Introduction to Alienation

I've used the concept of alienation in a couple of my recent articles without getting into what it actually means. Time to fix that! Today, I'll go over Marx's theory of alienation, as well as which parts of it I personally find useful. (Not all of it, for sure.)

Marx developed his theory of alienation to describe how, throughout a worker's participation in capitalist production, they become increasingly distant (alienated) from various aspects of their environment and self. Some of the things workers lose control over under capitalism include:

• What things they create
• When, how, and why they work
• The limitations of their bodies
• Their relationships with other people
• Their relationships with the natural world

Marx covered his theory of alienation most extensively in one of his earliest works: the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. The 1844 Manuscripts were written right around the time he met Engels, far before he published Capital (1867).

To explain alienation in more detail, I'm going to go over an excerpt from the first manuscript regarding the objectification and estrangement of labor. This is a pretty long piece, but I'll break it into sections and include my own summary. The words "alienation" and "estrangement" are used interchangeably throughout - they mean the same thing.

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

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 product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. 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.

So much does the labor’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.

All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. 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.

When engaging in production, workers must commodify their labor power. In other words, they sell their ability to work to capitalists as something separate from their whole selves. Workers do not direct their own work: they don't choose what they produce or what their creations are used for. They give up this autonomy and power to capitalists in exchange for a wage. This is the objectification of labor.

The more productive workers are, the more they produce their own labor as a commodity as well. The more they produce, the more of themselves they put into the process of production. The more they produce, the less autonomy they have over themselves. This loss of power workers experience is called the loss of realization.

When workers lose control of their labor power, they also become separated from the product of their labor. This is the core of the alienation of labor.

Let us now look more closely at the objectification, at the production of the worker; and in it at the estrangement, the loss of the object, of his product.

The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is realized, in which it is active, from which, and by means of which it produces.

But just as nature provides labor with [the] means of life in the sense that labor cannot live without objects on which to operate, on the other hand, it also provides the means of life in the more restricted sense, i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the worker himself.

Thus the more the worker by his labor appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in two respects: first, in that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labor – to be his labor’s means of life; and, second, in that it more and more ceases to be a means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker.

In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a servant of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labor, i.e., in that he receives work, and, secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. This enables him to exist, first as a worker; and second, as a physical subject. The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.

(According to the economic laws the estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the more powerful labor becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labor becomes, the less ingenious becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature’s slave.)

Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labor) and production. It is true that labor 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 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 intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.

The direct relationship of labor to its products is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the man of means to the objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence of this first relationship – and confirms it. We shall consider this other aspect later. When we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labor we are asking about the relationship of the worker to production.

Till now we have been considering the estrangement, the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects , i.e., the worker’s relationship to the products of his labor. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production, within the producing activity, itself. How could the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity, of production. If then the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labor is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labor itself.

Workers don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in the context of the natural world. But through the process of production, the relationship between workers and their environments becomes warped. Instead of having a balanced, mutually beneficial relationship, workers become focused on how they can extract the most utility from their environment. If there's an aspect of the environment that gets in the way of their productivity, the relationship becomes adversarial: the worker must overcome the obstacles to achieve full productivity. This perspective of nature - either as a resource to be exploited or as a rival to defeat - represents the workers' alienation from nature.

Ultimately, workers aren't the ones who benefit from their labor; capitalists are. (That's the main idea of capitalism.) So as workers produce more and more, they might be producing things of great value or beauty or utility, but they'll never be the ones to benefit the most from their own work.

So far we've considered workers' alienation from the objects of their labor and from their natural environments, but there's another dimension of alienation: the warped relationship between the worker and their own labor power.

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he 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. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for 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. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates 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.

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions.

We have considered the act of estranging practical human activity, labor, in two of its aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object exercising power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature, as an alien world inimically opposed to him. (2) The relation of labor to the act of production within the labor process. This relation is the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life – for what is life but activity? – as an activity which is turned against him, independent of him and not belonging to him. Here we have self-estrangement, as previously we had the estrangement of the thing.

Workers work to survive, but the labor they are paid for is not directly the labor of their survival. In this sense, workers become alienated not only from the products of their labor, but from the process of working itself. The experience of working can easily become boring, painful, or humiliating. Many workers only feel satisfied or truly alive when they're not engaging in work, despite work claiming the majority of their waking hours. But the more they work, the less time and energy they have to do what makes life feel worthwhile.

We have still a third aspect of estranged labor to deduce from the two already considered.

Man is a species-being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but – and this is only another way of expressing it – also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.

The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible – so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.

Species-being refers to the universal conceptualization of the human species: humanity. Species-being is what separates humans from other animals, but it also encompasses the relationship between humans and nature. The dynamics of capitalist production, in affecting every part of workers' lives and experiences, also affect workers' idea of species-being. Instead of viewing life in terms of humanity's collective good, capitalism forces workers to conceptualize themselves primarily as individuals inherently in competition with other individuals.

For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.

The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labor reverses the relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.

In creating a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.

It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.

Similarly, in degrading spontaneous, free activity to a means, estranged labor makes man’s species-life a means to his physical existence.

The consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by estrangement in such a way that species[-life] becomes for him a means.

Estranged labor turns thus:

(3) Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.

In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.

The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man [stands] to himself, is realized and expressed only in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.

Hence within the relationship of estranged labor each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the relationship in which he finds himself as a worker.

