Introduction.

This is a tripartite study of Marx’s political and social theory from the perspective of radical empiricism. The three areas to be explored are as follows:

• His theory of production.
• His labour theory of value.
• His concept of alienation.

A Study of Marx’s Theory of Production.

In Grundrisse, Marx refers to labour as both a value-positing activity and purposeful activity (G, p274&225), though this can have different values depending on whether it is directed towards use or exchange. Elsewhere, in the third volume of Capital, he states that:

We have seen that the capitalist process of production is a historically determined form of the social process of production in general. The latter is as much a production process of material conditions of human life as a process taking place under specific historical and economic production relations, producing and reproducing these production relations themselves, and thereby also the bearers of this process, their material conditions of existence and their mutual relations. (C3,P7, Ch.48, p592

From these statements, it is evident that production is a multifaceted aspect of being: operating in different spheres of existence and in various forms of enactment. Returning to Grundrisse, Marx asserts that all “production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society” (G, p87). This is to say that a subject objectifies itself by actively appropriating materials from nature. This singular process of production can be parsed into three into three movements: appropriation, transformation, objectification.

The term appropriation should not be considered simply as the extraction and use of raw materials but is rather a universal mode of relatedness. All activity involves a form of appropriation, whether physical or sensory: homesteading land, manufacturing a product, admiring a work of art, or feeling emotions for another. Speaking in human terms, as Marx writes in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:

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. Man lives 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. (EPM, p54)

By stating that nature functions as an inorganic body for human beings, Marx means that a living being cannot exist outside the lived environment upon which it is dependent for appropriating resources in the process of satisfying its needs, wants, and desires. Both the organism and its lived environment evolve from consequentially from this interactivity and interdependence. To posit itself objectively as an individual, a subject must appropriate and transform resources from the natural environment from which it is part. This sentiment is evident in the first volume of Capital with the proposition that:

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.(C1, p283)

In short, appropriation as a process of production signals an orientation of relationality: of thinking, feeling, sensing, making, and building, etc. This is what Marx means when speaks of objective orientation or orientation to the object (EPM, p75).

In the purposive and creative activity of production the appropriated material is both retained and transformed: wood becomes a table but retains its grain, the landscape becomes an artwork but eludes full disclosure, and the lover becomes a soulmate but preserves their character. The productive process is a continuum where objective content and information is subjectively transformed through creative activity to generate an objective product or outcome. Once considered, the appropriative, transformative, and objectified stages of the productive process become an inseparable continuity.

What is crucial here, is the role of an individual active agent as the initiator and facilitator of the productive process and the movement from one objective reality to another. It is this notion that Marx informs his critique of bourgeoisie political economists in Grundrisse, who he views as misguidedly overvaluing certain aspects of the productive process. As he states:

The opponents of the political economists — whether inside or outside its realm — who accuse them of barbarically tearing apart things which belong together, stand either on the same ground as they, or beneath them. Nothing is more common than the reproach that the political economists view production too much as an end in itself, that distribution is just as important. This accusation is based precisely on the economic notion that the spheres of distribution and of production are independent, autonomous neighbours. Or that these moments were not grasped in their unity. As if this rupture had made its way not from reality into the textbooks, but rather from the textbooks into reality, and as if the task were the dialectic balancing of concepts, and not the grasping of real relations! (G, p89–90)

When Marx asserts that “Production is also immediately consumption” and “Consumption is also immediately production” (G, p90), he means that they are two moments in the same singular process. Production predicates consumption and consumption necessitates production. This mutual implication is what Marx is driving at when he states that “Production creates the material, as external object, for consumption; consumption creates the need, as internal object, as aim, for production” (G, p93). It is in consumption that a facet of production receives its identity. This is a genuine Hegelian moment of sublation (aufhebung), of a retention of unity in difference. As Marx explains:

The important thing to emphasize here is only that, whether production and consumption are viewed as the activity of one or of many individuals, they appear in any case as moments of one process, in which production is the real point of departure and hence also the predominant moment. Consumption as urgency, as need, is itself an intrinsic moment of productive activity. But the latter is the point of departure for realization and hence also its predominant moment; it is the act through which the whole process again runs its course. The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self-reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production. (G, p94)

By affirming that production and consumption are moments of one process, Marx accentuates how production is both a singular activity and a unitive moment within a more comprehensive process. This is the notion behind his conclusion that it “is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production predominates not only over itself, in the antithetical definition of production, but over the other moments as well” (G, p99).

