The Shape of Estrangement in Marx's 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

1. Introduction

The concept of estrangement, or alienation (Entfremdung or Entäusserung, two terms I will use interchangeably), in Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, has a controversial, if not polarizing, status. While some—often Marxist humanists—have found that it provides, against Marxist orthodoxy, a promising normative ground for Marx’s critical project (e.g., Fromm 2004; Lukács 2013; Marcuse 2005; Mészáros 1970), others—occasionally anti-humanists—have found it vague, metaphysically dubious, or politically fruitless, and have insisted on placing these early writings on the less-mature side of an ‘epistemological break’ (e.g., Althusser 2018; Leopold 2007; Wood 2004).¹ According to the standard interpretation, the concept of alienation is grounded in Marx’s positive notion of human nature: to be alienated is to somehow deviate from this ideal. Although some have tried to defend Marx’s notion of alienation under this reading (Geras 2016; Ollman 1998), many others think Marx’s concept of human nature is difficult to justify (Brudney 1998, ch. 6; Wood 2004: 17), guilty of Platonic essentialism (Althusser 2018: 234; Balibar 2017; Heinrich 2017: 116), or of a romantic nostalgia for some human wholeness that has been lost (Jaeggi 2014, ch. 1.2; Mau 2023: 82). The theoretical difficulties involved with the concept of human nature have been such that most recent scholarship has attempted to ground the concept of alienation elsewhere altogether (Brixel 2024; Jaeggi 2014; Saitō 2017, ch. 1).

What is common to this standard interpretation is that it assumes that the critical concept of alienation is logically dependent on the positive concept of the human. This understandable assumption takes for granted that Feuerbach was the overwhelming influence on Marx at the time, a reading readily supported by Marx’s enthusiastic praise in the preface to the Manuscripts, in which he writes: ‘It is only with Feuerbach that positive humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins… [His writings] are the only writings since Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic to contain a real theoretical revolution’ (EW 281). Like other Young Hegelians before him, Feuerbach had critically reappropriated the central Hegelian concept of alienation—a concept that is ubiquitous throughout Hegel’s work and that denotes the recurring gesture through which spirit gives itself a natural existence external to it that it then reappropriates—to argue that it was above all in religion, in the adoration of a transcendent being outside of itself, that the human being suffered alienation (Feuerbach 1890).² In this way, Feuerbach took the human being as a fixed standard against which alienation could be measured.³ As is well-known, only one year after writing the Manuscripts, in the famous sixth thesis on Feuerbach, Marx would already criticize what he took to be Feuerbach’s overly abstract and ahistorical view of the human essence (EW 423). What is less often recognized is that even in 1843 Marx had expressed skepticism towards a critical procedure that begins with a positive fixed standard: ‘We shall not’, he writes in a letter to his friend Arnold Ruge, ‘confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it!’ (EW 208). And in his 1843 unpublished manuscript Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, he rejects this dogmatic type of criticism and instead sides with ‘true’ or ‘philosophical criticism’, which, he claims, ‘explains [contradictions], comprehends their genesis, their necessity’ (EW 158). Throughout this whole period, up to and including the 1844 Manuscripts, where he writes of communism as ‘the act of positing as the negation of the negation’, Marx is insistent that his critical concepts do not depend on the positive ones, but the other way around (EW 358). In short, Feuerbach’s influence has been overestimated, and, concomitantly, Hegel’s underestimated, in the common assessment that Marx builds his concept of alienation as logically dependent on the concept of the human.⁴

