It produces intelligence, but for the worker, stupidity, ignorance. It produces beauty, but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back into barbarous types of labor and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces mansions, but for the worker, shacks. It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things, but for the worker it produces poverty. Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor by not considering the direct relationship between the worker(labor) and production. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers’ objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it appropriation as estrangement, as alienation Labor’s realization is its objectification. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. 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 worker becomes an ever-cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. – the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system. Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labor, capital and landed property the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. Political economy starts with the fact of private property it does not explain it to us. We have shown 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 in 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 that, eventually, the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and property-less workers. We have accepted its language and its laws. We have proceeded from the premises of political economy.
Take note of the various aspects of alienation discussed by Marx. Marx uses the word alienation (or estrangement) to describe this dehumanization. We are fully ourselves when we work, but we have socially arranged our work so that it is alien to us, a hostile power at another’s command. In the 1844 manuscripts, written when still a young man, Marx struggled to articulate what was so problematic about the current system of capitalism. These early passages of Marx demonstrate the fundamental problems of social relations under class rule. Rather than focus on the concept of exploitation, or what was economically unfair about the social relationship between capitalist and worker, Marx critiqued the historical development of hired labor and the ways in which this kind of work dehumanizes those who take part in it. Introduction – Why this is important and what to look for
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