Marxism and Christianity

Alasdair MacIntyre

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1984
• ISBN:
  9780268161293
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Contending that Marxism achieved its unique position in part by adopting the content and functions of Christianity, MacIntyre details the religious attitudes and modes of belief that appear in Marxist doctrine as it developed historically from the philosophies of Hegel and Feuerbach, and as it has been carried on by latter-day interpreters from Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky to Kautsky and Lukacs. The result is a lucid exposition of Marxism and an incisive account of its persistence and continuing importance.

V.

MARX’S ACCOUNT OF HISTORY

We have now followed the proletariat of the British Islands through all branches of its activity, and found it everywhere living in want and misery under totally inhuman conditions. We have seen discontent arise with the rise of the proletariat, grow, develop and organize; we have seen open bloodless and bloody battles of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. We have investigated the principles according to which the fate, the hopes and fears of the proletariat are determined, and we have found that there is no prospect of improvement in their condition.

—F. ENGELS (in 1844)

BY 1844, Marx had to hand all the materials that he needed for his philosophy of history. The first attempt at it is to be found in the essay of that year, entitled “National Economy and Philosophy.” His approach to the fundamental themes of this essay was through his reading of David Ricardo and the enlightenment he drew from Ricardo’s formulation of the labor theory of value. What he learned from Ricardo was that the injustice of society toward the common people rests on a distribution of property that is only possible because the common people, by their labor, have created that property in the first instance. He uses this view of the centrality of labor to elucidate the truth hidden in various Hegelian and Feuerbachian doctrines. The form of the argument needs disentangling, for the manuscript is full of repetitions, abrupt breakings off, asides, and the like. The essay is in three parts, of which the first is on the alienation of labor, the second on the nature of private property, while the third has sections on the relation of private property to labor, on the transition from private property to communism, on the division of labor and the role of money, and, finally, a series of notes on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. The main course of the argument in the first manuscript was as follows.

In his Preface Marx had said that it was Feuerbach who had made a critical economics possible: his own starting point is typically Feuerbachian. Traditionally, national economy (as it was called in Germany—the English term is political economy—has assumed the existence of private property and has based its observations on the property relations deriving therefrom. What now has to be done is to pierce through that assumption to the fundamental realities of work, of labor. Basic to all is the objective existence of nature—here Marx breaks through the Hegelian insistence that nature itself is merely a product of spirit. “The worker cannot produce without nature, without the world of sense. It is the material through which his labor realizes itself, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it is productive.” Work, labor is the basis of production. Hence, not only are the products of labor commodities to be bought and sold, but labor itself, the means of production, becomes a commodity to be bought and sold for wages. “Labor produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity.” This process Marx interprets in Hegelian terms. When man as worker becomes himself a commodity, he is fundamentally alienated, estranged from himself. In the form of labor, man sees himself as a commodity, as an object. Hence, as labor he objectifies, externalizes his own existence. A consequence of this is that life becomes not something he enjoys as a part of his essential humanity, but rather merely an opportunity to earn a living, a bare physical subsistence that will enable him to go on working. Man, objectifying his life in the form of labor, is alienated from a truly human life. “Then, for the first time,” writes Marx, “work, the activity of life, the productive life, appears to man only as a means to supply a need, the need of maintaining physical existence.” Nevertheless, this estrangement makes man human. In seeing his life as an object, a commodity—labor—man becomes a reflective and not merely an instinctive being. “The animal is immediately at one with its own act of living. It is not differentiated from itself. It is itself. Man makes his very act of living an object of his will and consciousness.”

Thus to be human is to be estranged. But when man becomes a being divided against himself, able to envisage himself as a commodity, he breaks the community of man with man. For one man can buy and sell another, in the form of buying and selling his labor. One immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his work (that is, from the commodities which his labor has created, which belong not to him, but to those who bought his labor, that is, himself, in the first place), from the act of being, from his own essential nature, is the estrangement of man from man. When man stands over against himself, other men stand over against him also. What goes for the relation of man to his labor, to the product of his labor and to himself, is true also of the relation of man to other men, and so to the labor and to the objective form of the labor of other men.

“In short, the estrangement of man from his own essential being means that a man is estranged from others, just as each is estranged from essential humanity.” A consequence of this is that man creates a world in which he is a stranger, a world dominated by economic powers that he has created, but that he does not recognize as his own. Because of this lack of recognition, he envisages the powers that rule his life under strange and terrible forms. He sees himself as powerless, and with the power that is really his but that he has given over to external forces, he endows the being that seems to him to rule the world. In other words, he creates the gods. Earlier, Marx had remarked on the parallel between the world created in objectifying labor by making it a commodity, and the world created in objectifying human powers by making them gods. “The more the worker labors, the more powerful becomes the estranged, objectified world that he creates over against himself and the poorer becomes his own inner world, and the less he belongs to himself. It is the same in religion. The more man places in God, the less he retains in himself.” But the creation of gods as the masters of men is untruth. The truth is that man, in creating the images of the gods, has enslaved man. “Not gods, not nature, only man himself can be this estranged power over man.”

