The Philosophy of Marxism

Social and Historical Preconditions for the Emergence of Marxist Philosophy: The Problem of Alienation

Marxism emerged in the mid-19th century. According to its founders, Karl Marx (1818—1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820—1895), their doctrine is a product of its epoch, a response to the social, economic, and political challenges posed by the development of advanced capitalist states in Europe and North America.

Marx contended that by the mid-19th century, capitalism had revealed both its advantages and its shortcomings. Among the principal advantages of capitalism is the remarkable pace at which it has developed productive forces over a mere century, achieving levels unattainable by humanity throughout previous millennia. However, capitalism simultaneously demonstrated that the slogans that accompanied bourgeois revolutions—liberty, equality, fraternity—remained mere words, incapable of being actualized in capitalist society. The concentration of wealth and poverty at opposite ends of society not only persisted but escalated to even more extreme levels, with poverty reaching horrific, "absolute" forms. This occurs in a context marked by crises of overproduction, where goods, including food, are destroyed not due to a lack of need but because of insufficient purchasing power. Freedom, too, revealed itself as a hollow slogan, for the degree of each person's freedom is determined by the size of their wallet. Capitalism engendered a new type of worker, completely estranged from the means of production, whose existence relies solely on the sale of their labor power. Legally free, the worker is entirely dependent on the capitalist and the demand for labor.

From the outset of his creative work, Marx envisioned its purpose as facilitating the liberation of the proletariat. He severed ties with the Enlightenment perspective on the role of philosophy. "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it," Marx articulates this new understanding of philosophy's function in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845).

Marx associates the dire conditions of the working class with alienation. "Alienation is a social process in which the products of human labor and the labor process itself become a distant, confrontational, and dominating force." The problem of alienation had been raised in German classical philosophy, notably by Hegel and Feuerbach. In Hegel's view, the process of alienation manifests as the alienation of the absolute idea in nature and society. Feuerbach links alienation to the rise of religion, understanding it as spiritual estrangement. According to Feuerbach, humans create God through their imagination and subsequently perceive this deity as a force that dictates their behavior and actions.

Marx departs from this essentially idealist concept of alienation. In his "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," the "young" Marx explains alienation in terms of economic factors. All other forms of alienation—political, religious—are conditioned by the alienation of real life. The alienation of real life, or labor, lies at the essence of labor itself. The more the worker labors, the poorer they become, for the product of their labor does not belong to them; it exists as an external force.

"... Labor creates marvelous things for the wealthy, yet it also engenders the impoverishment of the worker. It builds palaces but also slums for laborers. It creates beauty, yet it distorts the worker. It replaces manual labor with machines, while simultaneously relegating some workers back to barbaric labor, transforming others into machines themselves. It fosters intellect, but also produces dullness and idiocy as the fate of the workers."

However, the worker's alienation is not only reflected in their relationship to the products of their labor but also in the self-estrangement of labor itself. Not only the product of labor but the labor process itself is perceived not as an expression of their essential powers or as self-realization, but as something external, necessary only insofar as it provides for the worker's physical existence. The worker feels free not in the manifestation of their essential powers, but labor becomes a mere expression of human activity, engaged only in fulfilling their animalistic functions: eating, drinking, and sexual reproduction. Thus, the human aspect within the human becomes animalistic, while the animalistic becomes human.

In the labor process, the worker alienates not only themselves but also their species essence. For it is through labor that the active species essence of humanity is revealed. According to Marx, productive life is species life. The fact that the products of labor and the labor itself exist as external, alien forces to the worker essentially means that species life is distanced from humanity and that humans are alienated from one another. In conditions of private property, it is not only the worker who becomes estranged but also the capitalist. Their alienation manifests in the way that private property renders them one-dimensional, driven solely by the desire to possess and gain profit, while neglecting their multifaceted social essence.

What, then, is the cause of the alienation of labor? Marx's answer is unequivocal: private property is the cause. As a consequence of the estrangement and self-estrangement of labor (for if the products, means of labor, and labor itself do not belong to the worker, they belong to another person—the capitalist), private property serves as a means of realizing this self-estrangement. Therefore, to eradicate the alienation of humanity, private property must be abolished. Only communism—"the positive expression of the abolition of private property"—can achieve this.

By abolishing private property, communism restores humanity to itself, to its species essence, transforming it into a social being, reintegrating all the wealth of social relations, unity with others, and the entirety of human feelings and abilities. Communism signifies the reunification of humanity with nature as its mother and nurturer. It embodies true humanism, offering solutions to all human contradictions. This is how the "young" Marx envisions communism. However, soon after, Marx's views on humanity and society undergo significant transformation.