Reconsidering the statement in Grundrisse that: production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society, the motive force behind all productivity is the individual active agent. However, as the individual active agent subsists in a relationship of autonomous dependence with its environment, it cannot be said to exist as an isolated or atomic being or entity. Rather, the environment is the totality of individual productive acts, with one generation of individual active agents providing the resources for the next. Stated simply, all present productivity is predicated upon past productivity, and all future productivity is dependent upon that of the present. This is the gist of Marx’s thesis that:

The whole process therefore appears as productive consumption, i.e. as consumption which terminates neither in a void, nor in the mere subjectification of the objective, but which is, rather, again posited as an object. This consumption is not simply a consumption of the material, but rather consumption of consumption itself; in the suspension of the material it is the suspension of this suspension and hence the positing of the same. (G, p300–301, his emphasis)

In the productive process, it is not only resources that appropriated, transformed, and objectified, but also the individual active agent as well. This is because these individual active agents draw upon a wealth of received content and information. That is, inherited, established, and customary patterns of thought, action, and behaviour. Thus, in their productive activity, individual active agents are at liberty to accept or reject preceding structures of influence, conduct, and procedure. The productive act is not merely an interpretation of the resources at hand, but also an evaluation of totality from an individual perspective, informed by subjective bias. That is, personal interest and prejudice. This is the significance of following passage by Marx, long and convoluted as it is:

[B]oth the material of labor and man as the subject, are the point of departure as well as the result of the movement…Thus the social character is the general character of the whole movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him. Activity and consumption, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social: social activity and social consumption; the human essence of nature first exists only for social man; for only here does nature exist for him as a bond with man — as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him — as the life-element of the human world; only here does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence. Only here has what is to him his natural existence become his human existence, and nature become man for him. Thus society is the consummated oneness in substance of man and nature — the true resurrection of nature — the naturalism of man and the humanism of nature both brought to fulfillment. (EPM, p73–72, his emphasis)

Conclusion.

To summarise, productive activity is conducted by an individual active agent in the process of its own becoming and self-reproduction. Through a procedure of appropriation, transformation, and objectification, these individual active agents subjectively interpret and reconfigure existing sets of relations as potentialities to produce new sets of relations. To this extent, there is an intrinsic relationality to individual existence, with the individual active agent functioning as the medium by which creativity and novelty come into being. Stated simply, all present productive activity is dependent upon past productive activity, and all future productive activity is dependent upon that of the present.

Living Time: Creative Labour as Productive Activity.

In Capital, Marx describes the labour process in the following terms:

The labour-process…is human action with a view to the production of use-values, appropriation of natural substances to human requirements; it is the necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature; it is the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase. (C1, p130).

In describing productive activity as a process of appropriation, transformation, and objectification, labour can be considered mediating passage of creative inflection. As all appropriation is relational, labouring represents the subjective injection of purposiveness or value-positing enactment within the productive process. This is what Marx means when he states that labour is the real side of production, which “creates new use-values by performing useful labour with existing use-values” (C1, p981).

Labour is the motive force behind productivity through its conceptual and volitional potency. While the conceptual and volitional faculties of a human being are dependent upon perception for their content and premises, they are mediated by the conceptual power which possess capacity to entertain the potentialities inherent in the given world. In labouring to produce a commodity for consumption to meet a need, want, or desire, conception and volition are active before, during, and after the process. The power of labour is in its creative capacity not only to produce novel ideas, but also to effect real-world activities and outcomes. It speaks for human willpower and ingenuity. This is the sentiment behind Marx’s assertion in Grundrisse that labour “is the living form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time” (G, p361).

What sets human beings apart from the remainder of the animal kingdom is that they are not moved by pure sensation, raw feeling, or impelled reaction. But are instead motivated by self-seeking. Beyond the struggle for survival, humanity is implicated in the struggle to understand both itself and life by transforming inequality and variability into strengths that permit the cultivation of individuality and self-actualisation.

