In contrast to Hegel, Marx did not feel that man's essential nature is to merge with the social substance. Instead, he felt that this essence is to be found in the choices that people make in terms of their "life-activity" (p. 81). Specifically, Marx believed that people gain their self-identity through meaningful and productive work which helps to express the individual self. In Marx's view, productive labor provides opportunities for workers to "externalize" their selves and to thereby attain a sense of "self-realization" (p. 85). However, Marx also claimed that it is possible for workers to become alienated from their own products and their own labor. This sense of alienation comes about whenever workers surrender their own control over their labor. Whereas Hegel divided alienation into two categories involving separation and surrender, Marx claimed that alienation occurs as a result of "separation through surrender" (p. 91). There are two major ways in which a person can surrender the products of his or her labor. One way is by turning over the fruits of that labor to "another man" (p. 94). This type of surrender occurs when a worker accepts wages in order to perform labor which benefits another person rather than the self. Another way in which a worker can lose control over his or her own labor is by being part of an impersonal market system (p. 95). This type of economic system creates alienation for workers because it encourages them to undertake work which is neither personally meaningful nor self-expressive.
Marx was highly critical of the capitalist system because he believed that it alienates workers from their own labor and thus denies them an important source for self-fulfillment. In the capitalist system, labor loses its personal meaning and becomes something which is simply done in exchange for pay. As a result of this situation, "labor appears not as an end in itself but as the servant of wages" and th...