As he began this new project, he believed that his work on economic theory would be a fairly brief and limited history. In the foreword he attached to the Manuscripts, he talked about his newly shelved project, a critique of jurisprudence and political science ‘in the form of a critique of the Hegelian philosophy of right’. Uniting the examination of speculation with the review of various more empirical materials proved to be unsuitable, he said. Moreover, he added, an ‘aphoristic presentation of this kind … would have given the impression of arbitrary systematization’.5 Hegel made the same kind of reservations in his forewords to The Phenomenology of Spirit and The Science of Logic, in which he points out that there is a crucial difference between an actual systematic description and one that only loosely puts the results together without accounting for how they were obtained.6
Now, Marx had set himself another, possibly higher goal. He intended to publish a series of ‘pamphlets’ on law, politics, morals, and so on, crowning the project with a work indicating the context among the various parts and carrying out criticism of the speculative treatment thereof – in a genuinely systematic way, one would assume.
The only visible result of these substantial ambitions was the manuscript on political economy. It is difficult to know how economics, in Marx’s interpretation, could be put together with ‘law, ethics, and politics’. It is not indicated in his letters from that time, or in other writings. In January 1845, Engels was still urging him to quickly finish with his ‘political economy book’, at a time when Marx had not touched the manuscript for several months. It did not matter whether Marx himself was satisfied with the results, Engels said. Time was fleeting, it was a matter of ‘strik[ing] while the iron is hot’.7 Much later, in March, another of his friends – Georg Jung, whom he had got to know during his time at Rheinische Zeitung – wrote a letter in which he inquired what had become of ‘your work on political economy and politics’. Do not let yourself be distracted by other tasks, Jung encouraged him. ‘With your brilliant writing style and the great clarity in your argumentation, you will and must be a success here [in Prussia] and become a star of the first magnitude.’8
But no words could persuade Marx. He was already heading in another direction.
In his foreword to the Manuscripts, his plans are even grander. He assures the reader that his report is built on solid studies of the literature on the subject, and it is hard for the reader to doubt it. Marx reproduces many long quotes from Smith, Ricardo, and others. But they are not alone in the text. Marx points out that he had also read the works of French and British socialists, and names a few original German contributions as well. First, he calls attention to Weitling’s writings, which he had already praised in his article in Vorwärts, and points out a few articles that Moses Hess had recently published in 21 Bogen aus der Schweiz (21 Sheets from Switzerland). One of them was called ‘Sozialismus und Kommunismus’ (Socialism and Communism); in it, Hess developed the harmonious image of the relationship between socialism and communism that he also expressed in a letter to Marx. Communism was, quite simply, radical socialism. On the other hand, Marx does not mention another article by Hess that he had just been a part of publishing in his and Ruge’s Deutsch-Französisch Jahrbücher. It is called ‘Über das Geldwesen’ (On Finances), and according to Hess’s foremost biographer Edmund Silberner, it is probable that it had been important for Marx’s article ‘On the Jewish Question’ and also influenced the Manuscripts and their treatment of money.9 But here, Marx’s silence is reasonable. There are no obvious similarities between this article by Hess and Marx’s thoughts on the significance of money. The only point on which they both agree concerns religion and its relationship to buying and selling.
On the other hand, Marx also mentions Engels’s ‘Outlines’ among his sources of inspiration; it would be strange otherwise. Even Feuerbach’s name turned up. But there, it was only a matter of philosophical inspiration. Marx’s picture of the world was still characterized by Feuerbach’s mixture of humanism and naturalism.
At the end of the foreword, Marx promises a reckoning with Hegel’s dialectic. ‘In contrast to the critical theologians of our days, I have deemed … a critical discussion of Hegelian dialectic a philosophy as a whole – to be absolutely necessary.’ By ‘critical theologians’, he meant Bruno Bauer and his other old friends from Berlin whom he now seemed to see as his main opponents. One question inevitably presents itself: Why is this reckoning so important for Marx in a pamphlet that would concern the criticism of modern political economy? This question cannot even approximately be answered until the contents of the Manuscripts have been examined in more detail.
The Struggle Between Worker, Capitalist, and Landowner
Before we go into Marx’s text in more detail, there is an important remark to make. Marx speaks throughout of the worker as ‘he’, never as ‘she’. In one sense, he is simply following the grammatical rules of German at the time. Where we, in a later period, would write ‘he or she’ – or even ‘they’ – it had long been the rule to simply write ‘he’. But Marx’s use of language is still odd in light of a few important bits of information he reproduced without commentary. One of the authors he cites in quite a bit of detail is the German Wilhelm Schultz, who in 1843 had just published an ambitious work titled Die Bewegung der Production (The Development of Production). In his book, Schultz – who lived a long life in constant opposition to the powers that be – collected a large amount of material on the development of society. The statistical information in particular was useful to Marx. One piece of information he reproduced held that 158,818 men and 196,818 women were working in English spinning mills. Similar conditions prevailed in similar industries in the United States. In wool factories, on the other hand, where the work demanded greater physical strength, men were predominant.10
It is odd that Marx did not comment on these numbers. His worker is always a he, although the most typical industries of the Industrial Revolution – and the ones that got the most attention – were dominated by women. He shared this blindness with many others of his time, of course, but it is nonetheless a blindness.