As creatures in possession of behavioural and cognitive traits such as abstract thinking, linguistic communication, symbolic representation, forward planning, concern for the future, and technological innovation, humans stand over and above the animal kingdom, though very much a part of it. In this sense, they are a recapitulation of the natural world. Not simply a product of it, but also capable of changing and augmenting it to suit their wants, needs, and desires.

The question then arises as to how labour and production become captured by the capitalist mode of production. For Marx, this quandary can be sourced in the distinction between use and exchange values, which define the natural human propensity for truck and barter.

The use-value of commodity is derived from its benefit in satisfying a need, want, or desire of an individual. Citing Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics, Marx observes that the difference and variability involved in exchange between individuals makes commensurability nearly impossible (C1, p151). Therefore, there must be a common measure, which he locates in human labour. For Marx, commensurability can be achieved by accounting for the average amount of time required to produce a certain commodity. That is, by measuring the temporal productivity of each individual against the social average. While this entails a degree of abstraction away from embodied productivity, it is necessary for the purpose of exchange. The creativity of labour is now qualified within the social sphere. This necessary abstraction becomes detrimental, however, when an individual is impelled through social and economic circumstances to sell or exchange their labour as form-giving fire on the market in return for a wage. Or, as Marx explains:

When we leave this sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities, which provides the ‘free-trader vulgaris’ with his views, his concepts and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour, a certain change takes place, or so it appears, in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but — a tanning. (C1, p280, his italics)

For there to be exchange in creative labour for a wage, a common measure must be found to estimate how much money, as a universal medium of exchange, is necessary to reimburse a particular contribution of labour time. But this begs the question as to how labour as a creative inflection of productivity can quantitatively be measured. In the very instance it is offered for exchange, the creative potency of labour is vitiated. It then becomes a commodity like any other. This is the meaning behind the verbally gymnastic assertion in Grundrisse by Marx that:

Not-objectified labour, not-value, conceived positively, or as a negativity in relation to itself, is the not-objectified, hence non-objective, i.e. subjective existence of labour itself. Labour not as an object, but as activity; not as itself value but as the living source of value. (G, p296).

What the capitalist extracts is the form-giving fire of labour. Thus, as Marx explains elsewhere in Capital:

The use-value of labour-power, in other words labour, belongs just as little to its seller as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer who sold it. The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labour-power; he therefore has the use of it for a day, a day’s labour belongs to him. On the one hand the daily sustenance of labour-power costs only half a day’s labour, while on the other hand the very same labour-power can remain effective, can work, during the whole day, and consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what the capitalist pays for that use; this circumstance is a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injustice towards the seller. (C1, p 301)

For Marx, the injustice of working for a wage does not occur in the actual process of labouring. Rather, the crime is committed at the very instance an individual offers their creative labour in exchange for monetary reimbursement. It is in this moment that subjectivity is surrendered, and the active agent becomes an object like any other. This is the essence of the following paragraph from Marx:

The turn into its opposite therefore comes about because the ultimate stage of free exchange is the exchange of labour capacity as a commodity, as value, for a commodity, for value; because it is given in exchange as objectified labour, while its use value, by contrast, consists of living labour, i.e. of the positing of exchange value. The turn into its opposite arises from the fact that the use value of labour capacity, as value, is itself the value-creating force; the substance of value, and the value-increasing substance. In this exchange, then, the worker receives the equivalent of the labour time objectified in him, and gives his value-creating, value-increasing living labour time. He sells himself as an effect. He is absorbed into the body of capital as a cause, as activity. (G, p674)

It is here that reformist social democratic interpretations of Marx are confounded. Valuable as they are, the issue is not improved employment terms, better working conditions, higher wages, and shorter hours, etc. But the ontological crime putting one’s subjectivity up for sale. The metaphysical violence of capitalism is that it objectifies subjectivity, arresting and exploiting labour as value-positing activity. Or, in Marx’s terms:

As the not-being of values in so far as they are objectified, labour is their being in so far as they are not-objectified; it is their ideal being; the possibility of values, and, as activity, the positing of value. (G, p297–298)

In the capitalist mode of production, embodied labour is stripped of conceptual and volitional facets and attenuated to mere perception. That is, the simple and brute use of the body, minus its subjective potential for creative action. It is self-reproduction in its barest and most vitiated form. Therefore, creativity and novelty are no longer the possession of the active agent but are the possession of the capitalist. Rather than a dynamic subject seeking self-actualisation, the human being is reduced to a mechanical object employed to generate capital. This reality is behind Marx’s conclusion that:

