4. Capital and Its Preparatory Manuscripts

In Capital and its preparatory manuscripts, Marx went deeper into the problematic of alienation, linking his economic and political analysis more closely to each other. In the capitalist mode of production, the separation between the workers and the means of production—a prerequisite for the buying and selling of labour-power—reaches the point where the conditions of labour appear before the worker as autonomous persons. Moreover, in Capital, Volume One, a new formulation for alienation took shape: that is, commodity fetishism, the phenomenon through which human beings are ruled over by the objects they have created and live in a world where the definite social relation between men themselves assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things.