We began with nature and man. Man by his work first creates commodities, then becomes himself a commodity. Attempting to envisage the world that he has made, he creates a universe of strange forces which overcome man from outside, a world of property relationships, that is, of the ownership of commodities and therefore of human life and labor, which divides man and the society of men from within. Thus the estrangement of man gives rise to divisions between man at every level. “Therefore,” says Marx, for instance, “the religious self-estrangement appears necessarily in the relation of laity to priests.” Labor is the root of all, but private property the final result. “National economy begins with labor as the true soul of production and nevertheless gives labor nothing and private property everything.” The logic of this process is Hegel’s logic of alienation and of objectification. But its history has yet to be written, and so the first manuscript culminates in the questions: “How has man come to externalize, to be estranged from his labor? How is this estrangement grounded in the essential course of human development?”

The essential antagonism of society is that between worker and capitalist. Adam Smith had given the reasons why the capitalist must always benefit in any struggle between workers and capitalists, and Marx had already in an earlier note on Adam Smith refuted his contention that wages would rise as a result of competition between capitalists. “The number of laborers is now in all industrial countries above the demand, and can daily be recruited from the workless proletariat, to which it, in turn, daily yields recruits.” Whenever the capitalist loses, the worker loses too, for his wages, the price paid for his labor, are determined by the price at which the capitalist can sell his finished product. Whenever the capitalist gains, his increased profits enable him to replace the worker by machinery; and at the same time the division of labor means that the worker’s specialized skills restrict his range of employment, so that the gain of the capitalist does not imply any consequent gain on the part of the worker. But this is not all. What the capitalist has to gain or lose is capital. What the worker has to sell for more or less is his labor, that is, himself and his chance of a livelihood. Hence it is the worker’s personality, his chance of a properly human life that is destroyed by his loss. In this the economic system is not interested. The worker owning only his labor is, in the present system, nothing else than his labor, a mere commodity, no longer a person, but a thing.

Furthermore, through investment of profits, the capitalist becomes also the landowner. Land itself becomes a commodity, and the tenant becomes a laborer. The expansion of capitalism is all-inclusive. All social relationships are reduced to the essential relation of capitalist and worker, employer and employed. But whence the original source of this capital that enslaves society? Capital is nothing else than accumulated wealth, wealth nothing other than the fruit of labor. Hence Marx’s vivid equation at the end of the second manuscript: “Capital = accumulated labor = labor.” Capital is labor in disguise. It is the object that the alienation of labor, of work, creates. For labor is alienated in that it has become not a means to a truly human existence, in which the non-human—nature—is made into the image of man by means of art and of science, but is rather now an end in itself, and has thus created an existence for man which is non-human, in which the labor of man creates the power of capital, which destroys all human fruits of man’s labor.

Thus it is of the nature of capitalist society to deprive more and more men of an essentially human life. Once again we may return to Marx’s earlier annotation of the political economists where he writes: “So it transpires (i) that there is no question of any national or human interest but only of net revenue, profit, rent, that this is the ultimate purpose of a nation, (ii) that a human life has of itself no value, (iii) that the value of the working class is limited to the necessary cost of production.” In National Economy and Philosophy Marx proceeds to examine what political economy and the earlier socialist writers, respectively, have made of the process whereby man is dehumanized in the creation of the proletariat. Political economy has never quite pierced through the veil of objectified forms in which society conceals the realities of the productive process. It resembles religion in treating as objects what are in fact parts of man’s estranged being. Thus it is labor that creates wealth and value, but value is objectified in the form of exchange value and hence in the symbolic form of money. The mercantilists were the fetish-worshipers, the Catholics of political economy who treated money as the real incarnation of value. Adam Smith is like Luther in that he translates symbol into reality, money into labor. But Adam Smith always sees value in the context of a society of private property where labor has its own price, and in the person of the laborer, who owns only his labor, which is itself excluded from private property. The socialist writers similarly have been deceived by outward forms. Proudhon with the slogan, “property is theft,” wants to reform the system by abolishing private property, without understanding the social realities which private property represents. Saint-Simon sees labor as the source of society’s wealth, but wants to preserve the present industrial system and merely improve the lot of the laborer within it.