How does capitalist production affect a worker's perception of the purpose of life? It takes the idea of "working to live" - that is, as work being a means to access greater life-defining activities - and reverses it into the need to "live to work." Work itself becomes life-defining. More than that, everything a worker has access to (up to and including any concept of species-being) becomes a resource to be exploited for greater productivity.

Instead of becoming actualized (building a sense of self & interdependence with others), the worker becomes estranged from others as well as themselves. Everything becomes a competition - a relationship of domination requiring a winner and a loser. A worker's alienation from themselves becomes apparent in the nature of their relationships with other people.

We took our departure from a fact of political economy – the estrangement of the worker and his production. We have formulated this fact in conceptual terms as estranged, alienated labor. We have analyzed this concept – hence analyzing merely a fact of political economy.

Let us now see, further, how the concept of estranged, alienated labor must express and present itself in real life.

If the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong?

To a being other than myself.

Who is this being?

The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labor. No more was nature. And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labor and the more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the product to please these powers.

The alien being, to whom labor and the product of labor belongs, in whose service labor is done and for whose benefit the product of labor is provided, can only be man himself.

If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must give satisfaction and pleasure. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.

We must bear in mind the previous proposition that man’s relation to himself becomes for him objective and actual through his relation to the other man. Thus, if the product of his labor, his labor objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If he treats his own activity as an unfree activity, then he treats it as an activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion, and the yoke of another man.

Every self-estrangement of man, from himself and from nature, appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from himself. For this reason religious self-estrangement necessarily appears in the relationship of the layman to the priest, or again to a mediator, etc., since we are here dealing with the intellectual world. In the real practical world self-estrangement can only become manifest through the real practical relationship to other men. The medium through which estrangement takes place is itself practical. Thus through estranged labor man not only creates his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers that are alien and hostile to him; he also creates the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as he creates his own production as the loss of his reality, as his punishment; his own product as a loss, as a product not belonging to him; so he creates the domination of the person who does not produce over production and over the product. Just as he estranges his own activity from himself, so he confers upon the stranger an activity which is not his own.

We have until now considered this relationship only from the standpoint of the worker and later on we shall be considering it also from the standpoint of the non-worker.

Through estranged, alienated labor, then, the worker 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 is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.

Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labor, i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labor, of estranged life, of estranged man.

True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labor (of alienated life) in political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.

Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labor, and that on the other it is the means by which labor alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.

(This is the last bit I'll go over from the manuscript. Whew.)

So who stands to benefit from all this alienation? Not the divine, not nature, but other humans. The owning class, to be specific: the people alien to labor, the people pulling the strings of the workers and of capitalist production.

What is created through the process of alienated production is private property owned by the capitalists. As production continues, the private property produced in the last cycle is used to perpetuate and expand the future cycles of the process. So as private property is created as the product of alienated production, it also becomes a critical component in the continued alienation of workers.

In my articles on education and bedtime, I've used the concept of alienation mostly to refer to the division between workers' productive activities and their physical and intellectual desires/restrictions. The concept of alienation is central to understanding why so many workers continue to work past the point of destroying their bodies and/or mental health. In fact, alienation is central to understanding our entire hyperindividualized conceptualization of mental health in the first place.

We Don’t Need No Education

Public education is facing a reckoning in the US. As we’re experiencing its collapse, now is a great time to review from the beginning: what is it actually for?

antiparentchorui halim

In Defense of Bedtime Abolition

Taking the anarchist cliché a little too seriously.

antiparentchorui halim

Personally, I'm not super concerned about the idea of species-being, humanity, et cetera. I think an overfocus on what separates humanity from other living creatures (and the world at large) is at best unnecessary and at worst counterproductive. "Human exceptionalism" is so deeply tied to ideas of civilization and barbarity, which carry heavy racial connotations. The idea of civilization, and stages thereof, is heavily present throughout many of Marx and Engels' works. It's one of my least favorite aspects about them. I'd be hard-pressed to find any European white guys in the 1800s who didn't subscribe to the concepts of civilization and barbarity, though.

I'm also not convinced that the experience of alienation is specific to capitalism - or that it'll disappear once capitalism is overthrown. Sometimes work just sucks, and you have to do it even when you don't want to. I think that'll be true to an extent even in a socialist or communist society, though probably not to the same extent as it is under capitalism. This feeling of alienation is referred to as subjective alienation, while the material dynamic is objective alienation. I believe people will continue to experience some level of subjective alienation even as objective alienation is minimized.

I'm not even sure that objective alienation can be eliminated in a massive industrialized society! Even if production is socialized, every worker won't be working specifically towards their own survival. They'll be working on one aspect of socially necessary labor, the aggregate of which they will eventually benefit from. Will the experience of alienation be significantly different when the means of production are owned by the workers instead of the owning class? Does it matter? I don't know!

Alienation is the progressive denial of autonomy to workers over their labor, their selves, and their environment. This aspect of capitalist production heavily affects workers' experiences and relationships with the people and the world around them. It affects the way people conceptualize the purpose of their lives: working to live vs. living to work. Alienated capitalist production occurs for the benefit of the owning class.

On a personal level, I find some aspects of the theory of alienation much more useful than others. The denial of autonomy to workers is very important to understand in order to analyze most aspects of life under capitalism. However, Marx's invocation of "species-being" and his other attempts to universalize the experience of the working class feel overly reductive to me. While Marx describes alienation as specific to capitalist production, I'm not entirely sure that's true. However, all in all, it's a crucial concept to understand.

Estranged Labour, Marx, 1844

Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

Karl Marx