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Alienation of Labor

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| the alienation of labor 1

karl marx economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 | |

In political economy 2 and its terminology, we have shown that the laborer sinks to the level of a commodity and indeed becomes the most miserable commodity possible, that the misery of the laborer stands in an inverse relationship to the power and size of his production, that the natural result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, which is the most frightening type of monopoly, that finally the difference between the ground-rentier 3 and the capitalist 4 as well as the difference between the farmer-renter and the factory laborer disappears and the entire society must fall into two classes: those with property and those propertyless souls who labor.
Political economy begins with the fact of private property. It does not explain this fact to us. It describes the material process of private property--by which it actually passes from hand to hand--in general, abstract formulas, which it then raises to the status of laws . It does notunderstand these laws, that is, it does not show how the existence of private property comes about. Political economy gives no explanation concerning the foundation of the division between labor and capital and between capital and land. When, for instance, it describes the relationship between wage-labor and the profit of capital, its fundamental point of departure is the interest of the capitalist, that is, it accepts as given what it should be explaining. In the same way, competition is used to explain everything. It is explained using external circumstances. How far these external, seemingly magical circumstances originate in a necessary process, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen, that exchange itself appears to be some magical occurrence. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion and

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