ALIENATIONA verb which means

1. To convey or transfer to another, as title, property, or right; to part voluntarily with ownership of.

2. To estrange; to withdraw affections or attention; to make indifferent or averse, where love or friendship before subsisted; to wean; with from.

Alienation may refer to:

Alienation (property law), the legal transfer of title of ownership to another party "Alienation", the medical term for splitting apart of the faculties of the mind Social alienation, the individual subject's estrangement from its community,

society, or world Marx's theory of alienation, the separation of things that naturally belong together,

or antagonism between things that are properly in harmony Alienation effect, a theatrical and cinematic device by which the audience is

"alienated" from a play or film

Marx's theory of alienationMarx's theory of alienation (Entfremdung in German), as expressed in the writings of young Karl Marx, refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony. In the concept's most important use, it refers to the alienation of people from aspects of their "human nature" (Gattungswesen, usually translated as 'species-essence' or 'species-being'). He believed that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism. His theory relies on Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841), which argues that the idea of God has alienated the characteristics of the human being. Stirner would take the analysis further in The Ego and Its Own (1844), declaring that even 'humanity' is an alienating ideal for the individual, to which Marx and Engels responded in The German Ideology (1845).

Contents 1 Types of alienation

o 1.1 Alienation in the labour process 2 The significance of alienation in Marx's thought

o 2.1 The concept of alienation — from Hegel and Feuerbach o 2.2 Alienation and Marx's theory of history o 2.3 Alienation and class

Types of alienation

Alienation in the labour process

Marx's Theory of Alienation is based upon his observation that in emerging industrial production under capitalism, workers inevitably lose control of their lives and selves, in not having any control of their work. Workers never become autonomous, self-realized human beings in any significant sense, except the way the bourgeois want the worker to be realized.

Alienation in capitalist societies occurs because in work each contributes to the common wealth, but can only express this fundamentally social aspect of individuality through a production system that is not publicly social, but privately owned, for which each individual functions as an instrument, not as a social being:

'Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.'" (Comment on James Mill)

In this work, written in 1844, Marx sought to show how alienation arises from private labour, from commodity production:

'Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition: My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life.' (Comment on James Mill)

Marx attributes four types of alienation in labour under capitalism:[1]

alienation of the worker from his or her ‘species essence’ as a human being rather than a machine;

alienation between workers, since capitalism reduces labour to a commodity to be traded on the market, rather than a social relationship;

alienation of the worker from the product, since this is appropriated by the capitalist class, and so escapes the worker's control;

alienation from the act of production itself, such that work comes to be a meaningless activity, offering little or no intrinsic satisfactions.

The significance of alienation in Marx's thought

The concept of alienation — from Hegel and Feuerbach

Alienation is a foundational claim in Marxist theory. Hegel described a succession of historic stages in the human Geist (Spirit), by which that Spirit progresses towards perfect self-understanding, and away from ignorance. In Marx's reaction to Hegel, these two, idealist poles are replaced with materialist categories: spiritual ignorance becomes alienation, and the transcendent end of history becomes man's realisation of his species-being; triumph over alienation and establishment of an objectively better society.

This teleological reading of Marx, particularly supported by Alexandre Kojève before World War II, is criticized by Louis Althusser in his writings about "random materialism" (matérialisme aléatoire). Althusser claimed that said reading made the proletariat the subject of history (i.e. Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness [1923] published at the Hungarian Soviet Republic's fall), was tainted with Hegelian idealism, the "philosophy of the subject" that had been in force for five centuries, which was criticized as the "bourgeois ideology of philosophy".

Alienation and Marx's theory of history

In The German Ideology Marx writes that 'things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence' [1]. In other words, Marx seems to think that, while humans do have a need for self-activity (self-actualisation, the opposite of alienation), this will be of secondary historical relevance. This is because he thinks that capitalism will increase the economic impoverishment of the proletariat so rapidly that they will be forced to make the social revolution just to stay alive - they probably wouldn't even get to the point of worrying that much about self-activity. This doesn't mean, though, that tendencies against alienation only manifest themselves once other needs are amply met, only that they are of reduced importance. The work of Raya Dunayevskaya and others in the tradition of Marxist humanism drew attention to manifestations of the desire for self-activity even among workers struggling for more basic goals .

Alienation and class

In this passage, from The Holy Family, Marx says that capitalists and proletarians are equally alienated, but experience their alienation in different ways:

The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it.

— Private Property and Alienation —

Private property alienates [entfremdet] the individuality not only of people

but also of things. Land has nothing to do with rent of land, the machine

has nothing to do with profit. For the landed proprietor, land has the

significance only of rent of land; he leases his plots of land and receives

rent; this is a feature which land can lose without losing a single one of its

inherent features, without, for example, losing any part of its fertility; it is

a feature the extent and even the existence of which depends on social

relations which are created and destroyed without the assistance of

individual landed proprietors. It is the same with machines. How little

connection there is between money, the most general form of property,

and personal peculiarity, how much they are directly opposed to each

other was already known to Shakespeare better than to our theorizing

petty bourgeois:

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

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

This yellow slave...

Will make the hear leprosy adored...

This it is

That makes the wappened widow wed again;

She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores

Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices

To the April day again...

Thou visible god,

That solder’st close impossibilities,

And makest them kiss!"

[Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act IV, Scene 3]

In a word, rent of land, profit, etc., these actual forms of existence of

private property, are social relations corresponding to a definite stage of

production, and they are “individual” only so long as they have not

become fetters on the existing productive forces.

According to Destutt de Tracy, the majority of people, the proletarians,

must have lost all individuality long ago, although nowadays it looks as if

it was precisely among them that individuality is most developed. For the

bourgeois it is all the easier to prove on the basis of his language the

identity of commercial and individual, or even universal, human relations,

as this language itself is a product of the bourgeoisie, and therefore both in

actuality and in language the relations of buying and selling have been

made the basis of all others. For example, propriété — property

[Eigentum] and characteristic feature [Eigenschaft]; property —

possession [Eigentum] and peculiarity [Eigentümlichkeit]; “eigen” ["one’s

own"] — In the commercial and in the individual sense; valeur, value,

Wert; commerce, Verkehr; échange, exchange, Austausch, etc., all of

which are used both for commercial relations and for characteristic

features and mutual relations of individuals as such. In the other modern

languages this is equally the case. If Saint Max seriously applies himself

to exploit this ambiguity, he may easily succeed in making a brilliant

series of new economic discoveries, without knowing anything about

political economy; for, indeed, his new economic facts, which we shall

take note of later, lie wholly within this sphere of synonymy.

Our kindly, credulous Jacques takes the bourgeois play on the words

Eigentum [property] and Eigenschaft [characteristic feature] so literally, in

such holy earnest, that he even endeavours to behave like a private

property-owner in relation to his own features, as we shall see later on.

Finally, on page 421, “Stirner” instructs communism that

“actually it” (viz., communism) “does not attack property, but the

alienation of property”.

In this new revelation of his, Saint Max merely repeats an old witticism

already used repeatedly by, for example, the Saint-Simonists. Cf., for

example, Leçons sur l'industrie et les finances, Paris, 1832, where, inter

alia, it is stated:

“Property will not be abolished, but its form will be changed ... it will

for the first time become true personification ... it will for the first time

acquire its real, individual character” (pp. 42, 43).

Since this phrase, introduced by the French and particularly enlarged on

by Pierre Leroux, was seized on with great pleasure by the German

speculative socialists and used for further speculation, and finally gave

occasion for reactionary intrigues and sharp practices — we shall not deal

with it here where it says nothing, but later on, in connection with true

socialism.

