Oxford Handbook Alienation

Alienation, or Why Capitalism is Bad for Us
Oxford Handbooks Online

Dan Swain
The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx
Edited by Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew
Subject: Sociology, Economic Sociology Online Publication Date: Oct 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695545.013.12
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter considers the significance of Marx’s concept of alienation to his overall
criticism of capitalism. At the concept’s core is the idea that while labor is potentially a
fulfilling and liberating activity, under capitalism it appears only as a hostile, dominating
force. Workers thus experience their own activity, natural and built environments, and
fellow human beings as alien and hostile. While this idea has been deeply influential, it
has also been the subject of heated controversies, in particular for its apparent
dependence on an essentialist or teleological idea of human nature. While important,
such controversies were often inflated by their political and intellectual context, and this
chapter argues they should be considered alongside the lasting significance of alienation
as an explanatory concept. Understood as such, it can still contribute a great deal to
understanding and criticizing contemporary society, and provide guidance for how to
transcend and replace it.
Keywords: alienation, labor, capitalism, essentialism, human nature, Marxism
1. Labor and Alienation

In his famous Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx begins his analysis
of estranged labor by noting “a present day economic fact”:
The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his
production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper
commodity the more commodities he produces. The devaluation of the human
world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things.
Labor not only produces commodities; it also produces itself and the workers as a
commodity, and it does so in the same proportion in which it produces
commodities in general.
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(Marx [1844] 1975:323–324)
But in addressing this economic fact, Marx hit upon a concept that was to have
significance not merely for understanding economics but also for understanding the
social, psychological, and even physical conditions of human beings under capitalism.
Estrangement, or alienation, became, as Bertell Ollman (1971:131) puts it, “the
intellectual construct in which Marx displays the devastating effect of capitalist
production on human beings, on their physical and mental states and on the social
processes of which they are a part.” As a result, alienation is simultaneously one of the
most contested and most enduring of Marx’s concepts, having inspired generations to
criticize and rebel against capitalism:; however, this concept has also been subject to
intense theoretical debate and scrutiny. While such debates are worthwhile, they should
be considered alongside a reckoning with the lasting significance of alienation as an
explanatory concept. Whatever philosophical controversies surround it, the concept of
alienation can still help us understand, criticize, and perhaps even overcome a series of
contemporary phenomena.
At the core of the concept of alienation is the idea that while human labor is potentially a
fulfilling and liberating activity, under capitalism it appears only as a hostile, dominating
force. Marx saw the fact that labor took this form as needing historical explanation. In
particular, he refused to accept the ideas of earlier political economists that work was
necessarily and always burdensome and that the condition of modern workers could be
explained according to some natural laws or “imaginary primordial condition,” which
“simply pushes the question into the grey and nebulous distance” (Marx [1844] 1975:
323). This is in part because of his belief that productive activity was fundamental to the
formation of human identity. Following Hegel, Marx saw labor as a process by which
human beings objectify themselves in nature and thus come to make themselves at home
within it. Through engaging with and transforming the natural world we make it an
extension of ourselves and thus become better able to recognize ourselves within it
(Sayers 2011:14–31; Mészáros 1970:66–92). Labor was thus (potentially) an action of
freedom, the means by which people realize their identity in the world. For Marx,
however, labor is never pure, unmediated labor. Rather, our existence as social beings
means that we also undertake labor in specific social relationships. Thus, if labor does not
afford workers the chance to feel at home in the world but in fact appears to enrich a
world of objects that stands against and outside them, then this must be due to some
particular (and in some senses deficient) form of social organization.
Marx’s analysis thus begins with the observation that workers are alienated from the
products they produce: from the object of their labor. Such objects are the material
embodiment of human activity and represent potentially a field for human self-realization.
However, in specific forms of production, this world of objects appears instead as not
merely an externalized part of the human but as something that exists “outside him,
independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous
power” (Marx [1844] 1975:324). Put simply, this is because under capitalist conditions of
production the product is never the possession of the producer. Unlike earlier forms of
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craft production, the product is not owned by the producers and then sold at market (or
seized by a lord), it is always already the property of the capitalist. Moreover, the more
workers produce, the more they expand and enrich the world of objects and the more
they empower the capitalist over them. Here Marx also identified the domination of
products over producers with the domination of capital, pointing to how workers not only
experience their product as alien but also the various machines, tools, and spaces used to
create those products. These, too, appear in production as the property of another, and
their growth and development take place at the workers’ expense. Later, in Capital, Marx
described capital as dead labor, which “vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor,
and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” (Marx [1867] 1976:342), vividly indicating
how machines that could enable our freedom appear instead as something to fear.
But alienation from the product rests on a more basic alienation. If the product always
already belongs to the capitalist, the reason for this lies within the nature of the labor
that produced it:
How could the product of the worker’s activity confront him as something alien if
it were not for the fact that in the act of production he was estranging himself
from himself? … if the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be
active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation.
(Marx [1844] 1975:326)
Marx’s point here is that the alienation of the product of labor rests on a moment of
alienation within the production process, in which labor itself becomes separated from
the laborer and appears as an external activity:
This relationship is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something
which is alien and does not belong to him, activity as passivity, power as
impotence, procreation as emasculation, the worker’s own physical and mental
energy, his personal life—for what is life but activity?—as an activity directed
against himself.
(Marx [1844] 1975:327).
Thus labor appears not as the worker’s own activity, as a way of realizing their freedom in
the world but as something apart from him or her.
The source of this is the transformation of labor itself into a commodity, something Marx
had already observed in the 1844 writings but developed more systematically later
through the concept of labor power. Under capitalism, workers appear as free workers,
bearers of their own labor, over which they exercise ownership relations and thus can
(and must) sell to capitalists for a given period. This already requires representing the
capacity to labor as in some sense separable from the human being who labors as
something that can be “alienated” away in the act of sale. Moreover, having bought the
labor of a group of workers, the capitalist must then put the group to work in order to
generate as much profit as possible. Capitalists thus appear as the organizers of
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cooperative production, bringing together otherwise separate workers in a given