(A)t the level of material production, of the life-process in the realm of the social — for that is what the process of production is — we find the same situation that we find in religion at the ideological level, namely the inversion of subject into object and vice versa. (C1, p 990, his emphasis)

It is in this way that relationality within this historical mode of production becomes subsumed under capital. Quite simply, waged work is the commoditization of productive activity. While surplus-value is the commoditization of creative labour. Under the capitalist mode of production, the value-positing inflection of creative labour is parsed from the productive process. The former is expropriated by the capitalist as surplus-value, while the latter is returned to the worker as a form of subsistence. Or, as Marx articulates:

The articles which are the material conditions of labour, i.e. the means of production, and the articles which are the precondition for the survival of the worker himself, i.e. the means of subsistence, both become capital only because of the phenomenon of wage-labour. Capital is not a thing, any more than money is a thing. In capital, as in money, certain specific social relations of production between people appear as relations of things to people, or else certain social relations appear as the natural properties of things in society. Without a class dependent on wages, the moment individuals confront each other as free persons, there can be no production of surplus-value; without the production of surplus-value there can be no capitalist production, and hence no capital and no capitalist! Capital and wage-labour (it is thus we designate the labour of the worker who sells his own labour-power) only express two aspects of the self-same relationship. (C1, p1005–1006, his emphasis)

Relations of Things: Capitalism and the Denigration of Creativity and Interconnectivity.

As was explained in my previous essay, contrary to the dialectical materialist for whom reality is the interaction of materials and substances. For the speculative empiricist, what is real is the moment-to-moment event of experience. That is, the very process of becoming itself.

What are classified as the phenomenal and observable objects and entities of the world to the dialectical materialist are, for the speculative empiricist, spatially and temporally extended organisations of experiential actants which vary in their consistency and complexity. These assemblages or multiplicities provide a relational network and structure for their constituent actants which facilitate the moment-to-moment transmission of content and information from past to future. In short, the universe is nothing but an assemblage of overlapping and interconnected multiplicities.

There are different types of assemblage or multiplicity: passive and active, inorganic and organic. An example of a passive assemblage would be the atmosphere or empty space, where there is mutual implication between the constituents, but little consistency. With the dissolution of this assemblage, its constituents also dissipate. By contrast, an active assemblage is defined by the potent agency and mutual presupposition of its constituents. It has a definitive consistency that perpetuates it as a being or entity in space and time. Examples of active assemblages can include inanimate and inorganic objects such as stones, minerals, and planets, etc. Also, organic beings, such as bacteria, fungus, cells, plants, animals, and humans, etc. Active and organic assemblages can be defined by an intensity in their being. That is, they interact functionally and perceptually with their lived environment to create living communities and ecosystems.

For Marx, the tragedy of the capitalist mode of production is that reduces the high intensity consciousness of a human being to that of a lesser subjectivity or even an object by degrading its productive activity to mere subsistence, as well as expropriating the creative inflection of its labour in the service of capital. In such a way, capitalism can be defined as dehumanizing.

Furthermore, given that the universe is an assemblage of overlapping and interconnected multiplicities, the capitalist mode of production insinuates itself into the relational interactivity of these multiplicities, creating fissures between them. While all multiplicities are ontologically independent, they possess varying magnitudes of interactivity and interconnectivity. That is, it sunders the relationship between humans, as well as between humans and the world they inhabit. In short, commercial interest, use and exchange, becomes the dominant criterion through which the world is interpreted and expressed. Historically, there have been numerous modes of though for interpreting the relationality of the universe. But what is particularly insidious about the capitalist mode of production for Marx, is implication that everything is a commodity for potential exploitation and profit.

The capitalist mode of production can be said to perpetrate ontological violence in the following manner:

1. By positing beings and entities as potential resources for exploitation or commodities to be exchanged, the relationality of existence is fissured. Viewed as commodities, beings and entities are interpreted in terms of their utility and commercial value, rather than intrinsic worth. In this way, reality becomes a universe of things, rather than a world of relations. By imposing a use or exchange value upon a being or entity, they are rendered as isolated and tractable objects devoid of spontaneity and experiential valence.
2. In restricting the potential of becoming to the profit motive, the horizon of disclosure is denuded of diversity. Creativity and novelty are predicated upon the affective interpretation by an individual active agent of the possibilities inherent within the given world. By reducing this affectivity to commercial interest, the latitude for the entertainment of potentiality is diminished. In this way, the possibilities for realisation are degraded to mundane and pedestrian repetition.

