Marxian Anthropology: Labor, Alienation, and Capitalism

Marxian Anthropology and the Essence of Labor

Marxian anthropology conceives of man as a natural being who is, on one hand, the subject of needs, but on the other, is equipped with a set of capabilities that allow him to meet those needs through the processing activity of nature. This activity Marx called work, and it is the defining feature of man.

Defining Man Through Productive Activity

Marx argues that work is the essence of man, distinguishing humanity from animals. While animals are limited to taking from nature what they need to meet their immediate needs, man is capable of producing the material conditions of his existence—that is, his means of life. In work practice, man realizes his own being so that productive activity determines not only the constitution of each individual but also, under the doctrine of Historical Materialism, the whole of social reality.

Historical Materialism and Modes of Production

This human essence is historical because work takes different forms at different times in history. These configurations Marx called modes of production, which are constituted by the so-called productive forces and relations of production.

Alienation in the Capitalist Mode of Production

Under the capitalist mode of production, the man who should find his fulfillment in productive activity finds it outside of himself; he is surprised or alienated. Through productive action, the natural order is processed and becomes a work of man, becoming his product and property, and especially that in which man is objectified and through which he is realized.

However, in the context of wage labor that operates within the capitalist mode of production, the result of the subject’s labor ceases to belong to him. Because he works for the capitalist, the product is alien and strange. In that situation, it is not only the product that becomes alienated—a natural thing more alien to man—but also, through the dispossession of the work product, man himself is dispossessed of himself and denied.

Reification: Man as a Commodity

For the same reason, man also becomes a thing. Marx states that man becomes reified because he is treated as one thing among other things, subjected to the same treatment as the rest of things. He is simply another commodity that sells himself as the labor force.

In capitalist alienation, man is therefore denied his nature because he is relegated to the status of a dehumanized animal whose freedom has been denied, along with the possibility of his full realization as homo faber (man the maker). Capitalism, however, is just a historical mode of production.