But the workers are cut off from this. They are reduced to pure survival. They are not free in their activities. Provisions become not simply means for them, but the entire content of life.
Following Feuerbach, Marx spoke of humanity’s species-life. The workers are shut off from species-life – a life that provides the individual the opportunity to fully realize their possibilities as a person in community with other people. In similar terminology, the worker cannot realize their essence as a human.
The concept of alienation, or estrangement, as it is used in the Manuscripts is intimately associated with the concept of essence – or, more specifically, human essence. Marx thereby inserted himself into a long tradition that goes back to Ancient Greece, which was given a renewed topicality and partially new content in German philosophy during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Immanuel Kant, for example, held yearly academic lectures on the subject of anthropology. It was still an unsettled field in which he, like many others, took up every subject that had to do with humans’ physical and mental capabilities. But it was precisely Kant who, at the end of his life, arrived at the conclusion that the question ‘What is man?’ was one of the greatest mysteries that philosophy had to grapple with. He himself had become too old and infirm to seriously begin work on this new question, but several of his followers tried to attack it in full force. They spoke of anthropology, but it essentially concerned what would come to be called ‘philosophical anthropology’ in the twentieth century, in contrast to physical anthropology, which deals with people as biological beings, and social anthropology, which puts their construction of society into focus.
Philosophical anthropology grapples with Kant’s question, and it does so through attempting to discover what distinguishes humanity from all other creatures. Early on in Berlin, Marx had come into contact with this tendency through following the lectures of Norwegian natural philosopher Henrik (or Heinrich) Steffens in anthropology – according to the notes, even ‘diligently’. Steffens was one of the most zealous advocates of philosophical anthropology, which he saw as the foundation of all the sciences.16 Any influence he might have had on the young Marx was in any case quickly surpassed by the influence Hegel would come to exert. Anthropology was a smaller part of Hegel’s system, wedged into the doctrine of the subjective spirit (humanity) between phenomenology and psychology. Hegel’s brief exposé of the human soul had certainly appealed to Marx at one time, but it was far from the author of the Manuscripts. The soul is something internal, Hegel said, and this internal requires its external, its physicality. The soul is the subject, the body the predicate. Or, in other words, it is the soul that is the starting point, and the body only something required for the soul to be able to act and react in a world of bodies.
Marx’s anthropology is of the Feuerbachian type, but nevertheless has its own distinctive character. The sensuous, or empirical, is the starting point. People are bodies equipped with the senses. They are also thinking beings, but it is not thinking that comes first; it is the senses. Both the senses and thinking are necessary conditions for their activities. Humans are, from beginning to end, active beings. Their lives are a continuous interaction between activity and passivity. They act, and with their actions they change their reality – not only their own, but that of others as well. They are dependent to the same extent on what others do. ‘[J]ust as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him.’ This dialectic is the condition for their possibility of being an individual and a social being at one and the same time. In fact, they are only individuals through being social beings and only social beings through being individuals. It is in and through community with others that they can distinguish themselves.
Like Feuerbach, Marx followed in Hegel’s footsteps in this conviction. In the tradition that Hobbes and Locke inaugurated back in the seventeenth century, the individual came first. Society was built on an agreement between individuals who in principle could break out of that community at any time in the event that society did not provide them with what they had a right to expect.
This societal ontology, which from the beginning of the nineteenth century was called ‘liberal’, stood in sharp contrast to a much older conception, according to which people in their original condition were social. Aristotle characterized humans as social beings – a zōon politikon, or political animal, as the common, slightly brutalizing translation goes.
In that aspect, Hegel was an enthusiastic follower of Aristotle, and here Marx followed in the footsteps of his first great master. It is only in community with others that a person can become themselves, he also argued. Even when they are working alone – Marx provides the solitary researcher as an example – their entire activity is imbued with the fact that they are social beings. The labour of others is the condition for their own. What they achieve becomes useful and a delight for others.
What is more, it is only through others that they can become an individual. ‘Man’s individual and species-life are not different,’ he wrote. It is society that gives the individual access to nature, through the labour and knowledge of others. It is through society that they can be their own distinctive person.
It is important to distinguish Marx’s characteristic individualism, so unlike the faceless collectivism that characterized the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Humans are not fully fledged individuals right from the start; they become – or, rather, can become – individuals. The worker, deprived of humanity, is denied this, just as the capitalist is (as we shall soon see).