In the Manuscripts, Marx for the first time describes society as an arena for conflicts between workers, capitalists, and landowners. He primarily follows in Adam Smith’s tracks, but also those of other, later economists as well. Working wages are determined by ‘the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker’, he writes. But the worker ‘necessarily’ loses in this showdown. Capitalists gang up, while workers are forbidden to collaborate. Union struggles are thus still out of sight. Marx did not find it worthwhile to mention the Chartists’ attempt in England; he only follows in the footsteps of those he cites.
The worker becomes just a commodity. In times of decline, it is the workers who suffer the most. But not even when the economy is flourishing can they safely count on better wages. Capitalists are personally free to take the profit. They can also invest in new machinery. The labour of the workers thus becomes more and more machine-like. It becomes ‘abstract labour’, Marx says: the antithesis of the physical and intellectual wealth that he would now see, following Feuerbach but also ever after, as the hallmark of genuine labour. Increasing production can also compel workers, or deceive them into wearing themselves out in advance and dying. It is bad for the individuals, but makes room for new workers.
It is striking how close Marx’s text is to Smith’s section on wages in The Wealth of Nations. Much of it is pure paraphrase. Marx painted the same dark, nearly hopeless picture of the lives of workers as Smith did. Wages normally approach a minimum under which death by starvation is imminent. Marx was also following closely in Smith’s footsteps when he said that prices on provisions vary more than the wages of labour, and Smith already called the worker a commodity.
Marx also repeated Smith’s assumption that there was a stage in which all opportunities for growth were exhausted and economic development would thereby reach its absolute maximum. Even in such a
state, the lot of the workers is precarious. Wages would be as low as possible. Marx spoke of ‘static misery’.11 It was a conviction that Marx would later abandon.
When he got to capital profits, he assiduously cited his political economic authorities, particularly Adam Smith but also David Ricardo and Jean-Baptiste Say. One of those he quoted deviated from the others: the French socialist Constantin Pecqueur. For a time, Pecqueur had followed in Saint-Simon’s footsteps, and thereafter counted himself among the followers of Fourier. He did not feel at home in this role, either, and went his own way. He differed from most contemporary French socialists in that he saw industrial development as positive. The error lay in the capitalist system alone. In this he anticipated Marx, who could still quote him with approval in Capital. But by the time of the coup of Napoleon III in 1851, Pecqueur had already left both economics and politics behind him. Pecqueur thus differed from the other authors that Marx cited in that he did not speak about the workers’ situation as a necessary evil but with the same indignation as Marx himself.
The diversity of quotes in the section on profit is certainly a sign that the pages were less well planned than the previous ones, and are nearly in an excerpt stage. Instead, Marx concentrated on the crucial conclusion that the capitalists’ only substantial ambition had to be to maximize profits. The implication: those who did not, fell out of the competition. At the same time, competition is the capitalists’ hindrance. This means that larger capital knocks out smaller capital, and that monopoly – with all its negative consequences, especially for the workers – was imminent at the end of the road.12
The economists’ third fundamental theory (after wages and capital), land rent, is also first presented with a swarm of quotations. But Marx himself soon begins to speak. He argued that the feudal lords – the traditional landowners – were finding it increasingly difficult to resist capital. Greater amounts of land were falling into the capitalists’ hands. This had gone especially far in capitalism’s homeland, England.
In a few important pages, Marx denies having a misconception that could lie near at hand, namely that he was sorry about the old system disappearing and being replaced with new, cold capitalism. He stressed that, unlike the Romantics, he shed no tears over the development. He was not saying, as they were, that a good and natural system was being replaced by one in which buying and selling was the goal of life. On the contrary, he maintained that by its nature, feudalism was bartering. Of course, the capitalists bartered as well, but they did it in a rational manner. Private property itself had its origins in land ownership, which in and of itself meant that people were subject to a lord. The serfs became ‘the adjunct of the land’ – at heart a temporary appendage. Even the feudal lords were an adjunct of the land. The inner connection between owner and land was only apparent. That semblance was completely abolished with the capitalization of landed property, something that was happening full-scale in England. There, industry was in the process of conquering the land as well.13
Alienated Labour
After the sections on wages of labour, capital, and ground rent, the account changes its character. The texts are more thoroughly worked out, and at times they reach magnificent stylistic heights. We witness an author who is pleased with his devastating irony and rhetorical ability with words.
Now headers are missing entirely. The ones that regularly reappear in various editions originate from the first printed version of 1932. They are of course partially arbitrary, but still created a kind of reasonable order.
