Marx's Estranged Labor

Karl Marx believed that there was an estrangement or alienation within the wage labor or capitalistic system. In his view, the wage laborer is estranged or alienated in four different ways. The laborer is estranged from the product he or she produces, the activity of producing said product, from his or her own essence, and from other wage laborers.

"He," the laborer, is estranged from the product he is producing. The object a laborer produces is the objectification or realization of the laborers work and efforts being put forth. Karl Marx believed that, in a political economy, the realization of labor is a loss of reality on the part of the laborer and bondage of the laborer to the product or object being produced. This causes an estrangement or alienation on the part of the wage laborer. The laborer is further estranged from the activities required of him or her while performing his or her job. If the laborer is estranged from the product of his or her labor then the act of producing is active alienation, according to Karl Marx.

The wage laborer is estranged from his or her own human essence, from his or her own self. Marx said that capitalism is the most negating of human nature; it is the most dehumanizing of systems. Wage labor is external and does not belong to the wage laborer in a capitalistic system. The laborer does not confirm or realize himself through his or her work thus causing estrangement. He or she does not fulfill his or her own physical existence through the tedious tasks of wage labor causing the laborer to separate from him or herself.

Karl Marx felt that wage laborers were estranged from each other. The capitalistic system incorporates competition in the job market, between the laborers, by creating a shortage of a small percentage of jobs. In the capitalistic system laborers must compete with each other to get these jobs and put up with horrid and impossible working conditions in order to keep their menial and sorely needed paychecks. In this system there is always someone else out there who is in need of your position and may take less pay then you to perform it.

Karl Marx felt that this estrangement of labor could be overcome if private property was transcended. Private property, according to Marx, is the reason for the entire system of wage labor capitalism. The bourgeoisie's need for wealth and material gain needed to create the wage labor system in order to support itself. He felt that the only way to transcend this phenomenon of private property was through the enactment of communism. Marx thought that communism would be able to get people back to their own "humanness" and in effect pull them away from things that were not essential to their nature, such as religion and the rule of the state. He felt that doing away with private property would in turn do away with the notion that an object or that money and capital gain could ever be of more importance than a living, breathing person. Karl Marx honestly did feel that enacting communism was the only way to abolish private property and rid all the citizens of society of inhuman activities, such as those relating to wage labor and the wage laborer.