Alienation

How does it differ from alienation in everyday speech?

In everyday speech “alienation” suggests feeling left out or estranged from others. The Marxist concept is narrower and sharper. The German original, Entfremdung, comes from fremd (“strange”, “alien”) and names the process by which something that was one’s own becomes strange. The point is that what has become alien is not someone else but something one has made oneself: the thing produced by one’s labour, the work one does, the institutions people have built together, which now stand over against their makers as an external power. As one German aesthetician put it, the estrangement is self-caused: the activity of whoever is estranged, an individual, a group or humanity as a whole, is the cause of the estrangement.

The word goes back to the Latin alienatio, the handing over of a thing into another’s possession. Classical English political economy used it for the “alienation” of a product that thereby becomes estranged from its producer, and eighteenth-century social-contract theory for the surrender of original freedom to a power, society or ruler, that faces the individual as alien. That is why in English law “alienation” still means the transfer of property such as land.

One more thing should be clear from the start: Marxist alienation is not the name of a mood. As Marxist humanism explains it, alienation is objective when society prevents people from developing their essential human capacities; subjective alienation, the sense that life lacks meaning or fulfilment, flows from that objective condition. Someone who feels no discontent at all may therefore still be alienated. That case is exactly the one Herbert Marcuse later examined.

What did Marx take from Hegel and Feuerbach?

Marx did not coin the term. For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel alienation was self-alienation: just as knowledge is self-knowledge, the self first faces the reality it has produced through its own activity as an alien outer world, then recognises it as its own product and appropriates it. At the end of this movement, in which subject and object separate and then interpenetrate ever more deeply, Hegel located the overcoming of alienation in a true reconciliation with reality and in the philosophy that grasps that reconciliation in concepts.

Ludwig Feuerbach turned the scheme into a critique of religion. In The Essence of Christianity (1841) he argued that religion is the projection of the human essence onto an external, alien being. God is man’s alienated essence, theology has to be dissolved into anthropology, and religion is only an other-worldly compensation for alienation in this world.

Marx took the framework from both and brought it down to earth. He located alienation not in spirit or religion but in labour, specifically the labour of the wage-worker who sells his labour-power. He set religion and labour side by side: “The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself.” In the same way the worker puts his life into the object, but then it no longer belongs to him but to the object.

What are the four forms of alienation in the 1844 manuscripts?

Between April and August 1844 Marx wrote a set of notes towards a critique of political economy, unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime, also known as the Paris Manuscripts. Their section on estranged labour is the classic statement of the theory. Marx begins from a present-day fact that political economy itself acknowledges: the worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production grows in power and extent. The world of things rises in value as the world of human beings is devalued.

The first form is alienation from the product of labour. The object labour produces confronts the worker “as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer”. Producing something and putting it into the world, objectification in Marx’s term, is not in itself the problem. The problem is that under the conditions political economy describes, the rule of private property, the realisation of labour appears as the worker’s loss of reality, objectification as the loss of the object and servitude to it, and appropriation as estrangement and alienation (Entäußerung, literally “giving away”).

The second is alienation from the activity of labour itself. If the product is alien, the activity that produces it is already alien. Labour no longer belongs to the worker, so that “the worker only feels himself at home outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.” His work is not voluntary but forced: “forced labour”. It is not the satisfaction of a need but only a means of satisfying needs outside it. The result is that a person feels free only in the animal functions of eating, drinking and procreating, and in his human functions feels like an animal: “What is animal becomes human, and what is human becomes animal.”

The third is alienation from species-being. “Species-being” (Gattungswesen) is Feuerbach’s term for the human being as one who is conscious of belonging to the human species and acts as a member of it. Marx held that humans differ from animals in carrying on their life-activity consciously and therefore freely. Animals also build, but only what they immediately need; humans know how to produce according to the standard of any species and also form things “according to the laws of beauty”. Estranged labour inverts this relation: precisely because a person is a conscious being, he makes his life-activity, his essence, a mere means to his existence.

The fourth is alienation from other people. When people are estranged from the product of their labour, from their activity and from their species-essence, the immediate consequence is the estrangement of human from human. If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, it belongs to someone other than the worker; if he relates to his activity as unfree, he relates to it as activity under the domination and coercion of another. Marx saw the same structure in religion, where religious self-estrangement appears in the relation of layman to priest.

Here Marx overturns a common assumption. It looks as if private property causes alienated labour, but he wrote that private property is rather “the product, the result, the necessary consequence of alienated labour”. Communism for him was therefore more than an equal division of wealth. He criticised a “crude communism” that envies private property and levels everyone down, and defined true communism as “the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement”, the real reappropriation of the human essence.

Did Marx abandon alienation in Capital?

The 1844 manuscripts were not published in Marx’s lifetime. They first appeared in 1932 in the Moscow Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, and among those who deciphered them under David Ryazanov was György Lukács. Yet the vocabulary of alienation does not feature prominently in Capital, and so a long dispute arose over whether the “young Marx” and the “mature Marx” were the same thinker.

On one side stands humanist Marxism. It holds that alienation is the guiding thread of both the early and the late writings, and that the central concepts of Capital cannot be properly understood without it. One piece of evidence it cites is the Grundrisse of 1857–58, first published in Moscow in 1939 and widely accessible only from 1953, which was read as the missing link between the early Hegelian humanism and the later economics. Another is Capital’s “commodity fetishism”, in which human creations escape our control, take on an appearance of independence and come to oppress us: not alienation as such, but one form it can take.

