The point for Marx is that in previous modes of production, medieval artisans or peasants did after all retain at least part of the product of their labor; in modern capitalism, the workers do not retain any part of what they produce—all they get is a wage, which is just a means to enable them to survive. Not only do they not own even a fraction of what they produce, but the modern division of labor even deprives them of viewing the end product of their labor as something that is part of themselves—something the traditional artisans or even peasants could claim and be, in a way, even proud of what they had produced. The modern workers have no relationship to their product; they are just a means for the capitalist’s ability to gain a profit. Nor are the workers’ wages related in any way to the value of what they have produced. Under capitalism, labor, which is the essence of human beings, diminishes them.
What constitutes the alienation of the worker? First, that labor is external to the worker, it does not belong to his intrinsic nature, that in his work he does not affirm himself but denies himself … does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker feels at home only outside his work. … His labor is therefore not voluntary but coerced. … It is therefore not the satisfaction of need, it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it.
In other words, what is the human’s essence—labor—becomes a mere instrument for other needs. Moreover,
Man (the worker) feels himself freely active only in his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating … and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal-like becomes human and what is human becomes animal-like.
Although Marx never studied directly the life condition of the modern proletariat, he refers to descriptions found in the writings of French socialists, and in Engels’s study of the conditions of the English working class.
If alienation means the substitution of humans’ creative relationship to nature by a mere cash nexus, this endows money with extraordinary power that, according to Marx, it never enjoyed in precapitalist societies. In a powerful manuscript section called “On the Power of Money,” Marx gives free rein to his classical literary education by quoting Goethe’s Faust as well as Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens to bring out the nature of money not just as a means of exchange but as a corporeal expression of its ability to endow its possessor with qualities he does not have as a person himself. He may be lame, but by being able to buy horses and carriages he becomes swift; he may be ugly, but money can buy him the most beautiful woman—so he is not ugly. Money transforms everything into its opposite.
Money as the external universal medium and faculty … [turns] an image into reality and reality into mere image, transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract notions.
All this presents Marx with a serious intellectual challenge: having castigated capitalist industrial society as basically dehumanizing, he has to suggest an alternative, and he does this in a manuscript called “Private Property and Communism.” It is one of the very few instances where Marx tries to describe an alternative society—communism—transcending private property. As we shall also see later, Marx is careful not to fall into the pitfall of what he calls “utopian socialism”—concocting out of thin air a perfect alternative to capitalism. It would therefore not come as a surprise that in this case, when he does try to pick up the challenge, his descriptions of communist alternatives are at the same time accompanied by sharp criticisms of such attempts by other socialist thinkers.
VISIONS OF COMMUNISM
As Marx mentioned in the preface to EPM, the Paris years acquainted him with the writings of French—but also English—socialists, and the manuscript on “Private Property and Communism” clearly shows this. This section of the EPM reflects both Marx’s brilliant powers of analysis as well as his formidable rhetorical flair—but also some of his limitations. It is inspiring, sometimes hauntingly beautiful—yet also somewhat disappointing. It also presents the reader with some methodological challenges that cannot always be resolved, given the fact that this is merely a rough manuscript, not a finally polished and edited text.
What stands out immediately in this manuscript is that Marx does not suggest a straightforward vision of communism, but speaks of different ways of abolishing private property, and different types of communism. What is not clear, however, is whether what he is describing are different theories of communism—some of which he finds inadequate—or whether these are various stages of communist developments in the future. The text is open to both interpretations, though on internal evidence of some of Marx’s later writings, it seems that he is describing future historical stages of the development of communist societies. Be this as it may, what stands out in either interpretation is that for Marx there are inadequate forms of communism, which have to be transcended, and that communism to him does not mean just the mere nationalization of the means of production or a mechanical egalitarianism.
The first form of communism described by Marx is called “crude” or “raw” communism, and its major feature is the abolition of private property through nationalization. Yet to him this does not change the basic relationship between workers, their work, and the product of their labor—hence alienation is not yet overcome. This is merely “the generalization of private property. … The role of the worker is not abolished, but is extended to all men. The relationship of private property remains the relationship to the world of things.”
The point made here by Marx is significant because so many socialist or communist visions or regimes viewed nationalization as the ultimate realization of their goals. In a number of long—and passionate—passages Marx takes issue with this position, and in the course of his criticism of this “crude communism” he gives expression to some of the more poetically moral foundations of his thought. The limits of this “crude communism” are evident to Marx:
The domination of material property looms so large that it aims to destroy everything which cannot be possessed by everyone as private property. It wishes to eliminate talent, etc. by force. Immediate physical possession seems to be the unique goal of life and existence.
