NOTE: Quotes are from "Quotes from Marx – September 18, 2002"

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.

In Paris, industry and the working class were more fully developed in economic and political terms than they were in Germany. Socialist ideas were commonly discussed in workers' clubs and meeting groups. In addition, Engels had written Outline of a Critique of Political Economy in late 1843, and this began to acquaint Marx with political economy. Engels' analysis spurred Marx on to study political economy, especially Smith and Ricardo. Engels also provided a study of working class life, The Condition of the Working-class in England in 1844. Marx began to critique the political economists, and this led to his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (referred to as Manuscripts in these notes). In the Manuscripts, Marx drew parallels between Hegelian philosophy and classical political economy, especially with respect to labour, and its importance in the analysis of society. Both systems of thought argued that the exercise of human labour was an essential aspect of defining what was unique to humans or the essence of humanity.

The Manuscripts were especially important in developing Marx's thought beyond the Hegelian approach. The Manuscripts are composed of three sections: (i) the alienation or estrangement of labour, (ii) an analysis of private property and communism, and (iii) a critique of Hegel's dialectic. (McLellan, p. 24). These themes, the concepts discussed, and the method of analysis, all foreshadow Marx's later work, and in some senses, Capital can be seen as a working out of these themes. The Manuscripts were not published in German until 1932, and were not available in English until the 1960s. They have since become an essential part of Marxian analysis, connecting the earlier Marxian ideas with his later writing.

2. Meanings of Alienation.

The first major topic of the Manuscripts is alienation, a term that has many interpretations. Alienation has a technical and legal meaning, and we often use it to describe how we are or feel separated from activities or situations which we do not like. A dictionary definition is "withdrawing or separation of a person or his affections from an object or position of former attachment" or, in the case of property, "a conveyance of property to another." The notions of separation or transferring something to a new owner are one way of considering alienation, and this is the way that Marx develops the term. For Marx, the main aspect of alienation is the separation of work or labour from the worker.

Marx uses alienation in several ways. Initially, and as part of his historical and philosophical concerns, Marx referred to religion whereby "God ... had usurped man's own position." (McLellan, p. 106). In Manuscripts, Marx notes

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. Tucker notes how Marx viewed the sacred and God as beliefs that have human origins – "these moral and dividne beliefes are of human origin, so that images of God and morality take on a universal and seemingly natural existence." (p. 98) For Marx then, "the idea of God controls how people act in the world, rather than people realizing that they themselves have fabricated the notion of God" (Tucker, p. 98)

Marx claimed that philosophy could be just as alienating as religion by putting "the Idea in place of God" (McLellan, p. 106), 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" (Tucker, p. 98). Marx's great contribution in the Manuscripts was to show how alienation is rooted in human labour 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 labour is organized and exercised.

Weber and Durkheim did not make much, if any, use of alienation, although their discussions of modern society, with the growth of large scale organizations and the division of labour, led to the development of similar concepts. Weber discussed the bureaucratic organization of social institutions, and in some ways his analysis of bureaucratic domination parallels Marx's analysis of labour. Durkheim, being more concerned with integrative forces, developed concepts of solidarity and integration. However, when these were inadequate of failed, Durkheim recognized that there could be crises of solidarity. One of the effects of this was to create anomie, a concept that has some parallels with alienation.

In contemporary sociology, alienation has been used in a variety of ways. In the sociology of labour, some writers use alienation in the Marxian sense, as the way in which private property and capitalism alienate the worker from what they create. Other writers consider alienation to have a more social-psychological interpretation, with interpretations such as of powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, self-estrangement and social isolation (Krahn and Lowe, p. 358). There may be various causes of these forms of alienation, with bureaucracy and organizational structures, lack of ownership, social disorganization or poor management, or technology being among the common explanations. Most of these approaches refer to alienation as loss of control over work, the lack of meaning in work, and the difficulty of self-expression in work. Some authors consider assembly line workers to have the greatest sense of alienation, with workers such as physicians, teachers, or other professionals to have the least alienation. "Alienation is likely to be lowest in organizational setting where members have control, meaning, and opportunities for self-fulfilment in their roles." (Hagedorn, pp. 213). This latter use of alienation is somewhat different than that of Marx, in that the solution to this form of alienation is to make work more meaningful. This is a more reformist view, whereas Marx considered it necessary to abolish private property and change social and economic structures. See, for example, Marx’s comments in "Estranged Labor" that increased wages just result in better pay for the slave (Marx, 1964, pp. 117-8).