That, at least, is the thesis of this paper, in which I argue, through a close reading of the famous section on alienation (EW 322–334), that Marx’s argument proceeds not by positing a positive standard, but through a categorial unfolding of presuppositions. I argue that, whereas what is new with respect to Hegel is that Marx does not begin with thought but with an empirical fact, he then goes on to deduce a series of implicit presuppositions: each of the famous four dimensions of estrangement (from the product, the activity of labor, one’s species-being, and one another) is shown to be presupposed by, or a condition of possibility for, the previous one, until, as we will see, the fourth dimension folds back into the first. In this sense, the kind of argument that Marx is putting forth could be called, for lack of a better term, quasi-transcendental, not in reference to Kant’s philosophical procedure, but to Hegel’s, whose dialectic has been interpreted by various readers as following this basic logic of unfolding presuppositions (e.g., Taylor 1976; Neuhouser 2022: 258). And just as Hegel’s dialectic does not commit him to one final presupposition that grounds all the rest, since the different moments in his system presuppose one another, making his philosophy a ‘circle of circles’ (E1 §15), estrangement for Marx, as we will see, has a similar shape. I will therefore argue not only against readings that insist on making human nature the centerpiece of alienation, but also against any attempt to make one of the four dimensions of alienation central. These sorts of readings give estrangement—to borrow a famous term from Deleuze and Guattari—an ‘arborescent’ shape (e.g., Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 16): they view alienation as standing on solid ground and emanating from one central, hierarchical source; its overcoming would then require only that one take aim at that central trunk—whichever of the four is chosen—and alienation as a whole would topple, root and branch. What our quasi-transcendental deduction of the dimensions of estrangement will show is that estrangement is not arborescent but cyclical: all its moments are reciprocally conditioned. Alienation, therefore, must be understood not as a deviation from any positive ideal, but as a self-reproducing process. I therefore argue that this interpretation of estrangement is not only exegetically correct but also philosophically and politically preferable to competing alternatives. I conclude by suggesting that it establishes a far greater continuity between the young and the later Marx than defenders of the epistemological break have recognized.

2. Estrangement from the Product

‘We shall start out’, Marx writes in the beginning of the section on alienated labor, ‘from a present-day economic fact. The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent’ (EW 323). Earlier on in the manuscript, Marx cites extensively from various political economists to support this empirical claim. He cites Wilhelm Schulz, Constantin Pecqueur, Eugéne Buret, and Adam Smith to show, for instance, how the population of the urban poor in the UK has risen in the first half of the 19th century (EW 293), how in the cotton industry, working time has increased as wages have diminished (EW 289), and how, even in times of prosperity where absolute poverty decreases, the tendency is for relative poverty to increase (EW 290). Thus, Marx articulates the familiar story of the industrial revolution: unprecedented material growth goes hand in hand with unprecedented material misery in the very producers of that wealth.

This is a sheer empirical fact. And yet it already points beyond itself. For it can be interpreted as yielding certain presuppositions. ‘This fact means’, or expresses (drückt aus), the following: ‘the object that labor produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien [ein fremdes Wesen], as a power independent of the producer’ (EW 324). The logical step that Marx takes here is subtle but significant. It is only possible for the masses of workers to be systematically dispossessed of their product—without this appearing, of course, as outright theft—because the product they make is from the very beginning already not theirs: the product confronts the worker always already not as their own but as foreign. This is all that is meant by ‘alienation from the product’, and it is as much a hard economic fact as it is a subjective phenomenological description. Thus, from our initial empirical fact—the more workers produce, the less they own—Marx has deduced a first presupposition: alienation from the product of labor.

Almost in the same breath, Marx deduces another presupposition, which, however, is worth distinguishing separately. That the product of labor confronts the worker as foreign contains the presupposition that the object of labor does likewise (EW 324). What does this mean? By object of labor, Marx means that on which the worker works in order to make their product. Another term that he uses synonymously here is ‘nature’, which he defines very broadly as the ‘sensuous external world’ (EW 325). (It is important to note that Marx has not yet introduced here his crucial concept of ‘means of production’. Later on, he will distinguish more carefully between nature and means of production, but at this point, both are subsumed under the same title: both are part of the sensuous external world that labor acts on.) In other words, if the result of their labor confronts the worker as foreign, this must be because the premise of their labor also confronts them as foreign. If a carpenter owns the oak and the tools used to make the table, then it is hard to imagine how the product of their labor—the table—could appear as foreign to them and be taken away. If the wood, however, along with the tools, machines, etc. that they employ in the production of a table, is not theirs from the very beginning, then it is easier to see how the table could appear as foreign as well, how it could be taken from their hands with full legal sanction and without further argument. Nature—that external sensuous world on which labor activates itself—must appear to the worker as separate to them. Alienation from nature, broadly understood, is therefore a precondition for alienation from the product of labor.