Saint Sancho, [following the] example of Woeniger, whom Reichardt

[used], takes delight in turning the proletarians, [and hence] also the

communists, into “ragamuffins”. He defines his “ragamuffin” on page 362

as a “man possessing only ideal wealth”. If Stirner’s “ragamuffins” ever

set up a vagabond kingdom, as the Paris beggars did in the fifteenth

century, then Saint Sancho will be the vagabond king, for he is the

“perfect” ragamuffin, a man possessing not even ideal wealth and

therefore living on the interest from the capital of his opinion. 

3. Production and Intercourse. Division of Labour and Forms of Property –

Tribal, ancient, feudal]

The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labour and internal intercourse. This statement is generally recognised. But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has been carried. Each new productive force, insofar as it is not merely a quantitative extension of productive forces already known (for instance the bringing into cultivation of fresh land), causes a further development of the division of labour.

The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labour. At the same time through the division of labour inside these various branches there develop various divisions among the individuals co-operating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these individual groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes). These same conditions are to be seen (given a more developed intercourse) in the relations of different nations to one another.

The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour.

The first form of ownership is tribal [Stammeigentum] ownership. It corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives by hunting and fishing, by the

rearing of beasts or, in the highest stage, agriculture. In the latter case it presupposes a great mass of uncultivated stretches of land. The division of labour is at this stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division of labour existing in the family. The social structure is, therefore, limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains, below them the members of the tribe, finally slaves. The slavery latent in the family only develops gradually with the increase of population, the growth of wants, and with the extension of external relations, both of war and of barter.

The second form is the ancient communal and State ownership which proceeds especially from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or by conquest, and which is still accompanied by slavery. Beside communal ownership we already find movable, and later also immovable, private property developing, but as an abnormal form subordinate to communal ownership. The citizens hold power over their labouring slaves only in their community, and on this account alone, therefore, they are bound to the form of communal ownership. It is the communal private property which compels the active citizens to remain in this spontaneously derived form of association over against their slaves. For this reason the whole structure of society based on this communal ownership, and with it the power of the people, decays in the same measure as, in particular, immovable private property evolves. The division of labour is already more developed. We already find the antagonism of town and country; later the antagonism between those states which represent town interests and those which represent country interests, and inside the towns themselves the antagonism between industry and maritime commerce. The class relation between citizens and slaves is now completely developed.

With the development of private property, we find here for the first time the same conditions which we shall find again, only on a more extensive scale, with modern private property. On the one hand, the concentration of private property, which began very early in Rome (as the Licinian agrarian law proves) and proceeded very rapidly from the time of the civil wars and especially under the Emperors; on the other hand, coupled with this, the transformation of the plebeian small peasantry into a proletariat, which, however, owing to its intermediate position between propertied citizens and slaves, never achieved an independent development.

The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property. If antiquity started out from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started out from the country. This different starting-point was determined by the sparseness of the population at that time, which was scattered over a large area and which received no large increase from the conquerors. In contrast to Greece and Rome, feudal development at the outset, therefore, extends over a much wider territory, prepared by the Roman conquests and the spread of agriculture at first associated with it. The last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces; agriculture had declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out or been violently suspended, the rural and urban population had decreased. From these conditions and the mode of organisation of the conquest determined by them, feudal property developed under the influence of the Germanic military constitution. Like tribal and communal

ownership, it is based again on a community; but the directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry. As soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also arises antagonism to the towns. The hierarchical structure of land ownership, and the armed bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over the serfs. This feudal organisation was, just as much as the ancient communal ownership, an association against a subjected producing class; but the form of association and the relation to the direct producers were different because of the different conditions of production.

This feudal system of land ownership had its counterpart in the towns in the shape of corporative property, the feudal organisation of trades. Here property consisted chiefly in the labour of each individual person. The necessity for association against the organised robber-nobility, the need for communal covered markets in an age when the industrialist was at the same time a merchant, the growing competition of the escaped serfs swarming into the rising towns, the feudal structure of the whole country: these combined to bring about the guilds. The gradually accumulated small capital of individual craftsmen and their stable numbers, as against the growing population, evolved the relation of journeyman and apprentice, which brought into being in the towns a hierarchy similar to that in the country.

Thus the chief form of property during the feudal epoch consisted on the one hand of landed property with serf labour chained to it, and on the other of the labour of the individual with small capital commanding the labour of journeymen. The organisation of both was determined by the restricted conditions of production – the small-scale and primitive cultivation of the land, and the craft type of industry. There was little division of labour in the heyday of feudalism. Each country bore in itself the antithesis of town and country; the division into estates was certainly strongly marked; but apart from the differentiation of princes, nobility, clergy and peasants in the country, and masters, journeymen, apprentices and soon also the rabble of casual labourers in the towns, no division of importance took place. In agriculture it was rendered difficult by the strip-system, beside which the cottage industry of the peasants themselves emerged. In industry there was no division of labour at all in the individual trades themselves, and very little between them. The separation of industry and commerce was found already in existence in older towns; in the newer it only developed later, when the towns entered into mutual relations.

The grouping of larger territories into feudal kingdoms was a necessity for the landed nobility as for the towns. The organization of the ruling class, the nobility, had, therefore, everywhere a monarch at its head.

Contents 1 Types of alienation 1.1 Alienation in the labour process 2 The significance of alienation in Marx's thought 2.1 The concept of alienation — from Hegel and Feuerbach 2.2 Alienation and Marx's theory of history 2.3 Alienation and class3 Further Reading

Types of alienation

Alienation in the labour processMarx's Theory of Alienation is based upon his observation that in emerging industrial production under capitalism, workers inevitably lose control of their lives and selves, in not having any control of their work. Workers never become autonomous, self-realized human beings in any significant sense, except the way the bourgeois want the worker to be realized.

Alienation in capitalist societies occurs because in work each contributes to the common wealth, but can only express this fundamentally social aspect of individuality through a production system that is not publicly social, but privately owned, for which each individual functions as an instrument, not as a social being:

'Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.'" (Comment on James Mill)

In this work, written in 1844, Marx sought to show how alienation arises from private labour, from commodity production:

'Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition: My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life.' (Comment on James Mill)

Marx attributes four types of alienation in labour under capitalism:[1]

alienation of the worker from his or her ‘species essence’ as a human being rather than a machine; alienation between workers, since capitalism reduces labour to a commodity to be traded on the market, rather than a social relationship; alienation of the worker from the product, since this is appropriated by the capitalist class, and so escapes the worker's control; alienation from the act of production itself, such that work comes to be a meaningless activity, offering little or no intrinsic satisfactions.

The significance of alienation in Marx's thought

The concept of alienation — from Hegel and FeuerbachAlienation is a foundational claim in Marxist theory. Hegel described a succession of historic stages in the human Geist (Spirit), by which that Spirit progresses towards perfect self-understanding, and away from ignorance. In Marx's reaction to Hegel, these two, idealist poles are replaced with materialist categories: spiritual ignorance becomes alienation, and the transcendent end of history becomes man's realisation of his species-being; triumph over alienation and establishment of an objectively better society.

This teleological reading of Marx, particularly supported by Alexandre Kojève before World War II, is criticized by Louis Althusser in his writings about "random materialism" (matérialisme aléatoire). Althusser claimed that said reading made the proletariat the subject of history (i.e. Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness [1923] published at the Hungarian Soviet Republic's fall), was tainted with Hegelian idealism, the "philosophy of the subject" that had been in force for five centuries, which was criticized as the "bourgeois ideology of philosophy".

