Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Estranged Labor: Karl Marx on Alienation

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Apr 4, 2020 In this solo episode, Breht breaks down Karl Marx’s powerful concept of alienation from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. He walks listeners through the four types of alienation Marx identified—alienation from the product, the labor process, our human essence, and from each other—and bring them crashing into the present with real, relatable examples from contemporary working-class life. From soul-crushing jobs to the feeling of life slipping through your fingers, we connect Marx’s 19th-century analysis to the 21st-century reality of exploitation and isolation under capitalism. In the process, Breht demonstrates how alienation is rooted in private property and capitalist social relations and explicates Marx's concept of species-being: our natural human capacity for conscious, creative, purposeful activity—which is reduced to a mere means of survival under capitalism, rather than a free expression of our humanity. This is Marxism made urgent, raw, relatable, and personal. Also: Happy International Worker's Day! Listen to the full Red Menace episode (from which this segment was extracted) here:  https://redmenace.libsyn.com/economic-and-philosophic-manuscripts-of-1844-karl-marx ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Now let's move on to what this text is really known for, which is the articulation of Marx's theory of alienation. Let's get into it. So Marx opens this section showing how he in the previous chapters has proceeded entirely from the premises of the political economists of his time, like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, etc. and through their own premises and arguments has shown, quote, that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities, that the wretchedness of the worker is an inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production, that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a most terrible form, and that finally the distinction between capitalist and landlord, like that between, the tiller of the soil and the factory worker disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes, property

owners and property-less workers, end quote. He then goes on to make a profound claim that foreshadows so much of what is to come in the tradition of Marxism. He says, quote, political economy proceeds from the fact of private property. It does not

explain it to us. In other words, the work of people like Smith and Ricardo are products of capitalism, not explanations of how it actually operates or how it arises. In effect, like so much of the economics of our own time, it takes the dominant system as given and then works backwards to justify it. When you walk into an Econ 101 class today, you are walking into a class that presupposes the truth of capitalism,

not a class that seeks to really understand it from an objective point of view, much less challenge it. As Mark says, political economy expresses in general abstract, formulas, the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes four laws. It does not comprehend these laws, i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy throws no light on the cause of the division between labor and capital and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalist to be the ultimate cause,

i.e. it takes for granted what is supposed to explain. End quote. Political economists do for capitalism what the theologian does when he explains the origin of evil in the world by recounting the story of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. Namely, he assumes as a historical fact what is supposed to be explained. Arguing that evil came into the world by an historical act of evil explains nothing at all about the origins of evil. It merely pushes the question back.

into what Marx calls a gray nebulous distance. Marx is determined, therefore, to proceed from actual economic facts. One fact, for instance, is that the worker becomes poor, the more wealth he produces. In our own times, we could say something like, even though the productivity of the working class has risen dramatically over the last 40 years, real wages have stagnated. In effect, we are producing more than ever, but are poorer than we were before. Marx goes on, quote, 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. It is the objectification.

of labor end quote labor's ultimate realization then is its objectification into the form of a commodity which labor itself doesn't control it is under these conditions that the products which labor creates appear as a loss of realization something akin to the opposite of self-actualization it may help to think about all of this through an example so let's say before the rise of capitalism you were an artisan shoemaker in a village from top to buy bottom, you created every aspect of the shoe. And the final product was the realization of your labor, a fully formed shoe that either yourself or someone else could use. Since you created that shoe, you controlled it. You decided who to give it to in exchange for how much. The full value

of the shoe and the labor that went into it was returned to you. And you could then take that value and go buy something else that you needed like food, medicine, etc. Now imagine that same scenario under capitalism. Instead of making the full shoe, you are now on an assembly line where your job all day is to glue soles onto the bottom of countless shoes each day, and then pass it on down the line to the next person who would skim the excess glue off, and then pass it down to the next person who would put the shoe strings in it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The final product is still a shoe, but it is not yours anymore.

It is the owner of the shoe factory who sits up in his office and watches the assembly line from afar. It is the owner who then decides how much to sell the shoe for on the market. Once the shoe is sold, the owner of the factory pays you and the other workers a fraction of what he got in exchange for selling that shoe and pockets the rest as his own personal profit. Your skill set is no longer making shoes. It's simply applying glue to one piece of an endless line of shoes all day. In fact, you no longer know how to make an entire shoe, and you certainly don't have the capital to go off and start your own shoe business even if you did, since the money you make from gluing soles onto shoes is just enough for dinner and rent.

