Marx and historical materialism

Marx & Alienation of the Worker from his Product:

The Theory of "Estranged Labor" from Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

According to the economic and philosophical theorist Karl Marx, to be a laborer in capitalist society, as opposed to a member of the bourgeois, is to be estranged or alienated from what one produces. Paradoxically, the more powerful or physically demanding the labor one exerts, the less power or political and social sway a worker often has in his or her environment, while the owners of the means of production do not work yet benefit socially and financially from the products of hard-working physical laborers.

A laborer produces in excess of his or her needs of, for instance, widgets or paper towels, or cars. The factory owner rewards the worker in the form of a wage for the excesses. Yet the owner gets to keep all the goods that are made by the workers, simply by owning the property and factory itself. The owner does not waste his or her time or physical health working in the factory, yet benefits financially and materially far more than the worker, from the worker's sweat and toil. "The culmination of this slavery is that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject and only as a physical subject that he is a worker." or, as Marx writes in his series of paradoxes regarding modern labor," the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker and the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker." (Marx, 1844)

Of course, the worker receives money in remuneration for his or her efforts and can buy more products that he or she does need. Yet the true irony, as observed by Marx, is that "The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent." In other words, according to the laws of supply and demand, the greater the supply, usually the lower the price of an item -- owners can charge less to encourage customers to buy more when there is a plethora of goods, due to the possibilities of great surpluses created by factories. In such a system, "the worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces. The devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things. Labor not only produces commodities; it also produces itself and the workers as a commodity," as workers sell their labor on the marketplace. (Marx, 1844)

The more money the factory owner makes, the more workers he can hire and thus the more command he can have over an increasingly alienated workforce. According to Marx, "this alienation has a profound psychological effect upon the worker. For it is clear that, according to this premise, the more the worker exerts himself in his work, the more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being over against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, and the less they belong to him." (Marx, 1844) the worker becomes a creature of brute strength, the owner has the leisure time to pursue education and seek 'the higher life.'

In other words, unlike working one's own property, and producing the goods one will eat, the process of factory labor generates profits for those who do not work, namely the owner, goods for those who do not produce the items, and place holding value in the form of money rather than actual goods for the worker.