From Monetary Alienation to Alienated Labor: On Marx’s Triple Transcendence of Hess’s Idea of Economic Alienation

Moses Hess's ideas on economic alienation in his philosophy of money had a direct influence on Marx's idea of the alienation of labor.Hess first introduced Feuerbach's theory of religious alienation into the economic sphere, further developing the abstract critique of religion into an economic critique of real society.Focusing on the analysis of the alienation of human nature, he conducted a concrete analysis of human interaction activities in capitalist society, exposing the egoistic worldview that pervades Christian society.However, Hess's idea of economic alienation fails to analyze the field of material production, and is inadequate in revealing the essence of capitalism.Marx, on the other hand, took alienation into the field of production, revealing the nature of human labor and the alienation of capitalist production, breaking through the religious critique of Hess's economic alienation thought and the humanistic position of his old philosophy.This not only laid the foundation for the birth of Marx's materialistic conception of history, but further developed Hess's philosophical communism, and through advocating the communist revolution and the proletariat's practice of eliminating capitalist private ownership, he renounced alienation and realized the restoration of human nature.