So labor is alienated, both from nature—its premise—and from its product—its result. But what exactly does this mean? For if we were just saying here that nature and product are separated from the worker, and that the worker wishes this were not the case, we would be dealing with a mismatch between reality and the desires, or normative expectations, of the worker. Critique according to Marx, however, should trace the genesis and internal contradictions of the thing in question: in this case, a particular kind of labor. We can understand his argument to this effect in the following way. Labor is always a process of a direct interaction between a worker and nature, a process that Marx calls ‘objectification’ [Vergegenständlichung] (EW 324).⁵ However, we have also seen how in the particular sociohistorical conditions that Marx is analyzing, nature and product confront the worker not as immediate but as foreign: through the mediation of private property:

The more the worker appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, through his labour, the more he deprives himself of the means of life [Lebensmittel] in two respects: firstly, the sensuous external world becomes less and less an object belonging to his labour, a means of life of his labour; and secondly, it becomes less and less a means of life in the immediate sense, a means for the physical subsistence of the worker. (EW 325)

The contradictory process that Marx is pointing to is that objectification—the immediate relation between work and nature—becomes increasingly mediated—external and estranged. And this process occurs, furthermore, through its very own activity. Living labor turns itself into its opposite.⁶

3. Estrangement from the Activity of Labor

In what follows, I first explain and argue against a common interpretation of this second root of alienation, before presenting my own, and showing how it can be deduced as a condition of possibility of the first dimension. This section, which is arguably the one that first comes to mind when one speaks of alienated labor, is most well-known for Marx’s phenomenological descriptions of the suffering experienced by the worker during work. The worker, Marx writes, for example, ‘does not affirm [bejaht, translation amended] himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh [Physis] and ruins his mind [Geist]’ (EW 326). Many commentators have fixated on this first-person experience of the worker for the normative content that it lends to the concept of alienation (Fromm 2004: 40; Brixel 2024; Jaeggi 2014: 12–14). This is certainly an important aspect of alienation, and a strong reason to resist the kind of labor that prevails under capitalism. But it is false if taken in isolation or absolutized as the trunk on which the other dimensions depend, at the risk of construing alienation as a purely individual and subjective problem: whether a worker is alienated or not would depend on the almost existentialist or voluntarist question of whether they are able to relate to their work in the right way. Carrying this logic to its conclusion might lead us to say that if the workplace were made more enjoyable—say, through gamification—or if workers could be made to identify with their activity or their product—say, through proper onboarding or yoga sessions that remind them that the journey is the destination—then alienation would be overcome. And that is a disappointingly low bar for political praxis. One could try to resist this conclusion by grounding alienation not just in a subjective failure, but rather by saying that alienated labor objectively dulls the human being, blunts their creative capacities and skills, their ‘essential human powers’ (e.g., Brudney 1998: 161). But then one would have to rely on a substantialist account of human nature.

So we have philosophical and political reasons to be skeptical of identifying alienation with a certain experience of the worker. We also have exegetical reasons to doubt that this is how Marx understood the second dimension of alienation. Immediately preceding the cited phenomenological descriptions, Marx asks, ‘What constitutes the alienation of labour?’ and answers: ‘Firstly, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., does not belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not affirm himself…’ (EW 326). The long description of the worker’s experience is introduced as a consequence of the alienation of labor, not as the alienation of labor itself. But then what does it mean to be alienated from one’s own activity of labor? Again, Marx answers explicitly: it is ‘the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something which is alien [fremd] and does not belong to him’ (EW 327). Thus, an instance of human activity is alienated if and only if it does not belong to the agent. In this understanding of alienation from one’s own activity, Marx seems to be following Hegel, who uses the term Entäusserung in the technical legal sense of ‘sale’, adding that for something to be salable [entäussern], it must be external [Äusserliches] to the agent (PR §65). It is clear, then, that wage labor, for example, as activity that does not belong to the worker during the time that they have sold it, is always alienated, regardless of how much the worker enjoys it, or finds it meaningful or satisfying.⁷ It is true that in many cases this kind of labor is meaningless, boring, or unpleasant, but that is not its defining characteristic. Suffering pertains to the appearance of alienated labor, not to its essence.

