. a. From Products of own Labor The first aspect of alienated labor is the separation of the worker from the products of the worker's labor.
All these consequences follow from the fact that the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For it is clear on this presupposition that the more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself. ... The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the less he possesses. What is embodied in the product of his labor is no longer his own. The greater this product is, therefore, the more he is diminished. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force . (Manuscripts, pp. 13-14)

Commodities produced by labor are taken away from the worker and sold, and labor itself becomes a commodity. This produces wealth for the capitalist, but poverty for the worker. This alienation produces riches and power for some but enslaves and deprives the worker.12 The product of labor belongs to the capitalist, who uses it to create profits. Workers have no control over the product, or over what they are producing. In modern industry, with a highly developed division

12

Edward G. Grabb, Theories of Social Inequality: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives, 2nd ed., (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990), 25.

of labor, workers may not even be aware of what they are producing, since the process itself is highly segmented.13 In the first form of alienation, the workers not only suffer impoverishment but also experience an estrangement or alienation from the world. This estrangement occurs because the worker relates to the product of his work as an object alien and even hostile to himself. The worker puts his life into the object and his labor is invested in the object, yet because the worker does not own the fruits of his labor, which in capitalism are appropriated from him, he becomes more estranged the more he produces. Everything he makes contributes to a world outside of him to which he does not belong. He shrinks in comparison to this world of objects that he helps create but does not possess.14 b. From the Process of Production or from Work Itself. The second type of alienation is the estrangement of the worker from the activity of production. The work that the worker performs does not belong to the worker but is a means of survival that the worker is forced to perform for someone else. As such, his working activity does not spring spontaneously from within as a natural act of creativity but rather exists outside of him and signifies a loss of his self.15
...he does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labor. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs. (Manuscripts, p. 15)

Under capitalism though, work is external to the worker and is not part of the worker's nature. The worker is not fulfilled, but has a feeling of misery, is exhausted and debased. Hadden notes that "this labor is not engaged to satisfy a need of the laborer but rather the need of someone external to the producer."16 This creates the division of time into labor time (negative) and leisure time (positive). Work at a job becomes only a means of earning enough money to buy food and other necessities. Instead of work being an exercise of human creativity, workers feel free only in their animal functions (eating, sleeping, etc.) and not in their human function (creative work). The potentially creative nature of human labor, that which distinguishes humans from non-human animals, is denied to workers. c. From Species-Being or from Humanity and Human Potential. Alienation is from the worker's own human potential. Individuals perform and act less and less like human beings, and more and more like machines.17

13 14

George Ritzer, Sociological Theory, 3 . ed. (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1992), 51. Cited hereafter as: Ritzer, Sociological Theory. SparkNotes Editors. SparkNote on Karl Marx (18181883). SparkNotes LLC. 2005. http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/marx/ (accessed August 1, 2013). 15 Ibid. 16 R. W Hadden, Sociological Theory: An Introduction to the Classical Tradition, (Peterborough, Broadview Press, 1997), 78. Cited hereafter as: Hadden, Sociological Theory. 17 Ritzer, Sociological Theory, 57.

rd

Since alienated labor: (1) alienates nature from man; and (2) alienates man from himself, from his own active function, his life activity; so it alienates him from the species. ... For labor, life activity, productive life, now appear to man only as means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to maintain physical existence. ... In the type of life activity resides the whole character of a species, its species-character; and free, conscious activity is the species-character of human beings.... Conscious life activity distinguishes man from the life activity of animals. (Manuscripts, p. 16)

Humans, unlike animals, have a consciousness and a will. They have a conscious life activity, and in this activity, humans express free activity. Humans, because they are self-conscious, make their own life activity. This is the essence of humanity. Humans produce when free from physical need, reproduce the whole of nature, and construct in accordance with beauty. This is the essence of species-being. But in doing this, alienated labor takes away the object of production, thus taking away species-being. Nature is taken from humans, and this turns humans' advantages into a disadvantage. Consciousness becomes only a means, and alienated labor turns the species-life into an alien being. "It alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life."18 Alienation means human labor adapts to nature (and products of nature produced by human labor), rather than exercising a mastery of nature. The worker becomes a slave of the object, and the worker's physical subject becomes identified with working and as a worker. A person is what he or she does in transforming nature into objects through practical activity. But in the modern system of private ownership and the division of labor, the worker is estranged from this essential source of identity and life purpose for the human species.19 d. From Other Persons. Humans are also alienated from other human beings. Giddens says that human relations become reduced to market relationships.20 Marx argues that the relationships of exchange are social relationships, but appear to become only money relationships.21
A direct consequence of the alienation of man from the product of his labor, from his life activity and from his species-life, is that man is alienated from other men...man is alienated from his species-life means that each man is alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life. (Manuscripts, p. 17).

