Liberal Egalitarianism: The Marxian Theory Of Alienation

For most of the twentieth century, the theories of German philosopher Karl Marx and his ideas of the inevitable, natural progression from capitalism to socialist reform were largely ignored in the field of western philosophy. The latter part of the twentieth century, however, saw a renaissance of Marxism in the form of a normative political theory, which applied the tools of contemporary western analytic philosophy to create a movement that has become known as ‘analytical Marxism’, which presents itself as an opposing theory of political philosophy to liberal egalitarianism and libertarianism. In this essay, I will specifically focus on the Marxian theory of alienation which argues that capitalism and the private ownership of the means of production

First, I will outline the four forms of alienation experienced by the proletariat under capitalism where the means of production such as land, labour, capital and creative freedom are privatized and owned by an elite few. The proletariat are the working-class citizens of a state who own neither the means of production nor the product of their labour, in this argument we are referring specifically to the blue-collar workers in a society working along production lines in factories, operating machinery etc.

The first form of alienation comes in the form of alienation from the product. There are two aspects to this. The first is that under a capitalist system, the worker produces a product but has no say in the possession or future use of that product, nor does he have any say in the creative or innovative process of designing it. He is merely instructed to complete a banal task within the greater process of creating the final product (Wolff, 2003: 31). This first aspect is relatively

Marx describes freely creative cooperative production (unalienated labour) as the sole ideal that humans should strive for in their existence, it is the essential foundation to our ‘species-being’, a term which Marx uses to describe what it fundamentally means to be human. Marx argues that what distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to freely produce in accordance with our will and consciousness in creative ways, other animals produce things, such as a spider spinning a web or a colony of ants building a mound but they cannot produce in unpredictable, progressive ways that humans can (Wolff, 2003: 34). Marx follows the Aristotelian belief that what distinguishes us as a species defines our good as a species, therefore, for a human being to achieve a perfect, fulfilled existence, free cooperative production and labour must be the pinnacle of importance and focus in our lives (Wartenberg, 1982: 80). In a capitalist system, however, workers use their labour merely as a means to an end, instead of making labour the locus of fulfillment, it is simply used a method of acquiring the necessary resources to engage in the very animal like activities we are trying to distinguish ourselves from, such as eating, sleeping, procreating and consuming. Marx is arguing that in a sense, we have prostituted our labour for the