One advantage of this interpretation of this dimension of alienation is that it can be deduced as presupposed by the first. Note, incidentally, that Marx himself suggests that this is the way to move argumentatively from the first to the second dimension:

Estrangement manifests itself not only in the result, but also in the act of production, within the activity of production itself. How could the product of the worker’s activity confront him as something alien if it were not for the fact that in the act of production he was estranging himself from himself? After all, the product is simply the résumé [or summary, Resümee] of activity, of production. So if the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. (EW 326)

Marx proposes here that alienation from the activity of labor is a necessary condition for alienation from the product. Our interpretation of alienated labor as laboring activity that does not belong to the worker makes this derivation plausible: just as we saw how alienation from the product of labor presupposes alienation from nature in our example of the carpenter, we can see now that it presupposes alienation of the activity of labor as well. For the table made by the carpenter to appear to them as foreign, it is necessary not only that they not own the nature that they act on, but also that the productive activity they were exercising at that moment was not their own, that it was not undertaken during their own time. Indeed, if the worker had been the owner of their activity, if they were at the time doing whatever they wanted, they would not have been allowed anywhere near the wood and tools, let alone act on them, and much less keep the product of their labor. Their use of this foreign property is only possible on condition that their own activity is also foreign. Understanding the second dimension of alienation simply as ‘not owning one’s activity’ makes it possible to derive it as a condition of possibility from the first dimension.

Before we move on, let us briefly address a possible objection to this interpretation of the second dimension of alienation. If we decouple the essential aspect of the alienation of labor from the experience of the suffering worker, as I have suggested in this interpretation that we should, then it seems like we lose the normative punch that we celebrated in the very beginning of this section. For it is clear that at least some people enjoy their waged labor, which means that we can at least imagine a society where the primary form of labor is waged and yet enjoyed by all or most workers; in that case, labor would continue to be alienated, according to our definition, and yet it would no longer be self-evidently problematic. A full answer to this objection will not become visible until we have unfolded all four dimensions of alienation. But already here we can give a hint. For what we learn by taking dimensions one and two together is that if the first dimension implies for the worker a loss of the object, both as the premise and result of laboring activity, this reduces them to a kind of empty subject, a pure activity of labor, which they must then in turn sell—‘alienate’ in sense two—in order to get back their object in the first place: in order to stay alive and reproduce themselves as that pure—objectless, or minimally objective—laboring activity. A sort of vicious cycle gets underway whereby the worker is constantly forced to lose not only their objectivity but also their subjectivity.⁸ Regardless of whether the worker finds meaning and satisfaction in their activity, what is more fundamental about alienation is that it describes a certain runaway and uncontrollable logic of social reproduction. But to see the whole process, we must continue developing the last two dimensions.

4. Estrangement from Gattungswesen

The third dimension of alienation that Marx discusses is from one’s Gattungswesen. Now, the term Gattungswesen is notoriously difficult to translate. It is composed of two terms: Gattung, meaning ‘genus’ or ‘species’—that is, both a logical and a biological category—and Wesen, meaning ‘essence’, or ‘being’. In the standard English translation, it has been rendered as ‘species being’.⁹ It is at this point that various critics simply assume that species-being means human nature. But this assumption—which has been compounded by several translation errors—has little to no textual support.¹⁰ Marx’s concept of Gattungswesen should not at all be taken for granted: it has its roots in a deep engagement not only with Feuerbach’s use of the concept—from whom Marx famously directly inherits it—but also from Hegel, who gives a careful treatment to the concept of Gattung both in his Naturphilosophie and in the Logic, and who in one of the most difficult and commented passages of the Phenomenology, the beginning of chapter four, already makes a connection between the human being’s consciousness of universals in nature, its consciousness of its own genus, and its relative freedom from its own species in a way that, as we will see, was sure to have a strong influence on Marx (see L 686–688; E2 §367–§377; PS, ch. 4). However, since a careful discussion of these influences lies beyond the scope of this paper, we will limit ourselves to Marx’s argument.¹¹ In what follows, I offer an alternative interpretation of this section that ties it to his broader argument. My task is threefold: (1) to explain the concept of Gattungswesen (I will refer to the term in German so as not to prejudge its meaning); (2) to show that the claim that the human being is a Gattungswesen can be derived immanently—i.e., that it can be shown to be presupposed by what we’ve said so far; and (3) to use this derivation to illuminate Marx’s claim that the human being not only is a Gattungswesen but is also alienated from it.