How can man be alienated from his fellow human beings? Since the workers product is owned by someone else, the worker regards this person, the capitalist, as alien and hostile. The worker feels alienated from and antagonistic toward the entire system of private property through which the capitalist appropriates both the objects of production for his own enrichment at the expense of the worker and the workers sense of identity and wholeness as a human being.22
I wish to cite here a part of Karl Marxs notion of alienation:

18

Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1971), 13. Cited hereafter as: Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. 19 Spark Notes Editors. SparkNote on Karl Marx (18181883). SparkNotes LLC. 2005. http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/marx/ (accessed August 1, 2013). 20 Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, 12. 21 Hadden, Sociological Theory, 62. 22 Spark Notes Editors. SparkNote on Karl Marx (18181883). SparkNotes LLC. 2005. http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/marx/ (accessed August 1, 2013).

We shall begin from a contemporary fact, the worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces and the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an even cheaper commodity the more goods he creates. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things. Labor does not create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods All of these consequences follow from the fact that the worker is related to product of his labor as to an alien object. For it is clear on this presupposition that the more the worker expends himself in work, the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, the less he belongs to himself. It is just the same as in religion. The more of himself of himself man attributes to god the less he has left in himself. The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the less he possesses. What is embodied in the product of his labor is no longer his own. The greater this product is, therefore, the more he is diminished. The alienation of the worker in his product means only that his labor becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force. the worker becomes a slave of the object; first, in that he receives an object of work, and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. Thus the object enables him to exist, first as a worker, and secondly, as a physical subject. The culmination of this enslavement is that he can only maintain himself as a physical subject so far as he is worker, and that it is only as physical subject that he is a worker What constitutes the alienation of labor? First, that the work is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature; and that consequently, he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed forced labor. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs. Its alien character is clearly shown by the fact that as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion it is avoided like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of sacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character of work for the worker is shown by the fact that it is not his own work but for someone else, that in work, he does not belong to himself but to another person We arrive at the result that man (worker) feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions-eating, drinking and procreating, or at most also in his dwelling and in personal adornmentwhile in his human functions he is reduced to an animal. The animal becomes human and the human becomes animal. Eating, drinking and procreating are of course also genuine human functions. But abstractly considered, apart from the environment of human activities, and turned into final and sole ends, they are animal functions. We have now considered the act of alienation of practical human activity, labor, from two aspects: (1) the relationship of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object which dominates him. This relationship is at the same time is the relationship to the sensuous external world, to natural objects, as an alien and hostile world; (2) the relationship of labor to the act of production within labor. This is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something alien and not belonging to him, activity as suffering (passivity), strength as powerlessness, creation as emasculation, the personal physical and mental energy of the worker, his personal life (for what is life but activity?), as an activity which is directed

against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him. This is self-alienation as against the above23 mentioned alienation of the thing.

Marx had earlier reached the conclusion that human alienation would not be ended by philosophical criticism alone. It was not simply that, as he famously put it, The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it. The change that was necessary would have to be a violent one, and that called for an alliance between the philosophers and the workers.24

