|) XXII We have proceeded from the premises of political 
economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We 
presupposed private property, the separation of labour, capital and - 
land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land—likewise 
division of labour, competition, the concept of exchange-value, etc. 
On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have 
shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes 
indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of 
the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of 
his production; that the necessary result of competition is the 
accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of 
monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction 
between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the 
soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society 
must fall apart into the two classes—the property owners and the 
propertyless workers. 

Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does 
not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the 
material process through which private property actually passes, and 
these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these 

laws, i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very 
nature of private property. Political economy throws no light on the 
cause of the division between labour and capital, and between capital 
and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to 
profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause, 
ie., it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain. Similarly, 
competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external 
circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently 
accidental] circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course 
of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen 
how exchange itself appears to it as an accidental fact. The only 
wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed and the war 
amongst the greedy—competition.* 

Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the 
movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the 
doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of 
the freedom of the crafts to the doctrine of the guild, the doctrine of 
the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate — for 
competition, freedom of the crafts and the division of landed 
property were explained and comprehended only as accidental, 
premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, of the guild 
system, and of feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and 
natural consequences. 

Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between 
private property, avarice, the separation of labour, capital and 
landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of 
value and the devaluation of men, of monopoly and competition, 
etc.— we have to grasp this whole estrangement connected with the 
money system. 

Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the 
political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial 
condition explains nothing; it merely pushes the question away into a 
grey nebulous distance. The economist assumes in the form of a fact, 
of an event, what he is supposed to deduce—namely, the necessary 
relationship between two things—between, for example, division of 

labour and exchange. Thus the theologian explains the origin of evil 
by the fall of man; that is, he assumes as a fact, in historical form 
what has to be explained. 
We proceed from an actual economic fact. 
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, 

the more his production increases in power and size. The worker 
becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he 
creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion 
to the increasing value of the world of things. Labour produces not 
only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity— 
and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in gen- 
eral. 

This fact expresses merely that the object which labour pro- 
duces—labour’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power 
independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which 
has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is 
the objectification of labour. Labour’s realisation is its objectifica- 
tion. Under these economic conditions this realisation of labour 
appears as loss of realisation for the workers”!; objectification as loss 
of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as 
alienation.” 

So much does labour’s realisation appear as loss of realisation that 
the worker loses realisation to the point of starving to death. So much 
does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is 
robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his 
work. Indeed, labour itself becomes an object which he can obtain 
only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interrup- 
tions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as 
estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he 
can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, 
capital. 

All these consequences are implied in the statement that the wor- 
ker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For on 
this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the 
more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates 
over and against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world— 
becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. 
The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The 
worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs 
to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the 
worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labour is, he is not. 
Therefore the greater this product, the less is he himself. The 
alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour 
becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, 
independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a 
power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he 
has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and 
alien. 

I XXIII/Let us now look more closely at the objectification, at the 
production of the worker; and in it at the estrangement, the loss of the 
object, of his product. 

The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous 
external world. It is the material on which his labour is realised, in 
which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces. 

But just as nature provides labour with [the] means of life in the 
sense that labour cannot live without objects on which to operate, on 
the other hand, it also provides the means of life in the more restricted 
sense, i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the worker 
himself. 

Thus the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external 
world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life 
in two respects: first, in that the sensuous external world more and 
more ceases to be an object belonging to his labour—to be his 
labour’s means of life; and secondly, in that it more and more ceases to 
be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical 
subsistence of the worker. 

In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a servant of his 
object, first, in that he receives an object of labour, i.e., in that he 
receives work; and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. 
This enables him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second, as a physical 
subject. The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker that he 
can maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a 
physical subject that he is a worker. 

(According to the economic laws the estrangement of the worker 
in his object is expressed thus: the more the worker produces, the 
less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more 
valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his 
product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilised 
his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the more 
powerful] labour becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; 
the more ingenious labour becomes, the less ingenious becomes the 
worker and the more he becomes nature’s servant.) 

Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of 
labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker 
(labour) and production. It is true that labour produces wonderful 
things for the rich—but for the worker it produces privation. It 
produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beau- 
ty —but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labour by machines, 
but it throws one section of the workers back to a barbarous type of 
labour, and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces 
intelligence — but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism. 

The direct relationship of labour to its products is the relationship of the 
worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the man of 
means to the objects of production and to production itself is only a 
consequence of this first relationship—and confirms it. We shall 
consider this other aspect later. When we ask, then, what is the 
essential relationship of labour we are asking about the relationship 
of the worker to production. 

Till now we have been considering the estrangement, the 
alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects, i.e., the worker’s 
relationship to the products of his labour. But the estrangement is 
manifested not only in the result but in the act of production, within 
the producing activity itself. How could the worker come to face the 
product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of 
production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is 
after all but the summary of the activity, of production. If then the 
product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active 
alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the 
estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarised the 
estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself. 

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour? 