Alienation and Marx's theory of historyIn The German Ideology Marx writes that 'things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence' [1]. In other words, Marx seems to think that, while humans do have a need for self-activity (self-actualisation, the opposite of alienation), this will be of secondary historical relevance. This is because he thinks that capitalism will increase the economic impoverishment of the proletariat so rapidly that they will be forced to make the social revolution just to stay alive - they probably wouldn't even get to the point of worrying that much about self-activity. This doesn't mean, though, that tendencies against alienation only manifest themselves once other needs are amply met, only that they are of reduced importance. The work of Raya Dunayevskaya and others in the tradition of Marxist humanism drew attention to manifestations of the desire for self-activity even among workers struggling for more basic goals .

Alienation and class

In this passage, from The Holy Family, Marx says that capitalists and proletarians are equally alienated, but experience their alienation in different ways:

The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it. [2]

Further reading“ I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain, from people’s psychological motivations. Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the spirit. If communism isn’t interested in this too, it may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a revolutionary way of life. ” — Ernesto "Che" Guevara [3]

Alienation is a theme in Marx's writing that runs right throughout his work, from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, to Capital - especially the unpublished sections entitled Results of the Immediate Process of Production. An online archive of almost everything written by Marx can be found at the Marxists Internet Archive- at which you can search for 'alienation'. Another good way to approach Marx's original writing is through a good collection - Karl Marx: selected writings (second edition), edited by David Mclellan clearly indicates sections on alienation in its contents. Key works on alienation include the Comment on James Mill and The German Ideology. An example of characterisation of alienation in Marx's later work (which differs strongly in emphasis, if not in actual content from earlier presentations) can be found in the Grundrisse. Marx's work can sometimes be daunting - many people would recommend reading a short introduction (such as one of those indicated below) to the concept first.

AN INTRODUCTION TO MARX'S THEORY OF ALIENATION

Judy CoxWe live in a world where technological achievements unimaginable in previous societies are within our grasp: this is the age of space travel, of the internet, of genetic engineering. Yet never before have we felt so helpless in the face of the forces we ourselves have created. Never before have the fruits of our labour threatened our very existence: this is also the age of nuclear disasters, global warming, and the arms race. For the first time in history we can produce enough to satisfy the needs of everyone on the planet. Yet millions of lives are stunted by poverty and destroyed by disease. Despite our power to control the natural world, our society is dominated by insecurity, as economic recession and military conflict devastate lives with the apparently irresistible power of natural disasters. The more densely populated our cities become, the more our lives are characterised by feelings of isolation and loneliness. To Karl Marx these contradictions were apparent when the system was still young. He noted that:

On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors of the Roman Empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by loss of character.1

Marx developed his theory of alienation to reveal the human activity that lies behind the seemingly impersonal forces dominating society. He showed how, although aspects of the society we live in appear natural and independent of us, they are the results of past human actions. For Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács Marx's theory 'dissolves the rigid, unhistorical, natural appearance of social institutions; it reveals their historical origins and shows therefore that they are subject to history in every respect including historical decline'.2 Marx showed not only that human action in the past created the modern world, but also that human action could shape a future world free from the contradictions of capitalism. Marx developed a materialist theory of how human beings were shaped by the society they lived in, but also how they could act to change that society, how people are both 'world determined' and 'world producing'. For Marx, alienation was not rooted in the mind or in religion, as it was for his predessesors Hegel and Feuerbach. Instead Marx understood alienation as something rooted in the material world. Alienation meant loss of control, specifically the loss of control over labour. To understand why labour played such a central role in Marx's theory of alienation, we have to look first at Marx's ideas about human nature.3

What is human nature?Marx opposed the common sense idea that humans have a fixed nature which exists independently of the society they live in. He demonstrated that many of the features attributed to unchanging human nature in fact vary enormously in different societies.

However, Marx did not reject the idea of human nature itself. He argued that the need to labour on nature to satisfy human needs was the only consistent feature of all human societies, the 'ever lasting nature-imposed condition of human existence'.4 Human beings, like all other animals, must work on nature to survive. The labour of humans, however, was distinguished from that of animals because human beings developed consciousness. Marx gave a famous description of this at the beginning of Capital:

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.5

In a useful introduction to Marx's ideas, How to Read Karl Marx, Ernst Fischer also described what is unique about human labour. He explained how, because we act on nature consciously, we build on our successes and develop new ways of producing the things we need. This means that we have a history, whereas animals do not: 'The species-nature of animal is an eternal repetition, that of man is transformation, development and change'.6

Working on nature alters not only the natural world, but also the labourer himself. Marx frequently reinforced this idea, as in the following quote from Capital: 'By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway.' Thus labour is a dynamic process through which the labourer shapes and moulds the world he lives in and stimulates himself to create and innovate. Marx called our capacity for conscious labour our 'species being'.

Our species being is also a social being, as Marx explained in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844): 'The individual is the social being.' People have to enter into relationships with each other regardless of their personal preferences because they need to work together to get what they need to live. In the Grundrisse, Marx emphasised the point: 'Society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves.' Humanity relates to the physical world through labour; through labour humanity itself develops and labour is the source of human beings' relationships with each other. What happens to the process of work, therefore, has a decisive influence on the whole of society.

Our ability to work, to improve how we work and build on our successes, has tended to result in the cumulative development of the productive forces. One such development gave rise to class society. When society became capable of producing a surplus, it also became possible for a class to emerge which was liberated from the need to directly produce and could live from its control over the labour of others. This process was necessary in order to develop and direct the productive forces, but it also meant that the majority of society, the producers, lost control of their labour. Thus, the alienation of

labour arose with class society, and Ernst Fischer has given a brilliant description of how it reversed the limitless potential of labour:

The first tool contains within it all the potential future ones. The first recognition of the fact that the world can be changed by conscious activity contains all future, as yet unknown, but inevitable change. A living being which has once begun to make nature his own through the work of his hands, his intellect, and his imagination, will never stop. Every achievement opens the door to unconquered territory... But when labour is destructive, not creative, when it is undertaken under coercion and not as the free play of forces, when it means the withering, not the flowering, of man's physical and intellectual potential, then labour is a denial of its own principle and therefore of the principle of man.7

The emergence of class divisions in which one class had control over the means of producing what society needed, led to a further division between individuals and the society to which they belonged. Certain forms of social life 'drive a wedge between the two dimensions of the self, the individual and the communal',8 producing a separation between individuals' interests and those of society as a whole. However, alienation is not an unalterable human condition which exists unchanged in every class society.

Alienation and capitalism: all in a day's workIn feudal society humans had not yet developed the means to control the natural world, or to produce enough to be free from famine, or to cure diseases. All social relationships were 'conditioned by a low stage of development of the productive powers of labour and correspondingly limited relations between men within the process of creating and reproducing their material life, hence also limited relations between man and nature'.9 Land was the source of production, and it so dominated the feudal-manorial system that men saw themselves not as individuals but in relation to the land. Marx described this in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

In feudal landownership we already find the domination of the earth as of an alien power over men. The serf is an appurtenance of the land. Similarly the heir through primogeniture, the first born son, belongs to the land. It inherits him. The rule of private property begins with property in land which is its basis.10

Ownership of land was dependent on inheritance and blood lines: your 'birth' determined your destiny. In an early work Marx described how 'the aristocracy's pride in their blood, their descent, in short the genealogy of the body...has its appropriate science in heraldry. The secret of the aristocracy is zoology'.11 It was this zoology which determined your life and your relationships with others. On the one hand, the low level of the productive forces meant constant labour for the peasants, while on the other, the feudal lords and the church officials took what they wanted from the peasants by force.

