Karl Marx, The Estrangement Of Labor

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Karl Marx
The Estrangement of Labor

Throughout Marx’s Philosophical and Economic Manuscript of 1844, the term "estranged labor" is predominate in his theories. But what is “estranged labor”? In the introduction to the book, the point is brought up that this phrase is one of difficulty when translating the Manuscript from German to English. There is a dispute over whether to use estranged instead of alienated. Both of these terms have similar meanings in that they describe the separation between two or more things or people. However, it is believed that it is more proper to use “estranged” because alienated leads the reader to believe that the separation was created, in this case, by the laborer. Whereas by definition, estranged means:
1: to remove from customary environment or associations
2: to arouse especially mutual enmity or indifference in where there had formerly been love, affection, or friendliness (www.m-w.com).
and labor:
2: an act or process requiring labor (task)
3: a product of labor (www.m-w.com).
Therefore, we can conclude that estranged labor is the removal of the process or product of a labor or task from its natural place in nature. But what does Marx mean by this?
To understand what Marx is talking about, we must look back at his dialectic. This part of Marx’s theories derives from two men, Georg Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach. Hegel and Feuerbach were on the opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Hegel was an Idealist Philosopher who believed that the human conscience developed separate of the outside world. Feuerbach on the other hand was a Materialist Philosopher who believed that everything was defined by the material world. Marx takes the middle ground here. He states that while it is true that the conscience develops separately and the material world does define much of a society, you cannot have one without the other. Here Marx uses Hegel’s ideas of the thesis and antithesis. Heg...