First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not 
belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not 
affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but 
unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but 
mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only 
feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. 
He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he 
does not feel at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but 
coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a 
need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien 
character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or 
other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External 
Jabour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of 
self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of 
labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but 
someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, 
not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous 
activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the 
human heart, operates on the individual independently of 
him—that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity—so is 
the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to 
another; it is the loss of his self. 

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely 

active in his animal functions— eating, drinking, procreating, or at 
most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human 
functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. 
What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes 
animal. 

Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely 
human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of 
all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they 
are animal functions. 

We have considered the act of estranging practical human activity, 
labour, in two of its aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to the 
product of labour as an alien object exercising power over him. This 
relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external 
world, to the objects of nature, as an alien world inimically opposed 
to him. (2) The relation of labour to the act of production within the 
labour process. This relation is the relation of the worker to his own 
activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as 
suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the 
worker's own physical and mental energy, his personal life—for 
what is life but activity?-—as an activity which is turned against him, 
independent of him and not belonging to him. Here we have 
self-estrangement, as previously we had the estrangement of the thing. 

XXIV] We have still a third aspect of estranged labour to deduce 
from the two already considered. 

Man is a species-being,” not only because in practice and in theory 
he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his 
object, but—and this is only another way of expressing it—also 
because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he 
treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being. 

The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists 
physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on inorganic 
nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more 
universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as 
plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part 
of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as 
objects of art—his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment 
which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible—so 
also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and 
human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of 
nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a 
dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in 
the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body—both 
inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the 

material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is 
man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human 
body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which 
he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That 
man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that 
nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. 

In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active 
functions, his life activity, estranged labour estranges the species from 
man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of 
individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual 
life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the 
purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and 
estranged form. 

For labour, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the 
first place merely as a means of satisfying a need—the need to 
maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the 
species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a 
species — its species-character—is contained in the character of its 
life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. 
Life itself appears only as a means to life. 

The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not 
distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life 
activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has 
conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly 
merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from 
animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. 
Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, 
i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his 
activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses this relationship, so 
that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life 
activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence. 

In creating a world of objects by his practical activity, in his work upon 
inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., 
as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that 
treats itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. 
They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, 
etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself 
or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces 
universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate 
physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from 
physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An 
animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of 
nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical 

body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms ob- 
jects only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species 
to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance 
with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply 
everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also 
forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty. 

It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man 
really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his 
active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his 
work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the 
objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as 
in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and 
therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing 
away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged 
labour tears from him his species-life, his rea] objectivity as a member 
of the species, and transforms his advantage over animals into the 
disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken away from 
him. 

Similarly, in degrading spontaneous, free activity to a means, 
estranged labour makes man’s species-life a means to his physical 
existence. 

The consciousness which man has of his species is thus trans- 
formed by estrangement in such a way that species[-life] becomes for 
him a means. 

Estranged labour turns thus: 

(3) Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species- 
property, into a being alien to him, into a means for his individual 
existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external 
nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect. 

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged 
from the product of his labour, from his life activity, from his 
species-being is the estrangement of man from man. When man 
confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a 
man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labour and to 
himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the 
other man’s labour and object of labour. 

In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged 
from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as 
each of them is from man’s essential nature. 

The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in 
which man [stands] to himself, is realised and expressed only in 
the relationship in which a man stands to other men. 

Hence within the relationship of estranged labour each man 
views the other in accordance with the standard and the relation- 
ship in which he finds himself as a worker. 

IIXXVIl We took our departure from a fact of political 
economy—the estrangement of the worker and his product. We 
have formulated this fact in conceptual terms as estranged, alienated 
labour. We have analysed this concept—hence analysing merely 
a fact of political economy. 

Let us now see, further, how the concept of estranged, alienated 
labour must express and present itself in real life. 

If the product of labour is alien to me, if it confronts me as an 
alien power, to whom, then, does it belong? 

If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien, a 
coerced activity, to whom, then, does it belong? 

To a being other than myself. 

Who is this being? 

The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal produc- 
tion (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India 
and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the 
product belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were 
never the lords of labour. No more was nature. And what a 
contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by 
his labour and the more the miracles of the gods were rendered 
superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man were to 
renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the product 
to please these powers. 

The alien being, to whom labour and the product of labour 
belongs, in whose service labour is done and for whose benefit the 
product of labour is provided, can only be man himself. 

If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it 
confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it 
belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is 
a torment to him, to another it must give satisfaction and pleasure. 
Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien 
power over man. 

We must bear in mind the previous proposition that man’s 
relation to himself only becomes for him objective and actual 
through his relation to the other man. Thus, if the product of his 
labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful 
object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that 
someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, 
hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If he treats his own 
activity as an unfree activity, then he treats it as an activity 

performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion, and 
the yoke of another man. 

