According to Marx, capital and labor present a movement consisting of three fundamental moments:
First, “the immediate and mediate unity of both”; it means that at first they are united, later separate and become strangers to each other, but sustaining each other and promoting each other as positive conditions;
Secondly, “the opposition of both”, since they mutually exclude each other and the worker knows the capitalist as the denial of his existence and vice versa;
Thirdly and lastly, “the opposition of each against himself”, since capital is simultaneously itself and its contradictory opposite, being labor (accumulated); and labor, in its turn, is itself and its contradictory opposite, being a commodity, that is, capital.
already the alienation or estrangement is described by Marx under four aspects:
1. The worker is a stranger to the product of his activity, which belongs to another. This has the consequence that the product is consolidated, before the worker, as an "independent power", and that, "the more the worker is exhausted in the work, the more powerful the strange, objective world that he creates before him becomes, the more he becomes poor and the less the inner world. belongs”;
2. The worker's alienation from the product of his activity appears, at the same time, seen from the side of the worker's activity, as an alienation from productive activity. This ceases to be an essential manifestation of man, to be a “forced work”, not voluntary, but determined by external necessity. Therefore, work is no longer the “satisfaction of a need, but only a means to satisfy needs external to it”. Work is not a happy self-assertion and development of free physical and spiritual energy, but rather self-sacrifice and mortification. The consequence is a profound degeneration of the modes of human behavior;
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3. With the alienation of productive activity, the worker also alienates himself from the human race. The perversion that separates animal functions from the rest of human activity and makes them the purpose of life implies the complete loss of humanity. Free conscious activity is man's specific character; productive life is "generic" life. But life itself appears in alienated work only as a livelihood. Furthermore, the advantage of man over the animal – that is, the fact that man can make his “inorganic body” out of all extra-human nature – is transformed due to this alienation, at a disadvantage, since man, the worker, increasingly escapes his “inorganic body”, either as food for work or as immediate food, physicist;
4. The immediate consequence of this alienation of the worker from generic life, from humanity, is the alienation of man from man. "In general, the proposition that man has become alien to his being, as belonging to a genus, means that one man remained alien to another man and that, equally, each of them became alien to the being of the men". This reciprocal alienation of men has the most tangible manifestation in the worker-capitalist relationship.
It is in this way, therefore, that capital, labor and alienation are related, promoting the reification or reification of the world, that is, making it objective, and its rules must be passively followed by its components. Class consciousness and revolution are the only ways for social transformation.
By João Francisco P. Cabral
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Philosophy from the Federal University of Uberlândia - UFU
Master's student in Philosophy at the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
CABRAL, João Francisco Pereira. "Capital, Labor and Alienation, according to Karl Marx"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/filosofia/capital-trabalho-alienacao-segundo-karl-marx.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
