It is thus strikingly clear, that resources never transfer more value to the product than they themselves lose during the production process. If such a resource has no value to lose, it transfers no value to the product.  It is obvious then that nothing has any productive value without human assistance--in this class are included all means of production supplied by Nature such as land, wind, water, metals in situ, and timber in virgin forests, and those Capital resources produced entirely by the hand of man. The worker adds fresh value to the subject of his labor by expending upon it a given amount of labor, no matter what the specific character and utility of that labor may be.

Thus the worker, by virtue of his labor being of a specialized kind that has a special object, preserves and transfers to the product more than simply the value of the means of production; he creates, by the mere act of working, additional or new value or utility.  This value is the only original bit of value formed during the production process, and this is what is used to support the worker’s base necessities.

Unfortunately in the Capitalist system, the worker actually becomes poorer the more wealth he produces. We know from what has gone before, that the workday may continue beyond the time necessary to reproduce the value necessary for the worker’s subsistence. Instead of the six hours that are sufficient for the latter purpose, the process may continue for twelve hours. The action of labor-power, therefore, not only reproduces its own value, but produces value over and above it. This surplus-value is the difference between the value of the product and the value of the elements consumed in the formation of that product--in other words, of the means of production and the labor-power—and is what Capitalist call profit.

Capitalism creates an alienation of labor in which the worker is robbed of the most necessary objects, not only to maintain his own life, but even objects with which to labor. This appropriation of objects manifests itself as estrangement in that the more objects the worker produces, the fewer he can own and so he plunges deeper under the mastery of his product: Capital. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object to be acquired and exploited rather than simply used for utilitarian production.

What then makes up the alienation of labor? First, alienation manifests itself to the worker in that this labor does not belong to him, but to someone else; 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, and is the loss of a part of himself.  The result, therefore, is that the human being (the worker) 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.

Neither does the worker affirm himself in his human 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 worker feels himself 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 the greed of the owner of Capital. 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 from this hypothesis the following becomes clear: the more the worker labors, the poorer he himself becomes, that is, his inner world, as he owns less. The worker actually places his life and time in the object; but then neither the labor nor the product of that labor belongs to him.  A direct consequence of the estrangement of humans from the product of their labor, from their life-activity, from their reason for being, is the estrangement of humans from humans

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when we directly possess it, rather than when we actually make it or use it.

From the relationship of estranged labor to private property follows the conclusion that the liberation of society from private property is the elimination from servitude and the emancipation of the worker, and not only the emancipation of the worker, for in the emancipation of the worker is contained the emancipation of all humanity....

The elimination of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes.

Communism is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social---i.e., human---being. Thus 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.

Source:

From: Karl Marx, The Collected Writings of Karl Marx, 2d Ed., ed. Friedrich Engels, trans.Samuel Moore, (London, 1888).

Scanned and organized by Jerome S. Arkenberg, Cal. State Fullerton. The text has been modernized by Prof. Arkenberg.

This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history.

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Paul Halsall, January 1999
halsall@fordham.edu