Charles
Karl Marx Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Estranged Labour
We have started out from the premises of political economy. We have accepted
its language and its laws. We presupposed private property; the separation
of labour, capital, and land, and likewise of wages, profit, and capital;
the division of labour; competition; the conception of exchange value, etc.
> From political economy itself, using its own words, we have shown that the
worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched
commodity of all; that the misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to
the power and volume of his production; that the necessary consequence of
competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands and hence the
restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that, finally, the
distinction between capitalist and landlord, between agricultural worker and
industrial worker, disappears and the whole of society must split into the
two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.
Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property. It does not
explain it. It grasps the material process of private property, the process
through which it actually passes, in general and abstract formulae which it
then takes as laws. It does not Comprehend these laws - i.e., it does not
show how they arise from the nature of private property. Political economy
fails to explain the reason for the division between labour and capital. For
example, when it defines the relation of wages to profit, it takes the
interests of the capitalists as the basis of its analysis - i.e., it assumes
what it is supposed to explain. Similarly, competition is frequently brought
into the argument and explained in terms of external circumstances.
Political economy teaches us nothing about the extent to which these
external and apparently accidental circumstances are only the expression of
a necessary development. We have seen how exchange itself appears to
political economy as an accidental fact. The only wheels which political
economy sets in motion are greed, and the war of the avaricious -
Competition.
Precisely because political economy fails to grasp the interconnections
within the movement, it was possible to oppose, for example, the doctrine of
competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to
the doctrine of the guild, and the doctrine of the division of landed
property to the doctrine of the great estate; for competition, craft
freedom, and division of landed property were developed and conceived only
as accidental, deliberate, violent consequences of monopoly, of the guilds,
and of feudal property, and not as their necessary, inevitable, and natural
consequences.
We now have to grasp the essential connection between private property,
greed, the separation of labour, capital and landed property, exchange and
competition, value and the devaluation of man, monopoly, and competition,
etc. - the connection between this entire system of estrangement and the
money system.
We must avoid repeating the mistake of the political economist, who bases
his explanations on some imaginary primordial condition. Such a primordial
condition explains nothing. It simply pushes the question into the grey and
nebulous distance. It assumes as facts and events what it is supposed to
deduce - namely, the necessary relationships between two things, between,
for example, the division of labour and exchange. Similarly, theology
explains the origin of evil by the fall of Man - i.e., it assumes as a fact
in the form of history what it should explain.
We shall start out from a actual economic fact.
The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his
production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper
commodity the more commodities he produces. The devaluation of the human
world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of
things. Labour not only produces commodities; it also produces itself and
the workers as a commodity and it does so in the same proportion in which it
produces commodities in general.
This fact simply means that the object that labour produces, its product,
stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the
producer. The product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an
object, it is the objectification of labour. The realization of labour is
its objectification. In the sphere of political economy, this realization of
labour appears as a loss of reality for the worker[18], objectification as
loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as
alienation.[19]
So much does the realization of labour appear as loss of reality that the
worker loses his reality to the point of dying of starvation. So much does
objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of
the objects he needs most not only for life but also for work. Work itself
becomes an object which he can only obtain through an enormous effort and
with spasmodic interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object
appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer
can he possess and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of
capital.
All these consequences are contained in this characteristic, that the worker
is related to the product of labour as to an alien object. For it is clear
that, according to this premise, the more the worker exerts himself in his
work, the more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings
into being over against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become,
and the less they belong to him. It is the same in religion. The more man
puts into God, the less he retains within himself. The worker places his
life in the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, but to the object.
The greater his activity, therefore, the fewer objects the worker possesses.
What the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this
product, the less is he himself. The externalisation of the worker in his
product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external
existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to
him, and beings to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life which
he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien.