From the Paris Notebooks

Summary

[Self-Estrangement]

We begin with a fact of contemporary economic life: The more wealth the worker produces, the more his production grows in power and scope, the poorer he becomes. The more commodities he creates, the cheaper a commodity he becomes. The more the world of things increases in value, the more in direct proportion the world of men loses value. The activity of labour does not just produce commodities, but also turns itself and the worker into a commodity, and it does this to the same extent that it produces commodities in general.

This fact simply expresses the following: The object that labour produces, labour's own product, confronts it as an alien thing, a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour that has taken the form of an object, labour that has made itself into a thing; it is the transformation of labour into an object. The actualisation of labour is its objectification [Vergegenständlichung]. But in present economic conditions, labour's actualisation carries with it the worker's loss of actualisation, labour's objectification is the worker's loss of the object and servitude to it, and instead of appropriation, there is for the worker estrangement [Entfremdung], alienation [Entausserung].

So much is labour's actualisation the worker's loss of it that this loss goes even to the point of death by starvation. So much is labour's objectification the worker's loss of the object that the worker is robbed even of the objects he needs for both his life and his work.