ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on 19th-century philosopher – Karl Marx. In the sections on “Alienated Labor” and “Private Property and Communism” from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx explains how a capitalist system results in alienation for the worker. The worker's labor is alien to the worker because it belongs to the capitalist. In return for the worker's labor, the capitalist pays the worker a wage—a wage that competition keeps at a subsistence level. The selection from Manifesto of the Communist Party, coauthored by Friedrich Engels and in the Samuel Moore translation, calls on the workers of the world to bring about such a revolutionary change in the modes of production. Political economy conceals the alienation in the nature of labor by ignoring the direct relationship between the worker (labor) and production. The direct relationship of labor to its products is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production.
