Capitalist Relations of Production and the Alienation of Labour

Abstract

Commodity production only first covers the entirety of society under capitalist production. The decisive characteristic of capitalist production is that production is based on the commodification of labour-power. Labour-power becomes a commodity because workers are separated from the means of production, which come under the exclusive control of non-workers such as capitalists and landowners. This production relation, i.e. the capital/wage-labour relation, is precisely what characterises capitalist production as one particular form of historical production. Marx inherited Hegel’s view of grasping labour as a subjective human activity that involves the process of alienation and its sublation, calling labour under capitalist production «alienated labour». Marx’s political economy explains the phenomena of the alienation of labour from the essence of capital and clarifies the necessity for this alienation to be sublated.