“According to Marx, how are human beings alienated from their human potential and what does he suggest to change this?” (2018)
For Karl Marx, what makes us human is labour as free, conscious and creative activity: we shape nature by design and, in doing so, develop ourselves. He called this potential species-being (Gattungswesen). The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) argue that capitalism turns this defining capacity against the person who has it.
Human potential in Marx
- Unlike the bee, humans produce “in accordance with the laws of beauty”, even when not driven by immediate need.
- Our nature is historical: humans make themselves through the way they transform the world, as The German Ideology (1846, with Friedrich Engels) argues.
- Potential is collective: it belongs to the species and is realised in cooperation.
How capitalism alienates people from that potential
- Labour becomes a commodity: separated from the means of production, the worker sells labour power to survive. Creative activity is reduced to a means of subsistence.
- Loss of control over process and product: the capitalist decides what, how and how fast. The product becomes capital, an alien power standing over its maker.
- Fragmenting division of labour: detail work in the factory, “an appendage of the machine” (Capital, 1867), cripples many-sided abilities. Workers feel free only in eating, drinking and procreating, their “animal functions”.
- Estrangement from others: people meet as competitors and instruments.
Indian illustration: surveys under the 2013 Act prohibiting manual scavenging identified 58,098 manual scavengers. This is caste-bound, degrading work in which the denial of human potential is extreme. It also shows, as B. R. Ambedkar argued, that the division of labour can be hereditary as well as economic.
What Marx suggests to change this
- Praxis, not mere interpretation: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world… the point is to change it” (Theses on Feuerbach, 1845).
- Class consciousness and revolution: the proletariat, which has “nothing to lose but its chains”, must become a class-for-itself and overthrow capitalist relations.
- Abolition of private property in the means of production, replaced by an association of free producers who control production collectively.
- Ending the forced division of labour: in communist society one could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon… criticise after dinner” without becoming only a hunter or critic.
- Shorter working day: Capital, Volume III places the “realm of freedom” beyond necessary labour.
- Distribution by need: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875). As The Communist Manifesto (1848) puts it, “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.
Assessment
- Erich Fromm (Marx’s Concept of Man, 1961) recovered this humanist Marx. Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man, 1964) warned that consumer affluence absorbs the desire for change.
- State-socialist economies abolished private property but kept hierarchy and bureaucratic control. Workers stayed alienated, as Max Weber would have predicted.
Conclusion
Marx locates alienation from human potential in a social structure, not in human nature, which is why he believes it can be overcome. His diagnosis remains powerful. His remedy needs adding to: democratic control of work, and attention to caste and gender, not just a change in ownership.