![]() What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. and in her human functions she no longer feels herself to be anything but an animal. It doesn’t really belong to her but to another.Īs a result, therefore, a human being (the worker) only feels herself freely active in her animal functions – eating, drinking, reproducing, or at most in her dwelling and in dressing-up, etc. Finally, it is not her own work, but someone else’s. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Her labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced it is forced labor. She feels at home when she is not working, and when she is working, she does not feel at home. The worker only feels herself outside her work, and in her work feels outside herself. She does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely her physical and mental energy but instead mortifies her body and ruins her mind. In her work she does not affirm himself but denies herself. In other words, it does not belong to her intrinsic nature. What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?įirst, the fact that labor is external to the worker. But the alienation (also known as estrangement) is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production, within the producing activity, itself. Until now we have been considering the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects – her relationship to the products of her labor. It produces intelligence, but for the worker, stupidity, ignorance. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back into barbarous types of labor and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces beauty, but for the worker, deformity. It produces mansions, but for the worker, shacks. It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things, but for the worker it produces poverty. ![]() Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor by not considering the direct relationship between the worker(labor) and production. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers’ objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it appropriation as estrangement, as alienation Labor’s realization is its objectification. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The worker becomes an ever-cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. – the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system. Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labor, capital and landed property the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. Political economy starts with the fact of private property it does not explain it to us. We have shown that 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 that, eventually, the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and property-less workers. We have accepted its language and its laws. We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. Take note of the various aspects of alienation discussed by Marx. Marx uses the word alienation (or estrangement) to describe this dehumanization. We are fully ourselves when we work, but we have socially arranged our work so that it is alien to us, a hostile power at another’s command. Rather than focus on the concept of exploitation, or what was economically unfair about the social relationship between capitalist and worker, Marx critiqued the historical development of hired labor and the ways in which this kind of work dehumanizes those who take part in it. ![]() These early passages of Marx demonstrate the fundamental problems of social relations under class rule. ![]() In the 1844 manuscripts, written when still a young man, Marx struggled to articulate what was so problematic about the current system of capitalism. Introduction – Why this is important and what to look for ![]()
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