Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced it is forced labor. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. “First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other.”Įconomic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist. Indeed, even the equality of wages, as demanded by Proudhon, only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labor into the relationship of all men to labor. Likewise, in the wage of labor, labor does not appear as an end in itself but as the servant of the wage.Īn enforced increase of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that such an increase, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labor their human status and dignity. Indeed, where the product, as the object of labor, pays for labor itself, there the wage is but a necessary consequence of labor’s estrangement. “We also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are identical.
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