The Theory of Alienated Labor

In the first of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx develops the concept of alienated or estranged labor (entfremdete Arbeit) as the central category through which he analyzes the condition of the industrial worker under capitalism. Marx identifies four distinct but interconnected dimensions of alienation. First, the worker is alienated from the product of his labor: the object he produces confronts him as something alien, belonging not to him but to the capitalist who owns the means of production, so that "the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over against himself." Second, the worker is alienated from the act of production itself, since labor under capitalism is not a spontaneous expression of human creative capacity but "forced labor," coerced by economic necessity, experienced as external to the worker's own nature, something he flees from as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, rather than an activity in which he feels at home.