Marx's Theory of Alienation

Marx's theory describes how capitalist production separates workers from the products and process of their labor, their human creative capacities, and one another.

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Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: Marx's unpublished 1844 notebooks that develop his account of alienated labor and private property. This manuscript gives the theory its fullest early statement and names its four forms of estrangement.
Labor Power: The human capacity to work, which workers sell as a commodity in capitalism. Marx distinguishes the capacity sold for wages from the labor performed and its products.
Karl Marx: A German philosopher, political economist, and socialist whose work analyzed capitalism and class conflict. Marx formulated alienation as part of his critique of capitalist labor and property.
Commodity Fetishism: Marx's account of how relations among producers appear as relations among commodities and their values. It develops a related form of estrangement in which social relations take on the appearance of things.
Wage Labour and Capital: Marx's account of how workers sell their labor power for wages under capitalist production. Wage dependence makes workers' activity a means of survival rather than an end they control.
Surplus Value: The value created by workers beyond the value represented by their wages, appropriated by capitalists. The extraction of surplus helps explain why workers do not control the results of their activity.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: A German philosopher whose account of spirit's development used estrangement and its overcoming as central themes. Marx reworked Hegelian estrangement as a material condition rooted in labor and social relations.
Reification: The process by which human relations and activities appear as fixed, thing-like properties or structures. Later Marxist theory uses reification to analyze how alienated social relations seem natural and objective.
Private Property: A legal and economic arrangement that grants individuals exclusive ownership and control over resources or goods. Marx links private property to the appropriation of workers' products and the reproduction of alienated labor.
Estrangement: A condition of separation or disconnection between a person and something they produce, do, or value. Marx's theory applies estrangement to labor, its products, human capacities, and social relations.