Marx took over from Hegel the notion of alienation, and adapted it to his own purposes. As it appears in his work, it is a many-stranded notion. On the one hand it refers to a process whereby humanity loses its original innocence and undergoes the sufferings which will enable it to reach the higher state of unity-with-differentiation. On the other hand it refers to the subjective or objective state of the individual in capitalist society, a state characterized by desires which are either distorted or frustrated, and by a lack of understanding and control of the social environment.

Selections 4 and 5 are seminal statements of the theory of alienation. It has been argued that this theory belongs to Marx's youth, and that it is absent from the mature economic writings. The passages excerpted from the Grundrisse in Selection 6 go against this view, as does the famous passage on commodity fetishism excerpted in Selection 7.

These notes on a French translation of Mill's Elements of Political Economy were written in Paris in 1844, and published in 1932. The excerpted passage expresses more clearly than any other in Marx's writings that work, to escape alienation, must be carried on within and for the sake of a community of other workers. The first part of the passage describes alienated work, whereas the last works out the implications of the assumption “that we had carried out our production as human beings”.