Tomorrow you'll have to come back so you can eat again. In that context, your labor is something very different than it was in the former context. And it is in this way that Mark says the worker becomes estranged or alienated from the product of their labor. The worker loses the object they helped create, and in the process has become. a commodity themselves, just like the shoe, something to be bought and sold, totally subject to the market's demands. The more souls he glues onto the shoes, the fewer shoes he himself can own, or put a different way, the more he recreates the conditions of his own exploitation, the more he falls under the domination of his real product, capital. Marks goes on to talk about

workers' relationship to nature under these conditions. He argues that nothing can be created without nature, for it is the natural world that provides the raw material upon which labor is enacted as well as the means for physical sustenance itself. Labor cannot live without objects on which to operate, and it also cannot live without the sustenance afforded to it by the natural world in the form of food and water. Under capitalism, the worker is given an object of labor in the form of receiving work from a capitalist, and then is given a means of sustenance in the form of a wage by that capitalist. In both cases, he is alienated from direct engagement with nature, cut off from his own life force. Only by selling his labor to a capitalist can he maintain himself as a physical

being. And by maintaining himself as a physical being, he continues to exist as a worker. He is now alienated not only from the product of his labor, but also from nature itself. Moreover, by being reduced to a worker, alienated from what he creates and what created him, he becomes alienated. from himself. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Mark's to this point has only shown methodically how the worker is alienated from the product of their labor. Now he aims to walk us through an explanation

of how the worker becomes alienated from the activity of his work itself. Mark says, quote, 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 energies,

but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker, therefore, only feels himself outside his work, and in his work he 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 the 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." End quote. This argument can be immediately recognized by any of us in the working class. We only feel at home when we are not at work, and when we are at work, we do not feel at home. Our labor is not voluntary, and if you doubt

that fact, ask yourself this question. If you are any working person that you know hit the lottery tomorrow. What is the first thing that you or they would do? Quit your job. It's such an obvious response and we have all heard it a million times. The last thing any of us would do the day after hitting the lottery is clock into our shitty job. And that is what Marx means here when he says our labor is not voluntary but coerced. It is forced labor. The moment the compulsion to earn a living is lifted, we do shun labor like the plague, do we not? And when we are at work, with no hope of winning the lottery, we often thinking about? When we will get off work. On the shittiest days, as we are slogging through our miserable jobs, our couch at home appears in our mind as a paradise we wish we could escape

back to. In the mornings, as we get up to the violent sounds of our alarm clocks, our beds become paradise lost. And we wish so deeply we could stay wrapped up in our blankets, forcing our bodies out of bed with resentment exploding in our bones. Now compare that to your alarm going off on the first day of a vacation. You welcome the sound and hop out of bed with excitement. It's not the bed itself that's the issue. It's the coercion or non-coercion from which we are moved to climb out of it that matters. Marks is showing us how these feelings and thoughts we all have all the time are indicative of our own estrangement and alienation from our own lives and from the activity we are forced to engage in just to make ends meet. It's as true for us today as it was for workers

200 years ago. As a result of this, Mark says, the worker no longer feels himself to be freely active in any activity other than his animal functions, eating, drinking, having sex, etc. I for one have engaged in all of these activities on the clock, eating without clocking out, drinking alcohol on the clock to make the day less shitty, and even having sex on the clock a few times, which I have to say is quite the thrill and genuinely made me feel as if I was taking back some of the time stolen from me. To all of that, though, I would add taking a shit. For what is one of the most common ways we kill time at our soul-crushing jobs and show a tiny flicker of resistance to this whole damn system, if not by going into the bathroom and extending it

as long as we can? I myself hold a personal record, which I'm very proud of, of once taking a two-hour shit on the clock, feeling like I was finally getting a leg up on the bastards, and reveling and seeing how long I can milk the clock without getting caught. The perversity of this, Mark says, lies in the fact that we only feel human in our animal functions, and we feel like animals in our human functions. What is animal becomes human, and what is human becomes animal? How could any of us not find the state of affairs deeply alienating? After having laid out how workers are alienated from the product of their labor and the activity of their labor, Marx turns towards the sense of alienation which humans have towards themselves under capitalism. And to do this, Marx articulates his

famous concept of species being. Admittedly, it is a fairly difficult concept to get a good grasp of, especially if you are only using this text to do it, but I will do my best to explain what he means here. Species being for Marx is our nature as homo sapiens, and it is what distinguishes us from other animals on earth. He explains that animals, although members of a species, don't experience their lives as such. They are not conscious of themselves as a member of a species, but exist only in the immediacy of their individual lives. A bear, for example, does not conceptualize itself as a member of the bear species, because it doesn't have the capacity for conscious reflections that humans have. It merely experiences its own individual existence

without any reference to bears outside itself, unless those bears are in its immediate awareness, be they at its cubs or a possible mate, or a bear of the same sex invading. its territory, et cetera. Human beings, on the other hand, have the capacity for abstract thought and self-consciousness, which allows us to understand ourselves as a part of humanity broadly. We do not see ourselves merely as individuals, but as members of our broader species, both historically and presently. In other words, we understand ourselves universally, and can take our species and others

as objects of conscious thought. The life activity of any animal, Marx goes on to talk about, is simply what that animal does, how it acts on the external world in order to maintain its physical existence. The whole character of a species, Mark says, is contained in the character of its life activity. The animal is always just its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. A bird is what a bird does. It flies. It makes nests. It catches worms. It feeds its chicks, etc. There is no separation between its life activity and itself. Human beings on the other hand, make our life activity the object of our conscious thoughts. We can stand back