workplace and subjecting them to a plan of work. Thus the work itself can only appear as
someone else’s plan, just as the machines must appear as the property of others: “Hence
the interconnection between their various labors confronts them, in the realm of ideas, as
a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and, in practice, as his authority, as the powerful will of
a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose.” (Marx [1867] 1976:450).
In addition to the transformation of labor power into a commodity (and laborers into
bearers of that commodity), Marx saw labor under capitalism as undergoing a process of
abstraction. This is based on his analysis of the commodity. If commodities are to be
exchanged according to a specific standard, it must be possible to identify something that
they share. Marx suggested that this common standard is labor but not labor in any
concrete, particular form. Rather, commodities appear as “congealed quantities of
homogenous human labor, i.e. of human labor-power expended without regard to the
form of its expenditure” (Marx [1867] 1976:128). While labor is always concrete labor—
that is, a specific form of activity, with a particular product, rhythm, purpose and so forth
—under capitalism it takes the appearance of abstract labor, an abstract quantifiable
substance, with no particular determinations. The worker appears, from this point of
view, as “an abstract activity and a stomach” (Marx [1844] 1975:285). A crucial part of
this abstraction of labor is the growth of an apparatus for meticulously measuring and
quantifying labor, and in particular notions of time as homogeneous, uniform, and
measurable. These in turn move workers away from rhythms of work connected to nature
and to the demands of a specific task toward a working day dominated by clocks,
whistles, and timecards. Moreover, as time becomes an important measure of value, it
impacts on other areas than just work. In particular, notions of time as value come to
dominate not just work, but other areas of life. As Jonathan Martineau (2015:44)
describes, “Just as labor-time must yield as much value as possible, leisure-time must
yield as much ‘leisure’ as possible, and that to not make the most of it, to not organize it,
to not use it adequately in a ‘productive-of-leisure-way’ can also be seen as a ‘loss-of-
time’.”
These two aspects of alienation—from products and from the process of labor itself—
became interwoven in an important concept for Marx’s later economic theory: commodity
fetishism. In a notoriously complex section of Capital, Marx described how the conditions
of capitalist production and exchange lead to objects taking on a life of their own. Human
beings relate to one another in the market as bearers of commodities—labor power on the
one side and capital on the other. This means that, as I. I. Rubin (1973:29) put it,
“Production relations are not established only for things, but through things,” and as a
result cooperative social activity appears as a kind of relationship between commodities.
This leads to commodities acquiring a social significance over and above their specific
use and purpose, appearing to have a life of their own. Marx (1867: 165) here draws
direct comparison with fetishistic worship of objects, which involves projecting human
powers onto objects that do not possess them: “There the products of the human brain
appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations
both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with
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the products of men’s hands” (Marx [1867] 1976:165). In the age of the smartphone, it
has become almost a cliché to talk about people being ruled by their devices, seeing them
not as useful products but as organizers of our lives. For Marx, this is simply the latest
manifestation of a system where things dominate activity, not vice versa.
Marx did not stop, however, at observing workers’ alienation from their product and from
their labor itself. He suggests that in separating workers from their labor, capitalist
production also separates them from what makes them distinctively human—their
“essence” or “species-being.” This is the source of much controversy, some of which will
be addressed in section 2, but at its core is a claim that alienated labor is inhuman labor,
since it denies the realization of distinctively human capacities (in later works, Marx talks
about species powers, rather than species being). Marx identifies in humans a distinct
capacity for consciously planning and reflecting on their activity: “Man reproduces
himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can
therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created” ([1844]1975: 329).
Alienated labor denies this capacity. Labor is frequently reduced to the status of merely
reflexive and repetitive activity, and even when it is more creative or complex, it appears
fundamentally as the plan of another and dominated by abstract labor time.
Marx ultimately saw this as having devastating consequences for human well-being. The
worker “does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not
happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins
his mind.” (Marx [1867] 1976:326). At worst, workers are reduced to mere appendages of
a machine, with their bodies fundamentally marked by the kind of labor they perform. As
John Berger vividly describes, “The repetition by which gesture is laid upon gesture,
precisely but inexorably, the pile of gestures being stacked minute by minute, hour by
hour is exhausting. The rate of work allows no time to prepare for the gesture, to demand
effort from the body. The body loses its mind in the gesture.” (Berger and Mohr, [1975]
2010:100). In Capital, Marx ([1867] 1976:474) observed how this kind of specialization
also has broader social consequences:
this division of labor seizes upon not only the economic, but every other sphere of
society, and everywhere lays the foundation for that specialization, that
development in a man of one single faculty at the expense of all others, which
already caused Adam Ferguson, the master of Adam Smith, to exclaim: ‘We make
a nation of Helots, and have no free citizens.’
Thus, in narrowing down human activity to a particular form of abstractly and largely
unconsciously expended labor, capitalism stunts human development, leading to
“incomplete” human beings dominated by “animal” functions rather than human ones.
Marx’s reference to the division of labor “seizing upon” every other sphere of society also
indicates the importance of the broader social consequences of alienation—alienation
from others. Those who engage in wage labor are alienated both from those they work
for, and those they work with. As already discussed, the will of the capitalist appears as
the dominating will of another, while other workers appear as much as potential
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competitors as cooperators. Workers are only capable of engaging in collective activity