On the other side stands Louis Althusser. He argued that an epistemological break around 1845, first visible in The German Ideology, divides Marx’s thought in two. The humanism of the early writings is an ethical theory, fundamentally incompatible with the scientific theory of the later works, where the social relations of capitalism are relations between structures and neither individuals nor classes act as subjects of history. For Althusser humanism is a bourgeois individualist philosophy that ascribes to each individual a universal essence of Man, and no such essence exists; he regarded socialist humanism too as an ethical and therefore ideological phenomenon. Soviet official philosophy had already largely ignored the 1844 manuscripts as “early writings” that led Marx nowhere, and Althusser in effect inherited that harsh verdict by another route.

The economist Ernest Mandel sorted the positions into three. The first denies any difference between the manuscripts and Capital and finds the essentials of Capital already in the manuscripts. The second holds that the manuscripts treat alienated labour more “totally”, adding an ethical, anthropological and philosophical dimension, and either sets the two Marxes against each other or re-evaluates Capital in the light of the manuscripts. The third holds that the young Marx’s conception of alienated labour not only contradicts the economic analysis of Capital but even hindered him from accepting the labour theory of value; at its extreme, alienation becomes a “pre-Marxist” concept that Marx had to overcome to reach a scientific analysis.

A few questions reveal which position a writer takes. Is “human essence” or species-being used as a yardstick of critique? Is the fetishism of Capital and the domination of capital read as the mature form of alienation, or as a new concept unrelated to it? Is the lever of change sought in people’s consciousness and practice, or in the analysis of modes of production and class structure? The political consequences diverge too. The humanist side gained grounds to criticise, in the name of alienation, not only capitalism but also a bureaucratic socialism in which workers do not control production. The Althusserian side put the scientific analysis of structures in place of moral appeal and treated such humanism as ideology.

Why was alienation a sensitive subject in socialist states?

After Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, the 1844 manuscripts became a cornerstone of the opposition to Stalinism in Eastern Europe. In Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia a “socialist humanist” movement combined grassroots demands for workers’ control with the philosophy of the early Marx. In Yugoslavia Mihailo Marković and Gajo Petrović developed it into what became the Praxis school, which published the journal Praxis from 1964 to 1975 and held annual debates on the island of Korčula on alienation, reification and bureaucracy. In the West the same year, the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising led British Communists such as E. P. Thompson and dissidents in the French Communist Party to break away under the banner of humanist Marxism.

The core of these arguments was that nationalising the means of production does not by itself abolish alienation, which can persist in socialist society. The opposing assessment was just as clear. Dialectical materialism, the official philosophy of the Soviet Union and the parties aligned with it, treated Marxism above all as a science and was wary of a humanism grounded in the early writings. In China the 1844 manuscripts were first published in the 1979 Chinese edition of the collected works; in February 1983 Zhou Yang, Wang Ruoshui and others argued that Marxism had developed through humanism. The party theoretician Hu Qiaomu rebutted this as a bourgeois distortion; Wang and others were removed soon afterwards, and the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of the same year turned a philosophical debate into a conservative drive against reformist and humanist currents. Underneath lay the question whether the absence of humanism in China signified Marxism’s fulfilment or its failure.

How was alienation reread in the twentieth century?

In 1923, nine years before the 1844 manuscripts appeared, Lukács had already developed a theory of reification in History and Class Consciousness, starting from the commodity fetishism of Capital. He later said that deciphering the manuscripts transformed his interpretation of Marxism permanently. When they were published Herbert Marcuse recognised their significance at once, writing that they put the entire theory of “scientific socialism” on a new footing. Henri Lefebvre, with Norbert Guterman, made the first translation into a foreign language, French, in 1933, and argued that alienation covered not only labour but consumption, culture, systems of meaning and language.

In One-Dimensional Man (1964) Marcuse pushed the theory in a pessimistic direction. People in advanced capitalist societies appear happy in their damaged relationships: they identify with their estranged circumstances and draw satisfaction from them. Objective alienation persists, but it no longer generates social conflict. His notion of repressive desublimation in the same book is one strand of this diagnosis. Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society (1955), drew mainly on the early Marx to argue for a humanistic and democratic socialism; he rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism as dehumanising and as producing the virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation. The 1961 American edition of the manuscripts appeared with Fromm’s introduction, as Marx’s Concept of Man.

Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment that civilisation’s power over nature is bought only at the price of estrangement from it. Like Fromm, they held that the masses are alienated not only in their working conditions but in their leisure as well: where alienation is concerned there is no longer any separation of work and free time, and the key word is the culture industry. Around 1968 the Situationists widened alienation from the worker’s estrangement from his product to everyday life as a whole under the “rule of the commodity”.

The concept also has its critics. The writer Karl-Heinz Ott argues that it often rests on an idealised, romanticised picture of past conditions: once one establishes a concept of alienation, one nourishes the belief that there is the genuine and healthy on one side and the false and sick on the other, and the twentieth century showed what happens when that ideal is realised by force. Within critical theory, too, alienation came under fundamental criticism along with the concepts of totality and reification. Even so, twenty-first-century German social philosophy has returned to it, in Rahel Jaeggi’s Alienation (2005) and Hartmut Rosa’s Beschleunigung und Entfremdung (2013).