Estrangement

A state of antagonism between the object and the subject, i.e., the object produced by the subject in its practical activity is divorced from the subject and becomes an alien force outside it, which in turn controls, dominates and rules over the subject. In different historical periods, scholars have interpreted the meaning of estrangement differently and applied it to different fields.

The concept of estrangement acquired a rich content in thinkers preceding Marx. Estrangement (Entfremdung) first appeared in Latin and had meanings such as separation, transfer, relinquishing, domination by alien forces, leaving to the control of others, etc. Although the phenomenon of estrangement appeared as early as the end of primitive society, the theory of estrangement began to take shape only with modern thinkers after the Renaissance, when thinkers such as Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau used the category of estrangement in the fields of jurisprudence and political science to illustrate the transfer and cession of rights. The classical German philosopher Hegel incorporated the concept of estrangement into his philosophical system and used it as a philosophical concept, holding that estrangement is an evolutionary process from the “absolute Idea” to nature, and that nature is the estrangement that occurs following the logical development of the absolute Idea through a series of stages. Hegel’s thought of estrangement contained the dialectical elements of bifurcation (or diremtion, “Entzweiung”) and contradictory development, but his reduction of nature to the estrangement and alienation of the “absolute Idea” was idealistic. Dissatisfied with religion and Hegelian philosophy, in his critique of religious theology, Feuerbach drew on Hegel’s concept of estrangement and inherited the historically abstract tradition of humanism. He put forth that “God is man’s essence estranged from man”, that is to say, it was not God who created man, but man who created God, and that man splits his true essence from man himself into God, and in turn sets in antithesis to man. But he acknowledged the existence of an abstract and immutable essence of man. He did not realize the social nature of the essence of man and failed to strip off the fetters of the idealist conception of history.

Marx and Engels have critically inherited the thoughts of estrangement of their predecessors, especially those of Hegel and Feuerbach. Based on the scientific conception of practice, they correctly solved the relation of dialectical unity of subject and object, theory and practice, and applied it to the analysis of political and economic phenomena, thus giving a brand-new content to the concept of estrangement. The real significance of Marx and Engels’ concept of estrangement lies in the profound revelation of the relation between the activity of the human subject and the products of his activity and man himself. In their view, the domination of the activity of the human subject and its products as an alien power over the subject is the most fundamental meaning of the concept of estrangement.

In 1844, Marx “went from Hegel for Feuerbach”. In his article in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, he used the concept of estrangement in the sense of Feuerbach’s philosophy and put forth the concepts of political estrangement and human self-estrangement. He held that political estrangement separated secular life into political life and civil life and that the political state is the estranged form of civil society. He held that it is the immediate task of philosophy to unmask the unholy self-estrangement once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Along with his study of political economy, Marx discovered that the root cause of the polar opposition between the lives of the bourgeois and proletarians lies in the moment of the productive labor and the separation of labor from the means of labor. In bourgeois political economy labor occurs only in the form of activity as a source of livelihood. Marx put forth the new concept of “estranged labor” by starting out from the premise that labor is the free and conscious “species”-being of man. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he explained the thought of estranged labor in a concentrated manner and analyzed the four aspects of estranged labor. He pointed out that estranged labor is a distortion of the nature of labor and thus of human essence, and tried to explain the relation between capital and wage-labor through estranged labor. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels, through an examination of the process of development of labor, found that the division of labor was an important factor for the emergence of private property. Private property is not merely a logical result of estrangement, but is illustrated from the historical phenomenon of the division of labor. With the development of the productive forces, the abolition of the forced division of labor and the expansion of universal intercourse, estrangement and private property will be sublated as historical phenomena.

In the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 and Capital, Marx took the capitalist relations of production as his object of inquiry on the basis of historical materialism, and re-analyzed the estranged labor of laborers in his analysis of capitalist production. Marx held that under the capitalist system, everything created by the labor of the worker turns to a force alien to the laborer, and becomes a power of the capitalists to dominate workers. The relationship of capital places the laborer in a state of utter indifference and estrangement vis-à-vis the means incorporating his labor. Not only is labor estranged from man, but because of the contradiction between private and social labor, the exchange of labor that should have taken place between men instead assumes the form of a commodity of exchanged products, which is resolved by the purchase and sale of the products of labor. That is to say, “the social characteristics of men’s own labor are reflected back to them as objective characteristics inherent in the products of their labor, as quasi-physical properties of these things, and that therefore also the social relation of the producers to the aggregate labor is reflected as a social relation of objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers.” Once this form of commodity is formed, people bow down to it. “It is the specific social relation of the people themselves which assumes for them, as in an optical illusion, the form of a relation of things.” As a typical form of appearance of estrangement, the essence of commodity fetish is to conceal the real relationship of man to man with the fantastic relation between things.

Marx held that the emergence and the evolution of estrangement have a historical necessity. Moreover, it is not an eternal phenomenon and will eventually be abolished with the withering-away of private property and classes and the abolition of the old social division of labor.