Theory of Karl Marx: Alienated Labor

Karl Marx's landmark work Alienated Labor is one of the single most important pieces of philosophical theory of the modern age, setting the stage for an entire way of thinking and government. In the opening paragraphs of Alienated Labor, Marx introduces one of the key points of his theory: a thesis he calls a "contemporary fact of political economy": adparams.getadspec('c_billboard1');

"The worker becomes poorer the richer is his production, the more it increases in power and scope. The worker becomes a commodity that is all the cheaper the more commodities he creates." (Marx 216)

Marx describes the product of labor as an alien being, independent of the worker who created it. Disconnected from the fruits of his labor in this way, the worker loses value as his production increases because the labor system views him as nothing more then another commodity. Marx stresses this point by exploring the ways in which increased work and productivity are detrimental to the worker, all due to the direct inverse relationship between the productivity of his labor and his intrinsic "value" as a labourer. "According to the laws of political economy the alienation of the worker is as follows: the more the worker produces the less he has to consume, the more values he creates the more valueless and worthless he becomes, the more formed the product the more deformed the worker..." (Marx 216)

Building on the alienation of the product discussed in the previous paragraphs, Marx now considers the alienation of the worker from the labor process itself. "How would the worker be able to affront the product of his work as an alien being if he did not alienate him in the act of production itself?" (Marx 217). Marx argues that if the product of the labor is externalization, the production itself must be "active externalization" as well. Labor must be alien to the worker, he states, because the labourer feels a stranger at work and would not be there were it not necessary. "How alien it really is," states Marx, "is very evident from the fact that when there is no physical or other compulsion, labor is avoided like the plague." (Marx 217). In further writings, Marx concludes that the only time the labourer feels "himself" is during his animal functions of eating, drinking, and procreating - further evidence to the worker being fully "alienated" from his labor.

Marx next moves on to discuss how alienated labor alienates man from himself. Marx argues that Man is only a conscious being because he has free activity - alienated labor, in objectifying his free activity as nothing more then a means to an end, reverses this relationship and thus alienates man from himself. Instead of free activity being the natural result of human life, alienated labor causes free activity (in the form of work) to become a necessary means for individual existence.

Marx describes the alienation of man from man as a direct result of alienated labor. "In general, the statement that man is alienated from his species-being means that one man is alienated from another as each of them is alienated from the human essence." (Marx 219). Marx states that, in a labor situation, men only measure their relationships with other men in the context of a labourer. adparams.getadspec('c_billboard1');

Finally, Marx discusses the "ownership" of the alienated and objectified collective "labor", concluding that the owner of this alien commodity can only be Man himself. The worker's labor itself is the private property of the capitalist or master; for he has been stripped of any right to call it his own by the wages he is paid. Marx concludes the selection by declaring that the whole system of alienated labor is dependant upon the relationship between the worker and his product - and all "slave relationships" are built upon this concept (Marx 220).

Citation:

Karl Marx, Alienated Labor in Continental Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by William McNeil & Karen S Feldman (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998)