In this life humans find themselves in what Marx calls a condition of alienation. For Marx the history of humankind is a history of the increasing development of man, and at the same time of increasing alienation. Since historical materialism determines man's will, alienation is the consequence. Another word for alienation is “estrangement,” which means that man does not experience himself as the acting agent in the grasp of his own world, but the world remains alien to him.

This sort of alienation exists more in industrial societies. It is expressed in the work and in the division of labor. As private property and the division of labor develop, labor loses its power of being an expression of a man's powers. So men working in a factory, working eighty-four hours a week as men did in the Manchester, England, during Marx's life, are just cogs in a larger machine, engaging in alienating labor that involves no human intelligence or creativity.

So “workers feel at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless,” Marx said in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In the act of producing for his employer the relationship to his own activity is experienced “as something alien and not belonging to him, activity as suffering (passivity), strength as powerlessness, creation as emasculation.”

A more humane society would emancipate man from his servitude. But a new society would be required for a man to attain his essence.