from what we do and reflect on it. This ability to become conscious of our own life activity, to step back from it and ponder it in the abstract, is what makes us different from all other animals on earth. And it is this capacity that Mark says makes us into a species being. Because of this wonderful ability, we are not strictly determined in our behavior like animals are. We have some freedom. Animals produce things like beaver dams and ant colonies and birds nests, but they produce them only in pursuit of the immediate needs of themselves and their offspring. Humans, Mark says, produce universally. We produce even when we are free from immediate physical need. We make art. We engage in science. We come up with philosophy. We organize into political movements. We build cities and

airplanes. We rocket ourselves to the moon and back, etc. It is this productive activity upon the objective world through which we prove ourselves to be a species being. This free and productive activity is our life activity. We duplicate ourselves in our consciousness and also actively out in reality, and we see ourselves in a world that we have created. But where does alienation come in here? Well, Marx makes it very clear. When we are torn away from the things we create, when we are alienated from the products of our productive activity, we are separated from our own nature as freely and spontaneously creative creatures. Mark says it changes for us the life of the species into a means of individual life, and turns

individual life into the purpose of our species. In other words, it flips the whole situation on its head. Instead of consciously and freely creating our world together as an end in and of itself, our life activity becomes degraded to a mere means to our individual existence, to a mere means by which we get a wage. Spontaneous and free activity, which constitutes our very nature as human beings, is replaced with monotonous, repetitive, and unfree activity in pursuit of a wage which we then turn into food, clothes, and shelter.

In other words, we become alienated from our own nature. We become strangers to ourselves. Mark says, quote, a strange labor turns man's species being 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 or human aspect, end quote. Okay, let's take a step back and reflect on the argument about alienation thus far. At this point, Marx has started from the brute economic fact

that we as workers are alienated from the products that we create, as I explained using the example of a shoemaker. From that empirical fact, Marx deduced that we are therefore alienated, from the activity of our labor, as I explained using the examples of extending bathroom breaks. From there, Marx advances the claim of humans as species beings to argue that given the fact that we are alienated from our productive activity, we are, by definition, alienated from ourselves, or our nature as human beings. This is an unbroken chain of argumentation, deducing truths from the initial empirical fact of our

estrangement from what we create under capitalism. Now, having caught up, Marx makes his final move. He argues that the immediate consequence of the fact that we are estranged from our labor, our life activity, and from our species being, is the estrangement or alienation from other people. What applies to our relationship to what we create, our relationship to our work, and our relationship to ourselves also holds of our relationship to other human beings. After all, if we are all alienated from our natures, then we are almost by definition, alienated from one another. By turning our species being into an individual pursuit of our own

individual means of sustenance, we turn away from each other. We stop viewing one another as fellow members of our species, and we begin to see them in terms of the relations of production which hold under capitalism. The other becomes a co-worker, a boss, an employee, a competitor, and ceases to be a part of ourselves, of our common nature. After laying out the four types of alienation, the worker under capitalism experiences, Marx turns to wondering how this fact of alienated labor expresses and presents itself in real life. He asks, quote, if the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom then does it belong? And he answers, to a being other than myself. So who is this being? Well, the alien being, to whom labor and the products of

labor belong, the being in whose service labor is done and for whose benefit the product of labor is provided can only be man himself. For if the product of labor does not belong to the worker, it must belong to some person other than the worker. If the worker's activity is a torment to him, it must give satisfaction and pleasure to someone else, or else why would we be forced to do it? If our activity is unfree and coerced, it must be made unfree and coerced by someone. That someone else is the capitalist, and private property is therefore the product, the result, and the necessary consequence of alienated labor. By starting his analysis, not from a just-so story made up by the political economists, but from the actual empirical fact of alienated labor, the logic

leads inexorably to the relations of production where someone is alienated from their labor and someone else benefits from this alienation, which in turn is shown to be rooted in the existence of private property. In actual fact, Marx argues that alienated labor is the necessary prerequisite for private property, which then turns around and reproduces alienation. In summary, whereas the political economists of Marx's time root private property in some fanciful story like John Locke's apple orchard or some other thought experiment, Marx starts with an empirical economic fact and follows a series of logical deduction. to arrive at the cause of private property, or alienation.

Marx wraps up this section with this quote. We now understand that political economy has merely formulated the laws of alienated labor. We also understand that wages and private property are identical. The wage is but a necessary consequence of labor's alienation. Labor does not appear as an end in itself, but as the source. servant of the wage. An enforced increase of wages would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labor their human status and dignity.

Wages are a direct consequence of alienated labor, and an alienated labor is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other. from the relationship of a strange labor to private property, it follows that the emancipation of society from private property is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers. Not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation. And it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production.

And all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation. End quote. We'll be able to be able to be.