And then comes an extraordinary passage, in which Marx refers to the tendency of this form of communism to see in the breakup of the bourgeois family and the introduction of “free love” the ultimate victory over private property. To Marx, the opposite is true.
This tendency to oppose general private property [that is, nationalization] to private property is expressed in an animal form: marriage … is contrasted with the community of women, in which women become communal and common property. … This is the open secret of this entirely crude and unreflective communism. Just as women are to pass from marriage to universal prostitution, so the whole world of wealth (i.e. the objective being of men) is to pass from the relation of exclusive marriage with the private owner to the relation of universal prostitution with the community. This communism negates the personality of man …
This approach to women as the spoil and handmaid of communal lust is the expression of infinite degradation …
The community is only a community of labor and equality of wages paid out by the communal capital—by the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality …
This is an abstract negation of the whole world of culture and civilization and the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor individual who has no needs and who has not only not transcended private property but has not yet even attained it.
This is truly strong language: calling the nationalization of private property, the hallmark of many socialist ideologies, “prostitution with the community” is certainly rhetorical excess, but it shows how Marx’s vision of a future socialist society was different—and deeper and more complex—from that of many of his radical colleagues. It clearly shows the weight of cultural baggage he brings to his vision of fu
ture society.
Yet before Marx moves to what he considers a higher form of communism, he adds a passionate—and revealing—passage about the nature of sexual relations, which he elevates to the quintessence of the meaning of humanity. It is a rare outburst, caused by Marx’s lack of sympathy for ideas of “free love” that were current, especially among French radicals of the day and their supporters among the German exiles in Paris. Nowhere in his opus can one find a similar view of the relationship of man to woman as emblematic of men’s (and women’s) nature as a species. The language borders on the poetic, but again does not lose its analytical power. It may appear as if this outburst comes out of nowhere, but the terms Marx uses very carefully have their roots in his philosophical anthropology.
The direct, natural and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man [Mann] to woman. In this natural species-relationship the relation of man [Mensch] to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature—to his own natural determination. Consequently, in this relationship it is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which extent nature has become the human nature. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development … how man as a species-being has come to be himself and to comprehend himself. The relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being, it therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behavior has become human and his human behavior has become natural. [It] also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need—the extent to which the other person as a person has become for him a need—the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being [italics added].
The obviously repetitive language is not only a reflection of the fact that this is a draft—but also that there is a passion here, rooted perhaps not only in philosophical insights but also in deeper personal layers of consciousness—something usually quite rare in Marx’s ways of expressing himself.
After this extraordinary excursus, Marx returns to his discussion of various forms of communism: having expressed his devastating critique of what he calls “crude communism” and its destruction of culture, he briefly mentions other forms of communism that still maintain the existence of the state (“be it democratic or despotic”), which he therefore views as incomplete. It is only with the abolition (Aufhebung) of the state as such that Marx sees communism achieving its true aim—the abolition of human alienation.
The Aufhebung of the state, which appears again in Marx’s later writings, has to be understood in the dialectical context of Hegelian philosophy. As already noted, Aufhebung covers, both in common German parlance as well as in the Hegelian system, a complex set of meanings: keeping, raising to a higher level—and abolition. In the specific case of the Aufhebung of the state one should bear in mind that what Marx means is that this ultimate form of communism both keeps the universal function attributed to the state, raises it to a higher level—and abolishes it as a separate and discrete institution. The Hegelian postulate of the state as the realm of the universal, communitarian nature of human relations is seen by Marx as being realized at the higher form of communism through the disappearance of the state as a separate institution, and hence the gap between civil society and the state—one of the institutional expressions of modern alienation—is overcome.
The problem, of course, is that Marx does not spell out what exactly is meant by this form of communism that he sees as the final goal of history. He endows this form of communism (“the positive transcendence of private property”) with the highest possible attributes: “It is the definite resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man.” He crowns this with the ultimate resolution of all the tensions of human history:
It is the return of man to himself as a social, i.e. human, being, a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire richness of previous development. This communism as fully developed naturalism equals humanism and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism.
It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence,
between objectification and self-affirmation,
between freedom and necessity,
between the individual and the species.
