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1、1Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Karl MarxEstranged Labour|XXII| 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
2、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
3、 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 b
4、etween 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 propertyless workers.Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract for
5、mulas 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 divisio
6、n 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 i
7、s 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
8、 political economy sets in motion are greed, and the war 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 freedo
9、m 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 2of monopoly, of the
10、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
11、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
12、pushes the question away into a grey 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
13、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
14、 more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing 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 f
15、act expresses merely that the object which labor produces labors 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 the objectification of labor. Labors realization is i
16、ts objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers18; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.19So much does the labors 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 objec
