Alienation of the Worker

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Last updated: 2026-08-26

This article is part of the Intermediate course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> Marxism

The Marxian critique of alienation is not a psychological lament (“work is boring”).

It is a philosophical thesis: capitalism separates the human being from his own activity, from what he produces, from his species nature, and from others.

The dispute with Austrians, liberals, and other currents starts there: what counts as “human nature,” whether exchange is estrangement or cooperation, and whether the remedy (abolishing private property in the means of production) cures or aggravates the evil.

1. What Marx says

The canonical text is the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx takes from Hegel Entfremdung (estrangement) and from Feuerbach the idea that man projects his essence into an alien object (God).

He shifts it from religion to production. The starting point is not a feeling, but an economic fact: the more the worker produces, the poorer he is as a commodity; the product confronts him as an independent power.

Four forms, which imply one another:

With respect to the product. What he makes does not belong to him. It is objectified over against him and dominates him (the machine he built dictates the pace; accumulated capital imposes conditions on him).
With respect to the activity. Labor is not an expression of himself, but a means to another end (the wage). It is external: “in work he does not affirm himself, he denies himself.” The human (creating with consciousness) becomes animal (eating, procreating outside the workshop); the animal becomes the only thing that is “free.”
With respect to Gattungswesen (species-being). What is specifically human, for Marx, is to produce in a free, universal, and conscious way —not instinctively, like the animal—. Wage labor reduces that potency to a means of survival.
With respect to others. Relations pass through things (commodities, wages, competition). The other appears as rival or as owner, not as co-producer of a common world.

In his maturity, Marx changes the vocabulary. In his book Capital commodity fetishism predominates: relations among persons present themselves as relations among things; value seems a property of the object. Alienation does not disappear; it becomes a structure of the market, not only the drama of the worker of 1844.

The political thesis is sharp: alienation is not anthropological destiny, but an effect of private property in the means of production and of wage labor. It is overcome by socializing production, so that the producer recognizes his work and cooperates without mercantile mediation.

Communism presents itself as “resolution of the conflict between man and nature, between man and man.”

An internal nuance within Marxism must be marked: Althusser and part of “scientific” Marxism considered the Manuscripts a Marx still Feuerbachian, humanist, and essentialist, separated from the Marx of the relations of production.

Others (Fromm, Mészáros, humanist Marxism) read alienation as the thread of the whole work. That fissure is already a critique from within.

Austrian critiques

The Austrian School of Economics does not deny that there is routine work, hierarchies, or malaise. It denies that this is explained as estrangement from a productive essence caused by exchange and property.

a) There is no “species essence” that the theorist can dictate

Marx needs a "universal human nature" (Gattungswesen): the realized man is the omnilateral producer who recognizes himself in his object.

Ludwig von Mises starts from another anthropology: man is a being who acts under scarcity, with heterogeneous subjective ends.

There is no objective list of “authentic activities.”

What for one person is creation (the workshop, the firm, calculation) for another is a burden.

To turn an image of the artisan-artist into a norm of the species is metaphysics, not a science of action.

If the “essence” is defined by the theorist or the Party, disalienation becomes tutelage: someone decides when you are already “fully human.”

b) The division of labor is not mutilation; it is cooperation

Marx inherits from Adam Smith the division of labor and loads it with a negative sign: to specialize is to lose the totality of universal human nature.

For Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek, the division of labor is the elementary social fact that multiplies knowledge and product.

No one “recognizes himself” in the set of goods of a complex economy; that is precisely why prices exist, which condense information that no producer possesses.

To ask that each person contemplate his finished work as the potter contemplates the jug is nostalgia for a small-scale economy, not a program for hundreds of millions of people.

Hayek adds: modern malaise does not prove that the market “dominates” man. It proves that Spontaneous Order exceeds the scale at which the individual mind can embrace the whole.

Wanting to restore the producer’s transparency over the product is, in practice, to demand a board that does claim to see the whole.

c) The wage is not self-estrangement; it is an intertemporal contract

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk: the capitalist does not appropriate a “labor-value” already crystallized. He advances present goods in exchange for a future product.

The worker prefers the wage now to waiting for the sale.

Without the Subjective theory of value and without Time Preference, surplus value —and with it the idea that the “alien” product is stolen life— does not stand.

If there is no value-substance embedded in the commodity, fetishism describes the phenomenon badly: price is not a mystical veil; it is an index of others’ valuations.

d) Inversion of the diagnosis of exploitation

Hoppe and Murray Rothbard accept that there are classes and exploitation, but they locate them in politics, not in voluntary exchange.

To exploit is to obtain income by coercion (tax, privilege, legal monopoly).

The wage contract, if free, does not alienate the person: it alienates a service for a period of time, which is what any complex cooperation requires.

The Marxist program —concentrating the means in the State or in “society”— creates the monopoly of violence over labor itself.

Alienation with respect to a boss is replaced by alienation with respect to an apparatus that cannot be left by changing jobs.

e) The remedy aggravates the problem it denounces

Mises, in Socialism, argues that without Private property in the means of production there is no Economic calculation.

An economy “disalienated” because there are no longer commodities would still have to allocate steel, hours, and land. That allocation would be made by an office.

The producer does not reconcile himself with his product: he faces a plan he did not choose and political sanctions if he deviates.

The experience of the twentieth century (Stakhanovite labor, exile, ration booklet, “enemy of the people”) is not an accident: it is what occurs when exit and the price are forbidden.

Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, translates this into political anthropology: for “society” to own the means, someone must speak in the name of society. That someone does not disalienate; he personifies the power that Marx attributed to things.

f) The entrepreneur as a figure Marx cannot think well

Kirzner: entrepreneurial action is alertness, the discovery of mismatches. That is the opposite of purely heteronomous labor.

Marx sees above all the factory worker and the rentier; he sees poorly the one who invents a process, risks capital, and coordinates.

A theory of alienation centered on the assembly line of 1844 does not cover cognitive work, self-employment, or the small firm —which are, empirically, a large part of modern economic life.

What still stands and what does not

What still stands, even for an Austrian or a liberal, is an empirical observation: many people live employment as an alien means, not as a work of their own; the large organization is opaque; consumption can become a borrowed identity. Weber and Simmel say something similar without surplus value.

What does not stand, if the Austrian and liberal critique is accepted:

that that opacity is fetishism (concealment of a value-substance) and not the reverse side of the use of dispersed knowledge;
that the cure is to suppress exchange of the means of production;
that there exists a species essence whose fulfillment justifies reorganizing society as a whole;
that the worker of 1844 is the universal anthropological type.

The paradox that Mises and Hayek underline is brutal: the theory that most spoke of reconquering the product for the producer inspired orders in which the individual could neither choose the product nor leave the plan. (See -> Central planning)

This article is part of the Intermediate course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> Marxism

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Last updated: 2026-08-26

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