Karl Heinrich Marx (1818 –1883) was a German philosopher, econo-
mist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of politi-
cal economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the
1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the four-volume
Das Kapital. Marx’s political and philosophical thought had enormous
influence on subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history.
We shall begin from a contemporary economic fact. The
worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces and the more
his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes
an ever-cheaper commodity the more goods he creates. The devalu-
5 ation of the human world increases in direct relation with the in-
crease in value of the world of things. Labor does not only create
goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and in-
deed in the same proportion as it produces goods…
All these consequences follow from the fact that the worker
10 is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For it is clear
on this presupposition that the more the worker expends himself in
work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he cre-
ates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and
the less he belongs to himself. it is just the same as in religion. The
15 more of himself man attributes to God the less he has left in himself.
The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no
longer to himself but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore,
the less he possesses. What is embodied in the product of his labor is
no longer his own. The greater this product is, therefore, the more he
20 is diminished. The alienation of the worker in his product means not
only that his labor becomes an object, assumes an external existence,
but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and
that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life
which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and
25 hostile force…
The worker becomes a slave of the object; first, in that he re-
ceives an object of work, i.e., receives work, and secondly, in that he
receives means of subsistence. Thus the object enables him to exist,
first as a worker, and secondly, as a physical subject. The culmination
30 of this enslavement is that he can only maintain himself as a physical
subject so far as he is a worker, and that it is only as a physical subject
that he is a worker…
What constitutes the alienation of labor? first, that the work
is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature; and that,
35 consequently, he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies him-
self, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop
freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted
and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home
only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His
40 work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labor. It is not the satisfac-
tion of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs. Its alien
character is clearly shown by the fact that as soon as there is no phys-
ical or other compulsion it is avoided like the plague. External labor,
labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of
45 mortification. Finally, the external character of work for the worker is
shown by the fact that it is not his own work but work for someone
else, that in work he does not belong to himself but to another per-
son…
We arrive at the result that man (the worker) feels himself to
50 be freely active only in his animal functions—eating, drinking and pro-
creating, or at most also in his dwelling and in personal adornment—
while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal. The animal
becomes human and the human becomes animal.
Eating, drinking and procreating are of course also genuine
55 human functions. But abstractly considered, apart from the environ-
ment of human activities, and turned into final and sole ends, they
are animal functions.
We have now considered the act of alienation of practical hu-
man activity, labor, from two aspects: (1) the relationship of the
60 worker to the product of labor as an alien object which dominates
him. This relationship is at the same time the relationship to the sen-
suous external world, to natural objects, as an alien and hostile world;
(2) the relationship of labor to the act of production within labor. This
is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something alien
65 and not belonging to him, activity as suffering (passivity), strength as
powerlessness, creation as emasculation, the personal physical and
mental energy of the worker, his personal life (for what is life but ac-
tivity?), as an activity which is directed against himself; independent
of him and not belonging to him. This is self-alienation as against the
70 above-mentioned alienation of the thing.
Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings.
In Defense of Capital-
ism
Perhaps you yourself still believe in nationalism or socialism
or proliferating regulation. And perhaps you are in the grip of pessi-
mism about growth or consumerism or the environment or inequal-
ity.
5 Please, for the good of the wretched of the earth, reconsider.
Many humans, in short, are now stunningly better off than
their ancestors were in 1800. … Hear again that last, crucial, astonish-
ing fact, discovered by economic historians over the past few dec-
ades. It is: in the two centuries after 1800 the trade-tested goods and
10 services available to the average person in Sweden or Taiwan rose by
a factor of 30 or 100. Not 100 percent, understand—a mere dou-
bling—but in its highest estimate a factor of 100, nearly 10,000 per-
cent, and at least a factor of 30, or 2,900 percent. The Great Enrich-
ment of the past two centuries has dwarfed any of the previous and
15 temporary enrichments. Explaining it is the central scientific task of
economics and economic history, and it matters for any other sort of
social science or recent history.
What explains it? The causes were not (to pick from the ap-
parently inexhaustible list of materialist factors promoted by this or
20 that economist or economic historian) coal, thrift, transport, high
male wages, low female and child wages, surplus value, human capi-
tal, geography, railways, institutions, infrastructure, nationalism, the
quickening of commerce, the late medieval run-up, Renaissance indi-
vidualism, the First Divergence, the Black Death, American silver, the
25 original accumulation of capital, piracy, empire, eugenic improve-
ment, the mathematization of celestial mechanics, technical educa-
tion, or a perfection of property rights. Such conditions had been rou-
tine in a dozen of the leading organized societies of Eurasia, from an-
cient Egypt and China down to Tokugawa Japan and the Ottoman Em-
30 pire, and not unknown in Meso-America and the Andes. Routines can-
not account for the strangest secular event in human history, which
began with bourgeois dignity in Holland after 1600, gathered up its
tools for betterment in England after 1700, and burst on northwest-
ern Europe and then the world after 1800.
35 The modern world was made by a slow-motion revolution in
ethical convictions about virtues and vices, in particular by a much
higher level than in earlier times of toleration for trade-tested pro-
gress—letting people make mutually advantageous deals, and even
admiring them for doing so, and especially admiring them when
40 Steve-Jobs like they imagine betterments. The change, the Bourgeois
Revaluation, was the coming of a business-respecting civilization, an
acceptance of the Bourgeois Deal: “Let me make money in the first
act, and by the third act I will make you all rich.” […]
The cause of the bourgeois betterments, that is, was an eco-
45 nomic liberation and a sociological dignifying of, say, a barber and
wigmaker of Bolton, son of a tailor, messing about with spinning ma-
chines, who died in 1792 as Sir Richard Arkwright, possessed of one
of the largest bourgeois fortunes in England. The Industrial Revolu-
tion and especially the Great Enrichment came from liberating com-
50 moners from compelled service to a hereditary elite, such as the no-
ble lord in the castle, or compelled obedience to a state functionary,
such as the economic planner in the city hall. And it came from ac-
cording honor to the formerly despised of Bolton—or of Ōsaka, or of
Lake Wobegon—commoners exercising their liberty to relocate a fac-
55 tory or invent airbrakes.
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality, University of
Chicago Press, 2016.
