Since they were first published in the 1930s, Karl Marx’s early writings on alienation have served as a radical touchstone in the fields of social and philosophical thought, generating followers, contestation, and debate. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx first developed his concept of alienated labor, pushing beyond the existing philosophical, religious, and political notions of alienation to ground it in the economic sphere of material production. This was a groundbreaking move, but alienation was a concept that Marx never put down, and he would go on to refine and develop his theory in the coming decades.

Although thinkers on the topic of alienation have, for the most part, continued to make use of Marx’s early writings, it is in fact in the later work that Marx provides a fuller, more developed account of alienation, as well as a theory of its overcoming. In the notebooks of the Grundrisse (1857-58), as well as in other preparatory manuscripts for Capital (1867), Marx delivers a conception of alienation that is historically grounded in his analysis of social relations under capitalism. If this important aspect of Marx’s theory has been underappreciated until now, it nonetheless remains the key to understanding what the mature Marx meant by alienation — and helps provide the conceptual tools that will be needed in transforming the hyperexploitative economic and social system that we live in today.