Finally alienation is sometimes used in a political sense with Western Canadian alienation from Central Canada and Ottawa or alienation of the electorate as reasons for disaffection with political parties or policies.

In the Manuscripts, Marx is referring to alienated labour, or economic alienation. Alienated labour forms an important basis for Marx's later analysis of the labour process and surplus value. Marx drew on (a) the importance of labour in Hegel's writings, (b) labour as the source of value in much of British political economy, and combined these with (c) ideas on human potential from the Enlightenment thinkers and early socialists. The result is an analysis where human labour and the labour process is always a key component of Marx's analysis.

Marx looks on human labour 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 labour the object of their own wills and consciousness. Tucker notes how "Capitalism crushes our particularly human experience. It destroys the pleasure associated with labor, the distinctively human capacity to make and remake the world, and the major distinguishing characteristic of humans from animals" (Tucker, p. 98). Also see last two sentences in Quote 7. Part of this is mental activity, in that humans do not just act on instinct, but construct the task or object in their mind before undertaking the activity. Marx looks on the integration of mental and manual labour as desirable and as the essence of human labour in its complete form.

Humans reproduce the whole of nature and make nature reappear as the work of humans. Humans are also social and since they are creative, can create a better society. Human potential is very great, and the social and economic forces of the past and present have limited humans in being able to achieve this potential. For Marx, capitalism is an economic and social system whereby the productive forces have been greater than ever before in human history, and this creates the possibility for a better society. While labour is much more productive in capitalism than in earlier economic systems, the problem with capitalism is it thwarts, distorts, and limits human potential.

Contemporary sociologists would not generally give labour the same importance that Marx did. Features of human society such as culture and values, human creativity, and language are often considered to be what distinguishes humans from non-human animals.

For Marx, objectification (Ritzer, p. 54) was the means by which people appropriate the natural world, and produce useful objects. Human labour is the process by which this is carried out. This was considered by Marx as a normal process expressing human potential if certain conditions are met. First, the actors must be conscious of the nature of this activity. Second, the actors must be able to express their capabilities in an overall or comprehensive manner. Third, they must be able to express the social character of this process. (Note that production is social in nature, it is not purely individual). Fourth, the process of objectification must not merely be a means to some end. That is, this process must involve the creative capacities of individuals. This would be labour and work in its ideal setting, and one that Marx hopes can be recreated in communism.

In the first paragraph of the Manuscripts, Marx contrasts political economy's positive descriptions of capitalism with the actual state of the working population in capitalism. This leads Marx to the conclusion that the state of

Marx begins his analysis of alienated labour 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 her self becomes devalued (worth less – lower wages) as a result. Quote 3 notes:

Note from this quote: (i) relevance to today; (ii) the contradictory or dialectical nature of the argument, that the worker creates the conditions that worsen the worker's condition and position; (iii) labour itself and the worker become commodities, to be bought and sold; (iv) analysis is concerned with (a) observed economic conditions, (b) historical analysis, (c) involves abstraction and (d) is humanistic. Quote 4:

The object produced by labour is a good or service and this product becomes an alien being and becomes a power independent of producer. Performance of work is its objectification. Note the Hegelian approach, for example, on p. 12 of Manuscripts, Marx refers to "objectification as loss of object." It is simultaneously production of the product and vitiation (debasing or spoiling) of worker, objectification as servitude to object, and alienation.

The results of work include the loss of essential aspects of life and work, work itself (unemployment, irregular employment, etc.) and the domination of capital, labour's product, becomes greater. The potential is turned into its opposite. Work and religion are similar in that as more is put into the object, the less there is of the self. This is not just a bad feeling or meaninglessness, but an actual separation and domination.

In the Manuscripts, there appear to be four aspects to alienation, for Marx. The two terms have a somewhat different sense in English, with alienation meaning both losing something and that thing being passed to another. Estrangement refers only to the separation involved. However, the difference is subtle, and in the end it is the two parts of alienation that result and are important. Following are the four aspects of alienation.

a. From products of own labour. The first aspect of alienated labour is the separation of the worker from the products of the worker's labour. Quote 5:

Under capitalism, the worker created products or objects. This is objectification, i.e. the workers production and the alienation and loss of the object it produces. Hadden (p. 78) says that "the product of labour is an objectification; labour is realized in an object. This object is lost to the worker and is appropriated by someone else." These products are produced in conditions over which the worker has no control. In capitalism, production is for exchange and the market, to be sold to others, and the worker does not control the fate of what is being produced (Giddens, p. 12). The worker actually puts his or her life into the object (biological reality – the very life of the worker is put into the object), but in this process the worker deprives him or her self of the means of existence. That is, there is a separation of the objects from the worker.

