Karl Marx: The Dehumanization Of Labor

Karl Marx criticizes capitalism in a multitude of his essays, including the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. His critique of capitalism varies from the exploitation of workers to the instability of the capitalist system, but fundamentally his issue with capitalism is the dehumanization of laborers. Marx argues that under capitalism, laborers are dehumanized because they are alienated, or disconnected from fundamental human properties, in four aspects – products of labor, labor, species-being, and human-human relations. The basis of Marx’s theory of alienation is the laborer’s estrangement from his labor, which arises from alienation from the laborer’s object of production. According to Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “the object which labour produces – labour’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer” (71). When the laborer works for the capitalist, the laborer creates products over which he has no ownership or relation. The laborer is alienated from the products of his labor because they have an identity separate from him and exist outside of his world. As laborer continues producing objects he has no connection towards, he eventually creates a material world that he is alienated from. Since the products of labor do not belong to the laborer, he is …show more content…
When the products of labor and the act of labor itself no longer belong to the laborer, they belong instead to the capitalist the laborer is working for. The laborer cannot help but feel disconnected from the capitalists who own the laborer’s estranged product and labor, and therefore the laborer no longer views the capitalist as a fellow human being. Rather, the laborer feels antagonistic towards the capitalist. The laborer sees the capitalist and the system the capitalist benefits from as the cause of his