Karl Marx I: Early Writings

Posted: Wed, Mar 4, 2026

Today

Questions about the term paper? [10 min]
Marx’s analysis of alienated/estranged labor + implicitly assumed account of human nature [30 min]
Compare methodologies: Aim of politics [35 min]

Critique of how we currently organize and structure society;
Vision of what a good society would look like;
Roadmap for realizing that vision in our real world, for transitioning from here to there.

Alienation: Problematic separation.

Alienation is an objective description, not merely a subjective feeling; we can be alienated in ways we may not be aware of.
The separation must be problematic: the entities in question must properly belong together but now stand “alien and hostile” in external opposition to each other.
Cf. breakup vs. forced family separation.

Wage labor: The proletariat (workers) labor on means of production owned by the bourgeoisie (capitalists) in exchange for wages.

Implicit account of human nature: Creative/productive activity is part of what it means to be and to flourish as a human being.

Labor itself is not to blame; what’s problematic about wage labor is the class character labor takes on under capitalism—labor is alienated under capitalist productive relations.
Likewise, property itself is not to blame; what’s problematic about bourgeois property is the class character it takes on under capitalism—private property, i.e., “the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of many by the few” (Communist Manifesto, p. 256/702).
Private property is a symptom not cause of alienated labor: it is “the product, result, and necessary consequence of externalized labour, of the exterior relationship of the worker to nature and to himself” (Paris Manuscripts, p. 93/675).

Four aspects of alienated labor under capitalism:

Alienation of the worker from the product/object of his labor (pp. 87–88/672).
Alienation of the worker from the activity of labor (p. 88–89/672).
Alienation of the worker from his species-being and thus himself (pp. 89–91/673–74).
Alienation of the worker from other men (pp. 91–92/674).

Political emancipation: Extension of liberal political freedom to all.

Comes down to “the right to do and perform what does not harm others” (“On the Jewish Question,” p. 60/666).
Everybody sees each other “not the realization but the limitation of his own freedom” (p. 60/667).
The only reason we are in society “is natural necessity, need and private interest, the conservation of [our] property and egoistic person” (p. 61/667).
Rejection of the social contract tradition: Paris Manuscripts, p. 86/670.
This is bleak! Because, in truth, our human essence is “the ensemble of the social relations” (“Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 172/694).

Political emancipation is not genuine human emancipation.

“[T]he state can be a free state without man himself being a free man” (“On the Jewish Question,” p. 51/661).
Political emancipation is freedom of property, etc.; human emancipation is freedom from property, etc.
Political emancipation is ultimately freedom from external interference; human emancipation needs rather than opposes other human beings.
Political emancipation reduces “man, on the one hand to a member of civil society, an egoistic and independent individual, on the other hand to a citizen, a moral person”; human emancipation restores man to his human nature/species-being (p. 64/669).

This revolution must be brought about by workers themselves.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (“Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 173/694).

Cases to think through: How would the communist revolution transform them?

Private property ⇒ communal property (Communist Manifesto, pp. 256–58/701–2).
Bourgeois family, marriage, countries, and nationality ⇒ “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (pp. 259–62/703–5).