MARX'S THEORY OF ALIENATION

In Marx's early writings, alienation (Entfremdung or Entäusserung in the German) refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to antagonism between things that are properly in harmony. In the concept's most important use, it refers to the alienation of people from aspects of their "human nature" (Gattungswesen, usually translated as 'species-essence' or 'species-being'). Marx believes that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism. His theory relies on Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841), which argues that the idea of God has alienated the characteristics of the human being. Stirner would take the analysis further in The Ego and Its Own (1844), declaring that even 'humanity' is an alienating ideal for the individual, but Marx criticized him in The German Ideology (1845). Marx latter abandoned the concept and substituted to it the concept of commodity fetishism, introduced in the opening chapter of Das Kapital (1867).

1 Clarifying Marx's concept of alienation
2 Types of alienation - the different ways in which people are alienated
- 2.1 Alienation in the labour process
3 The significance of alienation in Marx's thought
4 Further reading
- 4.1 Secondary literature
5 See also

Clarifying Marx's concept of alienation

While alienation can be something that people experience, for someone to be alienated in Marx's sense it isn't necessary for them to believe or feel that they are alienated. 'Alienation' for Marx describes objective features of a person's situation in capitalism. However, this doesn't mean that the objective fact of alienation will not have implications for a person's subjective feelings and experience. For an illustration of this, see the below section on Alienation and class.

Above, it was said that alienation principally refers to some estrangement (Entfremdung) between persons and their human nature. When people's ‘being does not correspond to their essence’ they are alienated, while actualisation (its opposite) is ‘the extent to which the human being as species being, as a human being, has become himself and grasped himself’. (For references to these usages in Marx's work, see Karl Marx by Allen Wood, second edition, p21.)

Given this, we need to understand something more about Marx's conception of human nature. Some aspects of human nature are shared with non-human animals, such as the need for food, drink and rest. Alienation has little to do with these. Rather, it has to do with those elements of human nature which are uniquely human. Marx says that characteristically, ‘the human being makes his own species his object’. This means that, as humans, we consciously make ourselves, and our lives, the objective of our action. That is, we make plans about how we want our lives to go, and try to carry them out. Therefore, one aspect of alienation is powerlessness: when we are not in control of our own life's activity. This is most especially a problem in the arena of productive activity. Marx says that in this respect, 'as individuals express their life, so they are'. He means that what we do makes us what we are. If production, which Marx believes is our most essential activity, is controlled and unfree, so will we be.

Alienation is also caught up with the perceived monotony of the work of the proletarian under the capitalist division of labour. We can see how, if we were truly able to make our lives our own object we would be able to carry out whatever variety of activity we wanted. In The German Ideology Marx says that 'the calling, vocation and task of human beings is to develop themselves and all their capacities in a manifold way’.

Marx sees alienation as caught up with individualism, and actualisation with community (Gemeinwesen). Thus, he says that to produce is 'immediately in the expression of my life to have created your expression your life, and therefore to have immediately confirmed and actualised in my individual activity my true essence, my human, my communal essence' (Comment on James Mill). We can see here an affirmation of the important place of productive activity in human life and also of the essentially collective nature of both humanity and productive activity.

Types of alienation - the different ways in which people are alienated

Alienation in the labour process

Marx argues that alienation in capitalist societies is due to the fact that in work, we each contribute to the common wealth, but can only express this fundamentally social aspect of ourselves through a production system that is not social but privately owned, for which we function as instruments, not as social beings:

'Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.'" (Comment on James Mill)

In this work, written in 1844, Marx attempts to show how alienation arises from private labour, from commodity production:

'Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition: My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life.' (Comment on James Mill)

The significance of alienation in Marx's thought

Alienation - a concept from Hegel and Feuerbach

Alienation can be seen as a foundational claim in Marxist theory. Hegel described a succession of historic stages in the human Geist or Spirit, by which that Spirit progresses towards perfect self-understanding and away from ignorance. In Marx's reaction to Hegel, these two idealist poles are replaced with materialist categories: spiritual ignorance becomes alienation, and the transcendent end of history becomes man's realisation of his species-being (i.e., our triumph over alienation; the establishment of an objectively better society). This teleological reading of Marx, which was supported in particular by Alexandre Kojève before World War II, has been criticized by Louis Althusser, in particular in his latter writings concerning "random materialism" (matérialisme aléatoire). Althusser claimed that this reading of Marx, which made of the proletariat the subject of history (as in Georg Lukacs' famous History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923 after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic), was in fact tainted by Hegel's idealism and, more generally, by the "philosophy of the subject" in force since five centuries, which was criticized as none others than the "bourgeois ideology of philosophy".

Alienation and Marx's theory of history

In The German Ideology Marx writes that 'things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence' [1]. In other words, Marx seems to think that, while humans do have a need for self-activity (self-actualisation, the opposite of alienation), this will be of secondary historical relevance. This is because he thinks that capitalism will increase the immiseration of the proletariat so rapidly that they will be forced to make the social revolution just to stay alive - they probably wouldn't even get to the point of worrying that much about self-activity. This doesn't mean, though, that tendencies against alienation only manifest themselves once other needs are amply met, only that they are of reduced importance. The work of Raya Dunayevskaya and others in the tradition of Marxist humanism drew attention to manifestations of the desire for self-activity even among workers struggling for more basic goals.

Alienation and class

In this passage, from The Holy Family, Marx says that capitalists and proletarians are equally alienated, but experience their alienation in different ways:

The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it. (Chapter 4 of The Holy Family- see under Critical Comment No. 2)

MARX'S THEORY OF ALIENATION

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