through the sale of their labor power, and so while in the workplace they appear as
separate elements brought together only by the capitalist, outside they must compete
with one another to get the best price for their labor. Moreover, to the extent this appears
(through commodity fetishism) as first of all a relationship between things, it takes on a
kind of false objectivity, in which such relationships appear “natural,” rather than
historically specific. Relations of production and exchange take on the appearance of a
natural force, like the weather, which can be understood and even manipulated but not
ultimately transformed. In this sense, alienation is self-reinforcing, since it both gives rise
to and depends on representing human activity as an external, dominating force.
2. Essences, Natures, and Cold War

Controversies
The previous section moved relatively freely between Marx’s youthful “philosophical”
writings and his “mature” treatments of political economy. This form of presentation,
however, is controversial. Many see in Marx not a fundamental continuity, but a
significant break in which his earlier “philosophical” preoccupations are replaced by a
new set of questions and concerns. Such interpretations can point to Marx’s increasing
impatience with abstract philosophical questions, including several dismissive remarks
about alienation, most prominently in The German Ideology written around 1845.
Moreover, while in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts he was happy to speak
about distinctively human powers and capacities, he later appeared increasingly
suspicious of ideas of human essence, most famously in the Theses on Feuerbach where
he remarked that “the human essence is no abstraction present in each individual. In its
reality it is the ensemble of the social relations” (Marx, [1845] 1975:423).
In part, this is a debate about Marx’s relationship to Hegel and Hegelian milieu from
which he emerged. Marx famously remarked in the preface to Capital that Hegel’s
dialectic had been standing on its head and that it needed to be “inverted, in order to
discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell” ([1867] 1976:103). Yet it is
precisely the character of this “inversion” that is at stake. One possibility, as many
Hegelian Marxists argue, is that Marx advanced Hegel’s thought by confronting it with
the fact of alienated labor under capitalism, which presented a challenge to Hegel’s
confidence in modern civil society’s ability to realize human freedom. For Marx, the
persistence of alienation was evidence that society demanded further transformation.
These approaches emphasize Marx’s deep debt to Hegel and see no particular problem in
it (see, e.g., Mészáros 1970; Sayers 2011). On the other hand, Louis Althusser argues that
this fails to grasp Marx’s radicalism: “If it were really a matter merely of an inversion, a
restoration of what had been upside down, it is clear that to turn an object right round
changes neither its nature or its content by virtue merely of a rotation!” (Althusser,
[1965] 2005:73). Rather, Marx’s relationship to the Hegelian ideas that dominated the
Germany of his time was not primarily one of correction, but one of retreat, withdrawing
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from these ideological debates in order to forge a new path and a new set of critical
concepts. According to Althusser, this new path had no place for the concept of alienation
or the idea of human essence on which it depended. Yet, as many of his critics have
pointed out, Capital contains passages that closely mirror those of the earlier works, in
which Marx talks about self-directed creative activity (labor) as a distinctively human
capacity (Marx [1867] 1976:283–292) and while less frequent, the language of alienation
persists (e.g., “Since, before [the worker] enters the process, his own labor has already
been alienated from him, appropriated by the capitalist, and incorporated with capital, it
now, in the course of the process, constantly objectifies itself so that it becomes a product
alien to him” (Marx [1867] 1976:716).
This interpretive debate cannot be resolved here. However, it is worth emphasizing that if
it were merely an interpretive debate, it is unlikely it would have had generated such
heat. Much of this has to be understood against the background of debates within and
about the “Communist” regimes in Eastern Europe. The Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts, while now some of Marx’s most widely read writings, came to light
extremely late, and did not form part of the established corpus of his work. Their
“discovery,” particularly in the West, coincided with a period of deep disillusionment in
developments in the Soviet Union, where Stalinist counter-revolution was shattering the
hopes that many had placed in the revolution. In this context, the discovery of a Marx that
appeared concerned with notions of freedom, creativity, and individuality—and who
offered a critique of stultifying, unfree labor—provided a vital basis for renewal. This was
certainly the perspective of the Frankfurt School theorist Erich Fromm, who translated
the manuscripts and worked to develop a tradition of socialist humanism on both sides of
the Iron Curtain. Fromm (1966 [2003]:64) closely associated the relegation of Marx’s
early works with defenses of the Soviet orthodoxy and insisted that “it is impossible to
understand [Marx’s] concept of socialism, and his criticism of capitalism as developed in
his later years, except on the basis of the concept of man which he developed in his early
writings.”
It is against this position that Althusser’s ideas developed. Indeed, he submitted an essay
on Marxism and humanism to a collection edited by Fromm (it was rejected). While
thinkers such as Fromm saw a return to the young Marx as restoring a vital missing link,
Althusser saw it as a backward step toward an idealist and unscientific approach. While
Althusser’s major concern was theoretical consistency—in particular his insistence that
Marxism should aspire to the objectivity of the natural sciences—his ideas are also deeply
influenced by what he saw as an inadequate and inappropriate reckoning with Stalinism
within the French Communist Party (and beyond) (see Elliot 2005:1–54). Althusser’s
argument thus presented a clear divide between humanism and anti-humanism, around
which many Western theorists (whether explicitly Marxist or not) felt the need to align
themselves.
Yet this question developed somewhat differently in the East, where dissident Marxists
often looked to the significance of Marx’s early writings for a trenchant criticism of the
official Communist regimes (see Karkov 2015). Most prominently, the Praxis School based
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in Yugoslavia developed a Marxism that foregrounded the notion of a subject engaged in

