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Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

KARL MARX

Translated and Edited by Martin Milligan

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC. Mineola, New York

•haye already been reduced to the miriimum, and the class of tenant farmers already represent within landed property the power of industry and capital. As a result of foreign competition, rent of land can in most cases form no longer an independent income. A large number of landowners have to displace farmers, some of whom in this way sink into the proletariat. On the other hand, many farmers will take over landed property; for 'the big proprietors who with their comfortable incomes have mostly given themselves over to extravagance are, for the most part, not competent to conduct large-scale agriculture, and in some cases pos sess neither the capital nor the ability for the exploitation of the land. Hence a section of this class, too, is com pletely ruined. Eventually wages, which have already been reduced to a minimum, must be reduced yet further, to meet the new competition. This then necessarily leads to revolution.

Landed property had to develop in each of these two ways so as to experience in both its necessary eclipse, just as industry both in the form of monopoly and in that of competition had to ruin itself so as to learn to believe in

man.

[ESTRANGED LABOURJi

We have proceeded from the premises of political econ omy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labour, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land likewise division of labour, competition, the concept of exchange-value, etc. On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of 'the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and mag nitude of his production; that the necessary result of com petition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; that finally the distinction between capitalist and land-ren tier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory- worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes ^the property-owners and the propertiless workers.

Political economy proceeds from the fact of private prop erty, but it does not explain it to us. It expresses in gen eral, abstract formulae the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulae it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy does not dis-

^ Estranged Labour Die Entfremdete Arbeit: re-“estranged,” see Entfremdung in “Translator’s Note on Terminology.”—Ed.

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close the source of the division between labour and capi tal, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the in terest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause; i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to evolve. Similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from ex ternal circumstances. As to how far these external and ap parently fortuitous circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how, to it, exchange itself appears to be a fortuitous fact. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are avarice and the war amongst the avaricious competition.

Precisely because political economy does not grasp the connections within the movement, it was possible to coun terpose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft-liberty to the doctrine of the corporation, the doctrine of the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate for com- ^ petition, craft-liberty and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only as fortuitous, pre meditated and violent consequences of monopoly, the cor poration, and feudal property, not as their necessary, in evitable and natural consequences.

Now, therefore, we have to grasp the essential connec tion between private property, avarice, and the separation of labour, capital and landed property; between exchange and competition, value and the devaluation of men, monop oly and competition, etc.; the connection between this whole estrangement and the money-system.

Do not let us go back to’ a fictitious primordial condi tion as the political economist does, when he tries to ex plain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing. He merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. He assumes in the form of fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce namely, the necessary relation ship between two things ^between, for example, division

of labour and exchange. Theology in the same way ex plains the origin of evil by the fall of man: that is, it as-

^sumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained. We proceed from an actual economic fact. The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he

produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing val ue of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity and does so in the proportion in which it pro- ,duces commodities generally.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces labour’s product confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The prod uct of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realisation is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by .political economy this realisation of labour appears as loss of reality for the workers;

.objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.^

So much does labour’s realisation appear as loss of real ity that the worker loses reality to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most neces sary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labour itself becomes an object which he can get hold of only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular inter ruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object ap pear as estrangement that the more objects the worker pro duces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the dominion of his product, capital.

1 Alienation—EntHusserung: See EntSusserung in "Translator’s Note on Terminology.’’—Ed.

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All these consequences are contained in the definition that the worker is related to the. product of his labour as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the. worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is 'the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. 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 greater is the work er’s lack of objects. Whatever the product of his labour 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 labour 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.

Let us now look more closely at the objectification, at the production of the worker; and therein at the estrange ment, the loss of the object, his product.

The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labour is manifested, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.

But just as nature provides labour with the means of life in the sense that labour cannot live without objects on which to operate, on the other hand, it also provides the means of life in the more restricted sense i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the worker himself.

Thus the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life in the double respect: first, that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labour to be his labour’s means

of life; and secondly, that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physi^^ cal'Subsistence of the worker.