Then comes what Marx calls “crude communism.” This is really the final expression of the present society. For private property in the form of capital so dominates and overawes present society that the “crude communist” concerns himself with nothing but its abolition. Capitalism denies private property to most, crude communism will deny it to all. Capitalism denied a truly human life to most, crude communism will deny it to all. In Hegelian terms this communism is the negation of the system of private property. But being such a negation it is, in Hegelian terms, necessarily one-sided. It, too, must be negated. A society in which none can achieve true humanity must be replaced by a society in which all can achieve it. This is socialist society. It is to be a society of true communists in which the needs that are satisfied will not be the demands of an economic system, but the needs of man. The values of this society will be human values. Men will deal with other men, neither as with capitalists nor as with proletarians, but as with men. The religion of crude communism is atheism, the negation of the religion of estranged humanity. But such atheism is merely negative. Its positive side is philanthropy, the love of men. The philanthropy of atheism is merely abstract; human values have replaced divine values only insofar as they have destroyed the divine. In socialist society human values are themselves fulfilled and the divine is not denied—it has disappeared. Nature is fully realized in man, man in nature. “Here first does his natural existence coincide with his human existence, and nature exist for men. This society is the realized unity in their essential being of men with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of men, the realized humanism of nature.” Nature realizes its human possibilities, man his natural. But the path to a truly human society is through the complete inhumanity of a wholly proletarianized society. That is the way to which history points.

The next part of Marx’s work deals with “Need, Production and the Division of Labor,” and the following part with “Money.” Under the rule of private property, human needs can only be satisfied by selling human labor. But labor has been reduced to the point where the laborer has only his labor, that is himself, to sell, and consequently can only afford to satisfy a few basic needs. The division of labor increases the wealth of society, but renders a man’s work still less the free expression of his personality, still more what the economic system demands of him: The consequence is that what ought to be the means of his existence—money—is made into the end; and consequently it is money, the abstract form of man’s estrangement, which rules society. Marx quotes Shakespeare in Timon of Athens:

Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?

No, Gods, I am no idle votarist….

Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair;

Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.

It is gold which rules human society. But in a society where man mattered as man, love as love, and art and science as humanizing forces—in such a society, money would count for nothing.

So far, Marx has used Hegelian concepts to elucidate the life of man. Now he turns his analysis back to see Hegelian philosophy itself as part of that life. Political economy placed the essential reality of man outside man; this reality was the victim of false objectification. For political economy the essential reality was money. Philosophy falls into the same error: it, too, objectifies essential human reality and places it outside man. For philosophy, essential reality resides in logic; logic plays the role in philosophy that money plays in political economy. Marx calls logic “the money of the mind.” The achievement of Hegel in Marx’s eyes was to “see history as a process in which man is estranged from himself, exteriorizes himself and his work, and then finally comes to his own once more.” The error of Hegel is to see this as a history not of men, but of abstractions. Hence Hegelian philosophy is itself a false objectification, a substitution of appearance for reality. It, too, belongs to man’s estrangement. “The human essence, man, is for Hegel simply self-consciousness. All the estrangement of essential humanity is therefore nothing but the estrangement of self-consciousness. The estrangement of self-consciousness is nothing but an expression reflecting in the forms of knowledge and thought the real estrangement of man’s true being.” The earlier sections of the essay have enabled us to see estrangement of thought as merely an expression of man’s fundamental estrangement. The achievement of Marx here is to have given historical form to a concrete view of what man in society ought to be, of what he is, and of how his estrangement from his own true being comes about.

Having elaborated the philosophy of history implicit in National Economy and Philosophy, Marx went on in The Holy Family, The German Ideology, and The Poverty of Philosophy to estimate the thought of the Left Hegelians and Proudhon as merely an expression of the ideology of the middle classes of the 1840’s. But if all views are mere expressions of phases of historical process, will not Marx’s own view be simply one more such expression? The answer to this is both yes and no. Marx would never have denied the historical conditioning of his views. But at the same time, the proletariat is in a special position where contemporary reality in all its harshness is forced on it, while the middle classes are protected by their favored economic position. So that the proletarian and the thinker who stands beside him will necessarily be able to see further into history. The difference between bourgeois and proletarian is well put by Marx in The Holy Family: “The possessing class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self-estrangement. But the former is comfortable in this self-estrangement and finds therein its own confirmation, knows that this self-estrangement is its own power, and possesses in it the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels itself annihilated in this self-estrangement, sees in it its impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.” The possessing classes are comforted by a semblance; the dispossessed have nothing but reality.

At the same time, Marx, in a new criticism of Feuerbach, provides a new criterion for the truth of any given philosophy of history. In his Second Thesis on Feuerbach he wri...