the active transformation of the world and self. It may well be that while for Althusser
opposing the deviations of the French Communist Party depended on a strict anti-
humanism, for those who lived in “actually existing socialism” in its various forms, an
assertion of humanism was a vital component of resistance. Similarly, many postcolonial
Marxists, while developing a sharp critique of the pretensions of Western humanism’s
universalizing tendencies, were also reluctant to abandon notions of humanism entirely,
perhaps, as Nikolay Karkov (2015:195) suggests, because they recognized in them “an
antidote to a history of systematic dehumanization and to forms of alienation far more
profound than those of the factory floor or the computer screen.”
These debates are thus sharply overdetermined by their political context, and it is often
hard to unpick the theoretical controversies from the various political battle lines they
intersect with. Nonetheless, there are substantive issues at stake, mostly revolving
around how to understand (and whether to take seriously) Marx’s remarks about essence
and species being. For some (like Fromm), these ideas are crucial to Marx’s criticism of
capitalism: capitalism deserves to be condemned precisely because it denies the
realization of a distinctively human essence, a core of needs, capacities and interests, and
this idea is essential to guide both the critique of capitalism and construction of an
alternative. (see, e.g., Meikle 1985; Geras 1983). Yet the idea that there exists some kind
of transhistorical human nature has become increasingly controversial, seen as incapable
of addressing the diversity of human societies and perhaps positing too narrow a view of
what it means to be human (as a laboring animal, rather than, say a speaking, writing or
political one). To the extent that Marx—and in particular the notion of alienation—relied
on such an idea, it might be seen as suspect. Indeed, Marx himself was at times
dismissive of such ideas, in part precisely because they fail to appreciate how human
nature is molded by social conditions. This allows for an alternative reading of Marx as
having a “historicist” view of nature, seeing human needs and powers as historically
modified and societies judged in terms of their ability to meet the specific historical needs
they produce (Sayers 1998).
A connected criticism focuses on the question of teleology. The idea of alienation appears
embedded in a logic of separation and restoration, in which human beings objectify their
powers, become separated from them, and then re-appropriate them in a moment of final
unity. Certainly, Marx’s earlier works tended in this direction—representing Communism
as a kind of final completion of the unity of humans and nature. Two particular worries
arise here. First, this view implies an overly demanding or unrealistic vision of the fully
realized human, such that overcoming alienation requires complete and transparent
recognition of one’s activity and place in society in a way that ignores how important
elements of our social relationships remain contingent and uncontrollable (Jaeggi 2014:
11–21). Second, this might be seen as relying on a deterministic view of history, such that
people are inevitably moving toward this final state of reconciliation with nature and that
all of history can be understood as part of this process. As well as raising familiar
criticisms of denying historical contingency and individual agency, this also seems to
depend on an idea of historical progress that allows some social forms to be represented
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as more “backward” than others. In this context, the long-term trajectory of some
members of the Praxis School matters—their commitment to humanism did not stop them
becoming apologists for violence against apparently “less developed” peoples in the
wider Balkans (Karkov 2015:189–193).
However, it is worth stepping back from these various debates to ask to what extent
alienation really depends on a substantive idea of human nature or of the fully realized
human. In Marx, alienation appears first and foremost not as a failure to live a certain
way but as a kind of pathological relationship to one’s own activity. Rahel Jaeggi (2014)
has recently argued for a reading of alienation as a kind of “relation of relationlessness.”
On this reading, what is at stake is not a failure to realize any specific essence or core
self but a failure in the relationship of a subject to their own activity in which activities
appear unchosen: either as externally imposed or simply as natural and inevitable. This
need not depend either on identifying a specific kind of human activity, or on the idea of a
perfect recognition of all activity as one’s own—but merely the idea there is some activity
that we could see as our own that we do not. While Jaeggi does not read Marx himself in
these terms, it is possible to do so. Even in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
species being is represented not as some specific core of human activities but free, self-
directed activity itself, strongly suggesting that the relationship to the activity was far
more significant than the kind of activity. Moreover, Marx’s positive account of human
nature generally appears as future oriented, often identified with the goal of Communist
society itself (see Ollman 1971:111–120). In this sense, to the extent that Marx has an
idea of essence or nature it can be seen as anticipatory, committed to the possibility that
a richer relationship to our activity is possible without committing him to a particular
(substantive or overdemanding) model of what this involved.
Here, alienation appears primarily as a negative concept, as a failure; but it does not
therefore bring with it a specific positive alternative. Alienation thus describes an
inhuman condition but does not commit us to a narrow vision of the human condition.
However, it does commit us to some claims about the human animal, namely that there
exist certain pathological ways of relating to our own activity, that we are capable of
recognizing them as such, and that these are connected to specific forms of organization
of social life. These claims are controversial, but they are capable of scrutiny and analysis
independent of the broader philosophical debates about essences and natures. Perhaps,
then, it makes more sense to scrutinize these claims not purely as abstract philosophical
ones but as empirical ones aimed at drawing links between specific social and
psychological phenomena and capitalist relations of production. If these claims can be
shown to contribute to an understanding of contemporary society and its condition, then
it at least partially vindicates them.
3. Grasping Phenomena by the Root