'Hius in this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labour; i.e., in that he receives worfe; and secondly, in that he re ceives means of subsistence. 'Therefore, it enables him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second, as a physical subject. Tbe extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a work er that he continues to maintain himself as a physical sub ject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.

j(The laws of political economy express the estrange ment of the worker in his object thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed be comes the worker; the more civilised his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the mightier labour be comes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labour becomes, the duller becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature’s bondsman.)

Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct rela tionship between the worker (labour) and production. It is true that labour produces for the rich wonderful things but for the worker it produces privation. It produces pal aces ^but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty -but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labour by machines

but some of the workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into ma chines. It produces intelligence but for the worker idiocy, cretinism. j ■ u

The direct relationship of labour to its produce^ is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the man of means to the objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence

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of this first relationship and confirms it. We shall con sider this other aspect later.

When we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labour we are asking about .the relationship of the worker to production.

Till now we have been considering the estrangement^ the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects, i.e., the worker’s relationship to the products of his labour. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production ^within the producing activity it self. How would the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activi ty, of production. If then the product of labour is aliena tion, production itself must be active alienation, the alien ation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrange ment of the object of labour is merely summarised the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of la bour itself.

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour? First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e.,

it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is work ing he is not at home. His labour is therefore not volunta ry, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon .as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self- sacrificc, of mor^cation. Lastly, the external character of

labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagi nation, of the human brain and the human heart, operates independently of the individual that is, operates on him as an alien, divine or diabolical activity in the same way the worker’s activity is not his spontaneous activity. It be longs to another; it is the loss of his self.

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels ■himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions

eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwell ing and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human be comes animal.

Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But in the abstraction which separates them from the sphere of all other human activi ty and turns them into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal.

We have considered the act of estranging practical hu man activity, labour, in two of its aspects. (1) The rela tion of the worker to the product of labour as an alien ob ject exercising power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature as an alien world antagonistically op posed to him. (2) The relation of labour to the act of pro duction within the labour process. This relation is the rela tion of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life or what is life other than activity as an activity which is turned against him, neither depends on nor belongs to him. Here we have self-estrangement, as we had previously the es trangement of the thing.

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We have yet a third aspect of estranged labour to de duce from the two already considered.

Man is a species being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object (his own as well as those of other things), but and this is only anoth er way of expressing it ^but also because he treats him self as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.

The life of the species, both in man and in animals, con sists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on inorganic nature; and the more universal man is compared with an animal, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, ani mals, stones, the air, light, etc., constitute a part of human consciousness in the realm of theory, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art his spiritual in organic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make it palatable and digestible so too in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, or whatever it may be. The universality of man is in practice manifested precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body—^both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life-activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body na ture, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life-activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It turns for him the life of the species into a means of ipdividual life: First it es

tranges the life, of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.

For in the first place labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need the need to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engen dering life. The whole character* of a species—its species character is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.

The animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Con-

^scious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being. Or it is only because he is a species being that he is a Conscious Being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Es tranged labour 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.

In creating an objective world by his practical activity, in working-up inorganic nature, man proves himself a con- .scipus species being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build them- ,selves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. •But an animal only produces what it immediately needs •for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man .produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst n]ian produces even •when he is free from physical need and only truly pro duces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only

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itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An ani mal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms things in accord ance with the laws of beauty.

It is just in the working-up of the objective world, there fore, that man first really proves himself to be a species being. This production is his active species life. Through and because of this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life: for he duplicates him self not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the dis advantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.

Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activ ity, to a means, estranged labour makes man’s species life a means to his physical existence.

The consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by estrangement in such a way that the spe cies life becomes for him a means.

Estranged labour turns thus; (3) Man’s species being, both nature and his spiritual

species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man’s own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual es sence, his human being.

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the p'oduct of his labour, from his life-ac

tivity, from his species being is the estrangement of man from man. If a man is confronted by himself, he is con fronted by the other man. What applies to a man’s rela tion to his work, to the product ol nis labour ana to him self, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the o^her man’s labour and object of labour.