Thus alienation arose from the low level of the productive forces, from human subordination to the land and from the domination of the feudal ruling class. However,

there were limits to these forms of alienation. The peasants worked their own land and produced most of the things they needed in their own independent family units. 'If a person was tied to the land, then the land was also tied to the people... The peasant, and even the serf of the middle ages, remained in possession of at least 50 percent, sometimes 60 and 70 percent, of the output of their labour'.12 The social relationships in feudal society were relationships of domination and subordination, but they were obviously social relationships between individuals. In Capital Marx described how 'the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour'.13

However, the constraints of feudalism were very different from the dynamic of capitalism. The bourgeoisie wanted a society in which everything could be bought and sold for money: 'Selling is the practice of alienation'.14 The creation of such a society depended on the brutal enclosures of the common land. This meant that, for the first time, the majority in society were denied direct access to the means of production and subsistence, thus creating a class of landless labourers who had to submit to a new form of exploitation, wage labour, in order to survive. Capitalism involved 'a fundamental change in the relations between men, instruments of production and the materials of production'.15 These fundamental changes meant that every aspect of life was transformed. Even the concept of time was radically altered so that watches, which were toys in the 17th century, became a measure of labour time or a means of quantifying idleness, because of the 'importance of an abstract measure of minutes and hours to the work ethic and to the habit of punctuality required by industrial discipline'.16

Men no longer enjoyed the right to dispose of what they produced how they chose: they became separated from the product of their labour. Peter Linebaugh in his history of 18th century London, The London Hanged, explained that workers considered themselves masters of what they produced. It took great repression, a 'judicial onslaught', in the late 18th century to convince them that what they produced belonged exclusively to the capitalists who owned the factories. During the 18th century most workers were not paid exclusively in money. 'This was true of Russian serf labour, American slave labour, Irish agricultural labour and the metropolitan labour in London trades'.17 By the 19th century, however, wage labour had replaced all other forms of payment. This meant labour was now a commodity, sold on the market. Capitalists and workers were formally independent of each other, but in reality inextricably connected. Production no longer took place in the home, but in factories where new systems of discipline operated. The mechanisation of labour in the factories transformed people's relationship with machines, 'those remarkable products of human ingenuity, became a source of tyranny against the worker'.18 In Capital Marx compared the work of craftsmen and artisans to that of the factory worker:

In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machines that he must follow. In manufacture

the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes a mere living appendage.19

One of the most important, and devastating, features of factory production was the division of labour. Prior to capitalism there had been a social division of labour, with different people involved in different branches of production or crafts. With capitalism there arose the detailed division of labour within each branch of production. This division of labour meant that workers had to specialise in particular tasks, a series of atomised activities, which realised only one or two aspects of their human powers at the expense of all the others. Harry Braverman pointed out the consequences of this division: 'While the social division of labour subdivides society, the detailed division of labour subdivides humans, and while the subdivision of society may enhance the individual and the species, the subdivision of the individual, when carried on without regard to human capabilities and needs, is a crime against the person and humanity'.20 John Ruskin, the 19th century critic of industrialisation, made a similar point when he wrote that the division of labour is a false term because it is the men who are divided.

In this system workers become increasingly dependent on the capitalists who own the means of production. Just as the worker 'is depressed, therefore, both intellectually and physically, to the level of a machine, and from being a man becomes an abstract activity and a stomach, so he also becomes more and dependent on every fluctuation in the market price, in the investment of capital and on the whims of the wealthy'.21 It became impossible for workers to live independently of capitalism: to work meant to be reduced to a human machine; to be deprived of work meant living death. Without work, if capital ceases to exist for him, Marx argued the worker might as well bury himself alive: 'The existence of capital is his existence, his life, for it determines the content of his life in a manner indifferent to him'.22 There is no choice involved - work is a matter of survival. Therefore labour became forced labour; you could not choose not to work, you could not choose what you made, and you could not choose how you made it. Marx noted:

The fact that labour is external to the worker, does not belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His labour is therefore not voluntary but forced, it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need, but a mere means to satisfy need outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists it is shunned like the plague.23

There was another side to the fragmentation of labour in the factory system. The creation of the 'detail labourer who performed fractional work in the workshop meant that the value-producing class became collective, since no worker produced a whole commodity'.24 This collectivity expressed itself in constant struggle against capitalist forms of production and frequent attempts by workers to assert their right to control machines rather than be controlled by them, most famously in the Luddite Rebellion of

the early 19th century, a revolt so widespread that more troops were deployed to crush it than were sent to fight with Wellington at Waterloo.

Four aspects of alienationThe development of capitalism proved irresistible and it brought alienation on a scale previously unimaginable. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (also known as the 1844, or Paris Manuscripts) Marx identified four specific ways in which alienation pervades capitalist society.

The product of labour: The worker is alienated from the object he produces because it is owned and disposed of by another, the capitalist. In all societies people use their creative abilities to produce objects which they use, exchange or sell. Under capitalism, however, this becomes an alienated activity because 'the worker cannot use the things he produces to keep alive or to engage in further productive activity... The worker's needs, no matter how desperate, do not give him a licence to lay hands on what these same hands have produced, for all his products are the property of another'.25 Thus workers produce cash crops for the market when they are malnourished, build houses in which they will never live, make cars they can never buy, produce shoes they cannot afford to wear, and so on.

Marx argued that the alienation of the worker from what he produces is intensified because the products of labour actually begin to dominate the labourer. In his brilliant Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, I I Rubin outlines a quantitative and a qualitative aspect to the production of commodities. Firstly, the worker is paid less than the value he creates. A proportion of what he produces is appropriated by his boss; the worker is, therefore, exploited. Qualitatively, he also puts creative labour into the object he produces, but he cannot be given creative labour to replace it. As Rubin explains, 'In exchange for his creative power the worker receives a wage or a salary, namely a sum of money, and in exchange for this money he can purchase products of labour, but he cannot purchase creative power. In exchange for his creative power, the worker gets things'.26 This creativity is lost to the worker forever, which is why under capitalism work does not stimulate or invigorate us and 'open the door to unconquered territory', but rather burns up our energies and leaves us feeling exhausted.

This domination of dead labour over living labour lies behind Marx's assertion in the Manuscripts that 'the alienation of the worker means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists o

Marx: Capitalism and AlienationKarl Marx (1818-83) grew up in Germany under the same conservative and oppressive conditions under which Kant and other German philosophers had to live. The Enlightenment had had some liberating effects on German life here and there, but most German principalities were still autocratic, and the idea of democracy was combated by all their rulers. The presence of police spies at major universities was a regular feature of German student life, and some students served long prison sentences for their political activism. As a law and philosophy student at the University of Berlin, Marx joined a political club that advocated political democracy. Very soon after receiving his doctorate, however, his ideas went beyond mere political reform. His future friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels introduced him to socialist and communist ideas, i. e., to ideas which progressed from mere political to social and economic reforms. For the rest of his life Marx dedicated himself to the project of radically restructuring modern industrial society along socialist and communist lines. In time he became the single most important theoretician and prominent leader of a growing international labor movement.

Since Marx participated in the Revolution of 1848 as an influential newspaper editor (in a revolution that was defeated by the monarchists, and the defeat of which led scores of liberal Europeans to emigrate to the United States and elsewhere), he found it preferable to leave the stifling and backward conditions of his fatherland and to go into exile. He spent the rest of his life in London, the powerful center of advanced capitalism and modern industry. As one of the organizers of the international working class movement he found that most labor radicals had all sorts of moral misgivings about capitalism, and a number of utopian ideas of an ideal society of the future, but no solid grasp of how a capitalist economy actually works. Marx also found that his own understanding of economic matters was far from complete. He therefore embarked on a two-decade long study of what was then called "Political Economy" (sometimes also dubbed "the dismal science").

