AN INTRODUCTION TO MARX’S THEORY OF ALIENATION

“Marx argued that the alienation of the worker from what he produces is
intensified because the products of labour actually begin to dominate
the labourer. In his brilliant Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, I I
Rubin outlines a quantitative and a qualitative aspect to the production
of commodities. Firstly, the worker is paid less than the value he
creates. A proportion of what he produces is appropriated by his boss;
the worker is, therefore, exploited. Qualitatively, he also puts
creative labour into the object he produces, but he cannot be given
creative labour to replace it. As Rubin explains, ‘In exchange for his
creative power the worker receives a wage or a salary, namely a sum of
money, and in exchange for this money he can purchase products of
labour, but he cannot purchase creative power. In exchange for his
creative power, the worker gets things’.²⁶ This creativity is
lost to the worker forever, which is why under capitalism work does not
stimulate or invigorate us and ‘open the door to unconquered
territory’, but rather burns up our energies and leaves us feeling
exhausted.

This domination of dead labour over living labour lies behind Marx’s
assertion in the Manuscripts that ‘the alienation of the worker means
not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but
that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and
begins to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life which he
has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien’.²⁷
For Marx this state of affairs was unique to capitalism. In previous
societies those who work harder could usually be expected to have more
to consume. Under capitalism, those who work harder increase the power
of a hostile system over them. They themselves, and their inner worlds,
become poorer. ‘The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more
goods he creates. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct
relation with the increase in value of the world of things’.”²⁸