In fact, the prpposition that man’s species nature is es tranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as eagh of them is from man’s essential nature.^

‘ Species nature (and earlier species being)—Gattungswesen: man’s essential nature—menschlichen Wesen: see Wesen in “Trans lator’s Note on Terminology.’’

The following short passages from Feuerbach’s Essence of Chris tianity may help readers to understand the ideological background to this part of Marx’s thought, and, incidentally, to see how Marx accepted but infused with new content concepts made current by Feuerbach as well as by Hegel and the political economists:

“What is this essential difference between man and the brute?... Consciousness—but consciousness in the strict sense; for the con sciousness implied in the feeling of self as an individual, in discrimina tion by the senses, in the perception and even judgement of outward things according to definite sensible signs, cannot be denied to the brutes. Consciousness in the strictest sense is present only in a being to whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought. The brute is indeed conscious of himself as an individual— and he has accordingly the feeling of self as the common centre of successive sensations—but not as a species___ In practical life we have to do with individuals; in science, with species.... But only a being to whom his own species, his own nature, is an object of thought, can make the essential nature of other things or beings an object of thought___ The brute has only a simple, man a twofold life; in the brute, the inner life is one ivith the outer. Man has both an inner and an outer life. The inner life of man is the iife which has relation to his species—to his general, as distinguished from his individual nature.... The brute can exercise no function which has relation to its species without another individual external to itself; but man can perform the functions of thought and speech, which strictly imply such a relation, apart fropi another individual___ Man is in fact at once I and Thou; he can put himself in the place of another, for this redson, that to him his species, his essential nature, and not merely his individuality, is an object of thought.... An

The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man stands to himself, is first realised and ex pressed in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.

Hence within the relationship of estranged labour each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the position in which he finds himself as a worker.

We took our departure from a fact of political economy the estrangement of the worker and his production. We

have formulated the concept of this fact—estranged, alien: ated labour. We have analysed this concept whence ana lysing merely a fact of political economy.

Let us now see, further, how in real life the concept of estranged, alienated labour must express and present itself.

•If the product of labour is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong?

If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien, a coerced activity, to whom, then, does it belong?

To a being other than me. Who is this being? The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal

production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labour. No

object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject’s own, but objective nature-----

“The relation of the sun to the earth is, therefore, at the same time a relation of the earth to itself, or to its o-wn nature, for the measure of the size and of the intensity of light which the sun possesses as the object of the earth, is the measure of the distance, which determines the peculiar nature of the earth-----In the object which he contemplates, therefore, man becomes acquainted ■with himself___ The power of the object over him is therefore the power of his o-wn nature.”

(The Essence of Christianity, by Ludwig Feuerbach, translated from the second German edition by Marian Evans, London, 1854, pp. 1-5.)—Ed.,

more was nature. And virhat a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labour and the more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the produce in favour of these powers.

The alien being, to whom labour and the produce of la bour belongs, in whose service labour is done and for whose benefit the produce of labour is provided, can only be man himself.

If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, this can only be be cause it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must be delight and his life’s joy. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.

We must bear in mind the above-stated proposition that man’s relation to himself only becomes objective and real for him through his relation to the other man. Thus, if the product of his labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is mas ter of this object, someone who is alien, hostile,- powerful, and independent of him. If his own activity is to him an unfree activity, then he is treating it as activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion and the yoke of another man.

Every self-estrangement of man from himself and from nature appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from him self. For this reason religious self-estrangement necessari ly appears in the relationship of the layman to the priest, or again to a mediator, etc., since we are here dealing with the intellectual world. In the real .practical world self- estrangemeint can only become manifest through the real practical relationship to other men. The medium through which estrangement takes place is itself practical. Thus

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through estranged labour man not only engenders his re lationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers that are alien and hostile to him; he also engenders the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as he begets his own production as the loss of his reality, as his punishment; just as he begets his own product as a loss, as a product not belong ing to him; so he begets the dominion of the one who does not produce over production and over the product. Just as he estranges from himself his own activity, so he con fers to the stranger activity which is not his own.

Till now we have only considered this relationship from the standpoint of the worker and later we shall be con sidering it also from the standpoint of the non-worker.