Conclusion.

To summarise, it has been established that labour is a mediating passage of creative inflection within the productive process. It represents the affective and interpretative structure of the human being, which speaks for ingenuity and willpower. While human beings are dependent upon perception for their content and premises, their conceptual and volition faculties permit them to entertain and transform the possibilities inherent in the given world into new actualities. By exchanging labour for a wage, the creative inflection of the productive process is appropriated by the capitalist as surplus-value, while productivity is returned to a worker as mere subsistence.

This commoditization of labour is not only detrimental to the interactivity between human beings, but also between human beings and the natural environment as use and exchange becomes the primary mode of disclosure. In the first instance, this image of though abstracts and atomises beings and entities from the relationality of their lived existence. Secondly, by confining the potentiality of becoming to the profit motive, the horizon of possibility for affective interpretation is attenuated, sapping opportunity for creativity and novelty through a concern for commercial interest.

An Actual Economic Fact: The Theory of Alienation.

The discussion of alienation begins within the capitalist mode of production where the creative potency of labour has been stripped from productive activity “like Esau his birthright for a mess of pottage” (G, p307). Marx deems it “an actual economic fact” that the “worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces.” (EPM, p50, his emphasis). This is because the wage paid to the worker is predicated upon the minimum level of subsistence necessary to produce that human being. By increasing productivity, the exchange-value of a commodity is reduced, and the wage of the worker along with it. Thus, given that the consumption of commodities is necessary for the worker to maintain subsistence, by increasing productivity and reducing the exchange-value of a commodity, the cost of production is diminished along with the worker’s wage. In short, an increase in productive quantity entails a reduction in subsistence quality, with the creative labour of the worker captured within the commodity for exchange. For, it is in commodity exchange that the value of the capitalist mode of production is realised as the accumulation of capital. his capital can be recapitulated in the following manners:

1. To maintain the existing means of production as equipment and machinery.
2. To acquire new and more advanced means of production as emerging technology.
3. To pay the wages of the workforce.
4. As pure profit to be saved or spent by the owner of the means of production.

In each circumstance, the worker is divorced from the proceeds and outcome of their creative labour. They own no equipment or machinery, cannot determine a wage, nor influence how profit it is allocated. Thus, as Marx explains:

Labor’s realization is in its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labor appears as loss of reality for the workers;18 objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. (EPM, p50, his emphasis)

Given that it is through productivity activity on behalf of individual active agents that the lived environment is transformed from one objective reality to another, estrangement from both the means of production and the outcome of such activity entails an existential and ontological alienation from existence. This is the source of Marx’s statement that in the first instance “labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being” (EPM, p52, his emphasis).

By essential being, the reference is to the self-reproductive activity of the human subjectivity in the transformation of perceptual content and conceptual information into real-world outcomes through volitional intentionality. Within the productive process, labour stands for the creative inflection by which affective entertainment and interpretation is injected into the passage from past to future. Under the capitalist mode of production, this free and spontaneous activity is extracted as surplus-value and utilised in the pursuit of profit. Consequently, the intentionality of the worker usurped by that of the capitalist as the owner of the means of (re)productive activity. As such, labour is “therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it” (EPM, p52, his emphasis).

Subsumed within the capitalist mode of production, the worker is alienated from the appropriative, transformative, and objectifying passages of productive activity. Therefore, according to Marx:

(T)he 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 independently of the individual — that is, operates on him as an alien, divine or diabolical activity — in the same way the worker’s activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self. (EPM, p52–53)

In a pristine state free of economic or political coercion, the self-reproducing and self-determining individual is at liberty to allocate space and time for their various productive activities. Bearing in mind that all productive activity is relational, this can include a totality of vocations, whether active and inactive, work or pleasure. So, there is no strict dichotomy between what constitutes toil or recreation. This is the source of Marx’s statement in The German Ideology that:

For as soon as the division of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. (GI, p53)