In the previous section, it was suggested that notions of alienation should be judged
primarily on whether they can help us grasp and understand contemporary phenomena.
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To the extent that they can help us do this, it might provide evidence for the conception of
the human that is implicit within it. This section will point to three quite disparate
instances in which Marx’s treatment of alienation might help understand contemporary
phenomena. The point is not to stress that these are the most fruitful, or the only relevant
ones, but merely to demonstrate the potential that alienation has for understanding the
world.
First, alienation rests on an apparently controversial claim about the potential effects of
certain social relationships on our health and well-being. It claims, in other words, that
social relations may not merely be just or unjust based on abstract criteria, but they
might appropriately be described as bad for us. This claim, however, is not as
controversial as it once was. Developments in social epidemiology increasingly point to
the psychosocial aspects of health care and particularly the way in which inequalities in
both wealth and status can have dramatic effects on both physical and mental health.
Strikingly, while the popular uptake of these ideas (specifically through the popularity of
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s 2009 book The Spirit Level) has been emphasized in
terms of wealth inequality, much of the foundational research behind these ideas focuses
on work and particularly questions of power, control, and autonomy in the workplace.
Michael Marmot, whose name is now inextricably associated with such ideas, began his
work with a study of British civil servants, discovering that heart disease was closely
correlated with the amount of control at work and that those in higher-echelon positions
with more control suffered less. This went against the folk belief that responsibility and
authority led to greater stress and ill-health.
Marmot (2015:172) continues to see work as having an important determining role

among many different sources of social disempowerment:
inequities in power, money and resources are the fundamental causes of

inequalities in health. All three of these inequities stand out in the workplace: the
lower the position in the hierarchy, the more disempowered, the less the money,
and the worse the physical, psychological and social resources. Worse health
ensues. Work is a breeding ground for disempowerment.
Thus disempowerment at work can radiate out into broader social disempowerment,
which is in turn correlated with a dramatically increased risk of illness. Much of modern
work is characterized by various combinations of “high demand and low control,
imbalance between effort and rewards, social isolation, organizational injustice, job
insecurity, [and] shift work” which together form a “toxic cocktail” (Marmot 2015:179).
Marmot is far from a Marxist or an anti-capitalist, but he does insist on a strong

connection between the social organization of work and human well-being. Moreover, he
insists that these are avoidable ills, which might be overcome or at least mitigated in
forms of work that allow for greater empowerment, participation, and control. All of this
is conducive to being read in Marxist terms, as examples of the effects of how alienated
labor “mortifies flesh and ruins minds” and how the denial of control in our productive
activity can lead to deeper and more profound denials of identity and self-worth. For
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Marmot, just like for Marx, the fact that such arrangements are specific and historical
rather than timeless and universal demands that we pursue alternative ways of
organizing our working lives.
For Marx, pursuing such alternatives depended first of all on abandoning capitalism as a
system. But Marmot’s ideas raise a possible response to this: might capitalism itself be
compatible with forms of work that are less alienating and more empowering for workers
than those Marx focused on? Not all capitalist work seems to deny autonomy and control
to the worker to the same extent—worker autonomy is even seen as valued in certain
industries. To the extent that such forms of work allow for greater control over both the
labor process and its product it might make sense to call them less alienated. However,
Marx retains good reasons for skepticism about such possibilities in the long term. First,
it is important to stress that any increased autonomy that involves or depends on control
over other workers (e.g., in some of the higher ranking civil servants studied by Marmot)
is merely to exacerbate alienation from others. Second, even those with a great deal of
autonomy continue to sell their labor power, thus establishing a relationship in which
both worker and employer relate to their activity primarily as a commodity. This activity
remains “alienated” in the narrow sense of appearing as something separable and
distinct, leaving in place a significant barrier to recognition of it as fully one’s own.
Finally, the fact that labor is bought and sold leaves in place an antagonistic relationship
in which the employer has an interest in maximizing profits and the worker in maximizing
wages. This in turn creates a necessity for techniques of management—while these may
sometimes coincide with the affording of greater autonomy, there always remains the
possibility that they do not.
Second, a different extension of the concept of alienation to contemporary problems lies

in the idea of alienation from nature. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
Marx emphasizes the importance of understanding humans as natural beings who are
both dependent upon nature and try to make nature an extension of themselves. He
describes nature as “man’s inorganic body” ([1844] 1975:329), as “the material in which
his labor realizes itself, in which it is active and from which and by means of which it
produces” ([1844] 1975:325). Thus, in separating the worker from the conditions of their
labor, estranged labor separates them from nature itself, representing nature as
something potentially dominating—and in turn, in need of domination. This estranged
relationship can only be overcome in a higher form, which is “the perfected unity in
essence of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of
man and the realized humanism of nature” (Marx [1844] 1975:349–350). This vision
might be seen as utopian and perhaps even licensing a “Promethean” account that sees
nature only as something to be subjected to human mastery (although Marx is clear even
here that this is a unity, not a domination). Later, however, Marx’s writings develop a
more lasting sense of nature as a kind of limit, albeit one that is still produced and
defined by human actions. While there is no “pure” nature untouched by human hand,
there remains a natural world that exists independent of human beings: a world with its
own laws that must be grasped and understood. Central to this is the notion of
Page 11 of 18

metabolism (Stoffwechsel) between humans and nature, in which labor appears as a

crucial regulating element.
The concept of metabolism has formed the core of recent attempts to apply the notion of
alienation from nature to contemporary environmental degradation and climate change,
which draw in particular on Marx and Engels writings about soil erosion and the
development of urbanization (Foster 2000:141–177). Mass migration of people to cities
from the countryside led to a concentration of human waste in the cities, which presented
both a crisis of hygiene and waste management and a crisis of soil quality, since these
nutrients were no longer being returned to the soil:
Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing

minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed
together in towns; in this way it produces the conditions that provoke an
irreparable rift in the interdependent process of the social metabolism, a
metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.
(Marx [1894] 1981:949)
This “rift” constitutes a breakdown of the metabolic relationship between humans and
nature, which can only be overcome through a system of social regulation and planning.
Indeed, one of Marx’s more famous passages in which he describes the conditions of
Communism makes use of this idea of metabolism: “Freedom [in the sphere of necessity]
can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human
metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under collective control instead of
being dominated by it as a blind power” (Marx, [1894] 1981:959).
This notion of metabolic rift can be extended to the problems of environmental

degradation we confront today—most dramatically in the case of a breakdown in the
process of carbon emissions and capture but also in more comically grotesque crises such
as the fatbergs that clog the London sewers. While there is debate about precisely how
best to extend and develop these insights, the concept of alienated labor remains central
to them (Burkett and Foster 2016:222–242). The central point is that while capitalist
production separates productive activity from its natural basis and seems to pull itself
free of the limits of nature, those limits reimpose themselves in dramatic forms and in
ways that ultimately undermine the basis of this production—and even the basis of human
existence itself.
Finally, a somewhat different aspect of alienation can be identified in contemporary

politics. Especially in his earlier works, Marx presents politics as an alienated sphere,
which arises on the basis of divisions within society but is unable to resolve those
divisions itself. Politics can be seen as following the same pattern as other areas of human
life: Human activity appears as an abstract force of nature: something external and
dominating. This approach dominates both the image and the reality of modern politics.
The news reports economic movements in the same language they use for reporting the
weather—and the same goes for politics. Parties and candidates rise and fall in the polls
Page 12 of 18

in an almost mystical and mysterious way, while the polls themselves begin to determine
the strategies taken in response to them. This, in turn, leads to an ever-narrower sense of
political engagement and political strategy, seeing politics as essentially a game of data
mining and modeling.
To an extent, this treatment of politics reflects a reality—contemporary politics is too

detached from the active engagement and participation of most people. Politics is an
alienated sphere, operating with its own laws, which can be mastered by particularly
smart data analysts—that is, until it can’t anymore. Hillary Clinton’s ultimately doomed
campaign for the American presidency followed precisely this pattern. Her strategists
were completely enamored with “analytics,” which attempted to model voters according
to their likelihood of voting for Clinton, thus concentrating resources according to these
models. While this involved vast quantities of data, it reduced most people to static and
statistical quantities:
The data team would collect as much information as possible about potential
voters, including age, race, ethnicity, voting history, and magazine subscriptions,
among other things. Each person was given a score, ranging from zero to one
hundred, in each of three categories: probability of voting, probability of voting for
Hillary, and probability, if they were undecided, that they could be persuaded to
vote for her. These scores determined which voters got contacted by the campaign
and in which manner—a television spot, an ad on their favorite website, a knock
on their door, or a piece of direct mail. ‘It’s a grayscale,’ said a campaign aide
familiar with the operation. ‘You start with the people who are the best targets
and go down until you run out of resources.’
(Allen and Parnes 2017: 229)
This model had, in more “normal” elections, reaped great rewards. In focusing resources
on a narrow section of the electorate likely to vote, it helped mobilize maximum turnout.
With no reason to believe people who usually did not vote would vote, this strategy
involves the most effective use of resources. Yet throughout the campaign, this approach
proved to be ineffective, first as a predictor of outcomes (Clinton tended to do worse than
her own analytics team expected), and ultimately as a political strategy.
What does alienation have to do with this? Firstly, it helps us think about a way in which
human activity can appear as a “natural,” statistical process, capable of analysis and
ultimately manipulation. If political developments can be reduced to such models, then all
that is required is a particularly skilled analyst to understand and manipulate these forces
to their own end. Such models gain their apparent wisdom from the fact that they are
effective under certain conditions in which people do in fact engage passively with
politics. But their claims appear weak at moments of irruption that shake up such
categories, either through new people engaging with politics, or through the breakdown
of established assumptions about people’s preferences and level of engagement. Such
strategies “work” because they grasp an element of the reality that for many politics is an
alienated sphere engaged in passively or not at all. Yet they mystify to the extent that
Page 13 of 18

they preclude the possibility of a different kind of engagement in politics. In this sense,
the “anti-political” shocks that throw all of this into doubt can be seen as reactions
against this narrow, alienated sphere of politics. This is not, of course, to say that such
shocks will always take emancipatory forms, but understanding them in these terms helps
grasp something important about the alienation of contemporary politics.
These examples suggest alienation can still contribute a great deal to grasping (and
perhaps uprooting) contemporary phenomena and that it has lasting significance as an
explanatory concept, which must be considered alongside philosophical debates about
human nature, essentialism, or the subject. Indeed, instead of beginning with an abstract
human being, perhaps we should begin with such concrete phenomena in order to “work
backward” to the picture of the human they imply. None of this is to suggest that an airy
invocation of alienation is a substitute for doing the painstaking empirical work necessary
to demonstrate and analyze these connections. As Lucien Séve (2012:109) suggests,
alienation can appear as a seductively simple concept, capable of explaining diverse
phenomena. But if we simply leave it at that, then we risk invoking alienation as a
“formula of formulas” with which “instead of undertaking a concrete scientific analysis;
we just need to formulate [phenomena] in the language of alienation to ‘account’ for them
and even to ‘deduce’ them.” But this is not to say that the empirical work cannot be done.
While the risk of oversimplification and abstraction is real, the answer is not to abandon
claims about alienation entirely but rather be prepared to do the empirical and
conceptual work necessary to support and develop them.
4. Alienation and Emancipation