Marx transitions into his discussion of the third dimension of alienation in the following way: ‘we have now to derive [ziehen] a third feature of estranged labor from the two that we already looked at’ (EW 327). To derive y from x––so I am suggesting in this paper––means to show that y is a presupposition of x.¹² Our task is therefore to show that what we have discussed in sections 2 and 3 presupposes that the human being is a Gattungswesen. But what, in the first place, is a Gattungswesen? ‘The human being’, Marx writes immediately after the quoted sentence,

is a Gattungswesen, not only because he practically and theoretically makes the Gattung—both his own and those of other things—his object, but also—and this is simply another way of saying the same thing—because he looks upon himself as the present, living Gattung, because he looks upon himself as a universal and therefore free being. (EW 327, translation amended)

There is a lot to unpack here, but the essential point is this: to be a Gattungswesen is to make the genus—both that of other things and of oneself—into one’s object; or, equivalently, to be free. How should we understand this twofold definition, and how does it connect to what we’ve argued thus far?

Let us begin by recalling something that we established in section 2: the unobjectionable fact that in order to live, the human being must be in constant and direct interaction with nature (broadly understood), by consuming it and producing things in and through it. In this sense, of course, the human being is like any other life form: ‘Species-life [Gattungsleben], both for man and for animals, consists physically in the fact that humans, like animals, live from inorganic nature’ (EW 327). But there is something more that we established in that first section as an empirical matter of fact: the explosive development of industry, of productive capacity. Here, there is a hidden presupposition that can be rendered explicit: ‘Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., theoretically form a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of science and partly as objects of art […] so too in practice they form a part of human life and human activity’ (EPM 328). Productive capacity goes hand in hand with—or presupposes—knowledge of nature. Furthermore, the kind of knowledge that production presupposes is not of particulars, but of universals. As Aristotle—whom Marx read avidly from a young age—puts it in Book A of the Metaphysics: ‘Craft knowledge [techne] comes about when, from many intelligible objects belonging to experience, one universal supposition about similar things comes about’ (Aristotle 2016: 981a1). The practical ability to bring about results in nature—from lighting a fire to nuclear fission—presupposes that the thing in question has been understood not as a mere particular ‘this’ or ‘that’, but as one of a kind—as wood, as atoms, as things with certain general properties: as universals. This alone still does not distinguish human beings from other animals. For surely the beaver in some sense understands the wood as wood, the predator as predator, the prey as prey. But—and this is the key distinction that Marx draws—the kinds of things that most animals regularly engage with appear to be fixed. A beaver, it seems, will not one day become interested in soil, begin to explore its general properties, and set out to find out how these discoveries can be used to innovate their dams. It seems like most animals do not, for the most part, discover new properties in things that will expand their sphere of action.¹³ Another way of saying this is that the sorts of genera or Gattungen in nature that most living individuals can relate to are constrained or determined by the Gattung, or species, that they themselves belong to.

The existence of industry, on the other hand, suggests that human beings are different here. Thus, Marx writes:

Because humans are more universal than animals, so too is the area of inorganic nature from which they live more essential […] The universality of humans manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature their inorganic body, 1) as a direct means of life and 2) as the matter, the object and the tool of their life activity. (EW 327)

The kinds of universals, or genera, in nature to which the human being is able to relate—that is, to theoretically understand and to practically act on—seem, judging by the sheer explosion of technological and scientific developments, unlimited. This is the first part of the definition of the Gattungswesen: a being that is able to relate to universals, an open-ended number of them. In that sense, to say that the human being is a Gattungswesen is a transcendental presupposition of the empirical fact that we began with.

