Estrangement Of Labour Rhetorical Analysis

Exegetical Paper #3 Phil 436
For Marx, the structure of the relations of the means of production, or the relations of property, estrange us our world and work, ourselves, our species being, and others. What is estrangement, and what are its modes? How are they related?

In Karl Marx’s Estrangement of Labor, Marx explains that there are 2 main classes of citizens under the economic arrangement of private land ownership; the citizens that own property and the working class citizens who do not. Marx states that this 2-class environment proves to be hostile because the working class citizens suffer from impoverishment and separation from not only the products they produce, but also from themselves and the rest of the
Estrangement means that as workers put increasingly more time and effort into their respective products and labor, the more alienated from the outside world and their natural relations they become because are contributing to a world completely foreign to them. He goes even deeper into his definition by dividing estrangement into 4 categories, or relationships. The first is the relation of the worker to the direct product that he produces. The second is the relationship between labor and the act of production within the labor process. The 3rd aspect of estrangement deals with the separation between the worker and his inner being. Finally, the fourth definition of estrangement deals with the alienation of men to all other
Being able to construct things out of inorganic material for survival is the core identity of who were are as human beings. “Physically man lives only in these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, whatever it may be. Man lives on nature, means that nature is in his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die,” (page 76). This is the being and essence of what “man” is and is their species life. Men are superior to animals because an animal can only produce for itself while men can produce for all of nature. Through this system of private ownership that is so hostile, a man’s being is reduced to that of an animal. Man cannot be physically and intellectually free while working because work is not the natural means of production for a man. This takes away from a man’s natural activity and one begins to feel estranged from their species life. Marx reaffirms this by saying “in tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him,” (page 77). Man is alienated from the source of his identity and the purpose for human