Marx: Estrangement From Species Being

Estrangement from Species Being Thus far we have examined the ways in which alienation and estrangement manifest themselves in the products of labour and the activity of labour itself. However, the third and arguably most nefarious type of estrangement, is the estrangement from species being. Marx succinctly describes the impacts of estranged labour on species being when he writes that estranged labour transforms, “Man’s species being, both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man’s own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being” (77). This excerpt is very dense in its use of Marxist vocabulary – or, the phrases and key words used by Marx as place-holders for larger and more complex ideas. Therefore, it requires a bit of un-packing. First, what does Marx mean by species being? It’s intended function is to serve as a description of the nature of human kind. Species being is indicative of our truest nature as a species. To understand this true nature, we must think back to a time before our own, where ‘civilized’ society is millennia to the future. In this pre-historic time, before hunter gatherer, we were not a people, but simply one species among …show more content…
The estrangement of man from an other, is understood in how man sees the other. As Marx famously states in the beginning of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (473). This quote is meant to illustrate the historical and hostile dichotomy of bourgeois and proletarian relations, of working class and ruling