Estranged Labor

A concept put forth by Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; this concept was formed on the basis of the accumulation of his earlier intellectual development and in the process of critically assimilating the theories of estrangement of his predecessors and contemporaries. And the relation between estranged labor and private property is the chief clue to understand Marx’s early thought. In Marx’s view, man is what he is by productive labor, and productive labor, or free and conscious activity, is the essence of mankind. Labor connects man with the world of objects. Man is an objective being, while man also possesses essential powers, including physical faculties, purpose, planning, and wisdom, etc. Through his labor, man transfers and imprints his own essential powers on the world of objects and creates an objective world that belongs to him. Labor as the species-being of man, the world of objects, the products of labor, and the objective activity should be a “manifestation” and the “confirmation” of the essential powers of man. In Marx’s view, labor should be an activity in which the subject of labor dynamically creates objects for its own realization, and should embody the essence of the working subject, but under the conditions of private property, labor has become an activity that does not depend on the working subject, and in turn dominates and enslaves the working subject, and labor has assumed an estranged nature.

As early as the time of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx was very concerned about the conditions of life of poor peasants and workers. He has conducted field research, has seen the antagonism between capital and labor and has conducted an economic analysis of this antagonism. Dissatisfied with the simplified and abstract understanding of labor in political economy, Marx has analyzed the social nature of labor on the basis of critically drawing on Feuerbach’s thought of “the estrangement of the nature of man” and put forth his concept of “estranged labor”, and revealed the antagonistic relation between the worker and the product of his labor and labor itself under the conditions of private property, the self-estrangement of the worker in capitalist society, and the sublation and the overcoming of estrangement in the ideal future communist society.

Marx investigated economic estrangement from political estrangement and eventually found that the root cause of laborers’ poverty lies in the estrangement of labor. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx analyzed the relationship between estranged labor and private property from the existing economic facts and discussed the concrete manifestations of estranged labor as: (1) The result of labor is estranged from labor. It goes without saying that the results of labor should be the materialization or objectification of labor, but in capitalist society, the world of objects is owned by capitalists, and the workers do not possess the right to relate to the world of objects “in a universal and free manner”, they possess only the right to sell their labor-power. In capitalist society, the worker is not only separated from the object of his labor, but is also in a state of estrangement from the product of his own labor. “The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.” The worker becomes all the poorer the more goods he produces; the worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. (2) Labor itself is estranged from the worker. The worker does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. Further, now, labor is not voluntary labor but coerced, forced one. Labor does not appear as an end, but only as a means to satisfy various needs other than labor. Lastly, the external character of labor in relation to the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another, or to be precise, the worker acts as a “living ferment” for the valorization of the capitalist’s value. “But the putting of labor-power into action—i.e., the work—is the active expression of the worker’s own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labor itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another. The product of his activity, therefore, is not the aim of his activity.” (3) The worker is estranged from his species-being. Marx held that free and conscious labor is man’s “species-character” and the essential difference between man and animal. Man has wants of mind, their own value and dignity. The capitalist passes private property into capital and takes hold of the world of objects, including the worker’s means of life and the means of production as well as his products of labor. Under the capitalist system, everything is transformed into commodities, including the labor of the worker. The purpose of the labor of the worker is not to satisfy the needs for the realization of the free and conscious “species”-being, but becomes a means to his physical existence, while man’s animal-like instincts of eating, drinking, and procreation became the chief goal that people seek. (4) The result created by the above three facts is the estrangement of man from man. In the process of material production, the laborer not only produces products in opposition to himself but also produces the relationship to this labor of a man alien to labor and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labor creates the relation to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labor). Private property, in Marx’s view, is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself. It embraces both relations—the relation of the worker to work and to the product of his labor and to the non-worker, and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product of his labor. Marx drew the conclusion of the denial of private property, and put forth that communism is the positive sublation (“Aufhebung”) of private property as human self-estrangement, the return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being.

Marx’s views at that time had still obvious traces of Feuerbachian humanism, which was mainly reflected in his acceptance of Feuerbach’s concept of “species-being”, holding that actual man, estranged man, “is not yet a real species-being”, and comprehended human emancipation as “real appropriation of the human essence”, the genuine resolution of the contradiction between “existence and essence”, between “the individual and the species”, and comprehended communism as “the positive sublation of human self-estrangement”. But in the early period of the development of Marx’s thoughts, the concept of estrangement held an important position, pushing Marx to deepen his knowledge of the relations of capitalist society and to approach the materialist conception of history. After the formation of historical materialism, Marx and Engels studied and explained human society and its historical development with the viewpoint and method of historical materialism, to reveal the contradictions and the laws of development of capitalist society, and to account for some contradictory phenomena of society by using “estrangement” as “a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers”. In his works such as the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 and Capital, Marx sometimes used the concept of estrangement, but instead of using it to interpret phenomena such as economy, politics, religion, and consciousness, as in the early days, he used this concept in economic research to describe some economic phenomena, illustrate the relation of capital to wage-labor, and the historically transitory nature of the capitalist mode of production. Marx at this time gave play to his early though of estranged labor, but he had completely overcome the influence of Feuerbachian humanism, and estrangement was no longer the central concept of his doctrine.