A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  But in the objects that people had produced during different periods, we have ‘sensuous, alien, useful objects’ in which humanity’s ‘objectified essential powers’ appear to us, although in the form of alienation.26 There is much to notice in these lines. First, it indicates that Marx here saw all production up to that point as alienated. Alienation did not begin with capitalism, or even with feudalism. It has been the companion of humanity ever since the beginning. He did not, as is often asserted, have any notion of an Edenic primitive condition.

  Secondly, it is important to pause here at the word ‘objectification’ (Vergegenständlichung). It is a central idea in the Hegelian tradition, accented by Feuerbach, that in and through the results of its work humanity creates something that is found within them as a possibility or a natural ability and is thereby expressed in the things they produce. The phrase ‘essential powers’ itself contains the important word ‘power’, with the meaning ‘that which produces or accomplishes something’. In production, humanity creates objects that are the expression of themselves. As we have seen, being active is part of humanity’s essence. Their activities express what they bear within themselves.

  Thirdly, it is therefore important to note that Marx emphasized the crucial significance of material production. It is easier to see the results of labour as an expression of a person’s innermost essence as regards intellectual activity, and art in particular. We imagine that we encounter Beethoven’s stormy emotional life in his music, or Dagerman’s anguish in his novels, or Picasso’s profound rashness in his art. It is also easy to detect a conscious intent in the labour of a skilled craftsman. But in machine-made products? In mass-produced artefacts?

  Did Marx wish to say that alienation made it impossible for industrial workers to objectify themselves in the products of their labour? Alienation seems to be universal; no one escapes its curse. Nevertheless, wage workers seem to be particularly affected by it; it is their lot that Marx dwells upon. The Manuscripts provide no clear answer to the question. Marx would come back to it thirteen years later, in the Grundrisse.

  At the same time, the assertion remains that it is in humanity’s material production that their essential forces are expressed most clearly. Marx wanted to achieve a paradigm shift. It is neither in art nor in philosophy that we above all can discern what is human. It is in all the useful objects produced – everything from the simplest clay pots, and tools for hunting and agriculture, to steam engines and rotary presses (or, in our contemporary perspective, the most advanced electronics or biotechnology). In short, it is the history of technology that best reveals what kind of beings humans are. Their active essence is most clearly indicated here – their characteristic as working and producing beings. In it, they also prove themselves to be social at heart: they do not work only for themselves, but for everyone else. Clay pots or hand-mills did not only have significance for just a few, but for the development of the entire human race.

  Marx emphasized that the history of technology was interwoven with that of the natural sciences. Through technology, the natural sciences reshaped the entire lives of people and their relationship to nature. But philosophy had not succeeded in integrating the natural sciences into it. ‘Their momentary unity was only a chimerical illusion.’27 With this, Marx was obviously alluding to Romantic natural philosophy as created by Schelling in the 1790s, which lived on for a few decades. Even Hegel indulged in this fantastic illusion, although in a somewhat divergent version.

  Marx’s reasoning here is read as indicating that he now wanted to achieve a unification of this kind, not only in the imagination but in a more tangible fashion. It would mean that philosophy would at one and the same time be realized and sublated, interpreted in the common history of technology and of the natural sciences as a key to the question of the essence of humanity.

  It was an ambition that led him into far-reaching reasoning about creation and about God. There were still several years to go until Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, and the idea of species development was not held in great repute. But the new geology had made creation theory unlikely, Marx argued contentedly; had his manuscript come to the attention of his contemporary readers, they would likely have known that he was thinking of Charles Lyell’s 1830 book Principles of Geology, according to which the forces impacting the surface of the Earth had to have existed for a very long period. Of course, it was so far still more difficult to prove with biological evolution, and Marx felt himself compelled to take refuge in an old theory that had just begun to lose its credibility when he began writing the Manuscripts: the doctrine of spontaneous generation (generatio aequivoca). According to this theory, life could arise spontaneously out of inorganic material. But with the rapid development of the microscope and the contemporary development of modern cell theory, such ideas had begun to appear outmoded.

  Even more feeble was his reasoning when he explained how humanity had come to be. We see an infinite succession of generations without end. It raises the question of whether there should not be a first beginning to this succession. But no, Marx said; that question was an abstraction. Through it, people abstract from humanity itself, just as with nature, and they imagine something independent of them both before the beginning of time.

  Moreover, Marx emphasized that ‘for the socialist man’, the history of the world was a creation of human labour. It is through their labour that nature exists for them. These lines have made several readers of Marx – chief among them Alfred Schmidt – question whether Marx in general assumed a nature outside of humanity and their labour. In its time, Schmidt’s 1962 book Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx (The Concept of Nature in Marx) played an important role in the criticism of the dialectic of nature that Engels developed during the 1860s and 1870s, which later became a fundamental part of Marxism–Leninism.28

  It is, however, risky to draw general conclusions about Marx’s interpretation based on these somewhat sophistic lines in the Manuscripts. Only fifteen years later, when he encountered Darwin’s theory of natural selection, did he return to questions of this type – and then from entirely different starting points. He betrays no doubts about the independent existence of nature, either in his earlier doctoral thesis or in his later works. Nature preceded humanity. But through its labour, humanity transforms nature.

