Long before Capital, the young Marx wrote about what capitalism does to people's inner lives and relationships. His notes from 1844, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, introduced the idea of alienation, which became one of his most widely discussed ideas in the twentieth century.

Human nature as creative activity

Marx believed that what makes humans distinctive is conscious, creative labor. Other animals produce to meet immediate needs; humans can imagine what they will make before they make it, shape the world according to plans, and recognize themselves in what they create. Marx called this our species-being. Work, at its best, is a way people express and develop themselves.

Four forms of alienation

Under capitalism, Marx argued, work becomes something that estranges people from themselves and each other. He described four forms:

1. From the product. What the worker makes belongs to someone else. The more they produce, the more the world of things that they do not own grows and stands over them.
2. From the activity of work. Work is not chosen or directed by the worker. It is a means to earn a living, done under someone else's control. Marx wrote that the worker “only feels himself freely active in his animal functions, eating, drinking, procreating,” and feels like an animal while working.
3. From species-being. Because work is reduced to a means of survival, the creative capacity that makes us human becomes just a tool for staying alive.
4. From other people. Relationships become shaped by competition and market exchange. Workers compete with each other for jobs, and worker and owner face each other as opposing interests.

Alienation, for Marx, is not mainly a feeling. A well-paid worker who enjoys their job is still, in his sense, alienated if they do not control what they produce or how. It describes a structure, though it often shows up as feelings of meaninglessness, exhaustion and powerlessness.

Division of labor

Marx saw the extreme division of labor in factories as deepening alienation. Adam Smith had praised the pin factory, where each worker performed one tiny step, for its enormous productivity. Marx did not deny the productivity; he pointed to the cost of spending one's life repeating a single motion. In The German Ideology, he and Engels imagined a communist society where a person might “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner,” without being confined to one role.

Commodity fetishism

In Capital, Marx developed a related idea: commodity fetishism. In a market society, relationships between people appear as relationships between things. When you buy a phone, you see an object with a price. You do not see the miners, factory workers, designers and shippers whose labor it contains, or the social relations between them. Prices seem to be natural properties of goods, the way a fetish object in a religion seems to have powers of its own.

Marx's point is that the market hides the social and human character of production. Because economic outcomes appear as the movement of prices and things, they seem like forces of nature rather than the results of human arrangements that people could change.

Why these ideas lasted

The 1844 manuscripts were not published until 1932. Their emphasis on human experience helped spark interest in a more humanist Marx, and the concept of alienation spread into sociology, psychology and literature. Many people who reject Marx's economics still find his description of alienated work recognizable.

Worked example: alienation at work today

Consider a warehouse worker who picks items for online orders. A handheld scanner tells him where to walk, counts the seconds per item, and flags him if he falls behind the target rate. He never sees the customers, has no say over the targets, and the products mean nothing to him personally.

Map Marx's four forms onto this job. The products belong to the company and the buyers (alienation from the product). The pace and method are set by software and managers (from the activity). His capacity for planning and creativity goes unused (from species-being). He competes with coworkers on the rate rankings, and his relationship with the company is defined by a contract both sides try to get the most from (from others).

Now consider a self-employed furniture maker who designs and sells her own pieces. She chooses what to make, how and when, and sees her work in what she sells. On Marx's account, her work is much less alienated, even if she earns less than the warehouse worker.

Critics reply that many people find meaning at work under ordinary employment, that modern firms often give workers autonomy, and that specialization is what makes high living standards possible. Marx's defenders answer that meaningful jobs exist despite, not because of, the logic of profit.