But the ability to relate to universals is not the whole definition of Gattungswesen. Recall the second half of his definition, though it is only, Marx claims, another way of saying the same thing: the Gattungswesen ‘looks upon itself as the present, living Gattung, because it looks upon itself as a universal and therefore free being’ (EW 327, translation amended). How can these two definitions be connected? We can catch the drift of Marx’s argument: If the Gattungswesen is able to make genera into its objects, it is also able to make its own genus into its object. The Gattungswesen is therefore, in a sense, self-conscious. And if theoretical understanding is closely tied to practical transformability, the self-consciousness of the Gattungswesen in some sense entails its freedom. That, of course, is much too quick, and Marx doesn’t spell out that argument much further. We can supplant this gap, however, with another argument that can be reconstructed from this section, an argument that operates, once again, as the making explicit of a presupposition. For recall what we ascertained in the last section: to be a wage laborer is to not be the owner of one’s activity, and a condition of possibility for that is for our own activity to confront us as foreign or external. But take a second to ponder how strange that is. For a living being, it seems, is just identical to its activity, its energeia, the ensemble of doings that it does. It seems counterintuitive to say that a living being is different from their activity, that their activity is something external to them. And yet the very fact of wage labor bears within it, as a presupposition, the wage laborer’s ability to do just that. In his discussion of this third dimension of alienation, Marx fleshes out this presupposition further. He does so, once again, by establishing a conceptual distinction between the human and the non-human animal:

The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from that activity; it is that activity. The human makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes human from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a Gattungswesen. Or rather, he is a conscious being, i.e. his own life is an object for him, only because he is a Gattungswesen. Only because of that is his activity free activity. (EW 328)

This is a mouthful. But if we connect it to our discussion on wage labor in the previous section, we can reconstruct the argument thus: wage labor is a fact. A precondition for this is that one be able to externalize one’s own life activity. A precondition for that is the capacity to turn one’s life into an object. To turn one’s life into an object is to be conscious of it. To be conscious of one’s life is to drive a wedge between oneself as a living individual and the particular biological species that one belongs to, to soften its metaphysical grip, to no longer have to compulsively repeat the dictates of one’s species, the way the beaver must dam, or the wolf hunt or the swallow fly south in the winter. To be conscious of one’s life is to be free. This is the second face of the definition of the Gattungswesen, and once again I have tried to show how it is a necessary presupposition of the facts that we’ve already established. Finally, it is in light of this definition that we can appreciate the extent to which it is a disastrous interpretation to identify Gattungswesen with human nature. Indeed, human nature, in this sense, is precisely the opposite of what Marx means. It is true that he identifies the Gattungswesen with the human essence (EW 329). But by that he does not mean a given, fixed, substantial species-essence. On the contrary, he is describing a species that, by becoming aware of itself as a species, is no longer in the same way beholden to it. The Gattungswesen is not fixed by its Gattung. Its essence is to transcend it. The Gattungswesen is condemned to be free.¹⁴

This concludes our first two tasks of defining the Gattungswesen and showing that it applies to the human being. Our third task, however, is to show that the human being is also alienated from it. What could that mean? Given how we have defined the Gattungswesen, we would expect alienation from it to mean that a human being is not conscious of universals, or of their own genus, and therefore of their freedom. Alienation would then be a peculiar combination of disinterest in the natural sciences and technology, as well as an existential failure of overly identifying with my facticity: of misrecognizing that my essence is nothing but my freedom. But that is interestingly not how Marx cashes out this dimension of alienation. Rather, the three times that he describes alienation in this section, it is described as occurring when Gattungsleben or Gattungswesen is turned into a mere ‘means for individual existence’ (EW 328, 329). Whereas Gattung has so far referred to a logical category––a genus in the sense of a universal instantiated by an exemplar—here it is being used to refer to something rather different: namely, the totality of society as opposed to the individual. And now we are being told that alienation from the Gattungswesen happens when the latter instrumentalizes the former. Is Marx simply changing the subject here, or being sloppy with his definitions? This poses an interpretive problem that we can formulate in the following way: how do we bridge the gap between the notion of genus as abstract universal and the notion of genus as the totality of society? Can we justify this semantic slide?

