Estrangement of Labor

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Funke Jayson J

Subject: Estrangement of Labor


I am reading most of Marx's work for the first time. I am currently
struggling to grasp the Estrangement of Labor as Marx relates it in the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Can anyone explain it
succinctly and in simple terms?
^^^^

CB: I'm not sure if this is an authentic representation, but Marx's
estrangement or alienation of labor is rooted in the idea of alienation of
the fruits of labor, and those alienated fruits developing into capital
which turns back on the laborer and dominates that laborer. So, it's sort of
the Frankenstein image of creating a monster that comes back and haunts you,
or the Sorcerer's Apprentice losing control of something he creates. For
Marx, religion is a process of self-estrangment too, as "God is alienated
man . "

 This fundamental estrangement then ramifies into other "separations"
including the worker from her or himself,  and from other workers. It
creates the isolated and lonely individual. So,in a way it is a theory of
loneliness in the modern world.

Also, See Ollman's _Alienation_




 I am interested in the relationship between the estrangement of labor as it
is linked to man's relationship to/as nature, and the development of private
property. I understand that all of this leads to the development of capital
as well as its concurrent philosophies, but something is not clicking for
me. I intend to read Engel's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and
the State next. Will this book help clarify the estrangement of labor idea?

^^^^^
CB: Maybe better would be Marx's _Pre-capitalistic Formations_
(International). There he discusses how a prerequisite for wage-labor (
estranged labor) is the separation or estrangment of the worker from the
land as her or his natural laboratory , that is , the creation of the doubly
"free" worker or "free" labour - Free , not a slave, but "free" , or
relieved of ownership of means of production, including land.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm#p471


Forms which precede capitalist production
(Concerning the process which precedes the formation of the capital relation
or of original accumulation)
A presupposition of wage labour, and one of the historic preconditions for
capital, is free labour and the exchange of this free labour for money, in
order to reproduce and to realize money, to consume the use value of labour
not for individual consumption, but as use value for money. Another
presupposition is the separation of free labour from the objective
conditions of its realization -- from the means of labour and the material
for labour. Thus, above all, release of the worker from the soil as his
natural workshop -- hence dissolution of small, free landed property as well
as of communal landownership resting on the oriental commune. In both forms,
the worker relates to the objective conditions of his labour as to his
property; this is the natural unity of labour with its material [sachlich]
presuppositions. The worker thus has an objective existence independent of
labour. The individual relates to himself as proprietor, as master of the
conditions of his reality. He relates to the others in the same way and --
depending on whether this presupposition is posited as proceeding from the
community or from the individual families which constitute the commune -- he
relates to the others as co-proprietors, as so many incarnations of the
common property, or as independent proprietors like himself, independent
private proprietors -beside whom the previously all-absorbing and
all-predominant communal property is itself posited as a particular ager
publicus [62] alongside the many private landowners.