Karl Marx- Theory of Alienation

Introduction
Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883), was a famous German economist and social
philosopher of the 19th century. He was a brilliant agitator and polemicist, a profound
economist, a great sociologist, an incomparable historian and a revolutionary who
undertook a critical analysis of capitalist society, propounded materialist interpretation
of history and showed the way for transition to communism. Marx and his close friend
Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) sought to replace utopian socialism by scientific socialism
for the analysis of social problems and finding their solution. The solution came in the
form of an elaborate philosophy which is now recognized as Marxism. His most
important works, apart from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
include: Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, The Poverty of Philosophy, The Class
Struggle in France and A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. One of the
most original contributions of Marx is his Theory of Alienation. This is contained in his
early work –Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts –which was written in 1843. Marx,
in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), severely criticized the capitalist
system which deformed the productive activity of man and caused his alienation in
several ways. Under capitalism, labor suffers from four types of alienation: (a) alienates
from his own product; (b) alienates from his work; (c) alienates from other workers; and
(d) alienates from himself.

Theory of Alienation
Marx defined human freedom as absence of man’s alienated condition. For him,
alienation and freedom were historical negation. Man expresses his humanity through
productive labor which can be of economic, social, artistic, literary or scientific nature.
Man as a subject transforms the material objects around him to express his creative
capacities. In capitalist society, man’s productive activity is deformed in such a way as to
cause his alienation and estrangement. Marx’s theory of alienation is derived directly
from Hegel, though its roots go much earlier. In his early writings, Marx discussed
several forms of alienation starting from religious alienation to philosophical, political,
and economic categories of alienation. As labor was man’s most significant activity,
economic aspects of alienation was regarded by Marx as more important than its
ideological and political aspects.
In a society of alienation the relationship of a man with other men is not that of a
human being to his fellow human beings but that of a servant to his masters, of an
exploited man to his exploiter, of a petitioner to a man of privilege, of a subordinate to
his boss, and so forth. The worker’s alienation is the most extreme form of alienation
because it is the very nature of his activity. For the non-workers, the master, the owner,
the idler, the priest, the philosopher, the general or the ruler, alienation is not an
activity but a condition. In his ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’, Marx mentioned
four aspects of estrangement: alienation from the product of work, from the work itself,
from one’s fellow beings and from human species-life. Estrangements or alienation is a
radical loss of freedom because it is the negation of free genuinely human creative
activity.
In the first place, the worker in the capitalist mode of production does not own and
control the products of his own labor. The proletarian does not use the wealth which he
creates. Thus, he is alienated from his own product. The life, which he has given to the
object, sets itself against him as an alien force. The labor himself becomes a commodity
whose value is equal to the bare means of his subsistence. The capitalist, who purchases
the labor-power of the proletarian, is the real owner of the wealth which he creates.
Secondly, Marx affirms that the alien relationship of the worker to the product of his
labor is only a manifestation of the alienated nature of the productive activity itself. The
laborer, who sells his labor-power for a wage, produces commodities under orders from
the capitalist. His work is, therefore, neither free nor voluntary because he does not
satisfy any creative urge of his own by working in a factory owned and managed by his
bourgeois employer. The bourgeois institution of private property reduces him to the
status of wage-slave.
Thirdly, alienated labor results in the estrangement of the proletarian from his fellow-
beings. It results in the hostility between the employed and unemployed workers who
look upon each other as alien forces. The worker similarly sees in the manager and the
proprietor alien forces profiting from his alienated work. The basis of genuine social
relation is thus totally destroyed in capitalism.
Fourthly, the above three aspects of man’s alienation produce his estrangements from
his species-life. Man is alienated from himself because the realm of necessity dominates
his life and reduces him to the level of animal existence, leaving no room for the taste of
literature, art and cultural heritage. Thus, capitalism subordinates all human faculties
and qualities to the conditions created by the private ownership of capital and property.
The members of the proletariat were obviously the most alienated section of capitalist
society. Marx, however, applied the concept of alienation to all social classes including
capitalists. In the ‘Holy Family’, Marx observed, “The propertied class and the class of
the proletariat represent the same human self-alienation. But the former feels
comfortable and confirmed in this own power and possessing in it the semblance of a
human existence. The latter feels itself ruined in this alienation and sees in it, its
impotence and the actuality of an inhuman existence. The capitalist himself, no less
than the worker becomes a slave to the tyrannical rule of money. The capitalist, who
rides on the back of the proletariat, also leads an alienated life because he is also not
personally engaged in any creative work and is a victim of the fetishization of the
commodities. In a society based on unfreedom, the slave and his enslaver are equally
unfree.
Marx believed that this condition of man’s alienation can be fully overcome under
communism which abolishes commodity production. In communism, there will be no
private property and, therefore, no alienated labor. Economic planning will reverse the
existing domination of the product over the worker and distribution will be done
according to the need and thus will remove the worker’s existing concern for physical
survival. The division existing under capitalism will be replaced by a new system of
assigning work through which an individual can engage himself in several types of
productive and creative activity according to his own aptitude and choice. In capitalist
society, the working class cannot hope to achieve its freedom because if cannot put an
end to the phenomenon of alienation without abolishing the capitalist method of
production itself.

Conclusion
Marx was a revolutionary and a socialist, but above all he was a humanist who believed
in genuine emancipation and liberation of human beings. He registered protest against
every kind of domination. True that many of his predictions did not materialize, but
Marx’s genius lay not merely in his ability to predict, but in the new modes of thinking
about economic and political issues. His dream of creating a classless society beyond
conflict and based on equality remained illusory. However, his critique of exploitation
and alienation, and the hope of creating a truly emancipated society that would allow
the full flowering of human creativity, would continue to be a starting point of any
Utopian project.