Karl Marx

Allen Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134372577
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This is one of the most respected books on Marx's philosophical thought. Wood explains Marx's views from a philosophical standpoint and defends him against common misunderstandings and criticisms. All the major philosophical topics in Marx's work are considered: the central concept of alienation; historical materialism and Marx's account of social classes; the nature and social function of morality; philosophical materialism and Marx's atheism; and Marx's use of the Hegelian dialectical method and the Marxian theory of value.

Part One

ALIENATION

1

THE CONCEPT OF ALIENATION

1 The young Marx’s ‘theory’ of alienation

In his essays and manuscripts of 1843 and 1844, the young Marx uses the terms Entfremdung (‘alienation’ or ‘estrangement’) and Entäusserung (‘externalization’ or ‘alienation’) to refer to a great many things. Apparently, the point of this usage is to indicate a close connection in reality between the various things to which the terms are applied. The challenge is to discover what this connection is, and in what way the notion of alienation serves to represent it.

The terms Entfremdung and Entäusserung themselves evoke images: they suggest the separation of things which naturally belong together, or the establishment of some relation of indifference or hostility between things which are properly in harmony. On the most obvious level, Marx’s use of them expresses the idea that the phenomena he describes are characterized by abnormalities or dysfunctions which follow these general patterns. Moreover, we can see this quite clearly in some of the things to which Marx applies the concept of alienation. Workers are said to be deprived of, and hence ‘alienated’ (separated) from their products; they stand in an ‘alien’ (hostile) relation to the environment in which they work, and they experience the labor they perform as ‘alien’ to them (indifferent or inimical to their natural human desires and aspirations).¹ The division of labor is ‘alienating’ in that it separates people into rigid categories, and sets human activities in an ‘alien’ relation to each other by developing the ones needed for each specialization to the detriment of each person’s individuality and integral humanity.² The economic system, as Marx depicts it, further separates or ‘alienates’ people from one another, by making them indifferent to the needs of others, and pitting the interests of each against those of everyone else.³ Further, Marx tells us, in the modern state the individual’s conscious participation in society as ‘citizen’ is separated from everyday life, experienced as an alien or false identity to be assumed at odd intervals for ritual purposes. The political state itself is ‘alienated’ from the realm of material production and exchange in which people sustain their actual common life.⁴ And following Feuerbach, Marx views the prevailing Christian religion as separating everything valuable and worthwhile from humanity and nature, positing it (in imagination) in an alien being outside the world.⁵

All these phenomena, and more besides, are described by Marx as forms of ‘alienation’. In his early writings, and especially in his celebrated fragment ‘Alienated Labor’, Marx seems to be trying to argue that they are all merely aspects of a single system or whole, based on one paradigm form of alienation: alienated laboring activity. Thus he describes his task in this manuscript as one of ‘comprehending’ (begreifen) the economic laws of modern society, ‘grasping the intrinsic connection between them’, by ‘grasping the whole alienation’ to which they belong. Marx ostensibly proceeds to perform this task by ‘formulating the facts of political economy in conceptual (begrifflich) terms as estranged, externalized labor’. As the manuscript breaks off, Marx is in the midst of ‘seeing further how the concept (Begriff) of estranged, externalized labor must express itself in actual life’.⁶

A great deal of paper and ink has been consumed in the attempt to spell out the ‘theory of alienation’ hinted at in this early fragment. But I think to no avail; there are strong reasons to doubt there could be any such theory worth explicating. Insofar as the various phenomena to which Marx applies the concept of alienation fall under that concept, they have in common only that they seem to involve some kind of unnatural separation or hostile relationship. That they have this feature in common does little to suggest that there is any real connection between them or that they all arise from a single underlying cause. It is hard to believe that ‘alienation’ (that is, unnatural separation or hostility) designates anything like a natural kind among human or social dysfunctions, and still harder to believe that it designates a ‘concept’ or essence whose presence in human laboring activity explains all the various sorts of separation or hostility which we find in the phenomena to which Marx applies the notion of ‘alienation’.

Consider some of the claims made on behalf of Marx’s ‘system of alienation’ by its exponents. Istvan Meszaros, perhaps the most painstaking of them, declares that ‘Marx’s system of alienation and reification is not less but more rigorous than the philosophical systems of his predecessors’, and that Marx’s ‘analysis of “alienation of labor” and its necessary corollaries’ constitute ‘the core of Marx’s theory: the basic idea of the Marxian system’.⁷ Both these statements, I submit, are simply preposterous. Marx’s early writings are original, provocative, profound, rich in both social and philosophical insights. But they could be called ‘rigorous’ only by someone who has little familiarity with the property that term denotes. The theory presented two decades later in Capital is undoubtedly a ‘system’, even one possessing a certain degree of ‘rigor’. But it certainly cannot be accurately described as a ‘system of alienation’. Whatever continuity there is between Marx’s early and his later writings, there is no evidence that he ever thought of ‘alienation’ as ‘the basic idea of the Marxian system’ at any time after 1844. Meszaros very accurately describes the ideas of the Paris writings when he calls them a ‘system in statu nascendi’. But (to cite Hegel) neither a child nor a system is fully formed as soon as it is born; the idea which may have seemed ‘basic’ to Marx in his first groping sketch of this theory may very well assume a very different, even peripheral role in more mature versions.

