That man’s own life is an object for him. That animals
build nests, build dwellings,
whereas man contemplates himself
in the world that he has created;
That you cannot find yourself in your labor
because it does not belong to your essential being:
That estranged from labor the laborer is
self-estranged, alien to himself:
That your nature is to labor:
That feeling himself fleetingly unbound only when
eating, drinking, procreating, in his dwelling and dressing-up,
man erects means into sole and ultimate ends:
That where he makes what he makes, he is
not: That when he makes, he is not:
Thus the ground of our self-estrangement.
—Marx in 1844, before the solutions that he proposed
betrayed him by entering history, before, like
Jesus, too many sins were committed in his name.