Living with his family in great poverty, and maintaining himself as a free-lance writer and journalist, Marx walked almost daily to the British Museum to study the works of such classical economists as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus. He slowly wrote his main work, Capital, which was published in 1867. As he was personally much more interested in natural science, literature, philosophy, and mathematics than in economics, he resented most of the time he had to spend on the analysis of how money was made. As a classical humanist he thought that making a living or creating wealth should be nothing more than a means for the pursuit of more worthy things, not a serious end in itself.

It was not until the 20th century that scholars found an unpublished study by Marx, the so-called Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. This study consists of somewhat unorganized, difficult to read, but highly insightful notes which Marx jotted down while giving a first reading to the classical economists as a young man. The study has since gained prominence because in it Marx formulated more or less explicitly his

Theory of Alienation--his analysis of how people are bound to become estranged from themselves and each other under the conditions of capitalist industrial production. This Theory of Alienation is often considered the philosophical underpinning for his later more technical critique of capitalism as an economic system.

In a nutshell Marx's Theory of Alienation is the contention that in modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense. Under pre-capitalist conditions a blacksmith, e.g., or a shoemaker would own his own shop, set his own hours, determine his own working conditions, shape his own product, and have some say in how his product is bartered or sold. His relationships with the people with whom he worked and dealt had a more or less personal character.

Under the conditions of modern factory production, by contrast, the average worker is not much more than a replaceable cog in a gigantic and impersonal production apparatus. Where armies of hired operatives perform monotonous and closely supervised tasks, workers have essentially lost control over the process of production, over the products which they produce, and over the relationships they have with each other. As a consequence they have become estranged from their very human nature, which Marx understood to be free and productive activity. Human beings cannot be human under these conditions, and for this reason the implication was obvious for Marx: Capitalism has to be abolished as much as any political oppression if a society’s emancipation is to be complete. Capitalism is just as incompatible with self-determination as absolute monarchy or any other autocratic system. But while an absolute monarchy limits people’s autonomy by controlling them in the sphere of politics, Capitalism does so by controlling their workplaces and their economic life. A society of truly free citizens, according to Marx, must therefor not only be a political, but also an economic and social democracy.

More specifically, real liberty does not exist unless workers effectively control their workplace, the products they produce, and the way they relate to each other. Workers are not fully emancipated until they work not in the way domesticated animals or robots work, but voluntarily and under their own direction. To accomplish this workers have to become the owners or controllers of their work places--the factories, railroads, hospitals, offices, and so forth on which they depend for their livelihood, and at which they spend the better parts of their days and lives. In contrast to earlier times, however, this ownership of the means of production cannot be individual anymore, since modern industrial production has irrevocably outgrown individual production in small shops; workers’ ownership of the means of production cannot but be communal or collective. Communities or societies as a whole have to make all major economic decisions in the way they make their major political decisions: by means of democratically elected legislatures and administrations.

The communal and democratic ownership and control of the major means of production, and thus of the economy as a whole, is Socialism. In light of the largely failed attempts to realize Socialism in the 20th century (attempts that for various reasons ended mostly in

undemocratic, oppressive, and economically weak regimes), it is important to point out that Socialism without political democracy is not what Marx had in mind. A society without democratic rights and freely elected governments cannot be considered truly Socialist, even if the means of production are nationalized or communally owned, as one of the main purposes of the introduction of Socialism is an increase in the degree of freedom and self-determination, not a lessening of it. 20th century Communist Party dictatorships have, therefore, always been defended by their organizers as merely temporary arrangements, as a way of preparing the conditions for genuine popular democracies that were to develop in the future. As mentioned earlier in the chapter on Plato, there has always been a debate--often acrimonious--within the political Left concerning the wisdom of such temporary dictatorships. Democratically minded Socialists and Communists always thought that the temporary dictatorships inaugurated by Lenin had existed far too long to be of any benefit for workers or anyone else.

To turn to the details of Marx’ Theory of Alienation: The most basic form of workers’ alienation is their estrangement from the process of their work. An artist, unlike an industrial worker, typically works under his or her own direction; artists are in total control of their work. (That is why artists usually do not mind working long hours and even under adverse conditions, because their creative work is inherently meaningful, and an expression of their most personal desires and intuitions.) Even the typical medieval artisan, although more closely motivated by economic needs, usually worked as a relatively independent person--controlling his own shop and up to a point choosing his own projects.

In modern industry, however, workers typically do not work under their own direction. They are assembled in large factories or offices, and they work under the close supervision of a hierarchy of managers who do most of the important thinking for them. Planners and managers also divide complex work processes into simple, repetitive tasks which workers can perform in machine-like fashion (Adam Smith’s famous principle of “the division of labor"). The rhythm of work is dictated by the quasi-military discipline of assembly lines or other regimented production systems, and by the requirements of the machines to which the workers are assigned. Workers thus are mere extensions of their machines, rather than machines being the extensions of workers. (They are “the tools of their tools,” as Thoreau put it.) Although workers have to exert themselves, often strenuously, in operating their machines, they are, in an important sense, passive--mere objects. Modern factory work, although highly productive compared with medieval craftsmanship, has become dehumanized drudgery work.

Marx describes the situation in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 as follows:

In what, then, consists the alienation of labor? First, in the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., that it does not belong to his nature, that therefore he does not realize himself in his work, that he denies himself in it, that he does not feel at ease in it, but rather unhappy, that he does not develop any free physical or mental energy, but rather mortifies his flesh and ruins his spirit. The worker, therefore, is only himself when he

does not work, and in his work he feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor, therefore, is not voluntary, but forced--forced labor. It is not the gratification of a need, but only a means to gratify needs outside itself. Its alien nature shows itself clearly by the fact that work is shunned like the plague as soon as no physical or other kind of coercion exists.

Workers do not control the process of their work because they do not own the means of production--the factories or offices, the land, the machines, the raw material, the fuel, or anything else that is necessary to manufacture a product. The entrepreneur who owns these means also buys the labor power of the workers that he employs. The workers, therefore, do not only have to work under the direction of the entrepreneur, they also have to leave the finished product in the entrepreneur's possession. This latter fact establishes the second aspect of alienation: the workers' estrangement from the product of their work. Modern industrial production produces a great variety of impressive things, but these things have mostly little to do with the lives and needs of the workers who produce them. In Marx' words:

Labor, to be sure, produces marvelous things for the rich, but for the laborer it produces privation. It produces palaces for the wealthy, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but cripples the worker. It replaces work by machines, but it throws part of the workforce back to a barbarous kind of work, while turning others into machines. It produces sophistication, but for the workforce it produces feeble-mindedness and idiocy.

There are some things here to which one may want to object. For one thing, it may have been true in the 19th century that workers had to work under sweatshop conditions, that the workday lasted twelve to fourteen hours, that sometimes children were literally chained to machines to work, that workplace safety did not exist, that workers were deprived of education, and, most of all, that wages were so low that workers rarely could afford to buy the things they produced. But all this has since become very different. Capitalism in the 19th century may have been rather brutal, but the system has been reformed. Wages have increased, all sorts of benefits are provided by employers or social security systems, and today's industrial workers sometimes own and consume more material goods than even members of the upper classes of earlier ages. The old political cartoons that showed the Capitalists with top hats, coat tails, and big guts, while depicting workers and their bedraggled families as emaciated, subdued wrecks, are surely outdated. Today’s workers are not as exploited and miserable as Marx describes them, and the relation of Capital and Labor is not so antagonistic and bad as to justify such old concepts as “class struggle” or “class war.”

Such objections are not pointless. Due to the long and often arduous struggle of unions, as well as the vastly increased productivity of industrial labor, the economic position of many workers has significantly improved since the days of the Industrial Revolution. Yet, the following facts make Marx' over-all theory still relevant. First, while many workers today are indeed better off, many others are not. There are occasional sweat shop conditions even in countries like the United States, and there are many countries where the majority of workers are as relentlessly exploited today as they were during the

Industrial Revolution in the United States or in Europe. It is only the physical remoteness of most low-wage countries from the centers of capitalist affluence that make the often grim exploitation of cheap labor invisible to us.