Marx certainly does not bridge this gap explicitly. But I would like to propose the following hypothesis. We have seen how the living being that becomes conscious of their genus becomes, to some degree, free of it. To be a Gattungswesen, to be aware of one’s species, is to no longer repeat the behavior prescribed by that species with the same compulsion. But if one is, to some degree, liberated from one’s species, then in that case it is no longer clear what it means to be a member of that species at all. If the individual is no longer a member of their genus as a mere exemplar of it, then the very meaning of ‘genus’ has changed radically. If, for the non-human animal, the relation between the living individual and the species, between the exemplar and the genus, still has something Platonic about it—the former merely incarnates the latter, is metaphysically subservient to and determined by it, is a mere repetition of it, one that more or less adequately approaches its ideal form—something changes fundamentally in the relation between genus and individual once this metaphysical grip has been softened, and the animal becomes conscious of itself as the animal that they are.¹⁵ The genus-being, the living being that becomes conscious of their genus, short-circuits the genus; self-consciousness dethrones the genus from its Platonic heavens. But that does not mean that the genus is destroyed: it merely changes its meaning. If the individual is not a sheer repetition of their genus, it is the product of society. Both materially and spiritually, the individual is produced by a social totality that they, in turn, produce. For the human being—the self-conscious Gattungswesen—the genus ceases to be an abstract universal. The genus becomes much more concrete: it is society itself. Thus, Marx writes later in the third manuscript, ‘It is above all necessary to avoid once more establishing “society” as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being’ (EW 350).¹⁶ The genus loses its abstract and transcendent character and becomes concrete and immanent. Although the human being continues to be, of course, a member of a species in the traditional sense—a homo sapiens—this biological determination is overlaid by a social determination; their first nature is not abolished but overwritten by a second nature. This would explain why the Gattungswesen is also a ‘Gemeinwesen’ for Marx: an essentially communal being that makes itself within and through society (EW 350; ÖPM 89).¹⁷

This section on the Gattungswesen is arguably the most suggestive and yet least clear in the entire Manuscripts. What I hope to have made somewhat plausible is how being a Gattungswesen can be derived as a condition of possibility of the first two dimensions: it entails a) the ability to take things as universals, including one’s own species, and b) to be free—to produce society and to be the product of society, in a relation of mutual reciprocity. To be alienated from one’s Gattungswesen is to somehow disavow this status and to turn society into a mere means for the perpetuation of my individual existence. But to see what that means concretely, we must turn to the fourth and final dimension of alienation.

5. Estrangement from Other Humans

This dimension is the one that Marx discusses most briefly, and it is the one that poses the least interpretive difficulties. We will deal with it, therefore, quickly.

As in the previous sections, our task is: (1) to explain what this fourth dimension of alienation means and (2) to show how it can be derived as presupposed by the previous ones. Let’s start with the latter. Marx suggests straight away that there is a tight connection between dimension three and dimension four: ‘In general [überhaupt], the proposition that the human is estranged from their Gattungswesen means that each human is estranged from the others and that all are estranged from the human essence’ (EW 330). Alienation from the Gattungswesen implies alienation between humans. Given our interpretation of the human genus, this comes as no surprise. For if the human genus is the concrete ensemble of social relations, then to be alienated from it must mean that human beings are alienated from one another. Thus, when Marx writes that ‘an immediate consequence of the human’s estrangement from the product of his labor, his life activity, his species-being, is the estrangement of the human from the human’ (EW 330), my suggestion is that the consequence, at least at this stage of the argument, is not one of causation, but rather of logical entailment—which is, in any case, the only way in which a consequence can be immediate.¹⁸ Alienation from the social totality would be conceived abstractly if one did not recognize that it presupposes alienation of concrete humans from one another.

But what exactly does this fourth dimension of alienation mean? It does not mean, as one might initially suppose, that humans in modernity feel isolated and atomized from one another. Rather, the kind of separation he is referring to here is traced along the lines of the ‘situation in which [the workers] find [themselves]’ (EW 330). One is separated from others on the basis of the position that one occupies as a worker. Thus, alienation between humans is an economic determination, and as becomes clear as Marx’s description unfolds, the separation he has in mind refers to something like ‘class society’: to say that humans are estranged from one another is to say that some produce without owning, while some own without producing: ‘If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, and if it confronts him as an alien power, this is only possible because it belongs to a human other than the worker. If their activity is a torment for them, it must provide pleasure and enjoyment for someone else’ (EW 330–331, my emphasis). Marx’s language once again clearly suggests that this is a quasi-transcendental argument: it is only possible for the worker not to own her product, not to own her activity, because both are owned by someone else.

