Breaking down the question
The question has two linked demands and you must honour both. The first asks how, according to Marx, human beings become alienated from their human potential — this calls for a clear account of alienation as the estrangement of people from their own creative essence. The second asks what Marx suggests to change this condition — a demand that pushes you beyond diagnosis into his proposed cure, namely the abolition of private property and the establishment of communism. Many candidates answer only the first half and forget the second, so mark the two parts of the question plainly and give the remedy real space.
The phrase "human potential" is the key. For Marx, alienation is not primarily a psychological mood but an objective separation of workers from what makes them distinctively human — their capacity for free, conscious, creative and social labour, which he called their "species-being". The concept is developed in his early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and rests on the historical materialism and class framework, in which the mode of production shapes human existence. A precise treatment of alienation as estranged labour, and of Karl Marx himself, anchors the answer.
How to approach it
Structure the answer around the two halves of the question. In the first and larger half, define alienation as estranged labour, locate its cause in the capitalist mode of production, and then set out the four dimensions systematically — alienation from the product, from the process of labour, from species-being, and from fellow human beings. Show how each dimension expresses a separation of people from their human potential.
Credit the intellectual inheritance briefly. Marx adapts Hegel's idea of estrangement and Feuerbach's critique of religious projection, but he grounds alienation in material economic relations rather than in spirit or theology. This lineage signals command of the thinker without consuming space.
In the second half, turn firmly to the remedy. Explain that because alienation is rooted in private property and the division of labour, Marx holds that no reform within capitalism can dissolve it — only the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and the movement to a communist society can restore workers to their species-being. Close with a short evaluative note. This keeps the answer analytical rather than merely descriptive.
Model answer
For Karl Marx, alienation describes the condition in which human beings, under capitalism, are separated from their own labour, from the products of that labour and from their distinctively human nature. Developed most fully in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, the concept draws on Hegel's notion of estrangement and Feuerbach's argument that in religion human beings project their own powers onto an imaginary God. Marx transforms these insights by rooting alienation not in spirit or theology but in the material organisation of production. Alienation is therefore an objective structural condition, not merely a subjective feeling of unhappiness.
The source of alienation lies in the capitalist mode of production. Under capitalism the worker does not own the means of production and must sell labour power as a commodity to the capitalist, who owns the process and appropriates its products. What should be the free expression of human creativity becomes forced, commodified labour, and the worker is estranged from her own human potential. Marx identified four dimensions of this estranged labour.
The first is alienation from the product of labour. The goods the worker creates belong not to her but to the capitalist. The more she produces, the greater the world of objects that confronts her as an alien and hostile power, while she herself remains poor. Her own creation stands over against her as something external and dominating.
The second is alienation from the process of production. Labour under capitalism is monotonous, externally controlled and driven by necessity rather than by the desire to create. The detailed division of labour reduces the worker to a fragment performing a single repetitive operation. Work becomes merely a means to survival, not a satisfying activity in itself, so the worker feels at home only outside work and homeless within it.
The third, and for the question the most important, is alienation from species-being. Marx held that what distinguishes human beings from animals is the capacity for free, conscious, cooperative and creative production — our species-being. In fulfilling labour, human beings realise this essence and objectify themselves in a world of their own making. Under capitalism, however, labour ceases to express this nature and becomes mere animal activity for survival, so people are cut off from the very potential that makes them human. This is the core of alienation from human potential.
The fourth is alienation from fellow human beings. When labour and its products are appropriated by another, social relations become relations of competition, domination and exploitation rather than cooperation. The worker is set against the capitalist who profits from her, and against other workers with whom she competes, so that human community is fractured and mutual estrangement replaces solidarity.
Marx's proposed remedy follows directly from his diagnosis. Because alienation is rooted in private property, in the commodification of labour and in the capitalist division of labour, it cannot be dissolved by better wages, kinder employers or piecemeal reform within the system. These leave intact the structure that produces estrangement. The cure must reach the cause. Marx therefore argues that alienation can be overcome only through the revolutionary abolition of private ownership of the means of production and the transition to a communist society in which the means of production are held in common.
In such a society, production would be organised for human need rather than for profit, and labour would once again become the free, conscious and creative activity through which human beings realise their species-being. The division of labour that chains each worker to a single narrow task would be superseded, allowing the many-sided development of the individual. Marx famously imagined a condition in which a person might do one thing today and another tomorrow without being confined to a fixed occupation. With private property abolished, the products of labour would no longer confront the worker as an alien power, competition would give way to cooperation, and human beings would be reconciled with their work, their products, their nature and one another. This reunification of people with their human potential Marx called disalienation, achievable fully only under communism.
Critically assessed, the concept is the humanist heart of Marx's early thought and a penetrating critique of the dehumanising effects of industrial capitalism, anticipating modern concerns about meaningless work and consumerism. Yet it rests on an essentialist assumption about a fixed human species-being that is philosophically contestable, and critics such as Althusser treated it as belonging to a pre-scientific young Marx. Others note that bureaucratic socialist economies displayed similar estrangement, raising doubts about whether abolishing private property alone suffices. Despite these reservations, Marx's account of alienation and its communist remedy remains a powerful lens on the human costs of modern production.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners reward answers that treat both halves of the question with equal seriousness. The diagnosis must set out the four dimensions clearly and in order, with species-being explained precisely, since the phrase "human potential" in the question points directly at it. Scripts that reduce alienation to a vague feeling of unhappiness, or that omit species-being, forfeit easy marks.
The decisive discriminator is the second half. Because the question explicitly asks what Marx suggests to change the condition, a strong answer devotes real space to the remedy — the abolition of private property, the supersession of the alienating division of labour and the establishment of communism — rather than dismissing it in a closing line. A brief critical note on the concept's essentialism and its uncertain status in the mature Marx lifts the script into the top band, while precise vocabulary such as estranged labour, species-being and commodity signals genuine command of the thinker.