“Alienated Labour”
from Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Gladys B. Esteve
Ateneo de Naga University
Questions:
1. What is work? Is it simply economic in character?
2. What is alienated labour?
3. What are the implications of his philosophy in how we
value work and rest?
Karl Marx
● Born in Triers, Germany. A former
Prussian territory.
● He studied in University of Bonn but later
on transferred to University of Berlin.
● He married Jenny von Westphalen and
had seven children.
● He lived his life exiled and had lifelong
friendship with Friedrich Engels.
Thesis Eleven
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point is to change it."
Theses on Feuerbach
Homo Faber
Man as maker, producer, and creator.
Man transform the earth by work; but by
changing nature, he also changes
himself: he develops and empowers
himself.
Through work man becomes man, and
nature becomes for man.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles…oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to
one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight,
a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of
society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes…
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of
feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but
established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of
struggle in place of the old ones.
The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1
Alienated Labour
Disorienting sense of
exclusion and
separation through labor
in a capitalist society
Factory Scene:
https://www.youtube.co
m/watch?v=6n9ESFJTn
Hs
First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic
nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not
feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but
mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his
work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and
when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but
coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means
to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no
physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in
which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external
character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s,
that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in
religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the
human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien,
divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It
belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.
1. Alienation that workers experience by the estrangement from the
product of their labor (man over product of his labor).
2. Alienation resulting from their lack of control over the labor process
or production activity (man over labor production).
3. Alienation from our species-essence/human essence or in a
reduced sense our human nature (man and species-being).
4. Alienated from our own human nature or essence which according
to Marx social (man to man).
Economic and Philosophical Manuscript
Some Notes:
1. Workers’ rights – protection against
unfair dismissal, right to redundancy
payment, and right to receive
minimum wages, paid holidays or
sickness pay.
2. Universal free public healthcare is
non-negotiable.
3. How and Where we work.
4. Rest is resistance.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.
They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by
the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let
the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have
a world to win.
Working Men of All Countries, Unite!
The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 4