Commodities produced by labour are taken away from the worker and sold, and labour 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. (Grabb, p. 25). Note that at this stage of his writings, Marx does not separate labour and labour power. Strictly speaking, labour is not a commodity in capitalism, what the worker sells is his or her ability to work, and the exercise of this labour power is labour.

The product of labour 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 of labour, workers may not even be aware of what they are producing, since the process itself is highly segmented. (Ritzer, p. 51).

b. From the process of production or from work itself. Quote 6:

This is alienation in the process of production, within productive activity itself. Since the product is separated from the worker, the act of production is active alienation. Behind this critique stands Marx's view of the possibility of a more integrated form of labour, whereby the labour process is controlled by workers, where there is a unity between mental and manual labour, and whereby workers together determine what and how production takes place. The market and capitalists do not dominate and control production in this alternative view.

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. Here is where some of the more social-psychological aspects of alienation emerge. Hadden notes that "this labour is not engaged to satisfy a need of the labourer but rather the need of someone external to the producer" (p. 78). This creates the division of time into labour 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 labour, that which distinguishes humans from non-human animals, is denied to workers.

c. From species-being or from humanity and human Potential. Ritzer (p. 52) notes that 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. Quote 7:

Humans, unlike nonhuman 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 labour 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 labour turns the species-life into an alien being. "It alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life."

Giddens (p. 13) notes that alienation means human labour adapts to nature (and products of nature produced by human labour), 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. The individual becomes identified as a worker, and only in being a worker is the individual important, at least from the viewpoint of political economy.

d. From other persons. Humans are also alienated from other human beings. Giddens (p. 12) says that human relations become reduced to market relationships. Marx argues that the relationships of exchange are social relationships, but appear to become only money relationships. (Hadden. p. 62). This is a critique of political economy and a critique of capitalist market relationships. Quote 8:

6. Summary and conclusions concerning alienation.

Labour is a cooperative venture, in that work in society involves both past human labour and the labour of many workers in the labour process. But in capitalism and in political economy, because production is organized to produce commodities, and because of specialization and the division of labour, it appears as if capital and labour are separate and individual sources of production. This results in isolation of the worker. (paragraph based on Ritzer (p. 52).

Some results of alienation are given by Ritzer, third edition, p. 60. These are some of what are often regarded as dehumanizing conditions of work under capitalism.

Note that some of these effects are social-psycholigical types of effects that may be associated more with meaningless or powerlessness. However, it is the alienation of objects, processes, and self that produces these results.

a. Alienation of labour not just individual alienation. Some consider alienation to be a personal or psychological problem. While this aspect of alienation certainly exists, for Marx the origin of alienation is not with the individual, nor can the problems it creates be solved on a person by person basis, perhaps by reorganizing workplaces or providing assistance to individuals. Rather, the origin of alienation is in the social structure, in the fact that society is organized in a way that production takes place with alienated labour, i.e. on the capital/labour basis. It is the fact that capitalists own the means of production, that workers must work for these capitalists, that is at the root of alienation. The solution must be a structural one, not merely an individual one. (See Ritzer, p. 51).

b. Social order and disorder. Many other sociological theorists were concerned with the economic, political and social disorganization that results from capitalism and industrialization, and as a result they focussed their studies on values, religion, ideology, the state, or consensus. For these theorists, the latter forces were ways in which social order could be created and maintained. In contrast, Marx shows how social disorganization is built into capitalism with a system with private property. Marx's solution to overcoming alienation is to remove the conditions creating alienation, rather than modifying or reforming sociey to create greater social organization. See quotes 9 and 10.

c. Solution to Alienation. Marx connects alienation with the division of labour, wages and private property. In early society, there was a very simple form of the division of labour, perhaps by sex and age. People may not have specialized in particular occupations, rather there were often group or communal activities. As the division of labour developed, and as people began to specialize in different occupational activities, a surplus began to develop. Exchange of products became necessary, and this created the possibility of alienation. At this stage, production was generally small scale and exchange mostly at a local level, so that control over production was close to the producer.

The development of private property creates a different situation. With private property and a system of exchange that expands to create a money economy, the possibility of gain become vastly expanded. As capitalism developed, some became propertyless and had to work as wage labourers. After the middle ages, the alienation of the peasantry from their land becomes a key part of this process. Once capitalism became more fully developed, the different forms of alienation became part of the normal functioning of a capitalist system.

