Question

Define Marx’s concept of “species being.” Discuss its significance in relation to his concept of alienation. Use specific quotes from the “Economic Manuscripts” for support.

Answer 1

For the wage earner, work is alienating because it serves solely to provide the means (i.e., money) for maintaining her physical existence.
 Instead of labor representing an end in itself—an activity that expresses our capacity to shape our lives and our relationships with others—private ownership of the means
of production reduces the role of the worker to that of a cog in a machine.
 The worker is an expendable object that performs routinized tasks. Put in another way, for Marx, working just for money—and not for the creative potential of labor it—is akin to selling your soul.
 Because the worker is alienated from the process of production as well as the product of his labor, he becomes inescapably alienated from himself.
 Torn away from the object of his labor, he is unable to realize the essence of his creative nature or “species being” through his work. Finally, the worker becomes alienated from the rest of humanity, just another commodity to be bought and sold.
 Sample quotes include:
o “This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces—labour’s
product— confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour.”
o “(3) Man’s species being, both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man’s own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being.”