An Epitome
From Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844: The
laborer becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, indeed, the more
powerful and wide-ranging his production becomes. Labor does not only
produce commodities, it produces itself and the laborer as a
commodity, and in relation to the level at which it produces
commodities. The product of labor is labor, which fixes itself in the
object, it becomes a thing, it is the objectification of labor.
The objectification of labor manifests itself so much as a loss
of objects, that the laborer is robbed of the most necessary objects,
not only to maintain his own life, but even objects with which to
labor. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object, which only with the
greatest effort and with random interruptions can be acquired.
Appropriation of objects manifests itself so much as estrangement,
that, the more objects the laborer produces, the fewer he can own and
so he plunges deeper under the mastery of his product: Capital.
In this definition--that the laborer is related to the product of
his labor as a strange, foreign object, lies all the consequences. For
from this hypothesis the following becomes clear: the more the laborer
labors, as well as the more powerful the alien, object world which he
builds over himself becomes, the poorer he himself becomes, that is,
his inner world, as he owns less. The same thing occurs in religion.
The more people place faith in God, the less they retain in
themselves. The laborer places his life in the object; but now it [his
life] belongs less to him than to the object. Therefore, the more this
happens, the more deprived of objects the laborer becomes. What the
product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this
product, the less he becomes. The alienation of the laborer in his
product has this significance: since his labor is an object, not only
does this labor become a separate existence, but it is also separate
from him, independent, alien to his existence and a
self-sufficient power which exists above him, that the life, which he
has bestowed on the object, confronts him as something hostile and
strange.
What then makes up the alienation of labor? First, that
labor is alien to the laborer, that is, that it does not make
up his existence, that he does not affirm himself in his labor, but
rather denies himself; he does not feel happy, but rather unhappy; he
does not grow physically or mentally, but rather tortures his body and
ruins his mind. The laborer feels himself first to be other than his
labor and his labor to be other than himself. He is at home when he is
not laboring, and when he is laboring he is not at home. His labor is
not voluntary, but constrained, forced labor. Therefore,
it does not meet a need, but rather it is a means to meet some need
alien to it. Its estranged character becomes obvious when one sees
that as soon as there is no physical or other coercion, labor is
avoided like the plague. This alienated labor, in which human beings
alienate themselves from themselves, is a labor of self-denial and
self-torture. Finally, the alienation of labor manifests itself to the
laborer in that this labor does not belong to him, but to someone
else; it does not belong to him; while he is doing it he does not
belong to himself, but to another. The activity of the laborer is not
his own activity. It belongs to someone else, it is the loss of his
self. The result, therefore, is that the human being (the laborer)
does not feel himself to be free except in his animal functions:
eating, drinking, and reproducing, at his best in his dwelling or in
his clothing, etc., and in his human functions he is no more than an
animal. The animal becomes human and the human becomes animal.
A direct consequence of the estrangement of the humans from the
product of their labor, from their life-activity, from their
species-being, is the estrangement of humans from humans. When
a human confronts himself as a stranger, so he confronts another human
as a stranger. The relationship of humans to their labor, to the
product of their labor, and to themselves, is also the relationship of
humans to each other, and to the labor of others and to the objects of
others. Moreover, this fact, that the individual is estranged from his
species-being means that the individual is estranged from other
individuals, since each of them is estranged from their own
species-being....
This relationship of the laborer to his labor gives birth to the
relationship of that labor to the capitalist, or whatever one wishes
to name the "labor-master." Private property is also the product, the
result, the natural consequence of alienated labor, of the
alienated relationship of the laborer to nature and to himself.
Therefore, private property arises from the analysis of the idea of
alienated labor, that is, of alienated humanity, of estranged labor,
of estranged life, of estranged humanity. Wages are an unmediated,
direct result of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the
unmediated, direct source of private property. If the one falls, the
other must fall. From the relationship of estranged labor to private
property follows the conclusion that the liberation of society from
private property, etc., from servitude, expresses its political form
in the emancipation of the laborer , and not only the emancipation of
the laborer, for in the emancipation of the laborer is contained the
emancipation of all humanity, and it contains this because the
entirety of human servitude is involved in the relationship of the
laborer to production and all relationships of servitude are only
modifications and consequences of this primary relationship....
Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human
self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human
essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to
himself as a social---i.e., human---being, a restoration which
has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of
previous periods of development. This communism equals humanism; it is
the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and
between man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between
existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation,
between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is
the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the
solution.
The entire movement of history is therefore both the actual act of
creation of communism---the birth of its empirical existence---and,
for its thinking consciousness, the comprehended and known movement of
its becoming. Its movement---production and consumption---is the
sensuous revelation of the movement of all previous production---i.e.,
the realization or reality of man. Religion, the family, the state,
law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of
production and therefore come under its general law. The positive
supersession of private property, as the appropriation of human life,
is therefore the positive supersession of all estrangement, and the
return of man from religion, the family, the state, etc., to his
human---i.e., social---existence. Religious alienation as such
takes place only in the sphere of consciousness, of man's inner life,
but economic alienation is that of real life -- its supersession
therefore embraces both aspects....
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object
is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when
we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short,
when we use it. The supersession of private property is
therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and
attributes; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses
and attributes have become human, subjectively as well as objectively.
From Theses on Feuerbach, 1845: Feuerbach starts out
from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the
world into a religious world and a secular one....He resolves the
religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no
abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is
the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, consequently, does
not see that the religious sentiment is itself a social
product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to
a particular form of society.
