“If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.” – Karl Marx

For Marx, the essence of human life is reciprocity. Love, trust, creativity, and influence only become real when they are met and affirmed by others. When that circuit of response is broken, the act collapses into alienation — whether in intimacy, in labor, or in society at large. Unrequited love is one example, but Marx’s point reaches further: alienation is the general condition in which human acts fail to return to us, leaving us estranged from ourselves.

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in the section called “The Power of Money,” Marx shows how this estrangement deepens when human qualities themselves are commodified. For Marx, money is the ultimate “alien mediator.” It does not bridge the gap between two people; it replaces the need for human connection with a transactional substitute, allowing one to possess the “effect” of a virtue without possessing the virtue itself.

Money, as the universal equivalent, makes “contradictions embrace”: cowardice can purchase bravery, ugliness can buy beauty, and the lonely can purchase the effect of companionship. What should be reciprocal expressions of human essence become purchasable services, severed from authenticity. When human connection becomes a service we must purchase—paying someone like a therapist to listen, for instance, when we have no friends—we inhabit a world where we are no longer “loved persons” by virtue of being “loving,” but consumers of the appearance of care.

Alienation in love reveals the fracture of reciprocity; alienation through money reveals the systemic commodification of human life, where even our most intimate powers are displaced into an external object. We buy the “effect” of being heard, while the actual human circuit remains broken.

– T.A.