The epistemic foundations of injustice: lessons from the Young Marx

The paper investigates how early Marxian categories—alienation, ideology, and proletariat—can illuminate contemporary forms of epistemic injustice, and how the latter clarifies aspects of those Marxian concepts. Situated within modern debates on freedom from Rousseau and Hegel to Critical Theory, the study frames freedom as socially constituted through recognition and institutions, not mere negative liberty. It asks how alienation from social norms that one cannot recognise as one’s own can be overcome, and proposes emancipatory praxis and transformative appropriation of social reality as answers. The purpose is to distinguish liberal (political) from human (social) emancipation, highlight the constitutive role of the excluded in creating new social sectors of reality, and show the universal character of certain sufferings that reveal hidden normative contradictions within ostensibly liberal orders.

The study engages classical and contemporary sources: Rousseau (on dependence and the social contract) and Hegel (social freedom, Sittlichkeit, civil society, and the rabble) as the philosophical backdrop. It reconstructs early Marx (On the Jewish Question; Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts; The German Ideology) on alienation, ideology, and proletariat, contrasting political versus human emancipation. It draws on Critical Theory (Honneth on social freedom and social pathology; Jaeggi on alienation, ideology, life-forms, and immanent critique), and connects to epistemic injustice literature (Fricker on testimonial and hermeneutical injustice; Medina, Kidd et al., Brady & Fricker) and political epistemology (Haslanger). It also considers critiques and extensions (Celikates on ideology vs epistemic injustice; Zurn, Laitinen, Freyenhagen on second-order social pathologies). Empirical illustrations reference social conflicts around extractive industries in Latin America (Bebbington; Damonte) and the Carmita Wood sexual harassment case.

Conceptual and reconstructive methodology typical of social and political philosophy. The author: (1) performs close textual analysis of Hegel and early Marx to reconstruct categories of alienation, ideology, rabble/proletariat, and the distinction between political (liberal) and human emancipation; (2) uses immanent critique to assess contradictions within liberal-civil society institutions that block recognition and self-realisation; (3) synthesises with contemporary epistemic injustice theory (testimonial and hermeneutical injustice) to frame second-order socio-epistemic blockages; (4) applies the framework to illustrative cases: conflicts over mining on indigenous/agricultural lands (showing category mismatch with market-based justice) and the Carmita Wood case (pre-conceptualisation of sexual harassment) to demonstrate how excluded groups’ experiences require production of new socio-epistemic resources and institutional change.

• Early Marx’s categories clarify contemporary epistemic injustice by revealing how alienation has a dual dimension: loss of control over a social world one co-produces, and a distorted self-relation shaped by market-centric norms that reduce individuals to functional roles.
• The proletariat, conceived ontologically as a class that is no-class (socially unrepresented), embodies universal suffering that exposes contradictions in civil society’s liberal order; its emancipation necessarily involves transforming society as a whole (justice as such), not merely including individuals within existing structures.
• Hegel’s rabble and Marx’s proletariat indicate that exclusion symptoms a failure of civil society’s own professed ideals; addressing this requires constituting new forms of social cooperation and recognition beyond market atomism.
• Epistemic injustice maps onto ideology: testimonial injustice reflects agential prejudice in credibility assessments; hermeneutical injustice reflects structural deficits in socio-epistemic resources. Both aspects are intertwined and sustained by ideological naturalisation that blocks recognition of new problems.
• Emancipation demands both negative critique (unblocking ideology) and positive production of social knowledge (new categories and practices) through collective organisation of the excluded, enabling articulation and legitimation of demands.
• Illustrative cases show: (a) market-justice frames misrecognise indigenous/agrarian communities’ ethical relations to land in mining conflicts, producing unresolved suffering and social conflict; (b) the Carmita Wood case shows how coining sexual harassment catalysed broad socio-epistemic changes (workplace norms, stereotypes, hierarchies), benefiting society beyond directly affected individuals.
• The universal character of certain sufferings lies in their capacity to reveal internal contradictions and second-order blockages of a society’s own values, making social transformation an immanent requirement for broader realisation of social freedom.

The findings address the research question by showing that Marx’s early categories offer a robust lens to diagnose and remedy second-order socio-epistemic blockages characteristic of epistemic injustice. Alienation and ideology explain why negative experiences remain unintelligible or dismissed (lack of categories; credibility deficits), and why mere inclusion within existing liberal frameworks fails. By foregrounding the proletariat/excluded as constitutive agents, the analysis argues that universal emancipation requires creating new sectors of social reality (norms, institutions, interpretive resources) in which previously misrecognised experiences become intelligible and addressable. This reframes justice from distributing existing goods to transforming social forms of life so that recognition and self-realisation are possible. The significance lies in integrating ideology critique with epistemic injustice to link subjective suffering with objective social transformation, highlighting the role of social movements and collective knowledge production in overcoming hermeneutical marginalisation and in realising social freedom.

The paper concludes that early Marx’s notions of alienation, ideology, and proletariat illuminate the epistemic foundations of injustice by identifying second-order ideological blockages that prevent recognition and articulation of suffering. It argues for a twofold critical task: (1) negatively, to unmask the false universality of dominant interests and the naturalisation that suppresses novel claims; (2) positively, to produce new socio-epistemic resources and institutional forms through the constitutive agency of the excluded, thereby enabling human (social) emancipation beyond liberal-political inclusion. Bridging Marxian critique with epistemic injustice clarifies how universal suffering can legitimise social transformation on immanent grounds, benefiting society at large. The paper suggests that future research deepen this two-way integration by examining concrete mechanisms of collective knowledge production, the dynamics of second-order normativity, and how different contexts shape the uptake of new categories and institutional reforms.