Marx's Concept of Man Offers A Better Understanding of Karl Marx

In Marx's Concept of Man, author Erich Fromm's purpose is to show the reader that Karl Marx is not understood correctly. To show this, Fromm includes Marx's
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts within his own book. This is an appropriate book for upper-level college students. Marx is a sociologist who has been misunderstood to be an "economistic-hedonistic materialism" (6) theorist. In "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," Marx is focusing on the connection between worker and owner, labor and competition, capital and wages and alienation and the external world.

The capitalist (owner) views his workers as a profit, through alienation and forced labor. Marx considers labor as a product or an object of production. The "worker becomes a slave of the object" (97) because the "worker puts his life into the object and his life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object" (96). Since the worker becomes so involved in his labor of production, this act alone alienates the worker because he is dominated by the capitalist, therefore the worker does not have much contact with the "external world". Marx is driving the point that because humans depend on capital, capital therefore depends on labor, which is produced by humans, resulting in the alienation from "individual life". Marx discovers that in order for the capitalist increase competition in order to gain more capital, he must therefore decrease the wages of the worker.