  Needs, Division of Labour, and Money

  Marx emphasized that humanity’s needs are not fixed. It is always possible to expand them and to create new ones, as it is possible to reduce them to a bare level of subsistence. What decides which needs a person can develop or decrease is their level of wealth. Refined desires can be brought out among those who can afford to satisfy them, but an almost brutish lifestyle is forced on the workers. Even sunlight can be denied them. ‘A dwelling in the light, which Prometheus in Aeschylus designated as one of the greatest boons, by means of which he made the savage into a human being, ceases to exist for the worker.’29

  It is the division of labour that, according to Adam Smith and other economists, makes labour more productive and thereby creates greater wealth. The division of labour is not for those whose labour is cut up into ever smaller areas, but for the capitalist. Nor does it serve all of humanity; it only favours a few. It has become a tool of egoism.

  Through division of labour, the activities of an individual become increasingly impoverished, which means that everyone affected gets farther and farther from the full wealth of humanity’s essence. The division of labour also increases the difference between the talents of different people. It makes the individual increasingly dependent on the labour of others; since it favours capitalism, it also drives development towards concentration and ultimately monopolies.

  The power of money in society constantly increases. With its help, everything can be purchased and all human shortcomings can be compensated. The ugly can purchase love, the lame can purchase the muscle power of horses, and the uneducated can purchase an ostensible education. It means nothing if �
�I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid’, for ‘money is honoured, and hence its possessor’. But the entire compensatory power of money, looked at more deeply, is still illusory. Money cannot be exchanged for love, only love for love. However much money someone has to purchase art, literature, or musical experiences, it does not help: ‘If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person.’

  In this text, Marx got help from the expressive power of literature through generous quotes from Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. In Faust, it is a question of the strength obtained by owning six stallions: ‘I tear along, a sporting lord,/As if their legs belonged to me.’ From Shakespeare’s play, he chose the charged scene in which the once-rich but now destitute Timon, hunting for edible roots out in the wilderness, finds a chest of gold instead. He curses his bad luck – he wanted roots, not riches. He knows all too well that money seems to make evil good, stupidity wise, cowardice brave, and baseness noble. But he wants to avoid being caught in its curse yet again. Instead, he wants to live an honest life on his own strength, and thus says no to the gold.30 In just a few pages, Marx thus managed to cite three of the authors he had the highest opinion of: Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Goethe. In short, he mobilizes another kind of riches – cultural riches – than the kind money automatically gives access to.

  For Marx, money constituted the very culmination of alienation. Through it, I can exchange and transform everything that is a part of what is human; I can unite the irreconcilable and replace what I might lack in my own equipment. I can develop the most prodigious needs. Those who have no money also have needs, of course, but they are ‘a mere thing of imagination’, Marx said.31 (Readers of Strindberg may recall The Red Room, in which the dead-broke Sellén and Olle Montanus try to satisfy their hunger by reading about cabbage rolls in a cookbook.) If I need to travel but have no money, I need to repress that need. If I am gifted but poor, I am not in reality suited for studies, but with a fortune I can earn my degrees even if I lack talent. Money is a means to realize desires that actually lie beyond the reasonable, but its absence makes the most reasonable goal completely unattainable.

  And Finally, Hegel …

  In his foreword, Marx starts by pointing out that he was thinking of concluding his work with a critical review of Hegel’s dialectic. Such a critique exists, but it is as incomplete as most of the Manuscripts.32

  The contemporary German philosophers, with Bruno Bauer at their head, had forgotten to take a position on Hegel’s dialectic despite claiming to be critics, Marx asserted. The only exception was Feuerbach, who demonstrated that philosophy had the same roots as religion, and that the relationship between human and human also had to be the foundation for every good theory.

  In Hegel, everything took place in thought. Even sensuous entities, like religion and the state, are intellectual phenomena. The greatness in his system lies in his view of the creative process as a succession of negations in which what is achieved is continuously sublated and at the same time lifted to a higher stage. He thereby ascribes a key role to labour, and defines humanity as a result of its own activities.

  In his view on labour, Hegel agreed with the modern political economists, Marx said. They also see the positive side of labour, but are blind to the negative. But the only labour Hegel recognizes is spiritual (or, to use contemporary language, intellectual). When a person of flesh and blood creates objects that are alien to him, however, it is not the activity that is the active subject but the person himself. Hegel did not start from reality, but from thinking about reality.

  Marx did not yet see himself as a materialist. Both materialism and its opposite, idealism, differ from humanistic naturalism in the spirit of Feuerbach, which at that time Marx was an adherent of. In fact, the contradiction between them is sublated in this observation, which is superior to both.