One prominent theme which Marx stresses is the ‘alienation’ of human creations when they turn into hostile powers dominating or enslaving their human creators. Many writers have even identified the young Marx’s concept of alienation with this theme. Marx’s own emphasis (in the later as well as the early writings) supports the contention that this theme was central to his use of the terms Entfremdung and Entäusserung. Moreover, such a notion of alienation is arguably less diffuse than the image or metaphor of ‘unnatural separation’. But even on this reading, the prospects are not bright for an explanatory theory of the sort adumbrated in the ‘Alienated Labor’ manuscript. The sorts of human ‘creations’ which Marx speaks of as ‘alienated’ and dominating their creators are extremely varied in character, including not only material products of labor, but also social institutions and practices (such as the state and private property) and even thoughts and ideas (such as religious ones) to which no extramental reality corresponds. These items are not all human ‘creations’ in the same sense (unless a rather slippery or rubbery one). And people are ‘dominated’ in very diverse ways by religious illusions, by the state, and by their product in the form of capital. Once again, it is extravagant to suppose that ‘positing something which turns on its creators and enslaves them’ designates a natural kind among human activities, or that all activities which this description can be made to fit are caused by some fundamental or paradigm activity. If Marx’s theory is to be taken seriously, such suppositions must once again be defended by arguments of a sort which neither the young Marx nor his enthusiasts have produced.

Our doubts on this score are not relieved by the reasoning Marx uses when he does attempt to establish a connection between the different forms or manifestations of alienation. ‘Alienation’, he says,

shows itself not only in the result but in the act of production, in the producting activity itself. How could the laborer come to stand over against the product of his activity as something alien unless in the act of production itself he was alienating himself from himself? The product is only the resumé of the activity of production. If the product of labor is externalization, then production itself must be active externalization, the externalization of activity, the activity of externalization.⁸

Here Marx seems to be relying on some principle whose import is that the properties of an effect must always somehow pre-exist in the cause.⁹ But even the scholastics who endorsed this dubious idea restricted it only to the ‘perfections’ in an effect, and alienation (whatever it is) is arguably not a perfection. If, moreover, we ignore the metaphysics of Marx’s argument and examine the particular case in light of his other statements, it is difficult to make any sense of the explanatory claim he is making. Marx seems to be saying that alienation of the worker’s product must result from alienation in the activity which produces it. Now as Marx describes it, ‘alienation of the product’ includes both the fact that workers do not appropriate or own the product of their labor, and the fact that they find themselves in servitude or bondage to it in the form of capital. The ‘alienation of productive activity’, on the other hand, consists in the fact that in labor the worker ‘does not affirm himself but denies himself, feels not well off but unhappy, develops no free physical and spiritual energy but mortifies his physis and ruins his spirit’. Thus Marx’s apparent claim is that wage labor’s unpleasant and unfulfilling nature is what explains the fact that the worker’s product belongs to someone else. Likewise, the unappealing nature of labor is what causes this product to dominate the worker in the form of capital. Those who wish to defend the young Marx’s theory of alienation must discover a way of reading its explanatory claims which saves them from being mere gibberish.

2 What is ‘alienation’?

The ‘Alienated Labor’ fragment contains Marx’s first recognizable attempt at a systematic theory of capitalism. The attempt fails because the philosophical concept of alienation is simply too vague and metaphorical to perform the explanatory function Marx tries to assign it. The attempt is of interest, however, because it already embodies (though in a muddled form) three ideas which are central to Marx’s mature theory of capitalist society.

First, Marx perceives a complex interconnection between the various ills and irrationalities which beset people in modern society. Second, he insists that what is distinctive about modern society, and what fundamentally explains its system of interconnected irrationalities, is something about the kind of labor or production which goes on in it. And third, he regards this peculiar kind of labor as characteristic of a determinate and historically transitory phase in the generally progressive movement of human history. (‘Alienation’, as the fragment puts it, ‘is founded in the essence of human development.’)¹⁰ In the mature theory the interconnection does not consist in a ‘system of alienation’ but in the economic structure of capitalist society. The mature Marx traces this structure to a kind of labor or production because he holds that the social relations of production which make it up are determined by the degree of development of society’s productive powers, and hence by the nature of its material labor. Finally, for the mature Marx the ‘essence of human development’ is not a process predetermined in the womb of the human species-essence but only the relentless expansion of society’s productive powers, which determines the course of development taken by the social relations of production.