Private Property and Communism
The immediate obstacle to people being able to realize their inherent possibilities in a highly developed society is private property.17 Private property attains its perfection with capitalism, but it does not start with capitalism; it is also found in feudalism. Marx once again denies the suspicion that he had any love for the feudal system. In an eruption of linguistic delight, he imitates how feudal lords and capitalists slandered each other. The feudal lord
depicts his adversary as a sly, hawking, carping, deceitful, greedy, mercenary, rebellious, heartless and spiritless person who is estranged from the community and freely trades it away, who breeds, nourishes and cherishes competition, and with it pauperism, crime, and the dissolution of all social bonds, and extorting, pimping, servile, smooth, flattering, fleecing, dried-up rogue without honour, principles, poetry, substance, or anything else.
Movable or personal property, on the other hand,
points to the miracles of industry and progress. It is the child of modern times, whose legitimate, native-born son it is. It pities its adversary as a simpleton, unenlightened about his own nature (and in this it is completely right), who wants to replace moral capital and free labour by brute, immoral violence and serfdom. It depicts him as a Don Quixote, who under the guise of bluntness, respectability, the general interest, and stability, conceals incapacity for progress, greedy self-indulgence, selfishness, sectional interest, and evil intent; it pours cold water on his reminiscences, his poetry, and his romanticism by a historical and sarcastic enumeration of the baseness, cruelty, degradation, prostitution, infamy, anarchy and rebellion, of which romantic castles were the workshops.
It is a festive pyrotechnic display of words.
According to Marx, private property is the great evil, regardless of whether it wears feudal or capitalist clothes. The great counter-force of the time against private property was communism.18 But communism appears first in a raw, immature shape. It is, as we remember, what Marx said earlier on the verge of departing for Paris, and Moses Hess had developed a more detailed argument along the same line.19
But here, Marx concentrated on a particular point in immature communism – the idea that women would also be the common property of men. Marx said that this thought involved a denial of the personality of humans. ‘Personality’ is not a common word in his vocabulary, but it has its evident proximity to a significantly more central concept – namely, the indi
vidual. Personality is the distinctive character in a fully developed individual. The intimate relationship between men and women regresses to a purely brutish sexual relation in which all women are seen and treated as objects of lust held in common. In fact, Marx said, the relation between the sexes reflected ‘the entire world of culture and civilization’.
He also perceives another, somewhat higher but still immature communism. It could be democratic or despotic in nature, but still primarily political; its goal was the abolition of the state but it maintained private property.
It is only a third kind of communism that Marx stood behind. To describe it, he took up the very key of Hegel’s philosophy itself, with its magnificent but hard-to-grasp dialectic: Aufhebung. The word is almost impossible to translate into English or French in any adequate fashion. In French, Gwendoline Jarczyk and Pierre-Jean Labarrière made up an entirely new word, sursumer, to cover the multiplicity of meanings found in the German that Hegel consciously made use of.20 In English, aufheben is usually rendered as ‘sublate’, an uncommon word. The Collected Works, on the other hand, uses the word ‘transcendence’, which does not adequately capture its content.
Marx, with his supreme mastery of Hegel’s conceptual apparatus, naturally uses the word Aufhebung, fully conscious of its triple meaning. The communism he swore allegiance to had as a goal a ‘positive Aufhebung des Privateigentums als menschlicher Selbstentfremdung und darum als wirkliche Aneignung des menschlichen Wesens’. The Collected Works translates this as: ‘the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man’. Only the word aufheben makes Marx’s meaning clear: it is not quite simply a question of abolition. The things that historical development up until then had borne with it would remain in place, but on a higher plane. ‘Private property’ literally means that the public was dispossessed of property (from the Latin privo, ‘I rob’), but this dispossession had been the precondition for the entire process of progress. Now, Marx argued, the time was ripe to realize the possibilities that each person has in their essence. Finally, they would become the social beings they had the internal resources for. The conflicts between humanity and nature, and between people, would be abolished, and humanity would achieve a perfected humanism that at the same time was a perfected naturalism. The contradiction between humanity’s existence and their essence would be abolished; that is, their actual existence would not be in glaring opposition to their inherent possibilities. Nor would their need to affirm themselves and their abilities stand in opposition to the results of their labour.
These are sweeping formulations about a good society, but no concrete information about what the road there would look like. The pages on ideal communism are a typical expression of what, a few years later, would be called ‘utopian socialism’ in the Communist Manifesto. They are only philosophical, but more sophisticated than most other, similar depictions of the future.
