#estranged labor

the worker, who works for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads - etc does he consider this twelve hours' weaving, spinning, drilling turning, building, shoveling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary, life begins for him when this activity ceases, at the table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hours' labour, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, drilling, etc. but as earnings which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed.

Estranged Labor

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 labor 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.

The Revolutionary Dead: Karl Marx (part 2)

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 labor 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 labor 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.

The more the worker exerts himself in his work, the more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being over against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, and the less they belong to him. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into god, the less he retains within himself.

It is true that labor produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it casts some of the workers back into barbarous forms of labor and turns others into machines. It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker.