2024 – ALIENATED LABOR by Karl Marx translated by Martin Milligan from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 the first

ALIENATED LABOR

by Karl Marx 

translated by Martin Milligan

from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, the first work in which Marx systematically elaborates problems of political economy.   He wrote it to clarify the problems for himself.  The manuscripts of 1844 led many years later to the writing of Das Capital.

Originally published by Progress Publishers  [Progress Publishers was a Moscow-based Soviet publisher founded in 1931.]

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We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labor, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land – likewise division of labor, 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 magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, 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 – property owners and property-less workers.

Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas 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 throws no light on the cause of the division between labor and capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause, i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain. Similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently accidental circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how exchange itself appears to it as an accidental fact. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed, and thewar amongst the greedy – competition.

Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of the guild, the doctrine of the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate – for competition, freedom of the crafts and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only as accidental, premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, of the guild system, and of feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and natural consequences.

Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labor, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. – the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system.

Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing; it merely pushes the question away into a gray nebulous distance. The economist assumes in the form of a fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce – namely, the necessary relationship between two things – between, for example, division of labor and exchange. Thus the theologian explains the origin of evil by the fall of Man – that is, he assumes 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 size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to theincreasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is theobjectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers [18]; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, asalienation. [19]

So much does the labor’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization 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 necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.

All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to theproduct of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and 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 more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor 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 labor 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 in it at the estrangement, the loss of the object, of his product.

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

But just as nature provides labor with [the] means of life in the sense that labor cannot livewithout 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 workerhimself.

Thus the more the worker by his labor appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in two respects: first, in that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labor – to be his labor’s means of life; and, second, in that it more and more ceases to be a means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker.

In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a servant of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labor, i.e., in that he receives work, and, secondly, in that he receivesmeans of subsistence. This enables him to exist, first as a worker; and second, as aphysical subject. The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.  (According to the economic laws the estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed 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 becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the more powerful labor becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labor becomes, the less ingenious becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature’s slave.)

Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labor) and production. It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back into barbarous types of labor and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism. 

The direct relationship of labor to its products 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 of this first relationship – and confirms it. We shall consider this other aspect later. When we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labor 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 labor. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production, within theproducing activity, itself. How could 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 activity, of production. If then the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labor is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labor itself. 

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; 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 feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a meansto satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor 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 imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling 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 becomes animal.

Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions. We have considered the act of estranging practical human activity, labor, in two of its aspects.

(1) The relation of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object 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 inimically opposed to him.

(2) The relation of labor to the act of production within the labor process. This relation is the relation 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’sown physical and mental energy, his personal life – for what is life but activity? – as an activity which is turned against him, independent of him and not belonging to him. Here we have self-estrangement, as previously we had the estrangement of the thing.

 

We have still a third aspect of estranged labor to deduce from the two already considered.

Man is a species-being [20], [ social organism – Engh]  not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but – and this is only another way of expressing it – also because he treats himself 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, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible – so also 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, etc. The universality of man appears in practice 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 – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Manlives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange 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.

Estranged labor turns thus:

(1) [man away from] nature, and

(2) [man away from] himself, . . .

his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man.  It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges 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 labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering 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 one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It isits 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. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately 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. Estranged labor reverses the 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 a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being.  [ie., a social organism – Engh]  

• Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves 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. 
• [Animal . . . ] produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. 
• An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. 
• An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. 
• An animal forms only 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 objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.

It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being [social organism – Engh].  This production is his active species-life.  Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality.  The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created.  

In tearing [man] away from . . . the object of his production, . . . estranged labor tears [him away from his social organism] from him his species-life, [from] his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.  Similarly, in degrading spontaneous, free activity to a means, estranged labor 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 species[-life] [life as a social organism] becomes for him a means.

Estranged labor turns thus:

(3) Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a beingalien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.

(4) 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 fromman. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.

In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.

The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man [stands] to himself, is realized and expressed only in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.

Hence within the relationship of estranged labor each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the relationship 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 this fact in conceptual terms as estranged, alienated labor. We have analyzed this concept – hence analyzing merely a fact of political economy.

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

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

To a being other than myself.

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 labor. No more was nature.  And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labor 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 product to please these powers.

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

If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must give satisfaction and pleasure. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.

We must bear in mind the previous proposition that man’s relation to himself becomes for him objective and actual through his relation to the other man. Thus, if the product of his labor, his labor objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If he treats his own activity as an un-free [involuntary] activity, then he treats it as an 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 himself. For this reason religious self-estrangement necessarily 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-estrangement can only become manifest through the real practical relationship to other men.  The medium through which estrangement takes place is itself practical. Thus through estranged labor man not only creates his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers that are alien and hostile to him; he also creates 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 creates his own production as the loss of his reality, as his punishment; his own product as a loss, as a product not belonging to him; so he creates the domination of the person who does not produce over production and over the product.  Just as he estranges his own activity from himself, so he confers upon the stranger an activity which is not his own.

We have until now considered this relationship only from the standpoint of the worker and later on we shall be considering it also from the standpoint of the non-worker.

Through estranged, alienated labor, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labor of a man alien to labor and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labor creates the relation to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labor). Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, ofalienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.

Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labor, i.e., ofalienated man, of estranged labor, of estranged life, of estranged man.

True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labor (of alienated life) in political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.

Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labor, and that on the other it is the means by which labor alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.

This exposition immediately sheds light on various hitherto unsolved conflicts.

(1) Political economy starts from labor as the real soul of production; yet to labor it gives nothing, and to private property everything. Confronting this contradiction, Proudhon has decided in favor of labor against private property[21].  We understand, however, that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of estranged labor with itself, and that political economy has merely formulated the laws of estranged labor.   We also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are identical. Indeed, where the product, as the object of labor, pays for labor itself, there the wage is but a necessary consequence of labor’s estrangement. Likewise, in the wage of labor, labor does not appear as an end in itself but as the servant of the wage. We shall develop this point later, and meanwhile will only draw some conclusions. [22]    An enforced increase of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that such an increase, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labor their human status and dignity.   Indeed, even the equality of wages, as demanded by Proudhon, only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labor into the relationship of all men to labor. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist.   Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other.

(2) From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in thepolitical form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation.   Just as we have derived the concept of private property from the concept of estranged, alienated labor by analysis, so we can develop every category of political economy with the help of these two factors; and we shall find again in each category, e.g., trade, competition, capital, money only aparticular and developed expression of these first elements.

 

But before considering this phenomenon, however, let us try to solve two other problems.

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

(2) We have accepted the estrangement of labor, its alienation, as a fact, and we have analyzed this fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labor? 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 of the origin of private property into the question of the relation of alienated labor to the course of humanity’s development. For when one speaks of private property, one thinks of dealing with something external to man. When one speaks of labor, one is directly dealing 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 labor has resolved itself for us into two components which depend on one another, or which are but different expressions of one and the same relationship.Appropriation appears as estrangement, as alienation; and alienation appears asappropriation, estrangement as truly becoming a citizen.[ (Links to an external site.)23]

We have considered the one side – alienated labor in relation to the worker himself, i.e., therelation of alienated labor to itself. The product, the necessary outcome of this relationship, as we have seen, is the property relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labor. Private property, as the material, summary expression of alienated labor, embraces both relations – the relation of the worker to work and to the product of his labor and to the non-worker, and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product of his labor.

Having seen that in relation to the worker who appropriates nature by means of his labor, 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 labor and its object of this person who is alien to labor and the worker.

First it has to be noted 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 who 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.    [Manuscript breaks off here.]

 

FOOTNOTES

18. Marx, still using Hegel’s terminology and his approach to the unity of the opposites, counter-poses the term (realization) to  (loss of realization).

19. In this manuscript Marx frequently uses two similar German terms to express the notion of “alienation.”   In some places it is translated as  “alienation,” in others as “estrangement”.

20. The term “species-being”   man and mankind as a whole.  [social organism – Engh]

21. Apparently Marx refers to Proudhon’s book Qu’est-ce que la propri’eté?, Paris, 1841.

22. This passage shows that Marx here uses the category of wages in a broad sense, as an expression of antagonistic relations between the classes of capitalists and of wage-workers. Under “the wages” he understands “the wage-labor,” the capitalist system as such. This idea was apparently elaborated in detail in that part of the manuscript which is now extant.

