Karl Marx believed that within a capitalist society “the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – the property-owners and the property-less workers” (652). It is with these property-less workers which Marx aligns himself and in “Economic and Political Manuscripts” describes how through any attempts the workers may use to better their situations, they will inevitably end up in far worse states than they started. The property-less workers have one main goal, to create as much ‘property’ as they possibly can in order to gain more wealth, however as Marx duly notes, from this property in and of itself the worker gains nothing. In fact “the worker become all the poorer the more wealth he produces” (653). This irreversible gap between what the worker produces and what he gains from his production is what Marx defines as ‘alienation’ of the worker to his product. As his life’s work, “the worker puts his life in to the object but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object” (653). He gains nothing from the work he spends tireless hours creating for others to enjoy and which he is unable to participate in after creating. To the worker, in Marx’s eyes, “the product of his labour is an alien object” (653) and not something one can ever attain genuine happiness from because it will always be completely separate from his being.

As Marx illustrates how ‘labor’ occupations -which I take to mean in the twenty first century as manual/factory labor, office or service jobs – alienate the individual from his true self, I start to wonder what would be classified as an occupation which does not ‘alienate’ the individual from his true ‘self’? Ultimately unalienating occupations to my perspective are ones in which monetary compensation are not of primary concern, where instead man is able to use all of his human faculties to create something that is of value not only to others but also to himself as a growing individual. When one’s main concern is to make as much money as possible, it is fairly conceivable that he or she will stoop to derogatory levels of action as a human being he would have never thought he would reach up until that point. When money becomes the solution to all of one’s problems, it is possible that one stops being a human being entirely and simply lives as an ‘alien’. He lives to consume the objects which mean nothing and are ultimately just the combined efforts of other individuals who he will never know or care about. In alienating oneself from the products he produces in order to make money, he alienates himself from not only himself but also from humanity entirely. He is no longer human, and that is just how the “property-owners” in charge want the “property-less workers” to see themselves, for then they are easier to control. That capitalism and the necessity of making money are the root sources of the necessity of alienated labor within western society is probably Marx’s main point in the essay, revealing yet another defining fault in our capitalist society. Although I am not and will never be a Marxist, I do see the validity in the problems alienation of labor insure for society, however to solve said problems seem to me almost impossible without complete societal upheaval.