  On the one hand, humanity is subject to the forces of nature like all other living beings. On the other hand, through its knowledge, humanity consists of beings that can change their lot. In their thinking, according to Marx, humans are still doomed to make use of formal categories of thought that are ultimately a sign of their alienation. It is Hegel’s merit that he showed both this and that the categories inevitably had to pass into each other in a dialectical process. But he had really shown how impossible his own system was. It was the Absolute Idea that, in Hegel’s system, constituted the culmination of development. But did he not say that all concepts, and thereby even his own, had to be abolished and to make room for something else in an eternal process of change? Hegel thus abolished himself, thereby revealing against his will that abstract thinking, regarded in its isolation, was nothing. With that, he paved the way for Feuerbach.

  And so end the Manuscripts. In a substantial respect, Marx still agreed with the Young Hegelian criticism that he himself once directed against Hegel: dialectical development could never come to a halt, either at the Absolute or at the existing Prussian state. Everything was subject to the law of changes.

  But, at the same time, inspired by Feuerbach, he argued that he had overcome his previous standpoint. If so, how did it relate to humanistic naturalism? Did this not also have to pass into the continuous succession of categories? And what about communism? Was it not depicted in the Manuscripts as the stable future of humanity? Was that not, too, insufficiently dialectical?

  These are unanswered questions. Marx, in the spirit of Hegel, would probably see them as meaningless. We can never lift ourselves above the historical situation we live in. The possibility of communism becomes apparent in the time we live in, but beyond this possibility we cannot distinguish any more distant future. And humanistic naturalism is the development that philosophy has arrived at. It is meaningless to speculate about knowledge that we do not yet have. The insights of the future lie beyond our horizons.

  An Important Stage in Marx’s Development

  The Manuscripts are a remarkable work that contain some of the most brilliant pages Marx ever wrote, but also long quotes and an account of Hegel that only someone who is already versed in his philosophy can fully follow. We can also see the first impression of his encounter with modern political economics, and Adam Smith in particular. The quotes, the paraphrases, and the summary conclusions are the result of a brief, intense period of reading. Smith and James Mill are quoted in French; the originals were perhaps unavailable in Paris and, in any case, French was nearly a second mother tongue for Marx while English still seemed quite exotic. But the little that is reproduced from Ricardo is still in English.

  Marx had not yet managed to form his own interpretation of economic questions. He made a point of emphasizing that he was following closely in the footsteps of the specialists – often word for word, in fact. He reproduced their thesis that it was labour that gives a commodity its value. He followed them in the conviction that development would nevertheless only make the workers’ situation even worse and push their wages further down towards the minimum. In short, he wholly accepted the dominant theory of impoverishment and Ricardo’s famous ‘iron law of wages’ that a forgetful posterity often blames Marx for, even though he abandoned it after 1848.

  His own original contribution in the Manuscript consisted of his setting this brutal reality against an idea of what a very expressive human life would be. Without going into more detail, he also argued that technological and scientific development had now gone so far that a life of that kind, purely as regards resources, lay within reach. But a system hostile to people does not force just the workers into a life that is wretched in every way. It also puts their opponents, the capitalists, in a situation where they cannot develop their humanity either. All their attention is directed towards saving their own skin in competition with other capitalists, resisting the workers’ demands, surviving recurring crises and keeping their machinery on a level with technological development. People are, by nature, active and social beings, Marx said. Neither worker nor capitalist has the opportunity to realize thi
s in the prevailing situation.

  The Manuscripts, on the one hand, paint a bright picture of the essence of humanity and the possibilities of the time, and on the other hand a dark picture of its realities. The contrast brings Marx to see the overthrow of existing conditions as posing few practical problems. The French revolutions of 1789 and 1830 were political revolutions, but what was now required by extension was a social transformation in which people finally liberate themselves from the bondage of private property. Marx had nothing to say about violence, barricades, or military adventures. The Manuscripts are perhaps his most optimistic writings.

  But it could be said that he painted a rare image of what people can be and painfully contrasted it with the kind of life the workers are forced to live. More briefly, but just as starkly, he observed the barrenness of the existence of the capitalists.

  We have to remember that Marx’s picture of humanity forms the antithesis of the one that predominated in political economics, and by and large in the liberal tradition in general. There, people were lazy at heart and work had to be organized so that it forced the person performing the work into diligence. The small carrot of wages and the powerful whip of discipline had to exist so that a person would not sink into the swamp of indolence.

  According to liberal economists, people were not social at heart, either. They voluntarily allowed themselves to become members of society and remain there because they find particular advantages through the protection of their own persons and their property. Marx’s human blooms only in community with others. But Marx is not alone in his interpretation. The active and social person has a central place in the philosophy of Hegel, and behind him is a tradition that reaches all the way back to Ancient Greece. The ideal of the vita activa, which Hannah Arendt wrote about in her famous book of 1958, has a long and rich tradition.33