PhilosophersKarl Marx

Karl Marx

History is the history of class struggles.

Marxism · Materialism1818 – 1883 GermanyMaterialist philosopherEconomistCritic of religionRevolutionary
Manuscripts of 1844, "Estranged Labour"

Estranged labour

What it claims

The worker cannot flourish in his work: he feels himself only outside it, and feels free only when eating, drinking, procreating. "What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal."

Why

What makes us human is free, conscious activity; wage labor is forced and belongs to someone else.

Valid with an implicit premise

Why do so many people wait for the weekend? At 26, Marx answers: because work as it is organised does not belong to us. Yet working, transforming the world, is precisely what makes us human. This text is a draft Marx never published (it appeared in 1932).

P1What distinguishes humans from animals is free, conscious activity: producing, transforming nature, and even creating according to the laws of beauty.
P2 · implicit premiseA being can only flourish if it freely exercises what makes up its essence; deprived of that, it cannot be happy in that activity.
P3In wage labour, activity is not free: it is forced, it is only a means of earning a living, and it belongs to someone else.
Therefore the worker cannot flourish in his work: he feels himself only outside it, and feels free only when eating, drinking, procreating. "What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal."

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P2, the computer finds a case where humans are defined by free activity and work is not free, yet one flourishes in it anyway, for example thanks to colleagues or pay.
Valid with P2. Marx does not state it as a general rule, but it links his definition of humans (P1) to his finding about work (P3). It is an idea close to Aristotle's: happiness is exercising well what makes us human. The debate is about P1 (are humans really defined by work?) and P3 (is wage labour really forced?).
Analogy. A bird in a golden cage has food and water. It lacks only one thing: flying, that is, what makes it a bird. For Marx, the worker is that bird, and the cage is work that does not belong to him.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Louis Althusser, For Marx 1965 · attacks premise 1

This is the text of a young, still "humanist" Marx who believes in a human essence. From 1845 Marx breaks with this idea (a "break"): the human essence is nothing but "the ensemble of the social relations". So his thought cannot be founded on P1. Other readers (Erich Fromm, 1961) see continuity right up to Capital.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1965, after the author's death (1883).
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition 1958 · attacks premise 1

Marx defines humans by labour, then dreams of a society where labour would be reduced to a minimum: that is contradictory. Above all, he confuses labour (the repeated toil of survival, consumed at once) with work (making a lasting world). What makes us human is not only labour: it is also work and political action.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1958, after the author's death (1883).
L
Liberal economists (Frédéric Bastiat) 1850 · attacks premise 3

The wage earner is not forced: he freely signs a contract, he can resign, and a fixed wage protects him from the risks the entrepreneur takes. And, as people add today, many find meaning in their job.

Marx replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Marx What the 1844 text already says
The proof that this work is alien: as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion, it is shunned like the plague.
The debate goes on (our summary) Bastiat would reply that not every painful effort is a constraint imposed by someone else: in any society, it is nature that forces us to work in order to live.