Marx’s mature theory, then, does not assign to alienation the basic, explanatory role projected for it in the early fragment. Yet Marx does not simply abandon the concept of alienation in his mature writings. On the contrary, we still find it used in many places in the Grundrisse, Capital and elsewhere. Marx’s use of it in these writings, I suggest, is no longer explanatory; rather, it is descriptive or diagnostic. Marx uses the notion of alienation to identify or characterize a certain sort of human ill or dysfunction which is especially prevalent in modern society. This ill is one to which all the various phenomena exemplifying the images or metaphors of ‘unnatural separation’ or ‘domination by one’s own creations’ contribute in one way or another. These images or metaphors, however, seem insufficient to describe the ill Marx has in mind. Perhaps it is impossible to improve upon them, but I will try.

One of the meanings Entfremdung had in Marx’s day was ‘madness’ or ‘insanity’.¹¹ Marx does not regard alienated individuals as insane, but he does regard them as involved in some sort of irrationality, as both producers and victims of life-circumstances which somehow do not make sense. Further, a central application of his image of ‘unnatural separation’ is that alienated individuals are in some sense separated from, at odds with, or hostile to themselves. These considerations motivate a provisional suggestion that alienation might be seen as the condition of a person who experiences life as empty, meaningless and absurd, or who fails to sustain a sense of self-worth. Of course, Marx regards many people as alienated who do not think of themselves or their lives in this way. (For example, religious believers, whose sense of meaning and self-worth is sustained by a faith in God’s love for them.) But it seems to be Marx’s view that such people possess a sense of meaning and self-worth only because they build their lives on consoling falsehoods.¹² He plainly believes that alienated people who sustain a sense of meaning and self-worth only through religious illusions would be unable to sustain such a sense if they were undeceived.

My provisional suggestion, then, is that we are ‘alienated’ if we either experience our lives as meaningless or ourselves as worthless, or else are capable of sustaining a sense of meaning and selfworth only with the help of illusions about ourselves or our condition.¹³ Alienation, I think, is usually meant in some such sense when it serves as a vehicle of popular social criticism. So understood, of course, alienation is not an affliction only of men and women in modern capitalist society. And it is not plausible to think that in every case of it the primary cause must be found in the social arrangements which surround the victim. Yet Marx may be right in believing that alienation in this sense is more systematically prevalent and more serious in modern bourgeois society than in any other; and this fact makes it worthwhile to investigate whether there is something about bourgeois social forms which systematically produces it.

I have spoken of alienation both as a lack of sense of ‘meaning’ and a lack of a sense of ‘self-worth’. The two things are different, but they are closely related. If I find little or nothing in myself which is worthy of value or esteem, I will have a hard time seeing any real meaning or serious purpose in my life. Conversely, if I experience my life as devoid of meaning, it will be difficult for me to place a high valuation on the self whose life it is. Of course it might be (and I might recognize) that I am not to blame for the emptiness of my life. But a blameless self may still be an impoverished, impotent and degraded self, a worthless self. (Blamelessness is no strong recommendation for a self which finds itself unable to purpose or achieve anything which it can regard as meaningful or worthwhile.) A sense of meaning and a sense of self-worth, therefore, although they are different, usually go together, and a concept of alienation which refers indifferently to either will not be dangerously ambiguous.

Marx comes quite close to describing alienation explicitly as a lack of meaning or self-worth. He says that alienated workers are people ‘robbed of all actual life content’, and rendered ‘worthless, devoid of dignity’. Under existing social relations, the human being is a degraded, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being’.¹⁴ Moreover, the images of ‘unnatural separation’ and ‘dominion by one’s product’ naturally lend themselves to the description of conditions which would give rise to alienation in the sense I have suggested. Someone lacking in self-worth may be described as ‘alienated’ from that person’s true self or humanity, and Marx does speak of ‘self-alienated’ individuals in this way.¹⁵ Alienated workers, according to Marx, spend their days in enervating drudgery, and must do so if they are to obtain the means of physical subsistence, and so sustain the whole absurd cycle of their alienated lives. ‘Life itself appears as only a means of life,… [the human being’s] life-activity, his essence is made into only a means to his existence.’¹⁶

Further, there seem to be a great many ways in which the disruption of harmonies or vital relationships either within a human self or between the self and the world, could contribute to a person’s loss of a sense of self-worth or of coherence ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Biographical Sketch
• Introduction
• Part One Alienation
• Part Two Historical Materialism
• Part Three Marxism and Morality
• Part Four Philosophical Materialism
• Part Five The Dialectical Method
• Concluding Remark
• Notes
• Some Further Reading
• Index