However, under capitalism work and leisure are strictly demarcated, with free time determined by what is considered strictly necessary to reproduce a pliant agent to maintain the functioning of the economic system. As such, the human being is reduced from a cultured and cultivated subject to boorish and base creature. The result, as Marx explains, is the following:

(M)an (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but 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 drinking, eating, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But in the abstraction which separates them from the sphere of all other human activity and turns them into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal. (EPM, p53)

While productive activity defines reality, from the interactivity of infinitesimal subatomic particles to the cultural creativity of human beings, only the latter can appropriate, transform, and objectify the world in totality. The human species is an evolutionary product of nature, and a recapitulation of it. This is the sentiment contain within the following statement by Marx that:

The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on inorganic nature; and the more universal man is compared with an animal the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives…The universality of man is in practice manifested 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, object, and the instrument of his life-activity. (EPM, p53–54)

What sets human beings apart from the remainder of the animal kingdom is that they are not moved by pure sensation, raw feeling, or impelled reaction. But are instead motivated by self-seeking. Beyond the struggle for survival, humanity is implicated in the struggle to understand both itself and life by transforming inequality and variability into strengths that permit the cultivation of individuality and self-actualisation. Or, as Marx explains:

An animal produces only itself, while man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, while man freely confronts his product. An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, while 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. (EPM, 54–55)

Working-Up: The Existential and Phenomenological Implications of Alienated Labour.

Opposed to a mere “working-up of the objective world,” humanity proves itself as a species being by the fact that “production is his active species life…nature appears as his work and his reality” (EPM, p55, his emphasis). Through its perceptual, conceptual, and volitional faculties, humanity not only rearranges nature, but actively transforms it. While bees build hives, spiders weave webs, and beavers erect damns, as an embodied being, there is nothing outside the perceptual reach of the human being. It has a conscious monopoly and near unlimited control over the lived environment. Thus, there are two crucial and interrelated aspects to human productivity:

1. It is conscious and intention activity, liberated from impelled reaction or limited by material metabolic exchange. That is, purely based on subsistence.
2. It is not simply reproductive activity, but transformative activity.

This is why, having exchanged free and spontaneous productive activity for waged work at the behest of the capitalist, the worker is dehumanised. Or, to use Marx’s terminology:

In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him” (EPM, p55).

Furthermore, given that the human being “duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in the world that he has created” (EPM, p55), in productively transforming one set of given relations to another, the waged worker finds theirself alienated from the world that produced them, unable to access the full actuality of existing relations in their affective entertainment of possibility. In short, the productive aspect of their being is denuded, and they become a mere product of the world like any other object. The existential and ontological implications are that the worker becomes estranged not only from the world around them, but also from themselves. As Marx explains:

The medium through which estrangement takes place is itself practical. Thus through estranged labor man not only engenders his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers that are alien and hostile to him; he also engenders 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. (EPM, p56–57, his emphasis)

Conclusion.

Speaking phenomenologically, alienation becomes a lived condition under capitalism, with the worker estranged from both their lived existence and lived environment. Given that the appropriate act of production stands for a universal and primordial mode of relatedness, not just the bare extraction and use of information and material, alienation strikes at the worker’s sense of being-in-the-world as a form of attunement, mood, or state of mind.

What is interesting here, is how Marx links the “general nature of private property”(EPM, p57, his emphasis) with “estranged labour, in its relations to truly human, social property” (Ibid, his emphasis). Thus, the concept of private property is not simply limited to an economic and political term, but existential and phenomenological. Essentially, labour alienation is the privatisation of being. While all subjects exist within their own existential frameworks of reference and significance, under the capitalist mode of production, the relational commons becomes enclosed and access to intersubjectivity is degraded. In short, private property is the arrest of productivity, the stifling and pinioning of relationality in being. A such, “labor appears as loss of reality for the workers” (EPM, p50, his emphasis).

Sources.

~(G) Grundrisse (Penguin Classics, 1993) by Karl Marx.

~(C3) Capital: Volume Three (International Publishers, 1959) by Karl Marx.

~(EPM) Economics and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Wilder publications, 2011) by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

~(C1) Capital: Volume One (Penguin Classics, 1976) by Karl Marx.

~(GI) The German Ideology (Prometheus Books, 1988) by Karl Marx.