The method of equating humanism with naturalism, of course, indicates the influence from Feuerbach. But behind Feuerbach, Spinoza can also be glimpsed. The formula ‘God or nature’ inspired Marx, as it did Hess. If God is only another name for humanity as it could be, then the step between humanism and naturalism is a short one. But that idea also leads him, as we shall see, to quite risky conclusions.21
Of particular interest is the idea that humanity should appropriate (aneignen) its essence. In German, this is the same eigen as in Eigentum (property, or possessions). Both have a fascinating origin. To possess something and to appropriate something means making it your own. The modern conception of property began with John Locke. For him, sovereignty over one’s own body is the foundation and starting point of all property. From this also follows the right both to one’s own thoughts and to the product of one’s own labour. Locke seemed unaware of the paradox that lay in the fact that he also counted the labour that ‘my servant’ performed in the property of the free ego.22
With that, Locke glossed over a still dormant but soon to be explosive contradiction between masters and their servants. If the master has the right to the products of his labour, the servants should reasonably also have the rights to theirs too. But how would they both share? Or is there a possibility of sublating the entire conflict?
A century and a half later, the battle lines had been drawn and Marx had joined those who stood on the side of the servants and the workers. But he did not see the solution in all property simply changing owners and going to those who performed the labour. Instead, the category of ownership would be transformed.
People have to live off nature, and through their work they transform the products of nature for their own consumption in an ever more artful fashion. But who should have power over what was thus created? Through private property, certain people appropriated this power to themselves. Others became dependent on them and were compelled to work for them for compensation that was barely sufficient for their own survival.
It could be said that both the private owners and those who work for them must assimilate the products of nature. But the assimilation occurs under very different conditions. A fundamental inequality prevailed, which hinders both parties. The assimilation that Marx saw in a happier future applied to the whole of the human essence. People would thus be able to realize all their inherent capabilities. They would become comprehensively active, fully social beings in collaboration with other social beings. Instead of having exclusive access to certain property, they would thus assimilate what nature and society offer, but they could thereby also access themselves and their fellow human beings.
It is striking how Marx, who constructed his reasoning with examples from economic theory, largely left economics out on these pages. Instead, he paints a picture of a kind of homo universalis, a universal human not far from the Renaissance ideal. While private property limits humanity, in a society where this is sublated they can assimilate their ‘comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner’. All their ways of relating to reality through ‘seeing, hearing, smelling, fasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving’ could then reach their full potential. Private property has made us ‘so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc.’. Real life is only seen as provisions, whereas the life of private property – labour and capital – appears as the actual. The real senses have been displaced by ‘the sense of having’.23
Each of us still carries the development that humanity has gone through. ‘The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present,’ Marx wrote. Someone eating cooked food with a knife and fork experiences something different that someone who tears off raw meat and devours it. The person weighed down with sorrows or worn out from all their labour cannot enjoy a play like a person who is rested and open to impressions. Narrow interests are also limiting. A merchant dealing in precious stones can only have a sense of their economic value, but not for their aesthetic value – that is, their beauty.
Another particularly interesting example he provides concerns music. It is only music that ‘awakens in man the sense of music’. But to an unmusical ear, even the most beautiful music has no meaning. In fact, it does not even exist as an object for such an ear, ‘because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers’. The object only has meaning for me ‘as far as my senses reach’.
Marx rarely talked about music. But he did so in a few extremely central, although incomplete, texts. The Manuscripts were the first of them. He did not speak about any particular music, either regarding genre or the work of an individual composer. While he often mentioned particular authors – everyone from Aeschylus to Balzac – he only spoke about music in general. By all appearances, it was in Paris that he encountered the most sophisticated music of his life. As we have seen, it was quite possible that he hea
rd Chopin and Liszt – two of history’s most legendary piano virtuosi – at Madame d’Agoult’s salons. But we know nothing of his reactions. In the many depictions of him from friends and acquaintances that are preserved there is no talk of music in his life; on the other hand, there is much about his tremendous literary reading and the role that drama, poetry, and novels played for him.
Music was not nearly as easily accessible as it is today. Perhaps this was a reason that he was not as concrete as when he talked about literature. This does not mean that references were lacking: Mozart, for example, appears numerous times in his articles and correspondence.24
But Marx was particular about linking historical development not only to art, but to human activity in general. The history of industry, he said is ‘the open book of man’s essential powers, the perceptibly existing human psychology.’25 The word ‘industry’ here should not be understood in the current everyday meaning of the word, as companies in which various objects are produced with the help of more or less advanced modern technology. Marx used the word in its original Latin – and in his time, still common – meaning of human diligence and initiative as expressed in general practical activities. But, at the same time, he emphasized that it was ‘ordinary essential industry’ he had in mind – that is, manufacture as regards material products.
The use of the word ‘psychology’ can also easily lead our thoughts astray. Psychology was not yet a highly specialized scientific discipline, but simply a subdivision of philosophy in which people tried, in thought, to get a clear idea of different mental phenomena and their distinctive character. The psychologists, Marx said, had only placed their subject in relation to ‘an external relation of history’ and not to the essence of humanity. They had not understood alienation, but only talked about humanity in general and in sweeping terms.
A World to Win Page 18