[ Alienation]
The FACT that, with the development of the productive forces of labour, there must be an increase in the reified conditions of labour, in reified labour, relative to living labour — strictly speaking, this is a tautology, since the growth of the productive power of labour can mean only that less immediate labour is required to create a larger product, and that, therefore, social wealth is increasingly expressed in the conditions of labour created by labour itself — this fact does not, from the standpoint of capital, appear in the form that the one moment of social activity, reified labour, becomes the ever huger body of the other moment, of subjective, living labour. Rather — and this is important in the context of wage labour — it appears in the form that the objective conditions of labour take on an ever more colossal degree of independence, represented by their VERY EXTENT, over against living labour; and that social wealth in huger portions confronts labour as an alien and dominating force. The emphasis is not laid upon labour's being objectified, but upon its being alienated, given up, sold; it is laid upon the fact that the enormous objectified power which social labour has set up over against itself as one of its moments belongs, not to the worker, but to the personified conditions of production, i.e. to capital.
To the extent that, from the standpoint of capital and wage labour, the creation of this objective body of activity takes place in opposition to the immediate labour capacity — to the extent that this process of objectification IN FACT appears from the standpoint of labour as a process of giving up, or from the standpoint of capital as one of appropriation of alien labour — this distortion and inversion is a real, not a merely thought one, not one which exists only in the imagination of the workers and the capitalists. Yet it is obvious that this process of inversion is merely an historical necessity, merely a necessity for the development of the productive forces from a definite historical point of departure, or basis. In no way is it an absolute necessity of production; it is, rather, a transitory one, and the result and (immanent) aim of this process is to transcend this basis itself and this form of the process.
The bourgeois economists are so wrapped up in the notions of a definite historical stage of social development that the necessity for the objectification of the social powers of labour appears to them to be inseparable from the necessity for their alienation over against living labour. But as soon as the immediate character of living labour is transcended, i.e., its character as merely individual, or as only internally or only externally general, with the positing of the activity of individuals as immediately general or social activity, this form of alienation is stripped from the reified moments of production. Then they are posited as [social] property, as the organic social body in which the individuals reproduce themselves as individuals, but as social individuals. The conditions enabling them to be such in the reproduction of their life, their productive life-process, are only posited by the historical economic process itself; both the objective and the subjective conditions, which are merely two different forms of the same conditions.
The propertylessness of the worker and the property of objectified labour in living labour, or the appropriation of alien labour by capital — both merely expressing the same relation at two opposite poles — are basic conditions of the bourgeois mode of production, by no means indifferent accidental features of it. These modes of distribution are the production relations themselves, only sub specie distributionis? Hence nothing could be more absurd than the statement by, e.g., /. St. Mill that "THE LAWS AND CONDITIONS OF THE PRODUCTION OF WEALTH PARTAKE OF THE CHARACTER OF PHYSICAL TRUTHS.... I T IS NOT SO WITH THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. THAT IS A MATTER OF HUMAN INSTITUTION SOLELY" (Principles of Political Economy, 2nd ed., London, 1848, Vol. I, pp. 239, 240).
T h e "LAWS and CONDITIONS" of the production of wealth and the LAWS of the "DISTRIBUTION of wealth" are the same laws u n d e r different forms, and both change, undergo the same historical process; they are, in general, merely moments of an historical process.
No extraordinary intellectual powers are needed to comprehend that, if the initial situation assumed is that of free labour arising from the dissolution of serfdom, or wage labour, the only way in which machines can originate is in opposition to living labour, as property alien to it and a hostile power opposed to it, i.e., they must confront labour as capital. O n the other hand, it is equally simple to understand that machines will not cease to be agents of social production when they become, e.g., the property of the associated workers. But in the first case, their distribution, i.e. the fact that they do not belong to the worker, is just as much a condition of the mode of production based upon wage labour. In the second, the changed mode of distribution would set out from a changed, new basis of production, one which has arisen solely as a result of the historical process.