With wage-laborers divorced both from the means of production and from their own products, capitalist alienation took a fetishistic turn, an ascription of life to objects produced by none other than the workers themselves. “The life which [the worker] has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force,” he mused. “If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, but confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to a man other than the worker.”