Marx's solution to alienation is outlined in Quotes 12 and 13 as Marx's early vision of communism. In order to end alienation, it is necessary to abolish private property and abolish the relationship between private property and wage labour. In quote 12 note Marx's early vision of the role of the working class in accomplishing this. For Marx, the abolition of private property removes the cause of alienation, and to accomplish this workers have to be emancipated from a system of private property and wages. Since other forms of inequality and servitude are a result of this, as workers emancipate themselves, this creates "universal human emancipation."

In order to carry out such emancipation, there would have to be more than destruction of the current system, so that there is a positive abolition of private property. That is, a new society could be created where there could be a "complete return of man to himself as a social being." (Quote 13) Giddens (p. 17) notes that

This communist society is not expected to be one that submerges the individual in the group, but allow for the "expansion of the particular potentialities and capabilities of individuals." (Giddens, p. 17).

Note that Marx does not have a well developed program to achieved this in his early writings. He objected to some of the utopian or crude communist ideas that appeared in early socialist writings. In these early writings there is no systematic theory connecting the development of socialism and communism with the development of the working class or proletariat. But he does argue that private property must be abolished in order to achieve the better society. His conception of communism involves an integrated form of mental and manual labour, with control over labour by the worker and the community, and the development of human productive and creative capabilities. These ideas were further developed in Marx's later writings.

d. Later Views on Alienation. Marx did not discuss alienation much in his later writings, partly because of the way that other writers used the term and partly because he developed other concepts. Marx objected to the philosophic view of alienation, instead seeing alienation as rooted in actual historical developments. In the Manuscripts Marx wrote about labour, political economy and alienation, moving back and forth between the approaches of Feuerbach and the political economists. In his later writings, political economy becomes the dominant form of analysis, and some writers have argued that the concept of alienation becomes transformed into the concept of surplus value. Alienation is the expression of what happens in the labour process, but the objectification also takes on a concrete form, that of surplus value. This is, surplus labour is extracted from the worker, the products created by this surplus labour are taken away from the worker, and the value created by this labour is transformed into profits and capital. These latter come to dominate the worker. It was only later that Marx worked out this more systematic political economic approach.

e. Problems with Marx's Views on Alienation. Some of the problems associated with Marx's writings on alienation are as follows.

(i) The explanation was not well worked out in terms of its implications and how it might be eliminated. The solution of communism has not occurred, and does not seem a likely prospect in the near future.

(ii) Marx's approach to the study of alienation helps explain a lot of what does occur in labour markets, and alienation is an important concept in the sociology of labour. At the same time, living and working conditions and the structure of the labour market have changed considerably since the time when Marx was writing. The worst conditions he describes are felt by some, but not by all workers. The division of labour has vastly expanded, with different types of effects for different segments of working class, and with different working classes in different countries.

(iii) Marx deals only with work for capitalists, seeing the roots of alienation only in exchange of labour and private property. Similar feelings and causes of estrangement and alienation may be related to ethnicity or race (alienation from the economic system, by being left out of the system), region (Prairie or western alienation, which may be tied more to the distribution, rather than production, of the surplus) or other aspects of society that are not directly tied to production. In addition, by considering only labour in the market, Marx ignores all aspects of life other than this -- in the home, relations between sexes, relations between those of different ages, etc. Many of these social relations have effects that are very similar to the aspects Marx is discussing. Work and labour as alienating refer only to work done in the capital-labour relationship. But work in general and production may be alienating in some of the same senses as Marx discusses.

(iv) Weber used rationalization and bureaucracy to describe some of the ways that people feel trapped. Durkheim used the division of labour and anomie to describe the sense of rootlessness and disconnection that people felt from society. What is interesting is that many of the same types of effects that Marx observed were important for later sociologists to explain as well -- although these later sociologists used different terms and had different explanations for these same or similar phenomena.

f. Conclusion. In spite of these weaknesses, the concept of alienation has proved to be a very useful and fruitful one. It is widely used today in politics, in social psychology, studies of labour and work, and so on. For Marx's system itself, the analysis of alienation is associated with the early stage of his writings. The analysis of alienation allowed him to pull together his philosophical background, his observations of early nineteenth century capitalism, his interest in political issues, and his first forays into a discussion of political economy. In the Marxian system, alienation becomes transformed into exploitation and surplus value, and it is the latter that the late Marx is more concerned with explaining.

Marx's contribution was to provide a systematic analysis of alienation, and show how it had material origin, being rooted in the organization of labour and private property. His theoretical approach is also evident in the study of alienation, with a dialectical analysis combining elements from various other writers, but developing a new approach to the study of alienation.

Last edited September 22, 2002

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