To go directly to the heart of the work of Marx, one must focus on his concrete program for humanity. This is just as important for an understanding of Marx as are The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. Marx’s interpretation of human nature begins with human need. “Man,” he wrote in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,

is first of all a natural being. As a natural being and a living natural being, he is endowed on the one hand with natural powers, vital powers…; these powers exist in him as aptitudes, instincts. On the other hand, as an objective, natural, physical, sensitive being, he is a suffering, dependent and limited being…, that is, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, independent of him, but are the objects of his need, indispensable and essential for the realization and confirmation of his substantial powers.

The point of departure of human history is therefore living human beings, who seek to satisfy certain primary needs. “The first historical fact is the production of the means to satisfy these needs.” This satisfaction, in turn, opens the way for new needs. Human activity is thus essentially a struggle with nature that must furnish the means of satisfying human needs: drink, food, clothing, the development of human powers and then of human intellectual and artistic abilities. In this undertaking, people discover themselves as productive beings who humanize themselves through their labour. Furthermore, they humanize nature while they naturalize themselves. By their creative activity, by their labour, they realize their identity with the nature that they master, while at the same time, they achieve free consciousness. Born of nature, they become fully human by opposing it. Becoming aware in their struggle against nature of what separates them from it, they find the conditions of their fulfillment, of the realization of their true stature. The dawning of consciousness is inseparable from struggle. By appropriating all the creative energies, they discover that “all that is called history is nothing else than the process of creating man through human labour, the becoming of nature for man. Man has thus evident and irrefutable proof of his own creation by himself.” Understood in its universal dimension, human activity reveals that “for man, man is the supreme being.” It is thus vain to speak of God, creation, and metaphysical problems. Fully naturalized, humans are sufficient unto themselves: they have recaptured the fullness of humanity in its full liberty.

Living in a capitalist society, however, the individual is not truly free. He is an alienated being; he is not at home in his world. The idea of alienation, which Marx takes from Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach, plays a fundamental role in the whole of his written work, starting with the writings of his youth and continuing through Das Kapital. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts the alienation of labour is seen to spring from the fact that the more the worker produces the less he has to consume, and the more values he creates the more he devalues himself, because his product and his labour are estranged from him. The life of the worker depends on things that he has created but that are not his, so that, instead of finding his rightful existence through his labour, he loses it in this world of things that are external to him: no work, no pay. Under these conditions, labour denies the fullness of concrete humanity. “The generic being (Gattungwesen) of man, nature as well as his intellectual faculties, is transformed into a being which is alien to him, into a means of his individual existence.” Nature, his body, his spiritual essence become alien to him. “Man is made alien to man.” When carried to its highest stage of development, private property becomes “the product of alienated labour…the means by which labour alienates itself (and) the realization of this alienation.” It is also at the same time “the tangible material expression of alienated human life.”

Although there is no evidence that Marx ever disclaimed this anthropological analysis of alienated labour, starting with The German Ideology, the historical, social, and economic causes of the alienation of labour are given increasing emphasis, especially in Das Kapital. Alienated labour is seen as the consequence of market product, the division of labour, and the division of society into antagonistic classes. As producers in society, workers create goods only by their labour. These goods are exchangeable. Their value is the average amount of social labour spent to produce them. The alienation of the worker takes on its full dimension in that system of market production in which part of the value of the goods produced by the worker is taken away from him and transformed into surplus value, which the capitalist privately appropriates. Market production also intensifies the alienation of labour by encouraging specialization, piecework, and the setting up of large enterprises. Thus the labour power of the worker is used along with that of others in a combination whose significance he is ignorant of, both individually and socially. In thus losing their quality as human products, the products of labour become fetishes, that is, alien and oppressive realities to which both the individual who possesses them privately and the individual who is deprived of them submit themselves. In the market economy, this submission to things is obscured by the fact that the exchange of goods is expressed in money.

This fundamental economic alienation is accompanied by secondary political and ideological alienations, which offer a distorted representation of and an illusory justification of a world in which the relations of individuals with one another are also distorted. The ideas that people form are closely bound up with their material activity and their material relations: “The act of making representations, of thinking, the spiritual intercourse of men, seem to be the direct emanation of their material relations.” This is true of all human activity: political, intellectual, or spiritual. “Men produce their representations and their ideas, but it is as living men, men acting as they are determined by a definite development of their powers of production.” Law, morality, metaphysics, and religion do not have a history of their own. “Men developing their material production modify together with their real existence their ways of thinking and the products of their ways of thinking.” In other words, “It is not consciousness which determines existence, it is existence which determines consciousness.”

