Harriet Martineau on Slavery and Alienated Labour

Abstract Prior to Karl Marx’s account of capitalism as alienated labour Harriet Martineau had developed an account of the way in which slavery alienates both slave and slave holder from their true self-realisation as ethical human beings, whose excellence involves the development, through work, of their physical, intellectual, and moral capacities. Both Martineau and Marx also developed materialist accounts of history, according to which, as Feuerbach maintained, religion is the objectification of humanity’s own essence as a natural being. Both also saw the progress of humanity as ultimately resulting in the disappearance of unlimited private property. This paper outlines Martineau and Marx’s rather different accounts of alienation and its cure and argues that, despite Marx’s derogatory comments concerning the positive attitude that Martineau takes towards the worker’s capacity to engage in capitalist accumulation, their final conclusions concerning the progress of history are surprisingly similar. It concludes that their shared idea that humanity might be alienated from its true nature is an illusion. Ultimately, the idea of alienation reinvokes the providentialist and teleological aspects of the religious traditions into which they were born, for while they both abjured the existence of a God made in humanity’s image, they each put in its place a teleological account of nature, made in man’s image.