Second, the poverty of the working class to which Marx often refers can be understood in absolute and in relative terms. In absolute terms (in terms of how much workers have to eat, how much of a house they can afford, etc.) the condition of workers in highly developed countries has undoubtedly improved since the 19th century. In relative terms, however (in terms of what workers earn in comparison to what the owners of capital gain), the situation of workers has worsened. If an average entrepreneur or top manager once earned perhaps fifty times as much as any one of his workers, today's owners and managers typically earn hundreds of times more than the average employee. The general trend on which Marx had his eyes still prevails: The rich still get richer and more powerful, while the majority of ordinary employees can count themselves lucky if they have steady employment and more or less adequate benefits. In America in particular the income gap between the rich and the rest of society has been steadily widening. Since the imbalance of wealth usually translates into an imbalance of political power and influence as well, many capitalist countries tend to be, for all practical purposes, oligarchies rather than genuine democracies. Although their democratic institutions may be intact and functioning, their policies tend to be determined by wealthy elites much more than by citizens at large.

The fact that workers do not own what they produce has far-reaching implications. Marx approaches these implications by observing: "The object which labor produces, its product, confronts it as something alien, as a power which exists independently of the producer." In historical periods when labor was not as productive as in modern times it may have sounded like an exaggeration if someone had said that the laborer's product "confronts the laborer as something alien”--simply because the product does not belong to the worker anymore. Only in special cases, as when a feudal lord obliges his serfs to build a castle which is then used to keep down the very people who built it, does such language seem to be called for.

Marx' description, however, is quite appropriate in a period of capitalist production, i. e., in a period when the productivity of labor is incomparably greater than under feudalism or in slaveholding societies like ancient Greece or Rome. The decisive difference is that capitalist production for the first time in human history has made it possible to replace, for most practical purposes, the natural world with a human-made world. While before the Industrial Revolution human civilization could still be seen as just making inroads into vast areas of wilderness, the 19th century quickly moved toward a situation where no area of the planet could escape the effects of industrialization anymore. While until the Industrial Revolution significant numbers of people may have been able to live independently of the products and the influence of industry, this became increasingly impossible as ever greater areas of the planet were subjected to the administration and utilization of industrial powers. (The fate of the Plains Indians of North America provides a vivid illustration of this general process.) The most basic fact of capitalist industrialization is that it has created a world in which essentially all human beings are

dependent on each other--and on the human-made environment which they have created with their increasingly productive labor. It is, thus, the entire human-made world which constitutes the product that "confronts" its makers as an "alien power."

Part of this human-made world is, of course the market and the business cycle with its often dramatic ups and downs. Business cycles, as well as other market dynamics, literally confront workers as forces beyond their control, as powers which often victimize them like floods, draughts, or epidemics. A worker's personal skill or willingness to work may not change at all, but a recession will throw him or her out of work regardless of his or her personal qualities and qualifications. Without any fault on his or her part, that is, a worker may suffer all sorts of hardships because of the impersonal forces of the market--the "invisible hand," as Adam Smith called them in his classic The Wealth of Nations. Yet, while workers are at the mercy of forces beyond their control, it is their own accumulated labor which creates and maintains these forces. For the market is not a creation of nature, but the result of human production and consciously organized institutions. Workers, in other words, decisively help to build the world on which they are so precariously dependent. They diligently construct and maintain the production apparatus that determines their lives, and not infrequently punishes them severely. ("Till now each worker's patient day/ Builds up the house of pain," as William Morris put it in his poem "No Master.")

The image of workers building and maintaining the machinery of their own oppression applies not just to the market and its dynamics, but to the modern world at large. The more people produce (the more they replace the natural world with an artificial one), the more they become dependent on what they produce. Today this has become even more obvious than it was during the lifetime of Marx. Armies of workers, busy and thoughtless like ants, build huge industrial conglomerates with their corresponding administrations-- conglomerates which produce overwhelming floods of merchandise, which in turn transform the surface of the earth with ever increasing speed. Side products of this enormous productivity are awesome amounts of toxic waste for which vast bureaucracies and costly disposal systems have to be developed, and terrifying stockpiles of bombs, missiles, and other weapons of mass destruction which could wipe out this whole civilization in a matter of days. And periodically people are victimized by these, their own products, without quite understanding how and why. They are vaguely aware of these present dangers, but they feel powerless, and they try to escape into comforting distractions. In their everyday lives the millions are bruised and mauled by the mega-trends and crises of their human-made world even in times of peace, and they have grown used to the idea that these forces are something like a fate, and not the result of human activities and decisions. Hence Marx' description:

All this results from the fact, that the worker relates to the product of his labor as an alien object. For it is clear ... that the alien, objective world will become the more powerful the more the worker produces; ... The alienation of the worker from his product does not only mean that his labor becomes an object, an external entity, but also that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien, that it turns into a power on its own confronting him, that the life which he has given to his product stands against him as

something strange and hostile.

This sheds some more light on the meaning of the "poverty" that Marx discusses in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The poverty to which he refers is only in part a poverty of material deprivation. To fully understand what Marx means one has to understand that Marx' highest value is not material consumption, but self-determination and self-realization. In Marx' philosophy high standards of living are not defined in terms of ever more food, drink, clothing, vehicles, appliances--in short, ever more things. A high standard of living rather means rich experiences, fully developed emotions, closeness to other people, a good education, and so forth. A person with very few possessions, but with an intensive life, comes much closer to Marx' idea of a happy human being than a well-paid worker who can afford to buy many consumer goods, but who is neither informed enough to understand the society in which he lives, nor has the motivation to shape, in cooperation with fellow-workers, his working conditions or the political system in which he lives. A worker who is overweight, who spends most of his time watching commercial television, whose main conversations with colleagues deal with the sports page, and who is too tired or apathetic to participate in the political process--such a worker is not well off in Marx' eyes, but a victim of a system that is ripe with alienation in every sense. Marx was not so much interested in what people might have, but in what they could be. He was interested in people being alive, informed, and in control of their destiny. Marx was an Enlightenment thinker in so far as he aimed at personal and human autonomy foremost. And he remained in line with Kant's and Fichte's thinking in that he expected workers to cease being the passive objects of history, and to become the active makers of their own fate.

The third aspect of the alienation of workers follows from the first two: As workers have no control over the process or the product of their production, because they do not own the means of production, they also have no significant control over how they relate to each other. They all are just an extension of the means of production that the owners of capital buy, and which the managers of industry employ to create and maximize profits. On a limited scale, workers sometimes organize themselves in labor unions, and not infrequently they practice solidarity in such situations as strikes. (The camaraderie that often develops in strike situations is a way of being human that usually has no place in the modern work world.) But even during strikes workers have to contend with strike breakers, indifferent fellow-workers, or working-class members who work as spies, hostile policemen, or "goons." For the over-all situation is such that workers always have to look at each other as potential competitors for scarce jobs. (Which is one reason why the managers of a capitalist industry often prefer high unemployment to a situation where they have to compete for scarce labor.) The competitive situation among workers sometimes emerges with particular bitterness when lay-offs lead to conflicts between workers with seniority and groups who seek a foothold in a particular industry. In the United States, e. g., white male workers repeatedly displayed considerable hostility toward women and black men, because in a situation of job scarcity any newcomers were perceived as a threat. Workers, instead of feeling solidarity and organizing on the basis of their common interests, found themselves pitched and played off against each other. The racism and sexism that could frequently be found among white male workers is one way

in which the general alienation of workers from each other has found a concrete expression.

