[BEST OF] Estranged Labor: Karl Marx on Alienation
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May 1, 2025
Delve into Karl Marx's concept of alienation and how it resonates in today's capitalist society. Discover the four types of alienation—separation from the product, the labor process, our essence, and each other. Explore how soul-crushing jobs lead to feelings of exploitation and isolation. Learn about the impact of private property on our sense of self and creativity. This discussion brings Marx's 19th-century insights to life, revealing their pressing relevance in a world where work often feels like a survival grind.
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Marx's Critique of Political Economy
Marx critiques political economy for taking capitalism as a given and justifying it backward.
He insists on analyzing capitalism from actual economic facts to understand its origins and effects.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Shoemaker vs Assembly Line Worker
A shoemaker making whole shoes controls and owns the product, while an assembly line worker only glues soles and does not own the final shoe.
Under capitalism, workers lose control and ownership of their labor's products, becoming alienated and commodified.
insights INSIGHT
Alienation from Nature
Workers become alienated not only from the products they create but also from nature itself.
Capitalism cuts workers off from the natural world that sustains them by mediating their survival through wage labor.
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Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are a collection of writings that explore the nature of alienation, private property, and communism. These essays delve into Marx's early critique of capitalism, focusing on the dehumanizing effects of industrial labor. He examines how capitalism alienates workers from their labor, the products of their labor, their fellow workers, and ultimately, themselves. Marx's analysis lays the groundwork for his later, more mature works, such as Das Kapital. The manuscripts offer a profound and enduring critique of the social and economic structures of capitalism.
ORIGINALLY RELEASED Apr 4, 2020
In this solo episode, Breht breaks down Karl Marx’s powerful concept of alienation from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. He walks listeners through the four types of alienation Marx identified—alienation from the product, the labor process, our human essence, and from each other—and bring them crashing into the present with real, relatable examples from contemporary working-class life. From soul-crushing jobs to the feeling of life slipping through your fingers, we connect Marx’s 19th-century analysis to the 21st-century reality of exploitation and isolation under capitalism. In the process, Breht demonstrates how alienation is rooted in private property and capitalist social relations and explicates Marx's concept of species-being: our natural human capacity for conscious, creative, purposeful activity—which is reduced to a mere means of survival under capitalism, rather than a free expression of our humanity.
This is Marxism made urgent, raw, relatable, and personal.
Rev Left Radio 