23. This apparently refers to the conversion of individuals into members of civil society which is considered as the sphere of property, of material relations that determine all other relations. In this case Marx refers to the material relations of society based on private property and the antagonism of different classes.

 

GLOSSARY

Anabaptists, German – Among the medieval religious communistic communities, in particular, there was current a notion of the common possession of women as a feature of the future society depicted in the spirit of consumer communism ideals.  In 1534-35 the German Anabaptists, who seized power in Münster, tried to introduce polygamy in accordance with this view. Tommaso Campanella, the author of City of the Sun (early 17th century), rejected monogamy in his ideal society. They would not be the first.  SeeMormons, below.  See Campanella, below.

Babeuf’s communism – 23 November 1760 – 27 May 1797), known as Gracchus Babeuf, was a French political agitator and journalist of the French Revolutionary period.  His newspaper “the tribune of the people” was best known for his advocacy for the poor and calling for a popular revolt against the government of France.  He was a leading advocate for democracy, the abolition of private property and the equality of results.   He angered the authorities who were clamping down hard on their radical enemies.  In spite of the efforts of his Jacobin friends to save him, Babeuf was executed for his role in theConspiracy of the Equals.

Bourgeois Society – in the narrow sense, the material relations of  capitalism.

Cabet, Étienne –   (January 1, 1788 – November 9, 1856) was a French philosopher and Utopian socialist. He was the founder of the Icarian movement.  His goal was to replace capitalist production with workers cooperatives. He became the most popular socialist advocate of his day, with a special appeal to artisans were being undercut by factories. Cabet led groups of emigrants to found a utopian community in Nauvoo, Illinois.   Due to his bitter attacks on the French government he was accused of treason in 1834 and fled to England, seeking political asylum. Influenced by Robert Owen, he wrote “Travel and Adventures of Lord William Carisdall in Icaria,”  which depicted a utopia in which a democratically elected governing body controlled all economic activity and closely supervised social life. The nuclear family remained the only other independent unit.  Icariais the name of the fictional country and ideal society he describes. The success of this book prompted him to take steps to realize his Utopia.   In 1839, Cabet returned to France to advocate a communitarian social movement, for which he invented the term communism.  Cabet’s notion of a communal society influenced other socialist writers and philosophers, notably Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.  Some of these other writers ignored Cabet’s Christian influences, as described in his other book  “The real Christianity according to Jesus Christ,” 5 volumes.  In this book Cabet explains that Christ’s mission was to establish social equality.    True primitive Christianity was nothing like the modern tendency to build religious empires out of churches.   In 1847 Cabet printed an Icarian almanac, a number of controversial pamphlets and the book on Christianity mentioned above.  He was widely read in France.  Some believe there were probably 400,000 adherents of the Icarian school.  In 1848, Cabet gave up on the notion of reforming French society.  Instead, after conversations with Robert Owen and after studying Owen’s own attempts to found a commune in Texas,  Cabet gathered a group of followers from across France and traveled to the United States to organize an Icarian community.  They entered into a social contract, making Cabet the director-in-chief for the first ten years, and embarked from France in 1848, to take up land on the Red River in Texas.  Cabet came later at the head of a second and smaller band.  Texas did not prove to be the Utopia looked for, and, ravaged by disease, about one-third of the colonists returned to France.   The remainder moved toNauvoo, Illinois, to a site recently vacated by the Mormons, in 1849.  With the improved location, Nauvoo developed into a successful agricultural community.  In July 1852, the community was suffering economically, and a split developed regarding the work division and food distribution.  By 1855, the Nauvoo Icarian community had expanded to about 500 members with a solid agricultural base, shops, schools, and a newspaper.  In attempts to save the community Cabet issued a series of edicts; he forbade “tobacco, hard liquor, complaints about the food, and hunting and fishing ‘for pleasure’.”    Disputes within the Nauvoo community led to  Cabet’s expulsion.  He went to St. Louis in 1855 where he  petitioned the state legislature to repeal the act that incorporated the community into the state of Missouri.  He died the following year.  The last Icarian colony at Corning disbanded in 1898.

