are a “universal” being and differentiate themselves from other animals. According to Marx, while animals remain trapped in a given particular situation and can only work and consume in a certain manner—though we know now that this is not quite true—humans can teleologically relate to nature as their “inorganic” body and modify its current forms in accordance with their own needs, inventing new technologies and creating a wholly new environment.14 Furthermore, Marx argues that human labor is also a “free” activity because it is not always directed to the satisfaction of immediate physical needs for the sake of a bare subsistence. Humans can also produce something fully independent from their physical needs. For example, one can produce an artistic object “in accordance with the laws of beauty” and attain self-confirmation and pleasure in this act.15 Marx bemoans the fact that alienation negates this creative activity, which is nothing but a manifestation of human species-being, since labor is now subordinated to mere individual purposes as a means to sustaining one’s existence: “Estranged labor reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.”16 The universal dimension of human labor gets lost as its functions are instrumentalized to increase the wealth of others.
Finally, Marx adds the fourth form of alienation: “An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being is the estrangement of man from man.”17 If individuals have to strive desperately for their physical existence, their intersubjective social cooperation and communication becomes extremely problematic. Consequently, it is no longer possible to enrich the physical and mental dimensions of the human species-being together. Instead of free mutual intercourse and collaboration, there emerges antagonistic and atomistic competition for survival.
To sum up, Marx’s analysis of estranged labor delineates the modern unfree reality where one cannot execute labor as an end in itself but rather labor functions as a process of loss of reality, impoverishment, dehumanization, and atomization. Marx argues that the only way to overcome this alienated reality is to transcend the system of private property so that humans can relate to nature through labor in a thoroughly conscious, free, universal cooperative manner and acquire self-affirmation with the totality of the external world with their own objectified products. This will lead to the absolute realization of human essence as species-being. Marx envisions communism as a goal of the historical process, in which humans overcome the estranged dichotomy of the subject and object through a revolution to realize the absolute unity between humanity and nature under the name of human species-being.
It is obvious that Marx’s project of 1844 is heavily influenced by Feuerbach, who is supposed to have achieved “the establishment of true materialism and of real science.”18 Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity put forward a theory of alienation as a critique of religion. Individuals suffer from alienation in religion because they are finite beings and project an infinite being (that is, God) in opposition to which they find themselves powerless. Feuerbach argues that this religious estrangement can be overcome if they are able to recognize the hidden truth that humans are actually projecting their own essence as a species-being onto God. God is nothing but the product of human imagination that later became more and more powerful and independent, dominating humans as an alien existence. Against this inverted reality, Feuerbach opposes the importance of “sensibility,” and particularly “love,” as the unique materialist foundation of truth:
Love is the middle term, the substantial bond, the principle of reconciliation between the perfect and the imperfect, the sinless and sinful being the universal and the individual, the divine and the human. Love is God himself, and apart from it there is no God. Love makes man God and God man. Love strengthens the weak and weakens the strong, abases the high and raises the lowly, idealizes matter and materializes spirit. Love it the true unity of God and man, of spirit and nature. In love common nature is spirit, and the preeminent spirit is nature.19
Feuerbach claims that with the power of love humans will be able to transcend religious estrangement, because through love they can cooperate with one another to overcome their isolated state of being and this intersubjective unity allows them to see through their own essence as species-being.
Feuerbach’s explanation of alienation together with its transcendence had a tremendous impact upon the Young Hegelians. Marx at the time firmly believed that Feuerbach had carried out a thorough critique of religion and revealed the true principle of a coming revolutionary “philosophy of the future.” He felt it necessary only to extend its scope to include other spheres of the modern bourgeois society: “For Germany the criticism of religion is in the main complete, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”20 Marx’s Paris Notebooks document his attempt to carry out this type of criticism of alienation, combining it with his recent discoveries in the field of political economy. However, he neither published these notebooks nor discussed the concept of alienation in an extensive manner again.
It has been heatedly disputed whether Marx stuck to his original plan to extend the concept of alienation to political economy in later works. Marx’s theory of alienation was interpreted from a philosophic perspective ever since the publication of the text as The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in 1932. What is more, the participants in this debate never questioned this tendency, something that must now change based on recent philological findings. At the time, Marx was reading various works of political economy, and if he started his discussion on alienation rather spontaneously while he was making other excerpts of political economy in his Paris Notebooks, political economy must have affected his theoretical interest even with regard to alienation.
In terms of philosophizing the text and ignoring political economy, Herbert Marcuse played a particularly important role. He published an article on the newly discovered manuscripts in 1932 titled “The Foundation of Historical Materialism” and shed light on the novel dimension of Marx’s “philosophical critique” of alienation. Marcuse argued that there is an important “breakthrough” within the first manuscript, and that Marx’s analysis “seems initially to proceed completely on the ground of traditional political economy and its theorems. Marx significantly starts by dividing his investigation into the three traditional concepts of political economy: ‘The Wages of Labor,’ ‘The Profit of Capital’ and ‘The Rent of Land.’” However, according to Marcuse, Marx’s radical critique of alienation and estrangement “point[ed] in a completely new direction,” and his critique emerged only after “this division into three [was] exploded and abandoned.” Marcuse went further, claiming that the “development of the concept of labor thus breaks through the traditional framework for dealing with problems.”21 Thus, Marx’s philosophical critique of modern bourgeois society and political economy as its ideologue only begins when he supersedes the “three traditional concepts of political economy.” A radical break exists between the economic and philosophic parts.
As Marcuse emphasized, Marx first excerpted relevant sentences by Jean-Baptiste Say and Adam Smith from his notebooks into the Manuscripts and then added detailed comments on them.22 Subsequently, he began his discussion of estranged labor only after page XXII of the first “Manuscript.” Yet, this fact does not mean that Marx’s comments on these economists within their framework are insignificant for his concept of alienation as Marcuse’s interpretation implies. Marcuse’s analysis almost completely neglects Marx’s economic critique in the first half of the first manuscript.23 This tendency of Marcuse to underestimate the economic part of the first manuscript was widely shared by later Marxists, showing that Marcuse’s interpretation was quite influential. For example, Erich Fromm shared the same view, and his popular edition of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts omitted the economic part of the first manuscript, which reinforced the philosophic interpretation of alienation.24 Marcuse and Fromm only recognized the original theoretical contribution by the young Marx in his philosophical criticism of “alienated labor,” without going into the very beginning, which