The fourth aspect of alienation is the estrangement of workers from their human nature in general, from their "species" nature, as Marx calls it. Potentially human beings produce freely and with deliberation. Free and thoughtful production would be the most authentic form of human existence. This does not only mean that human beings ought to be in charge of particular work processes, but also that they be able to produce without external necessity altogether--like artists who create for the pleasure of creating or for some other kind of inner satisfaction. Up to a point, of course, human beings have to produce to fulfill their material survival needs. But what distinguishes the human species is that human beings also produce what has no practical use, such as merely beautiful things. The horizon of human beings is wider than that of other animals: it transcends the limits of the survival needs of any particular species. It is, in this sense, "universal." And it is, according to Marx, only when human beings have become universal beings that they are authentically human.

None of this can be the case under conditions of capitalist industrial production, where most people have to labor for utilitarian purposes alone, and where few are free to work for themselves and under their own direction. In an economic landscape where the impersonal forces of the market dictate most aspects of human behavior, most people are unable to ever develop fully their human potential. Capitalism, in other words, is in conflict with much of human nature, and thus should be abolished as soon as that is a realistic possibility.

Marx’s Theory of Alienation

3. Conceptual Structure of Marx's Theory of Alienation

1. Foundations of the Marxian System

LEGENDS are easily invented and difficult to dispose of. An empty

balloon (sheer ignorance of all the relevant evidence) and a lot of hot air

(mere wishful thinking) is enough to get them off the ground, while the

persistence of wishful thinking amply supplies the necessary fuel of

propulsion for their fanciful flight. We shall discuss at some length, in the

chapter which deals with The Controversy about Marx, the main legends

associated with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. At

this point, however, we have to deal, briefly, with a legend that occupies a

less prominent place in the various interpretations in an explicit form, but

which has none the less, a major theoretical importance for an adequate

assessment of Marx's work as a whole.

The Manuscripts of 1844, as we have seen, lay down the foundations of the Marxian system, centred on the concept of alienation. Now the legend in question claims that Lenin had no awareness of this concept and that it played no part in the elaboration of his own theories. (In the eyes of many dogmatists this alleged fact itself is, of course, ample justification for labelling the concept of alienation “idealist”.)

If Lenin had really missed out Marx's critique of capitalistic alienation and reification – his analysis of “alienation of labour” and its necessary corollaries – he would have missed out the core of Marx's theory: the basic idea of the Marxian system.

Needless to say, nothing could be further from the truth than this alleged fact. Indeed the very opposite is the case: for in Lenin's development as a Marxist his grasp of the concept of alienation in its true significance played a vital role.

It is an irrefutable fact that all of Lenin's important theoretical works – including his critique of Economic Romanticism as well as his book on The Development of Capitalism in Russia – postdate his detailed Conspectus of The Holy Family, written in 1895. The central ideas expressed in this Conspectus in the form of comments remained in the centre of Lenin's ideas in his subsequent writings. Unfortunately there is no space here to follow the development of Lenin's thought in any detail. We must content ourselves with focusing attention on a few points which are directly relevant to the subject of discussion.

It is of the greatest significance in this connection that in his Conspectus of The Holy Family Lenin quotes a long passage from this early work and comments upon it as follows:

“This passage is highly characteristic, for it shows how Marx

approached the basic idea of his entire 'system', sit venia verbo,

namely the concept of the social relations of production.

Little matters whether or not one puts, half-apologetically, in inverted

commas the word “system”. (Lenin, understandably, had to do this

because of the customary polemical references to “system-building”,

associated, in Marxist literature, with the Hegelian philosophy. Besides,

he was writing the Conspectus of a book highly critical of the Hegelian

system and of the uses to which it had been put by the members of “The

Holy Family”.) What is vitally important in this connection is the fact that

“the basic idea of Marx's entire system” – “the concept of the social

relations of production” is precisely his concept of alienation, i.e. the

Marxian critical demystification of the system of “labour's self-

alienation”, of “human self-alienation”, of “the practically alienated

relation of man to his objective essence”, etc., as Lenin correctly

recognised it. This we can clearly see if we read the passage to which

Lenin's comment refers:

“Proudhon's desire to abolish non-owning and the old form of owning

is exactly identical to his desire to abolish the practically alienated

relation of man to his objective essence, to abolish the political-

economic expression of human self-alienation. Since, however, his

criticism of political economy is still bound by the premises of

political economy, the reappropriation of the objective world is still

conceived in the political-economic form of possession. Proudhon

indeed does not oppose owning to non-owning, as Critical Criticism

makes him do, but possession to the old form of owning, to private

property. He declares possession to be a 'social function'. In a function,

'interest' is not directed however toward the 'exclusion' of another, but

toward setting into operation and realising my own powers, the powers

of my being. Proudhon did not succeed in giving this thought

appropriate development. The concept of 'equal possession' is a

political-economic one and therefore itself still an alienated expression

for the principle that the object as being for man, as the objective being

of man, is at the same time the existence of man for other men, his

human relation to other men, the social behaviour of man in relation

to man. Proudhon abolishes political-economic estrangement within

political-economic estrangement.

Those who are sufficiently acquainted with the Economic and Philosophic

Manuscripts of 1844 will not fail to recognise that these ideas come from

the Paris Manuscripts. In fact not only these pages but many more in

addition to them had been transferred by Marx from his 1844 Manuscripts

into The Holy Family. The Russian Committee in charge of publishing the

collected works of Marx, Engels and Lenin – the same Committee which

finds “idealist” the Manuscripts of 1844 – acknowledged in a note to

Lenin's Conspectus of The Holy Family that Marx “considerably increased

the initially conceived size of the book by incorporating in his chapters

parts of his economic and philosophical manuscripts on which he had

worked during the spring and summer of 1844. Lenin could not read, of

course, Marx's Manuscripts of 1844, but in his Conspectus of The Holy

Family he quoted a number of important passages, in addition to the cane

on Proudhon, which originated in the Economic and Philosophic

Manuscripts of 1844 and which deal with the problematics of alienation.”

If, then, Marx's Manuscripts of 1844 are idealistic, so must be Lenin's praise of their central concept – incorporated from them into The Holy Family – as “the basic idea of Marx's entire system”. And this is not the worst part of the story yet. For Lenin goes on praising this work (see his article on Engels) not only for containing “the foundations of revolutionary materialist socialism” but also for being written “In the name of a real, human person”. Thus Lenin seems to “capitulate” not only to “idealism”, confounding it with revolutionary materialist socialism”, but – horribile dictu – to “humanism” as well.

Needless to say, this “humanism” of writing “in the name of a real, human person” is simply the expression of the “standpoint of labour” that characterises the Manuscripts of 1844. It expresses – in explicit polemics against the fictitious entities of idealist philosophy – the critically adopted standpoint of “the worker, trampled down by the ruling classes and the state”;... the standpoint of the proletariat in its opposition to the “propertied class” which “feels happy and confirmed in this self-alienation, it recognises as its own power”, whereas “the class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its self-alienation; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence”. This is what Lenin, and Marx, had in mind when they spoke of the “real, human person”. However, no amount of textual evidence is likely to make an impression on those who, instead of really “reading Marx” (or Lenin, for that matter), prefer reading into the classics of Marxist thought their own legends, representing – under the veil of a high-sounding verbal radicalism – the sterile dogmatism of bureaucratic-conservative wishful thinking.

As Lenin had brilliantly perceived, the central idea of Marx's system is his critique of the capitalistic reification of the social relations of production, the alienation of labour through the reified mediations of Wage Labour, Private Property and Exchange.