Campanella, Tommaso –   the author of City of the Sun  in the early 17th century, ie the 1600’s, and early Utopian society built around a perfect city, called (in the book) The City of the Sun.  Campanella’s utopia pointed out many problems of his contemporary society, issues that seemed to cause the greatest stress in society.  Consequently, the government in his ideal, but imaginary society rejected monogamy.  They would not be the first.  SeeMormons, below.  See Anabaptists, German , above.

Civil Society – in a broader sense, the economic system of society regardless of the historical stage of its development, the sum total of material relations which determine political institutions and ideology

Classless Society – a society in which all humans (homo sapiens sapiens) are treated humanely,  a future society characterized by new features distinct from earlier stages. 

Corn Laws – a series of laws in England (the first of which dated back to the 15th century) which imposed high duties on imported corn with the aim of maintaining high prices on it on the home market. In the first third of the 19th century several laws were passed (in 1815, 1822 and so on) changing the conditions of corn imports, and in 1828 a sliding scale was introduced, which raised import duties on corn while lowering prices on the home market and, on the contrary, lowered import duties while raising prices.   In 1838 the Manchester factory owners Cobden and Bright founded the Anti-Corn Law League, which widely exploited the popular discontent at rising corn prices. While agitating for the abolition of the corn duties and demanding complete freedom of trade, the League strove to weaken the economic and political positions of the landed aristocracy and to lower workers’ wages.  The struggle between the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy over the Corn Laws ended in their repeal in 1846.

Equalitarian  – communism or egalitarianism.  Marx uses this term to mean different things, but often in Alienated Labor he uses it to mean crude egalitarian communism, such as that propounded by Babeuf and his followers.  While recognizing the historic role of Babeuf’s communism, Marx thought it impossible to ignore the weak points of Babeuf’s system.  Marx here used the term “communism” to mean not the higher phase of classless society (which Marx called  “socialism” at this time of his life) but evolution toward it.  Marx emphasized that this evolutionary process should not be considered an end in itself, but that it is necessary, though transitional, a stage in attaining the future classless society.

Geoscience –  This expression apparently refers to the theory of the English geologist Sir Charles Lyell who, in his three-volume work The Principles of Geology (1830-33), proved the evolution of the earth’s crust and refuted the popular theory of cataclysms.  Lyell used the term “historical geology” for his theory. The term “geognosy” was introduced by the 18th-century German scientist Abraham Werner, a specialist in mineralogy, and it was used also by Alexander Humboldt.

Medieval Religious Communistic Communities – held a notion of the common possession of women as a feature of the future society depicted in the spirit of consumer communism ideals.  See Anabaptists, above.    See Mormons, below.  See Campanella, above.

Mormons – term loosely referring to various religious groups descended from that founded by Joseph Smith.  Many of the divisions began and separated from the community of Nauvoo Illinois.  See Nauvoo, below.

Nauvoo, Illinois –  staring point of a whole series of uniquely American religious, socialist, communist communities, first founded by Joseph Smith, author of the Book of Mormon.   Joe rejected monogamy and private property and taught polygamy and communism, requiring the faithful to deed all things to the Bishop of the Church of Christ.   In 1844 Joe was assassinated, murdered, or martyred (depending on who is writing the account) and the Nauvoo community split:  some going west with Brigham Young, some following  Sidney Rigdon,  but many followed James Strang to his island kingdom which he built on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan.  Strang found his greatest support among the scattered outlying branches of Mormonism, which he frequently toured.  His followers may have numbered as many as 12,000.  Young and Strang both continued polygamy and communism (no-private property).  Rigdon abandoned both communism and polygamy.   The city of Nauvoo quickly declined after the Mormons scattered.  However, the location proved ideal to another early communist, this time from France, Etienne Cabet.  See Cabet, above.

Ontology – in some philosophic systems a theory about being, about the nature of things.

Owen, Robert – a 19th century proponent of egalitarian society in England, who later came to America to try his social experiments anew.

Primitive Communistic Communities – were characterized by asceticism and a hostile attitude to science and works of art.   Some of these primitive equalitarian features, the negative attitude to the arts in particular, were inherited by the communist trends of the first half of the 19th century, for example, by the members of the French secret societies of the 1830s and 1840s (“worker-egalitarians,” “humanitarians,” and so on) comprising the followers of Babeuf.