Marx did not see alienation, as some others have: as an inevitable product of modern
technology or mass society. Rather, he saw it as connected to a particular form of
economic organization: capitalism. He believed that it could be overcome, or at least
minimized, in an alternative society. Moreover, he believed that alienated workers had an
interest in confronting and challenging their alienation and that through this process
such an alternative society might emerge. These points, too, provide fertile grounds for
debate. We have already discussed the importance of the concept of alienation in the
context of the Cold War and the debates concerning the nature of the official Communist
regimes but more generally the notion of Communism as an unalienated, or at least less
alienated, society can provide a touchstone for practical political debates. In particular, to
the extent that alienation has its roots in forms of workplace organization, it suggests
that alternatives that leave workplace hierarchies substantially intact are unlikely to be
sufficient. It cautions against an overidentification of Communism with nationalization
and state control, at the expense of sustained consideration of questions of social
domination and empowerment. At the same time, Marx’s insistence that lack of control at
work is fundamentally rooted in capitalist relationships of production and exchange
provides a challenge to accounts that believe we can empower people while leaving such
relations fundamentally intact.
Page 14 of 18

If a focus on alienation can tell us something important about alternatives to capitalism, it

also suggests something about the process by which such a society comes to be. In
particular, it suggests an idea of revolution as an activity of “de-alienation.” On this
understanding, revolutionary transformation involves a process coming to recognize
oneself in the world through the process of changing it: and in particular recognizing
what appeared as alien, external forces as human activity. Marx seems to have believed
that this kind of process took place to a certain extent “naturally” as workers are forced
to organize to defend their own interests in necessarily antagonistic relationships with
their exploiters. Here it is important to note that, while Marx sees both workers and
capitalists as alienated, there is an important difference:
The worker stands on a higher plane than the capitalist from the outset, since the
latter has his roots in the process of alienation and finds absolute satisfaction in it
whereas right from the start the worker is a victim who confronts it as a rebel and
experiences it as a process of enslavement.
(Marx [1867] 1976:990)
Thus while the capitalist sees in alienation only the means to increase their wealth—
reinforcing and confirming their identity as capitalists—workers already see labor as a

kind of domination against which they are likely to rebel. It is in this rebellion that the
possibility to transform social relations can be found.
Seeing revolutionary activity as a process of de-alienation raises a number of practical

debates: The first is about the role of labor—particularly the official labor movement.
Marx saw the struggle of workers as workers—for higher wages, better conditions etc.—
as a vital part of the development of a class identity and ultimately of preparing workers
for social revolution. And as a result, Marxists have tended to see such struggles as
having a certain priority. This has often been criticized in terms of blindness to other
struggles, but some have gone further, suggesting that a focus on the point of view of
labor offers no way out of alienation. For example, John Holloway (2010:151–164)
develops such an argument rooted in the distinction between concrete and abstract labor.
In its struggle for higher wages, better conditions and more secure employment, the
labor movement remains trapped within a logic that sees the significance of labor as
measured solely in terms of the value it produces. He argues that this maintains and
takes for granted the dominance of abstract labor over concrete labor (and thus of
alienated social relations). Instead, Holloway calls for a rejection of this logic through a
revolt of “doing against labor,” in which people distance themselves as far as possible
with the wage-labor relation and do things for themselves (through forms of direct action,
social experiments, etc.). Others (see, e.g., Lebowitz 2003:178–196), however, argue that
while such struggles do not necessarily break the logic of alienation themselves, they
expand the horizons of workers and help them recognize themselves as active
transformers of the world.
Page 15 of 18

A similar debate concerns politics. As previously discussed, Marx presents politics as an

alienated sphere of activity that stands above society and appears beyond the control of
ordinary people. Yet he also insists that the working class must engage in political
activity, up to and including conquering state power. This is partly for narrowly strategic
reasons but also because such struggles are an important part of forming class
consciousness and helping people better articulate their own demands and interests. This
raises a series of practical questions of how to engage in political activity in a way that
does not merely reproduce the alienated norms of politics as it currently exists, in
particular over the role of leadership, organization, and how and when to contest political
power.
Finally, this raises the role of revolutionary theory. If revolution is understood as de-
alienation, then theory should play a role in helping people understand and transform
their place in the world. This is the crucial sentiment behind Marx’s famous eleventh
Thesis on Feuerbach: that philosophers have only interpreted the world, but the point is
to change it. An important aspect of this is that theory should aim to overcome fetishes
and reveal how seemingly natural features of society are really merely alienated
reflections of human activity (see Feenberg 2014). This suggests a particular view of
emancipatory theory, which is intimately connected to practical struggles to transform
the world and take sides within those struggles. Moreover, if theory is to play this role, it
cannot remain the preserve of a small group of experts: it must be capable of being
recognized and incorporated into the projects of ordinary people and in a way that does
not simply reproduce hierarchies of domination. All of this is easier said than done.
As with the previous empirical examples given, these practical questions suggest the
enduring relevance of alienation as a concept for helping understand and transform the
world. While seeing the alternative to capitalism as a less alienated society does not
provide a blueprint or road map, it does provide a set of pointers that can motivate action
and debate. Similarly, seeing revolutionary transformation as a process of de-alienation
may not be specific enough to provide hard and fast answers, but it can provide a
framework and coordinates for shared practical debate. The fact that these questions do
not have easy answers should not be seen as a weakness of alienation as a concept but
rather as a sign of its enduring vitality and relevance. Again, these point to the enduring
significance of alienation not as a master key or “formula of formulas” but as a living
concept that can help shed real light on contemporary problems and challenges.
References
Allen, Jonathan, and Amie Parnes. 2017. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed
Campaign. New York: Crown.
Althusser, Louis. [1965] 2005. For Marx. London: Verso.
Berger, John, and Jean Mohr. [1975] 2010. A Seventh Man. London: Verso.
Page 16 of 18