It is the solution of the riddle of history—and knows itself to be this solution.
Looking carefully at this messianic vision one soon realizes that the tensions to be overcome by this form of communism are actually the major tensions that traditional philosophy tried to solve. The terms used by Marx hark back to the challenges of Hegelian philosophy, from the Phenomenology of the Spirit to The Philosophy of Right: “Begriff/Wesen” (concept/essence, or being), “Existenz/Wesen” (existence/essence), “Vergegenständlichung/Selbstbestätigung” (objectification/self-assertion). Marx’s highest form of communism is the answer to the riddle that philosophy tried to solve in the realm of thought but Marx maintains can be solved only through historical praxis.
But this powerful and inspiring apotheosis is also disappointing. Although Marx describes in great detail and harshly criticizes the forms of communism he views as incomplete (whether they are different theories of communism or stages of future communist development), when it comes to what he calls “the solution of the riddle of history that knows itself to be the solution” (a most extraordinary philosophical claim), he remains in the realm of philosophical statements, never following this up with a discussion of what this would mean in real, historical life.
In his Theses on Feuerbach, written at about the same time, Marx concludes with an equally powerful statement (Thesis 11): “Philosophers have until now only interpreted the world in various ways; but the point is to change it.” This should not be seen as a denigration of philosophy as a useless scholastic exercise: on the contrary. Its meaning is that until that time, philosophers had only interpreted the world, but now, as Marx claims for his own philosophy, there exists an adequate interpretation of the world, and it is finally possible to change it. Changing the world is not the opposite of philosophy—it depends on philosophy’s adequate interpretation of the world. This is what Marx was trying to do in his writings for the rest of his life, and therefore his unfinished major opus was titled Das Kapital—not Der Sozialismus. When Marx wrote the stirring passage about what the final form of communism would mean, he may have been aware that he could not go beyond these generalities, beautiful though disappointing as they may be. For him the quest for a historically adequate interpretation of the world is still the only key for changing it.
AGAINST ONE-DIMENSIONAL MATERIALISM
During the Brussels years, Marx tried to formulate systematically his thinking about Feuerbach’s philosophy. This he did mainly in two very disparate pieces of writings—the short and pithy Theses on Feuerbach and the extensive The German Ideology, neither published in his lifetime, but critical to the construction of the dialectical nature of his materialist view of history.
Like all Young or Left Hegelians, Marx’s indebtedness to Feuerbach was enormous, and is evident in his critique of Hegel in the DFJ. Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) had a liberating impact on German philosophical and theological discourse in presenting what was called the “anthropological essence of religion.” This led to a basically atheistic position claiming that religious thought is a human artifact projecting unto the deity the attributes human beings lack in their real life in the here and now. In this Feuerbach followed the legacy of eighteenth-century French materialist thought.
For Marx this was a powerful theoretical weapon in his critique of Hegel’s idealist philosophy. Yet Marx found Feuerbach’s thinking abstract, divorced from the real conditions of human life: the fact that various religions differ from one another has to do with different real-life social conditions. Therefore any attempt to overcome human alienation—which is reflected in
religious thoughts and beliefs—has to study human social conditions, not religion itself.
Marx had already followed this line in his DFJ essays, but writing in Brussels he went one step further. Materialists, he argues, look at human perception of reality as if it were a merely automatic, passive activity—as if reality existed as such outside human consciousness, and human perception was merely registering it in a mechanical way. But—to Marx—the way human beings perceive objective reality is influenced and determined by the social conditions that have formed their consciousness: so human perception is not just a mechanical reflection of a reality “out there,” but is mediated through the specific conditions that had formed the human beings who perceive it. In other words, Feuerbach’s materialism overlooks the subjective ingredient in all human consciousness—be it that of individuals or of large human groups.
The chief defect of all previous materialism (including Feuerbach’s) is that the object, what we perceive through our senses, is understood only in the form of object or contemplation, but not as a sensuous human activity, as praxis, not subjectively. Hence in opposition to materialism the active side was developed abstractly by idealism.
Beyond the apparent scholarly language, this is a battle cry against the one-dimensionality of classical materialism, as represented by Feuerbach, which totally overlooks human agency and its role in the way human beings perceive reality. Hence the need to integrate the contribution of idealist philosophy (of Hegel) into a praxis-oriented way of thinking.
The materialist doctrine of changing circumstances and education forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator himself must be educated.
Karl Marx Page 8