Marx’s analysis of labor under capitalism is thus quite deep seated, going further than the structure of economic relationships to the actual human content. Relations such as those between capital and labor, capital and commodity, labor and commodity, and those between commodities are understood as human relations, relations in man’s social existence. Even the institution of private property appears as ‘the product, result and inevitable consequence of the alienated mode of labor,’ and derives from the mechanisms of the social mode of production. The alienation of labor leads to the division of labor so characteristic of all forms of class society: ‘Each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape a division that is not overcome when the abstract freedom of the individual is proclaimed in bourgeois society. Labor separated from its object is, in the last analysis, an ‘alienation of man from man’; the individuals are isolated from and set against each other. They are linked in the commodities they exchange rather than in their persons. Man’s alienation from himself is simultaneously an estrangement from his fellow men.