Marxs critique of Capitalism

The first volume of Marx's famous work Capital (Das Kapital) appeared at Hamburg in 1867. But the author did not continue the publication. He died in March 1883, and the second and third volumes were published posthumously by Engels in 1885 and 1894 respectively. Further manuscripts were published in several parts by K. Kautsky in 1905-10. In the work Marx maintains that-the bourgeois or capitalist system necessarily involves a class antagonism. For the value of a community is crystallized labor, as it were. That is to say, its value represents the labor put into it. Yet the capitalist appropriates to himself part of this value, paying the worker a wage which is less than the value of the commodity produced. He thus defrauds or exploits the worker. And this exploitation cannot be overcome except by the abolition of capitalism.25 The worker's product is treated as something alien to himself. In capitalist society it belongs to the capitalist, not to the worker.26 Capitalism is a mode of production based on private ownership of the means of production. Capitalists produce commodities for the exchange market and to stay competitive must extract as much labor from the workers as possible at the lowest possible cost. The economic interest of the capitalist is to pay the worker as little as possible, in fact just enough to keep him alive and productive. The workers, in turn, come to understand that their economic interest lies in preventing the capitalist from exploiting them in this way. As this example shows, the social relations of production are inherently antagonistic, giving rise to a class struggle that Marx believes will lead to the overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat. The proletariat will replace the capitalist mode of production with a mode of production based on the collective ownership of the means of production, which is called Communism.27
23 24

See Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Karl Marx: Early Writings. T.B. Bottomore, 1963. Anthony Kenny, An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy (Australia: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006), 305. Cited hereafter as: Kenny, Brief History of Western Philosophy. 25 Frederick Coplestone, A History of Philosophy, Vol. VII (New York, Doubleday Publishing Group, Inc.), 312-313. 26 Ibid,. 329. 27 SparkNotes Editors. SparkNote on Karl Marx (18181883). SparkNotes LLC. 2005. http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/marx/ (accessed August 1, 2013).

The theme of Marxs great work is that the capitalist system is in a state of terminal crisis. Capitalism, of its very nature, involves the exploitation of the working class. For the true value of any product depends upon the amount of labor put into it. But the capitalist appropriates part of this value, paying the laborer less than the products real worth. As technology develops, and with it the laborers productivity, a greater and greater proportion of the wealth generated by labor finds its way into the pockets of the capitalist.28 According to Marx man is no longer in control of his life, it is the capitalist who controls the life of the laborer. Marx links alienation by how the capitalist continue to make man feel alienated. The capitalist, by maintaining the status quo where man believes that his only refuge is in his religion, destroys mans understanding of the world as a concrete manifestation of historical unity.29 Everywhere according to Marx, the worker allows credit to the capitalist.30 Under capitalism, however, prices in the market are determined not by true value, but by supply and demand. The capitalist, who owns the raw material and the means of production, having paid the worker a wage equal to his days subsistence, say 1, can often sell the product for many times that sum, say 10. The difference between the subsistence wage and the market price is the surplus value, in this case 9. Under capitalism, no part of this surplus value is returned to the worker, it is all pocketed by the employer. The effect is that only one-tenth of the laborers work is for his own benefit; nine-tenths of it is just to produce profit for the capitalist.31 As technology develops, and the laborers productivity increases accordingly, surplus value increases and the proportion of his work which is returned to him becomes smaller and smaller. Finally this exploitation is bound to reach a point at which the proletariat finds it intolerable, and rises in revolt. The capitalist system will be replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will abolish private property and introduce a socialist state in which the means of production are totally under central government control. But the socialist state will itself be only temporary, and it will wither away to be replaced by a communist society in which the interests of the individual and the community will be identical. The theory of surplus value suffers from a fatal weakness. Marx offers no convincing reason why the capitalist, no matter how great his profits, should pay no more than a subsistence wage. But this thesis is an essential element in his prediction that capitalism would inevitably lead to revolution, and do so soonest in those states where technology, and therefore exploitation, was progressing fastest. In fact, employers soon began, and have since continued, to pay wages well above subsistence level in advanced industrialized countries. It was not in them but in backward Russia that the first proletarian revolution occurred.32

28

Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Vol. IV: Philosophy in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 22. Cited hereafter as: Kenny, A New History of Western Vol. IV. 29 Maboloc, Philosophy of Man, 26. 30 Ibid. 31 Kenny, Brief History of Western Philosophy, 307. 32 Ibid.

Marx regarded not religion but capitalism as the greatest form of alienationit was money, not God, that was the capitalists object of worship. Religion, said Marx, is the opium of the people. By this he did not mean that religion was a pipe-dream (though he believed that it was) but that belief in a happier afterlife was a necessary stupefacient to make labor under capitalism bearable.33

33

Kenny, A New History of Western Vol. IV, 292.