In “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” Karl Marx shows his emerging interest in the economy and illustrates his transition from philosophy to political economy. In the first manuscript, “Estranged Labor,” Marx adopts Hegel’s concept of alienation yet interprets it differently as arising from the way human beings regard their own labor and work. Furthermore, in the last manuscript, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” Marx explicitly argues that “[t]he only labor which Hegel knows and recognizes is abstractly mental labor” (Marx 112); consequently, he concludes that Hegel’s concept of alienation is one-sided and thereby limited in scope. Therefore, although following closely with Hegel’s dialectic methods, the young Marx is nevertheless moving away from the idealism of Hegel, his main philosophical predecessor, toward the materialism that is the foundation of Marx’s own view of human nature and history. In this essay, I will focus on the manuscript of “Estranged Labor” in order to both illustrate the four types of materialistic alienation Marx has pointed out and to contrast them with Hegel’s idealistic view of alienation in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

According to Marx, under the economic system based upon private property, society “must fall apart into the two classes—the property-ownersworkers” (70). Consequently, the latter have to work for the former in order to maintain their existence. However, as Marx continues to argue, “the product of labor . . . is the objectification of labor,” meaning that “the realization of labor appears as loss of reality for the workers,” and the eventual result of which is “appropriation as estrangement, as alienation” (72). In order to demonstrate his conceptual argument, Marx divides alienation into four types and analyzes them as follows. and the propertyless

The first type of alienation is the estrangement of the worker from the product of his work. This estrangement occurs because the worker relates to the product of his labor as an object that is essentially alien and even hostile to himself. Everything he creates with his own hands contributes to a world that he does not belong to since he is rather the “propertyless-worker” than the “property-owners” (70). Thus, “the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world—becomes, the less belongs to him as his own” (72). As such, Marx formulates an inverse relation between the contribution of the worker’s labor and the degree to which he becomes alienated within the system.

Because of this tragic relationship between the worker and the product of their work, Marx goes so far as to call the worker “a slave of his object” (73), which might be interestingly contrasted with Hegel’s slave in his master-slave dialectic. What the two slaves have in common is their ability to work and to create products, through which they also re-shape the world. However, this similarity at the same time leads to their fundamental difference with each other. On the one hand, Marx’s slave can be referred to as the negative slave in the sense that “the more the worker by his labor appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life”; in other words, Marx’s slave, through his labor and work, re-shapes the world into a hostile place that excludes him. Hegel’s slave, on the other hand, can be accordingly referred to as the positive slave in the sense that he re-shapes himself through his work, and that he becomes the master of nature from doing so; in other words, Hegel’s slave, through his labor and work, re-shapes the world into a friendly place that helps him realize his essential consciousness.

The second type of alienation Marx points out is the estrangement of the worker from the activity of production. Marx views this second alienation as a logical inference from the previous type: “[i]f then the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation, the activity of alienation” (74). Here Marx is essentially engaging in a discussion of “ends vs. means.” The activity of production should have been the satisfaction of the need for man to objectify themselves and truly become human beings. However, because the worker becomes more alienated the more products he creates under the economic system based upon private property, the activity of production naturally becomes “forced labor”; in other words, the activity of production now becomes “merely a means to satisfy needs external to it” (74). As such, the activity of production loses its natural essence and signifies a loss of the worker’s self.

If the first type of alienation is “the estrangement of the thing,” and the second type is “self-estrangement” (75), then the third type is the worker’s alienation from “species-being,” or human identity, and the fourth and the last type is the estrangement of man from man. According to Marx, “[t]he whole character of a species—its species character—is contained in the character of the life-activity, and free, conscious activity is man’s species character” (76). For human beings, the activity of transforming inorganic matter into products constitutes the essential identity of our species; in other words, we are what we produce. However, in modern society based on private ownership and division of labor, the worker is estranged from both the activity of production and the final product; therefore, “estranged labor makes man’s species life a means to his physical existence” (77). That is to say, the symbol of the uniqueness of our species—“man reproduces the whole of nature” (76)—is degraded into a mere animal function of self-production and self-preservation. Furthermore, in Marx’s point of view, the third type of alienation leads to the fourth and the last type, the estrangement of man from man, because “the proposition that man’s species nature is estranged from his means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature” (77). Since the worker’s product is not owned by himself but the capitalist, the former naturally regards the latter as alien and hostile, as an “Other.” Thus, man is also alienated from other man.

From the analysis above, one is able to see that Marx’s idea of alienation is the alienation of worker from the product, the means of production, the species-being, and other man. In general, Marx regards alienation as against human nature, which is to be social; therefore, “[w]hat is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of “Society” as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual” (86). Nevertheless, Hegel, from whom Marx adopts the concept of alienation, does not regard alienation as such a materialistic and negative element of human being and modern society. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel uses the first three chapters to discuss what can be referred to as “objective consciousness” and illustrates that the reason why none of these shapes of consciousnesses is adequate in reaching absolute knowing is because none of them passes the phase of self-alienation, and it is only when objective consciousness becomes self-conscious, or self-alienated, from the universal, will absolute knowing become closer to achieve. Furthermore, in the master-slave dialectic, Hegel again emphasizes the importance of alienation in the role of the slave. The slave fears death and surrenders during the life and death struggle, which leads to his slavery. However, precisely because the slave is accordingly in the state of alienation and later surpasses it by re-shaping the world through labor, he actually becomes fully and essentially self-conscious. The master, on the other hand, only enjoys the products created by the slave, and is thereby existentially imprisoned.

Therefore, alienation for Marx is quite different from alienation for Hegel for two primary reasons. First of all, Marx equates alienation with materialistic alienation, or the alienation of the worker through the estranged labor; Hegel’s concept of alienation, on the other hand, is idealistic because he believes that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness. Marx, in the fourth manuscript “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” points out this difference by arguing that what Hegel recognizes is “abstractly mental labor” (112). Moreover, Marx also criticizes Hegel by saying that “he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labor” (112), which leads to the second reason for their difference. From a Marxian point of view, alienation is negative because it is essentially dehumanizing, and the only way to restore humanity is to follow the social nature of human beings and to abolish private property by adopting Communism. Hegel, as can be seen in Marx’s criticism, views alienation as a positive and somewhat inevitable element because it is the only way for an individual to obtain his self-consciousness and identity in society.

In conclusion, in “Estranged Labor,” the first manuscript of “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” the young Marx illustrates his materialistic view of alienation as well as its negative effects in modern society. Adopting this concept from Hegel, Marx’s interpretation of alienation is nonetheless quite different from that of Hegel, and this difference precisely shows Marx’s departure from Hegel’s idealism and his emerging interest in political economy, both of which will pave the road for his future and revolutionary thought.

Works Cited

Marx, Karl. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978.