Every self-estrangement of man, from himself and from na- 
ture, appears in the relation in which he places himself and 
nature to men other than and differentiated from himself. For 
this reason religious self-estrangement necessarily appears in the 
relationship of the layman to the priest, or again to a mediator, 
etc., since we are here dealing with the intellectual world. In the 
real practical world self-estrangement can only become manifest 
through the real practical relationship to other men. The medium 
through which estrangement takes place is itself practical. Thus 
through estranged labour man not only creates his relationship to 
the object and to the act of production as to powers* that are alien 
and hostile to him; he also creates the relationship in which other 
men stand to his production and to his product, and the 
relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as he 
creates his own production as the loss of his reality, as his 
punishment; his own product as a loss, as a product not belonging 
to him; so he creates the domination of the person who does not 
produce over production and over the product. Just as he 
estranges his own activity from himself, so he confers upon the 
stranger an activity which is not his own. 

We have until now considered this relationship only from the 
standpoint of the worker and later we shall be considering it also 
from the standpoint of the non-worker. 

Through estranged, alienated labour, then, the worker pro- 
duces the relationship to this labour of a man alien to labour 
and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labour 
creates the relation to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses 
to call the master of labour). Private property is thus the pro- 
duct, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, 
of the external relation of the worker to nature and to him- 
self. 

Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of 
alienated labour, ic., of alienated man, of estranged labour, of 
estranged life, of estranged man. 

True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we 
have obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) in 
political economy. But analysis of this concept shows that though 
private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated 
labour, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not 

the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this 
relationship becomes reciprocal. 

Only at the culmination of the development of private property 
does this, its secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand it is 
the product of alienated labour, and that on the other it is the means by 
which labour alienates itself, the realisation of this alienation. 

This exposition immediately sheds light on various hitherto 
unsolved conflicts. 

(1) Political economy starts from labour as the real soul of 
production; yet to labour it gives nothing, and to private property 
everything. Confronting this contradiction, Proudhon has decided in 
favour of labour against private property.’* We understand, 
however, that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of 
estranged labour with itself, and that political economy has merely 
formulated the laws of estranged labour. 

We also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are 
identical. Indeed, where the product, as the object of labour, pays 
for labour itself, there the wage is but a necessary consequence of 
labour’s estrangement. Likewise, in the wage of labour, labour does 
not appear as an end in itself but as the servant of the wage. We shall 
develop this point later, and meanwhile will only draw some con- 
\IXXV]| clusions.” 

An enforced increase of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, 
including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that such an 
increase, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be 
nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for 
the worker or for labour their human status and dignity. 

Indeed, even the equality of wages, as demanded by Proudhon, only 
transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour 
into the relationship of all men to labour. Society is then conceived as 
an abstract capitalist. 

Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labour, and 
estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. The 
down fall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other. 

(2) From the relationship of estranged labour to private property 
it follows further that the emancipation of society from private 
property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the 
emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at 
stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains 
universal human emancipation—and it contains this, because the 
whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to 
production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and 
consequences of this relation. 

Just as we have derived the concept of private property from the 
concept of estranged, alienated labour by analysis, so we can develop 
every category of political economy with the help of these two factors; 
and we shall find again in each category, e.g., trade, competition, 
capital, money, only a particular and developed expression of these first 
elements. 

Before considering this phenomenon, however, let us try to solve 
two other problems. 

(1) To define the general nature of private property, as it has arisen 
as a result of estranged labour, in its relation to truly humanand social 
property. 

(2) We have accepted the estrangement of labour, its alienation, as a 
fact, and we have analysed this fact. How, we now ask, does man 
come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How is this estrangement 
rooted in the nature of human development? We have already gone 
a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the 
question of the origin of private property into the question of the 
relation of alienated labour to the course of humanity’s development. 
For when one speaks of private property, one thinks of dealing with 
something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is 
directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the 
question already contains its solution. 

As to (1): The general nature of private property and its relation to truly 
human. property. 

Alienated labour has resolved itself for us into two components 
which depend on one another, or which are but different 
expressions of one and the same relationship. Appropriation appears 
as estrangement, as alienation; and alienation appears as appropriation, 
estrangement as truly becoming a citizen.” 

We have considered the one side—alienated labour in relation to 
the worker himself, i.e., the relation of alienated labour to itself. The 
product, the necessary outcome of this relationship, as we have seen, 
is the property relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labour. Private 
property, as the material, summary expression of alienated labour, 
embraces both relations—the relation of the worker to labour and to the 
product of his labour and to the non-worker, and the relation of the non- 
worker to the worker and to the product of his labour. 

Having seen that in relation to the worker who appropriates 
nature by means of his labour, this appropriation appears as es- 
trangement, his own spontaneous activity as activity for another 
and as activity of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, production 
of the object as loss of the object to an alien power, to an 
alien person—we shall now consider the relation to the worker, to 

labour and its object of this person who is alien to labour and the 
worker. 

First it has to be noted that everything which appears in the 
worker as an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears in the 
non-worker as a state of alienation, of estrangement. 

Secondly, that the worker’s real, practical attitude in production 
and to the product (as a state of mind) appears in the non-worker 
confronting him as a theoretical attitude. 

||XXVII] Thirdly, the non-worker does everything against the 
worker which the worker does against himself; but he does not do 
against himself what he does against the worker. 

Let us look more closely at these three relations? {[XXVII|| 

[ANTITHESIS OF CAPITAL AND LABOUR.