Burkett, Paul, and John Bellamy Foster. 2016. Marx and the Earth, an Anti-Critique.
Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Elliot, Gregory. 2005. Althusser: The Detour of Theory. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Feenberg, Andrew. 2014. The Philosophy of Praxis. London: Verso.
Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s Ecology. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Fromm, Erich. [1966] 2003. Marx’s Concept of Man. London: Continuum.
Geras, Norman. 1983. Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend. London: Verso.
Holloway, John. 2010. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto.
Jaeggi, Rahel. 2014. Alienation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Karkov, Nikolay. 2015. “Decolonizing Praxis in Eastern Europe: Toward a South-to-South

Dialogue.” Comparative & Continental Philosophy 7(2):180–200.
Lebowitz, Michael. 2003. Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marmot, Michael. 2015. The Health Gap. London: Bloomsbury.
Martineau, Jonathan. 2015. Time, Capitalism and Alienation. Leiden, The Netherlands:
Brill.
Marx, Karl. [1844] 1975. “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.” Pp. 279–400 in
Early Writings, edited by London: Penguin.
Marx, Karl. [1845]1975. “Theses on Feuerbach.” Pp. 421–423 in Early Writings. London:
Penguin.
Marx, Karl. [1845]1998. The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus.
Marx, Karl. [1867]1976. Capital Volume 1. London: Penguin.
Marx, Karl. [1894]1981. Capital Volume 3. London: Penguin.
Meikle, Scott. 1985. Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx. London: Duckworth.
Mészáros, István. 1970. Marx’s Theory of Alienation. London: Merlin.
Ollman, Bertell. 1971. Alienation: Marx’s Concept of Man in Capitalist Society.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Rubin, I. I. 1973. Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Montreal: Black Rose.
Sayers, Sean. 1998. Marxism and Human Nature. London: Taylor & Francis.
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Sayers, Sean. 2011. Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Séve, Lucien. 2012. Aliénation et Émancipation. Paris: La Dispute.
Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level. London: Penguin.
Dan Swain
Dan Swain, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague
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Alienation, or Why Capitalism is Bad for Us

Oxford Handbooks Online

Subject: Sociology, Economic Sociology Online Publication Date: Oct 2018

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: alienation, labor, capitalism, essentialism, human nature, Marxism

1. Labor and Alienation

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

(Marx [1844] 1975:323–324)

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

(Marx [1844] 1975:326)

(Marx [1844] 1975:327).

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

cooperative production, bringing together otherwise separate workers in a given

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

competitors as cooperators. Workers are only capable of engaging in collective activity

2. Essences, Natures, and Cold War

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

in Yugoslavia developed a Marxism that foregrounded the notion of a subject engaged in

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

3. Grasping Phenomena by the Root

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

Marmot (2015:172) continues to see work as having an important determining role

inequities in power, money and resources are the fundamental causes of

Marmot is far from a Marxist or an anti-capitalist, but he does insist on a strong

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

Second, a different extension of the concept of alienation to contemporary problems lies

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

metabolism (Stoffwechsel) between humans and nature, in which labor appears as a

Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing

(Marx [1894] 1981:949)

This notion of metabolic rift can be extended to the problems of environmental

Finally, a somewhat different aspect of alienation can be identified in contemporary

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

To an extent, this treatment of politics reflects a reality—contemporary politics is too

(Allen and Parnes 2017: 229)

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

4. Alienation and Emancipation

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

If a focus on alienation can tell us something important about alternatives to capitalism, it

(Marx [1867] 1976:990)

reinforcing and confirming their identity as capitalists—workers already see labor as a

Seeing revolutionary activity as a process of de-alienation raises a number of practical

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

A similar debate concerns politics. As previously discussed, Marx presents politics as an

Althusser, Louis. [1965] 2005. For Marx. London: Verso.

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

Feenberg, Andrew. 2014. The Philosophy of Praxis. London: Verso.

Fromm, Erich. [1966] 2003. Marx’s Concept of Man. London: Continuum.

Holloway, John. 2010. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto.

Jaeggi, Rahel. 2014. Alienation. New York: Columbia University Press.

Karkov, Nikolay. 2015. “Decolonizing Praxis in Eastern Europe: Toward a South-to-South

Marmot, Michael. 2015. The Health Gap. London: Bloomsbury.

Marx, Karl. [1845]1998. The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus.

Marx, Karl. [1867]1976. Capital Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Marx, Karl. [1894]1981. Capital Volume 3. London: Penguin.

Mészáros, István. 1970. Marx’s Theory of Alienation. London: Merlin.

Ollman, Bertell. 1971. Alienation: Marx’s Concept of Man in Capitalist Society.

Rubin, I. I. 1973. Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Montreal: Black Rose.

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019

Séve, Lucien. 2012. Aliénation et Émancipation. Paris: La Dispute.

Dan Swain, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 17 February 2019