The first section, called ‘Estranged labour’, is the one that has attracted the most attention from posterity.14 The primary reason is the word ‘estrangement’ – or ‘alienation’ – itself, and what that implies. At heart, they have the same meaning, whereas in the German they are matched by two words with clear nuances of meaning: Entfremdung and Entäusserung. The word Entfremdung has to do with ‘alien’; Entäuserrung, on the other hand, has to do with something ‘external’, in the sense of selling off or parting with something. The terms are used with no great differentiation in the German tradition, although with the nuance that Entfremdung is used more often in relations between people, and Entäusserung chiefly in relations between people and things. Both go back to the Latin alienatio, which gave rise to different variations of the word ‘alienation’ that occurs in modern languages.
The most important thing is to narrow down what Marx meant with these loaded words. As we know, the closest background to the account in the Manuscripts was Feuerbach’s philosophy, in which concepts like the essence of humanity and its essential forces are central. People have been alienated from their essence; they have become a stranger to themselves and to others. This finds its clearest expression in religion – and in speculative philosophy. In them, people create images such as God or the Absolute as surrogates for the complete humanity that exists in their minds but cannot realize in the society they live in.
An entire generation of young Germans who united philosophical interest with political radicalism were deeply impressed by Feuerbach’s thinking for a few years in the 1840s; Marx, Engels, and Hess were only some of them. What Marx wrote in the Manuscripts distinguishes itself in the fact that he used philosophical concepts so directly in concrete political economic texts. Hess kept to a more general plane, and as we have seen the word Entfremdung, like the rest of the philosophical vocabulary, is missing in Engels’s Outlines. On the other hand, Marx arranged a direct meeting between the worlds of concepts; he followed the texts on economics in detail and then dissected them with philosophical instruments – several of which come from Feuerbach, and others directly from Hegel.
In fact, we stand before one of the most characteristic features in Marx – not only in his early years, but throughout his life. They can be recognized in his doctoral thesis, where the substantial masses of quotes from Greek philosophers are arranged using Hegel’s categories. They continue in his criticism of the proposed law in the Rhenish Landtag and in his reckoning with Hegel’s philosophy of state and law. Marx was above all a tremendous reader who critically scrutinized what he had read.
In a way, we could speak of an exegesis in the literal meaning of the word as commentary or interpretation. But Marx devoted himself almost thoroughly to a sharp, inquisitive criticism of what he read. He did not content himself with understanding the text; he also wanted to expose it and reveal its actual content. What is more, in this case, he saw the text as an expression of the reality it depicted – a reality that the text itself was unable to grasp the meaning of.
The section on alienated labour in the Manuscripts was a pure example of this method of staying close to the text. In the preceding pages, Marx reproduced numerous long quotations from various authors. Now he could concentrate on summarizing them and revealing their blind spots. In his opinion, the political economists had no explanation for the reality they were depicting. More specifically, he said that they did not comprehend it. In German, he used the word begreifen. It is an important word in Hegel. It has to do with concepts; as always, Hegel is particular about drawing out the literal content of words. To comprehend something is literally to ‘grasp it’, and thereby have the opportunity to scrutinize it in all its aspects. The concept is the intellect’s way of getting a clear idea about reality.15
The national economists established the laws of the modern economy, but did not comprehend them. They provide no explanation of the division into labour and capital, capital and ground rent. The only thing that seemed to have put the wheels of the economy in motion are ‘greed and the war amongst the greedy – competition’. To clarify the economic context, the economists often looked back to a kind of original condition of humanity before all development began. It is a solution that Marx, with his sense of the historically concrete, found unsustainable. The problem, in that case, is reduced to ‘the form of a fact, of an event’.
Instead, Marx saw the solution in what the political economy of the time itself emphasized: th
e workers become poorer the more they produce, and they themselves become a cheaper commodity the more commodities they produce. It is like religion, Marx said: the more humanity transfers themselves to God, the less they have for their own part.
This transfer, whether it occurs in religion or labour, is what Marx called alienation. Alienation has multiple forms. The worker cannot express themselves in their labour, but must see it as forced labour that hunger compels them to. The labour is not their own, but someone else’s. They are only freely active in their animal functions: eating, drinking, begetting children – but not in their human ones. Humanity as a ‘species being’ – people in their specifically human functions – are distinguished by the fact that they are universal and free in their activities. But the worker cannot be that.
People resemble other animals in that they live off of organic nature. But they do it in a more multifaceted way than any other animal. They can make all natural phenomena their objects through the natural sciences and in art. They can also handle them in practice. Marx said that nature is their ‘inorganic body’. The choice of the word ‘inorganic’ may seem odd to us, because what we can primarily live off of is other organisms. But Marx used the word in a sense that was not uncommon for the time. Whatever serves as food for someone else becomes inorganic in that relationship – that is, it ceases to be an organism itself.
Humanity is bound up with nature, and thereby also with itself, for it is in itself a part of nature. But alienated labour alienates it from itself, and thereby from nature.
Humans produce a world of objects – an objective world, something that means they transform parts of nature. A beaver or a bee certainly produces something as well, but only for their immediate physical needs. People also have physical needs, but production is not limited to meeting them. In production, people manifest their freedom by producing more than is necessary for their survival. What is necessary only appears as provisions – that is, means for the real, productive lives they live.
A World to Win Page 17