In bourgeois, capitalist society the individual is divided into political citizen and economic actor. This duality represents his political alienation, which is further intensified by the functioning of the bourgeois state. From this study of society at the beginning of the 19th century, Marx came to see the state as the instrument through which the propertied class dominated other classes.

Ideological alienation, for Marx, takes different forms, appearing in economic, philosophical, and legal theories. Marx undertook a lengthy critique of the first in Das Kapital and of the second in The German Ideology. But ideological alienation expresses itself supremely in religion. Taking up the ideas about religion that were current in left post-Hegelian circles, together with the thought of Feuerbach, Marx considered religion to be a product of human consciousness. It is a reflection of the situation of a person who “either has not conquered himself or has already lost himself again” (the individual in the world of private property). It is “an opium for the people.” Unlike Feuerbach, Marx believed that religion would disappear only with changes in society.

Analysis of the economy

Marx analyzed the market economy system in Das Kapital. In this work he borrows most of the categories of the classical English economists Smith and Ricardo but adapts them and introduces new concepts such as that of surplus value. One of the distinguishing marks of Das Kapital is that in it Marx studies the economy as a whole and not in one or another of its aspects. His analysis is based on the idea that humans are productive beings and that all economic value comes from human labour. The system he analyzes is principally that of mid-19th-century England. It is a system of private enterprise and competition that arose in the 16th century from the development of sea routes, international trade, and colonialism. Its rise had been facilitated by changes in the forces of production (the division of labour and the concentration of workshops), the adoption of mechanization, and technical progress. The wealth of the societies that brought this economy into play had been acquired through an “enormous accumulation of commodities.” Marx therefore begins with the study of this accumulation, analyzing the unequal exchanges that take place in the market.

According to Marx, if the capitalist advances funds to buy cotton yarn with which to produce fabrics and sells the product for a larger sum than he paid, he is able to invest the difference in additional production. “Not only is the value advance kept in circulation, but it changes in its magnitude, adds a plus to itself, makes itself worth more, and it is this movement that transforms it into capital.” The transformation, to Marx, is possible only because the capitalist has appropriated the means of production, including the labour power of the worker. Now labour power produces more than it is worth. The value of labour power is determined by the amount of labour necessary for its reproduction or, in other words, by the amount needed for the worker to subsist and beget children. But in the hands of the capitalist the labour power employed in the course of a day produces more than the value of the sustenance required by the worker and his family. The difference between the two values is appropriated by the capitalist, and it corresponds exactly to the surplus value realized by capitalists in the market. Marx is not concerned with whether in capitalist society there are sources of surplus value other than the exploitation of human labour—a fact pointed out by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942). He remains content with emphasizing this primary source:

Surplus value is produced by the employment of labour power. Capital buys the labour power and pays the wages for it. By means of his work the labourer creates new value which does not belong to him, but to the capitalist. He must work a certain time merely in order to reproduce the equivalent value of his wages. But when this equivalent value has been returned, he does not cease work, but continues to do so for some further hours. The new value which he produces during this extra time, and which exceeds in consequence the amount of his wage, constitutes surplus value.

Throughout his analysis, Marx argues that the development of capitalism is accompanied by increasing contradictions. For example, the introduction of machinery is profitable to the individual capitalist because it enables him to produce more goods at a lower cost, but new techniques are soon taken up by his competitors. The outlay for machinery grows faster than the outlay for wages. Since only labour can produce the surplus value from which profit is derived, this means that the capitalist’s rate of profit on his total outlay tends to decline. Along with the declining rate of profit goes an increase in unemployment. Thus, the equilibrium of the system is precarious, subject as it is to the internal pressures resulting from its own development. Crises shake it at regular intervals, preludes to the general crisis that will sweep it away. This instability is increased by the formation of a reserve army of workers, both factory workers and peasants, whose pauperization keeps increasing. “Capitalist production develops the technique and the combination of the process of social production only by exhausting at the same time the two sources from which all wealth springs: the earth and the worker.” According to the Marxist dialectic, these fundamental contradictions can only be resolved by a change from capitalism to a new system.