What is alienated labour, and what would unalienated labour be like?

An essay written as an undergraduate in the Department of Philosophy, King’s College London

Alexander Rikowski

London, June 2010

In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844a) Marx explains that there are four aspects of alienated labour under capitalism. Wolff (2002, p. 29) writes: “The basic idea [of alienation] is that two things which belong together come apart” [1]. I shall be examining the four forms of alienated labour indicated by Marx in his Manuscripts and I will be using the concept of ‘unalienated labour’ as a tool to clarify what Marx meant by ‘alienated labour’. For, as Ollman puts it:

“Alienation can only be grasped as the absence of unalienation, each state serving as a point of reference for the other. And for Marx, unalienation is the life man leads in communism” [2].

Marx explains that the capitalist alienates the products of labour from the workers by forcing them to produce products for both him and the buying public. But, according to Marx, since there would be no private property under communism, it is there that man would then be free to express his individuality through production (Marx, 1844b, p. 278). I will argue that although some will remain unconvinced by Marx’s theory of alienated labour because it relies on what they see as Marx’s warped conception of human nature, the theory is still useful to those struggling to understand the difficulties imposed on them by capitalist society.

The first category of alienated labour analysed by Marx is: alienation from the product of labour. Under capitalism the workers produce products, but Marx argues they are alienated from the products they produce. One understanding of why this is the case is: it is not up to the workers what happens to the products they produce (Wolff, 2002, p. 31).