From The German Ideology, 1846: The various stages of
development in the division of labor are just so many different forms
of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labor
determines also the relations of individuals to one another with
reference to the material, instrument, and product of labor.... As
soon as the distribution of labor 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 herdsman,
or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose
his means of livelihood; while 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, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without
ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic....
From The Communist Manifesto, 1848: The history of
all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master
and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden,
now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a
revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common
ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we
find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into
various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient
Rome we have patricians, equites, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle
Ages, lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs;
in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material production
is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of
its ruling class. When people speak of ideas that revolutionize
society, they do but express the fact that within the old society the
elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of
the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old
conditions of existence. The modern bourgeois society that has
sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with clash
antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of
oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our
epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this
distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms.
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great
hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other:
Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of
the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the
bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of
the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The
East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade
with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in
commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry,
an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary
element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid
development. The feudal system of industry, under which industrial
production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed
for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system
took its place. The guild-masters were closed on one side by the
manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different
corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each
single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising.
Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery
revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was
taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial
middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole
industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. Modern industry has
established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved
the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to
navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its
turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as
industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same
proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and
pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle
Ages. We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the
product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions
in the modes of production and of exchange. Each step in the
development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding
political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of
the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the
medieval commune; here an independent urban republic (as in
Italy and Germany), there a taxable third estate of the
monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacture
proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a
counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, the corner-stone of
the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last. since
the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market,
conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive
political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a
committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.....
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose
foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in
feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these
means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal
society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture
and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of
property became no longer compatible with the already developed
productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst
asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free
competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution
adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the
bourgeois class.....
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., Capital, is
developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern
working class, developed--a class of laborers, who live only so long
as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor
increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves
piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and
are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to
all the fluctuations of the market. 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. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is
restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he
requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But
the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its
cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of
the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the
use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the same
proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation
of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time
or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.....
Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like
soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the
command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are
they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they
are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the foreman, and,
above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more
openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more
petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. Differences of
age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the
working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to
use, according to their age and sex....The growing competition among
the bourgeoisie, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages
of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of
machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more
and more precarious...The modern laborer, instead of rising with the
progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of
existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism
develops more rapidly than population and wealth....
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a
world to win.
WORKERS OF THE WORLD: UNITE!!
From, Contributions to the Critique of Political Economy,
1859: In the social production of their life, men enter into
definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their
will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of
development of their material productive forces. The sum total of
these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not
the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the
contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a
certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of
society come in conflict with the existing relations of production,
or--what is but a legal expression for the same thing--with the
property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From
forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn
into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.
With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense
superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering
such transformations a distinction should always be made between the
material transformation of the economic conditions of production,
which can he determined with the precision of natural science, and the
legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic---in short,
ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and
fight it out..... No social order ever perishes before all the
productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and
new, higher relations of production never appear before the material
conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old
society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks
as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will
always be found that the task itself arises only when the material
conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the
process of formation.
From Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875: Since labor
is the source of all wealth, no one in society can appropriate wealth
except as the product of labor. Therefore, if he himself does not
work, he lives by the labor of others and also acquires his culture at
the expense of the labor of others. Labor becomes the source of wealth
and culture only as social labor, or, what is the same thing, in and
through society. In proportion as labor develops socially, and becomes
thereby a source of wealth and culture, poverty and destitution
develop among the workers, and wealth and culture among the nonworkers.
This is the law of all history hitherto.
Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the
means of production, the producers do not exchange their products;
just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as
the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them,
since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no
longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part
of total labor. What we have to deal with here is a communist society,
not as it has
developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it
emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect,
economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the
birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly,
the individual producer receives back from society---after the
deductions have been made---exactly what he gives to it. What he has
given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, he
receives a certificate from society that he has furnished
such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the
common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social
stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor
cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one
form, he receives back in another.
This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It
recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker
like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual
endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It
is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every
right. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more
children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal
performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption
fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer
than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of
being equal, would have to be unequal. But these defects are
inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it
has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving
subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and
therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has
vanished;
after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime
want; after the productive forces have also increased with the
all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of
co-operative
wealth flow more abundantly---only then can the narrow horizon of
bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its
banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to
his needs!
A "free state" is by no means the aim of the workers, who have got
rid of the narrow mentality of humble subjects, to set the state free.
Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ
superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it; and
today, too, the forms of state are more free or less free to the
extent that they restrict the "freedom of the state."....The question
then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist
society? In other words, what social functions will remain in
existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This
question can only be answered scientifically.... Between capitalist
and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary
transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is
also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing
but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Bourgeois "freedom of conscience" is nothing but the toleration of
all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience from the
witchery of religion. But one chooses not to transgress the
"bourgeois" level. The standardization of the working day must include
the restriction of female labor, insofar as it relates to the
duration, intermissions, etc., of the working day; otherwise, it could
only mean the exclusion of female labor from branches of industry that
are especially unhealthy for
the female body, or are objectionable morally for the female sex. A
general prohibition of child labor is incompatible with the existence
of large-scale industry and hence an empty, pious wish. Its
realization---if it were possible---would be reactionary, since, with
a strict regulation of the working time according to the different age
groups and other safety measures for the protection of children, an
early combination of productive labor with education is one of the
most potent means for the transformation of present-day society.