Class division thus seems to be the final logical precondition of alienation, a kind of determinant in the last instance. To say that class division is the ground of estrangement, its logical precondition, is to say that all other dimensions of alienation would not be possible without it. This also entails that this fourth dimension must precede the other three historically. The whole process is set in motion when one group establishes itself as a ruling class, expropriates another, and forces them to sell their laboring activity. This is an anticipation of the way Marx in Capital will introduce the concept of original accumulation as a necessary condition for the production process of capital to begin at all (C 873–905). Alienation begins when one group of humans separates another from nature and forces them to sell their labor power. We have reached the ground—logical and historical—of alienation.

6. Conclusion

Have we reached, however, the ontological ground of alienation? If so, then estrangement would have the arborescent shape that we discussed above: it would stand on stable ground, it would emanate from a central trunk—dimension four—and dimensions one through three would be but branches stemming from it. Politically, then, the destruction of this class division, the creation of a society of equals is ‘all’ that would be needed. Marx, however, is clear that he does not consider this to be the case: he calls the position that demands ‘only’ equality ‘vulgar communism’, and associates it, among others, with Proudhon (EW 332). This society, he argues, would still be subjected to the movement of private property, and it would for that reason still be alienated (EW 346). But that means that dimension four is not a trunk on which the others depend unilaterally; it means that the shape of estrangement is not arborescent. How, then, should we understand the shape of estrangement?

Let us reconsider what ‘class division’ means in the first place. It means that group A has separated group B from nature, and on that basis entitles itself to expropriate the product of B’s labor. In other words, a concrete interpretation of dimension four sends us back to dimension one. One presupposes two presupposes three presupposes four, but four, concretely, means one. This is clearly a logical circle. It is, however, not vicious, for it corresponds to the progression of estrangement itself. In other words, our logical analysis of the four dimensions of estrangement—their relation to one another as one of mutual presupposition—has an ontological upshot: it reveals that the four dimensions are moments in a cyclical process that condition and feed one another reciprocally, like the organs in a living body. Marx makes this co-dependence clear when he writes that although private property is the ‘consequence’ of alienated labor—in my reading, because private property begins when one group expropriates another—’later, however, this relationship becomes reciprocal [Wechselwirkung]’ (EW 332). Alienated labor constantly reproduces its own conditions, constantly recreates the relations that enable and necessitate it: ‘Through estranged labor, the human not only produces his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to alien and hostile powers; he also produces the relationship in which other men stand to his production and product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other humans’ (EW 331, my emphasis). Thus, although class domination is at the origin of estrangement, its consequences are the separation of the worker from nature and, concomitantly, the coercion of the worker to sell their labor power to exist—which in turn reinforces class domination. The cyclical structure of estrangement entails that all its moments are equally essential: it cannot be reduced to a single principle, a prioritized ontological ground, an arborescent shape. This is what makes its overcoming so difficult, what lends it so much inertia. And indeed, because alienation reproduces its own conditions at an expanded scale—with every new iteration of the process, alienation draws in ever more workers and nature into its orbit, forms them in its image, in separation from one another, each circle greater than the last—it is even more precise to say that estrangement is not a circle but a spiral: a runaway, self-reinforcing, and, to use a term from Marx’s contemporaneous On the Jewish Question, ‘unbridled’ (zügellos) process (EW 233). More than in virtue of any one of the single roots, it is as this unbridled totality that estrangement is normatively reprehensible. We do not reach an ontological or normative ground, because its essence is to be groundless and self-sustaining.

According to this interpretation, the movement of estrangement begins to look a lot like that of capital, as Marx would theorize it in his mature work: both describe the movement of society as a self-reproducing whole that is contradictory and out of control.¹⁹ One consequence of my interpretation is thus that the young Marx is not in radical opposition to the mature Marx, as argued by some of his detractors. But nor do the concepts of estrangement or the human give us a stable normative ground for critique, as some of his supporters have hoped. For the human essence is not always already there as a Platonic or nostalgic ideal, as a potential waiting to be realized; ‘potentiality is determined ex post, not ex ante’ (Brassier 2019: 104). If estrangement describes that ‘unbridled’ process, the contours of the human merely emerge as its photographic negative: a human society would bring this process under free, conscious, and communal control. Why, then, does Marx drop the humanist language in his later work? Not, I suggest, due to an epistemological break, but simply because it is less productive to speculate about that human society than to negate in thought and action the negativities of this one.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.