Marx on alienation and employee capital participation

Abstract

The paper aims to show that the theory of alienated labour that Marx develops in his early and still endorses in his mature work is an application of Hegelian dialectics, that the conditions of production in which the alienation of labour is sublated do not coincide with the conditions of production that Marx’s political writings say should characterise post-capitalist societies (i.e. do not coincide with central planning), and that in order for alienated labour to be sublated, it suffices to transfer the means of production to the ownership of workers (to introduce what is nowadays known as ‘employee capital participation’).