Through estranged, alienated labour, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labour of a man alien to labour and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labour engenders the relation to it of the capi talist, or whatever one chooses to call the master of la bour. Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.

Private property thus results by analysis from the con cept of alienated labour i.e., of alienated man, of es tranged labour, of estranged life, of estranged man.

True, it is as a result of the movement of private prop erty that we have obtained the concept of alienated la bour (of alienated life) from political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though pri vate property appears to be the source, the cause of alien ated labour, it is really its consequence, just as the gods in the beginning are not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes re ciprocal.

Only at the very culmination of the development of pri vate property does this, its secret, re-emerge, namely, that

on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and that secondly it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realisation of this alienation.

This exposition immediately sheds light on various hitherto unsolved conflicts.

(1) Political economy starts from labour as the real soul of production; yet to labour it gives nothing, and to pri vate property everything. From this contradiction Prou dhon has concluded in favour of labour and against pri vate property. We understand, however, that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of estranged labour with itself, and that political economy has merely formulated the laws of estranged labour.

We also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are identical: where the product, the object of la bour pays for labour itself, the wage is but a necessary consequence of labour’s estrangement, for after all in the wage of labour, labour does not appear as an end in it self but as the servant of the wage. We shall develop this point later, and meanwhile will only deduce some conclu sions.

A forcing-up of wages (disregarding all other difficul ties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that the higher wages, being an anomaly, could be main tained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not conquer either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity.

Indeed, even the equality of wages demanded by Prou dhon only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour into the relationship of all men to la bour. Society is then conceived as an abstract capitalist.

Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one aspect must therefore mean the downfall of the other.

(2) From the relationship of estranged labour to pri vate property it further follows that the emancipation of

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society from private property, etc., from servitude, is ex pressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone was at stake but because the emancipation of the workers contains uni versal human emancipation and it contains this, because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and every relation of servi tude is but a modification and consequence of this relation.

Just as we have foxmd the concept of private property from the concept of estranged, alienated labour by analy sis, in the same way every category of political economy can be evolved with the help of these two factors; and we shall find again in each category, e.g., trade, competition, capital, money, only a definite and developed expression of the first foundations.

Before considering this configuration, however, let us try to solve two problems.

(1) To define the general nature of private property, as it has arisen as a result of estranged labour, in its relation to truly human, social property.

(2) We have accepted the estrangement of labour, its alienation, as a fact, and we have analysed this fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development? We have already gone a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the question as to the origin of private property into the question as to the relation of alienated labour to the course of humani ty’s development. For when one speaks of private proper ty, one thinks of being concerned with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly con cerned with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution.

As to (1): The general nature of private property and its relation to truly human property.

Alienated labour has resolved itself for us into two ele ments which mutually condition one another, or which are

hut different expressions of one and the same relationship. Appropriation appears as estrangement, as alienation; and alienation appears as appropriation, estrangement as true enfranchisement.

We have considered the one side-alienated labour in relation to the worker himself, i.e., the relation of alien ated labour to itself. The property-relation of the non worker to the worker and to labour we have found as the product, the necessary outcpme of this relation of alienat ed labour. Private property, as the material, summary ex pression of alienated labour, embraces both relations— the relation of the worker to work, to the product of his labour and to the non-worker, and the relation of the non worker to the worker and to the product of his labour.

Having seen that in relation to the worker who appro priates nature by means of his labour, this appropriation appears as estrangement, his own spontaneous activity as activity for another and as activity of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, production of the object as loss of the object to an alien power, to an alien person ^we shall now consider the relation to the worker, to labour and its ob ject of this person who is alien to labour and the worker.

First it has to be noticed, that everything which appears in the worker as an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears in the non-worker as a state of alienation, of estrangement.

Secondly, that the worker’s real, practical attitude in production and to the product (as a state of mind) appears in the non-worker confronting him as a theoretical attitude.

Thirdly, the non-worker does everything against the worker which the worker does against himself; but he does not do against himself what he does against the worker.

Let us look more closely at these three relations.^^

1 At this point the first manuscript brealis off unfinished.—Ed.

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