Karl Marx

Dialectical Materialism
• Dialectical materialism, a philosophical approach
to reality derived from the teachings of Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels.
• For Marx and Engels, materialism meant that the
material world, perceptible to the senses, has
objective reality independent of mind or spirit.
• They did not deny the reality of mental or spiritual
processes but affirmed that ideas could arise,
therefore, only as products and reflections of
material conditions.
 Dialectical Materialism
• Marx and Engels understood materialism as the
opposite of idealism, by which they meant any theory
that treats matter as dependent on mind or spirit, or
mind or spirit as capable of existing independently of
matter.
• For them, the materialist and idealist views were
irreconcilably opposed throughout the historical
development of philosophy. They adopted a
thoroughgoing materialist approach, holding that any
attempt to combine or reconcile materialism with
idealism must result in confusion and inconsistency.
 The Hegelian influence
• Marx’s and Engels’ conception of dialectics owes much
to G.W.F. Hegel.
• Hegelian dialectics considers things in their
movements and changes, interrelations and
interactions.
• Everything is in continual process of becoming and
ceasing to be, in which nothing is permanent but
everything changes and is eventually superseded.
• All things contain contradictory sides or aspects,
whose tension or conflict is the driving force of change
and eventually transforms or dissolves them.
 The Hegelian influence
• But whereas Hegel saw change and development
as the expression of the world spirit, or Idea,
realizing itself in nature and in human society, for
Marx and Engels change was inherent in the
nature of the material world.
• They therefore held that one could not, as Hegel
tried, deduce the actual course of events from any
“principles of dialectics”; the principles must be
inferred from the events.
 The Theory of Alienation
A quick look at the meaning of the word:

• Cambridge dictionary - the feeling that you

have no connection with the people around
you.
• Merriam-Webster dictionary - a withdrawing
or separation of a person or a person's
affections from an object or position of former
attachment : ESTRANGEMENT.
 The Theory of Alienation
• The theory of alienation is the intellectual
construct in which Marx displays the devastating
effect of capitalist production on human beings.
• Capitalist production has an effect on their
physical and mental states and on the social
processes of which they are a part.
• Alienation is a condition of workers in a capitalist
economy, resulting from a lack of identity with
the products of their labour and a sense of being
controlled or exploited.
 The Theory of Alienation
• For Marx alienation under the capitalist mode of
production is not just a subjective state of mind, that
one enters, but an objective process that develops
from the reality that we experience through labor in
capitalist society.
• Alienation in a generalized abstract sense, is the loss
of control over an attribute of the self, one in which
the actor is separated from any sense of agency in
relation to the attribute.
• The alienation that Marx refers to comes into being
through the relations of production found in capitalist
society.
 The Theory of Alienation
• Within the capitalist mode of production we
find the conditions necessary for alienation to
emerge.
• Those conditions are the reality that workers
in capitalist society are forced by the necessity
of subsistence and lack of ownership over the
means of production to sell their labor-power
as a commodity to someone else: the
capitalist.
Aspects of Alienation
Alienation from the product of labour
• Something produced by a worker (proletariat)
immediately becomes the possession of another
(bourgeoisie) and is therefore out of the control
of the proletariat.
• The means of production are produced by
workers, but completely controlled by owners.
• The more the workers produce, the more
productive power there is for someone else to
own and control.
• Workers produce someone else’s power over
them.
 Alienation from the activity of labour
• This alienation occurs because to not have control
over the products of labor implies that one also does
not have control over the process of production that
produced the commodities.
• The fact that workers do not have a say in how
production is organized and what is produced or how
something is produced, is how this aspect of alienation
come into being.
• Life activity is not life-activity. It is merely the means of
self-preservation and survival. In alienated labour,
Marx claims, humans are reduced to the level of an
animal.
 Alienation from human
essence/human nature
• Capitalist society makes man’s free conscious
activity, labor, a means to an end, instead of an
end in of itself.
• In taking from man the object of his production,
alienated labor takes from his species-life, his
actual and objective existence as a species.
• Marx claims that humans are by nature creative
conscious beings and that we objectifying
ourselves in the products that we produce.
Alienation from other men/society
• When a man realizes that he does not own his
activity and production, he begins to question
who it belongs to, alienating himself from “the
other”, who would be the capitalist that owns the
man’s activity and production.
• If man’s labour and product does not belong to
himself, than it must belong to another person.
• As man tries to figure out who holds the power
comes the realizations that this alien power
belongs another man causing the estrangement of
man from man.