This paper examines how Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed the concept of alienation within their broader critique of capitalist society. Beginning with the class struggle framework presented in the Communist Manifesto and grounded in historical materialism, the paper traces how alienation emerges from the unequal ownership of the means of production. It then analyzes Marx's theoretical elaboration of alienation in "Alienated Labor" before turning to the scholarship of Wheen and Carver, both of whom argue that Engels's firsthand exposure to industrial capitalism in Lancashire provided the empirical foundation that Marx later theorized. Engels's 1842 work on the English working class is presented as early evidence of this priority.
The paper demonstrates effective use of secondary scholarship to reframe a primary-source debate. Rather than simply summarizing Marx and Engels, the student deploys Wheen's biography and Carver's intellectual history as interpretive lenses, showing that scholarly authority can be used to challenge received wisdom about who originated a major concept.
The essay opens with historical and ideological context, then explains the theoretical machinery (historical materialism, mode of production, class division) before defining alienation. The second half pivots to the scholarly debate over intellectual priority, drawing on Wheen and Carver, and closes with a direct quotation from Engels's 1842 tract as corroborating evidence. This two-part structure — theory first, historiography second — is well suited to a concept-origin argument.
In 1848, Western society was confronted with a new ideology put forward by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their political treatise the Communist Manifesto. In it, the authors proposed and expounded upon socialism as a new revolutionary movement that served as the antithesis of capitalism and, eventually, of modernism itself. The socialism-capitalism dichotomy was discussed in terms of the antagonistic relationships that emerged from the unequal opportunities given to people at each stage of the socioeconomic history of humanity. Marx and Engels posited that throughout history, and persisting under capitalism, human society had been defined by the "history of class struggles," wherein inequalities existed among "[f]reeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman — oppressor and oppressed — stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight."
Through historical materialism, both political theorists determined that social experience — that is, the existence of oppression in society — is directly related to the conditions and mode of economic production. The mode of production consists of the means (material objects), forces (type of labor and level of technology), and relations (ownership of means and participation in the labor force) of production. Because the landowning class, or bourgeoisie, controls the means and forces of production, they dominate those who constitute the labor force — identified as the proletariat, or working class. Oppression therefore emerges when the social system is divided into classes, and this classification is determined by ownership of the mode of production.
Marx's and Engels's discussion of class oppression ultimately centers on the individual — and more specifically, on the worker. Both believed that the process of individualization is dependent on the economic structures of society and on the position the individual occupies within those structures. Marx, in particular, believed in the human agent as the creator of value: capital is nothing but human labor disguised as an object, which, ironically, then turns to oppress the very people who created it. The Communist Manifesto terms this phenomenon — the oppression of humanity by the object — alienation, and explicates it in the following passage:
Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him… the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
Alienation is the process by which the proletariat is denied the opportunity to experience full individualization. Because workers live in poverty and are completely dependent — socially and economically — on the bourgeoisie, their political lives are equally dependent on the elite class. In his discourse "Alienated Labor," Marx elaborated further on how alienation occurs among the oppressed. He expressed alienation in theoretical terms, asserting that the conflict between "property owners" (bourgeoisie) and "propertyless workers" (proletariat) produces alienation, wherein "[t]he devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things… The performance of work appears in the sphere of political economy as a vitiation of the worker, objectification as a loss and as servitude to the object, and appropriation as alienation" (Macionis & Benokraitis, 1998: 263–4).
Marx's theoretical expression of alienation did indeed reflect the real-life situation that most workers experienced during the period when his ideas were becoming rapidly known throughout the Western world. However, scholars examining Marx's and Engels's concept of alienation have argued that it was Engels, not Marx, who possessed the stronger grasp of the inherent oppression and alienation within capitalist economy. Wheen (1999), in his biography of Marx, argued that Engels had greater knowledge and understanding of capitalism and its dynamics than Marx, thereby suggesting that the very concept of alienation originated with Engels and was only theorized further by Marx (75):
Though he had already decided that abstract idealism was so much hot air, and that the engine of history was driven by economic and social forces, Marx's practical knowledge of capitalism was nil. He had been so engaged by his dialectical tussle with German philosophers that the condition of England — the first industrialized country, the birthplace of the proletariat — had escaped his notice. Engels, from his vantage point in the cotton mills of Lancashire, was well placed to enlighten him.
In this passage, Wheen highlights how, despite Marx's authority on the issues of oppression and alienation, the ideology of socialism emerged substantially from Engels's discourses. This finding is not surprising, given that the Communist Manifesto was based on a draft on political economy originally authored by Engels. From Wheen's perspective, Engels's direct exposure to the realities of capitalism during the nineteenth century established him as the true authority on socialist ideas.
Carver (1984) echoed Wheen's assessment in his analysis of the political discourses of Marx and Engels. While Wheen argued that the key concepts of oppression and alienation originated with Engels, Carver went further, contending that the deterministic approach adopted in developing the Communist Manifesto was shaped by Engels rather than Marx. It was Engels's lived experience within a capitalist society, his development of socialist ideas, and his command of economic theory that allowed him to form a firmer conception of socialism as an ideology. Once Engels's ideas took shape, Marx developed them further into a political theory — a process that ultimately accorded Marx greater public credit than Engels received (157).
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