Secret Societies of the 1830s –

Socialism – the word “socialism” is used to denote the stage of society at which it has carried out a revolutionary transformation, abolished private property, class antagonisms, alienation and so on.  In the same sense Marx used the expression “communism equals humanism.”  At that time he understood the term “communism as such” not as the final goal of revolutionary transformation but as the process of this transformation, development leading up to that goal, a lower stage of the process.

 

Your assignment. 

• PART A:  Ten Vocabulary words.  As you read the text above select 10 vocabulary words (minimum).  You select the words new to you, or words used in a way new to you.  List each word and then a definition that fits the usage of the word.  Look up the definition in an academic dictionary (such as Oxford or Miriam Webster’s New Collegiate, but not Google.)  Then write the definition IN YOUR OWN WORDS.  Select as many vocabulary words as needed to fill up the requirement of 10.  
  
• PART B: Answer the following questions. Do NOT retype the question.  
  

1. Who was Karl Marx, when did he live, and where, and what are some of his contributions to critical thinking?
2. Explain the meaning of Political Economy?  [You may need to research this online.]
3. According to Karl Marx, what is the fallacy of private property?  Give a full explanation in your own words.  Do not quote Marx, do not quote any other sources.  Use your own words.
4. What causes the devaluation of man? Give a full explanation in your own words.  Do not quote Marx, do not quote any other sources.  Use your own words.
5. Explain why man is estranged (alienated) from the product of his own labor.  Give a full explanation in your own words.  Do not quote Marx, do not quote any other sources.  Use your own words.
6. Give some real life examples of alienated labor.  Give a full explanation in your own words.  Do not quote Marx, do not quote any other sources.  Use your own words.
7. Explain this passage, ” . . . though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its consequence, . . ” [Marked in blue font above.]  Give a full explanation in your own words.  Do not quote Marx, do not quote any other sources.  Use your own words.
8. Explain this passage, ” . . . the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion . . .”  [Marked in red font above.]  Give a full explanation in your own words.  Do not quote Marx, do not quote any other sources.  Use your own words.
9. How is private property the means by which labor becomes estranged, and by which it is perpetuated?  [Clue: think of class distinctions in society.  Everyone thinks, you included,  by working hard enough they will be able to own their own home, some property.  By ownership people mean, have a deed to a house or an estate which they can pass on to their children, and heirs.   Why do they want to do this?  They want life to be easier for their children, so the children will not be forced to work as hard as the parents did, or in as difficult or miserable jobs or circumstances as the parents did.  Everyone dreams of becoming landed gentry, owners of lands to the point where they only need to work if they want to, but it is not required by their circumstance.  This is an illusion.  Let us review the facts:  death is real,  everyone will die, death is expensive, so expensive that most people spend their entire life savings in the last few days of life (think of two weeks in intensive care in a hospital where it easily costs $10,000 per day), funerals are expensive, caskets are expensive, burial is expensive (land is not free).  At the end, the cost of death exceeds the value of the home.  To pay expenses the home is sold.  That does not cover the bill, so the rest of the bill is paid out of savings and investments.  But then your spouse dies, and the costs arise again.  Now there is nothing left.  Hospitals and clinics and others will try to collect the money from the children.  Welcome to the real world.  The idea of becoming landed gentry is so far from reality that it now becomes an obvious illusion.  Even if there is a small inheritance to pass on, it gets’ divided among the children, and to do that it must be sold:  leaving no estate.  What would the children do with it if they had one?  They try to pay down their student loans or refinance their own mortgages.    End of the clue.]  Now, go back and try to answer the question,   . . . How is private property the means by which labor becomes estranged, and by which it is perpetuated? 
10. What would really restore human significance and dignity? 

Follow this STYLE GUIDE: All answers for all assignments must be written as full sentences, do not answer with fragments.  All answers must follow the style guide below:

• No First Person (I, me, we, us, our, ours)
• No Second Person (you, your)
• No Passive Voice
• No Cliché’s
• No Contractions (don’t, won’t, can’t, isn’t, and so on) 
  
• No Colloquialisms
• No Jargon
• No Jingoism
• No Rhetorical answers
• No Dialectal answers
• No Fragments
  
• No non-factual answers