Sociology 250
January 26, 2003
Quotes from Marx on
Alienation
1. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity
of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human hear, operates
independently of the individual–that is, operates on him as an alien, divine or
diabolical activity—so is the worker's activity not his spontaneous
activity. It belongs to another; it is
the loss of his self. (p. 111).
2. The worker sinks to the level of a commodity
and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of
the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his
production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of
capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible
form ... (p. 106)
3. We shall begin 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.
Labour 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)
4. This fact simply implies that the object
produced by labour, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer.
The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object and
turned into a physical thing; this product is an objectification of labour.
... So much does the performance
of work appear as devaluation that the worker is devalued to the point of
starvation. So much does
objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is deprived of the
most essential things not only of life but also of work. Labour itself becomes an object which he can
acquire only with the greatest effort and with unpredictable interruptions. ... the more objects the worker produces the
fewer he can possess and the more he falls under the domination of his product,
of capital. (Manuscripts, p. 13)
5. All these consequences follow from the fact
that the worker is related to the product
of his labour 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
labour 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 labour 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)
6. [H]e 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 labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but
only a means for satisfying other
needs. (Manuscripts, p. 15)
7. Since alienated labour: (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 labour, 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)
8. A direct consequence of the alienation of
man from the product of his labour, 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)
9. Political economy starts
with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. (p. 106).
10.
Now, therefore, we have to grasp the
intrinsic connection between private property, greed, and the separation of
labour, capital and landed property; between exchange and competition, value
and the devaluation of men, monopoly and competition, etc. – the connection
between this whole estrangement and the money
system. (p. 107)
11. 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 it throws one
section of the workers back to a barbarous type of labour, and it turns the
other workers into machines. It
produces intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism. (p. 110).
12. Wages are a direct consequence of estranged
labour, and estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of one must involve the
downfall of the other. (2) From the relationship
of estranged labour to private property it follows further that the
emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is
expressed in the political form of
the emancipation of the workers; not
that their emancipation alone is at
stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human
emancipation – and it contains this, because the whole of human servitude is
involved in the relation of the worker to production, and every relation of
servitude is but a modification and consequences of this relation. (p. 118).
13. Communism
as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement,
and therefore as the real appropriation
of the human essence by and for man;
communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return
become conscious, and accomplished within the entire wealth of previous
development. This communism, as fully
developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals
naturalism; it is the genuine
resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the
true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between
objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between
the individual and the species.
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be
this solution. (p. 135)
Manuscripts refers to Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, reprinted in A. Giddens and D. Held, Classes, Power, and Conflict: Classical and Contemporary Debates, pp. 12-19. (Note: I changed the translation of the word 'vitiate' to 'devalue' in 2).
Other references are from Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, New York, International Publishers, 1964. HX39.5 A224 1964
Last edited January 24, 2003
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