Indeed Marx's general conception of the historical genesis and alienation of the social relations of production, together with his analysis of the objective ontological conditions of a necessary supersession of alienation and reification, constitute a system in the best

sense of the term. This system is not less but more rigorous than the philosophical systems of his predecessors, including Hegel; which means that any omission of even one of its constituent parts is bound to distort the whole picture, not just one particular aspect of it. Also, the Marxian system is not less but far more complex than the Hegelian one; for it is one thing ingeniously to invent the logically appropriate “mediations” between “thought-entities”, but quite another to identify in reality the complex intermediary links of the multifarious social phenomena, to find the laws that govern their institutionalisations and transformations into one another, the laws that determine their relative “fixity” as well as their “dynamic changes”, to demonstrate all this in reality, at all levels and spheres of human activity. Consequently any attempt at reading Marx not in terms of his own system but in accordance with some preconceived, platitudinous “scientific model” fashionable in our own days, deprives the Marxian system of its revolutionary meaning and “inverts it into a dead butterfly-collection of useless pseudo-scientific concepts.

It goes without saying that Marx's system is radically different from the Hegelian one. Not only as regards the opposition between the actual social phenomena, depicted by Marx, and the Hegelian “thought-entities”, but also in that the Hegelian system – due to its internal contradictions – had been closed and ossified by Hegel himself, whereas the Marxian system remains open-ended. We shall return to the discussion of this vitally important difference between a closed and an open system in the last section of this chapter. But first we have to consider the structure of the Marxian system as a whole, in order to gain a clearer understanding of its manifold complexities.

On the face of it, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 are critical commentaries on Hegel and on the theories of political economists. A closer look, however, reveals much more than that. For the critique of these theories is a vehicle for developing Marx's own ideas on a great variety of closely interconnected problems.

As has been mentioned, the system we can perceive in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is a system in statu nascendi. This can be recognised, above all, in the fact that the basic ontological dimension of labour's self-alienation does not appear in its universality until the very end of this work, i.e. in the section on money. As a matter of fact this section had been written after Marx's critical examination of the Hegelian philosophy in the same manuscript, although in the published versions the latter is put to the end (in accordance with Marx's wishes). And this is by no means a negligible point of chronological detail. Indeed Marx's profound assessment of the Hegelian philosophy as a whole – made possible by his analysis of political economy which enabled him to recognise that “Hegel's standpoint is that of modern political economy” puts into Marx's hands the key to unlocking the ultimate ontological secret of the “money-system”, thus enabling him to embark on a comprehensive elaboration of a materialist dialectical theory of value. (Compare this part of the Manuscripts of 1844, in concreteness as well as in comprehensiveness notwithstanding its limited size, with a work that tackles the same problematics: Marx's Comments on James Mill's Elements of Political Economy, written shortly before his Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole, probably in May or June 1844.) It is by no means accidental that a substantial part of

these pages on The Power of Money had been subsequently incorporated by Marx in his Capital.

But even if this general ontological dimension of labour's self-alienation is not rendered explicit until the very end of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, it is implicitly there, though of course at a lower level of generalisation, almost right from the beginning. At first it is present in this system in statu nascendi only as a vague intuition and, accordingly, Marx's method of analysis is more reactive than positive and self-sustaining: he lets his hand be guided by the problematics of the immediate subject of his criticism, namely the writings of political economists.

As his insights accumulate (through his gradual realisation that the partial aspects: “worker as a commodity”, “abstract labour”, “one-sided, machine-like labour”, “earth estranged from man”, “stored-up human labour = dead capital”, etc. point in the same direction) the originally adopted framework proves to be hopelessly narrow and Marx casts it aside.

From the discussion of Estranged Labour onwards Marx follows a different plan: the centre of reference of every single issue is now the concept of “alienated labour” as the “essential connection” between the whole range of estrangements “and the money-system”. And yet, although this programme is there in the last section of the first manuscript, it is not fully realised until the very end of the third manuscript. In this latter Marx is able at last to demystify the “money-system” – this ultimate mediator of all alienated mediations, this “pimp between man's need and the object, between his life and his means of life”, this “visible divinity” was “the alienated ability of mankind”, as “the external, common medium and faculty of turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image (a faculty not springing from man as man or from human society as society)”, as “the existing and active concept of value ... the general confounding and compounding of all things – the world upside down ... the fraternisation of impossibilities” which “makes contradictions embrace”. And all this in the context of explaining the “truly ontological affirmations of essential being (of nature)”, “the ontological essence of human passion”, and “the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of enjoyment and as objects of activity”.

Thus Marx's system in statu nascendi is accomplished when he clearly realises that although the money-system reaches its climax with the capitalistic mode of production, its innermost nature cannot be understood in a limited historical context but in the broadest ontological framework of man's development through his labour, i.e. through the ontological self-development of labour via the necessary intermediaries involved in its necessary self-alienation and reification at a determinate stage (or stages) of its process of self-realisation.

2. Conceptual Framework of Marx's Theory of Alienation

The difficulties of Marx's discourse in his Manuscripts of 1844 are not

due merely to the fact that this is a system in statu nascendu in which the

same problems are taken up over and over again, at an increasingly higher

level of complexity, in accordance with the emergence and growing

concretisation of Marx's vision as a whole – though of course this is one

of the main reasons why people often find this work prohibitively

complicated. Some of its major difficulties, however, are inherent in

Marx's method in general and in the objective characteristics of his subject

of analysis.

Marx investigates both the historical and the systematic-structural aspects of the problematics of alienation in relation to the dual complexities of “real life” and its “resections” in the various forms of thought. Thus he analyses:

1. the manifestations of labour's self-alienation in reality,

together with the various institutionalisations, reifications

and mediations involved in such a practical self-alienation,

i.e. Wage Labour, Private Property, Exchange, Money,

Rent, Profit, Value, etc., etc.;

2. the reflections of these alienations through religion,

philosophy, law, political economy, art, “abstractly

material” science, etc.;

3. the interchanges and reciprocities between (1) and (2); for

“the gods in the beginning are not the cause but the effect

of man's intellectual confusion.” Later this relationship

becomes reciprocal;

4. the inner dynamism of any particular phenomenon, or field

of enquiry, in its development from a lesser to a higher

complexity;

5. the structural interrelations of the various social

phenomena with each other (of which the reciprocity

between (1) and (2) is only a specific type) as well as the

historical genesis and renewed dialectical transformation

of this whole system of manifold interrelations;

6. a further complication is that Marx analyses the particular

theories themselves in their concrete historical

embeddedness, in addition to investigating their structural

relations to each other at a particular time (e.g. Adam

Smith the political economist compared to Adam Smith

the moral philosopher; at the same time the types of

answers given by Adam Smith – both as an economist and

as a moralist – are situated historically, in relation to the

development of capitalism in general).

As we can see, then, the main difficulties we experience in reading the

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, with the exception of

those due to their being a system in statu nascendi, are expressions of

Marx's efforts directed at adequately dealing with the mystifying

complexities of his subject of analysis on the basis of concrete empirical

enquiry in place of mere philosophical abstraction.

In the course of his analysis of the various theoretical reflections of actual human self-alienation Marx makes the general point that:

“It stems from the very nature of estrangement that each sphere applies

to me a different and opposite yardstick – ethics one and political

economy another; for each is a specific estrangement of man and

focuses attention on a particular round of estranged essential activity,

and each stands in an estranged relation to the other. Thus M. Michel

Chevalier reproaches Ricardo with having abstracted from ethics. But

Ricardo is allowing political economy to speak its own language, and

if it does not speak ethically, this is not Ricardo's fault”.

Thus he emphasises that the contradictions we encounter in these fields

are necessarily inherent in the structural relation of the various disciplines

of thought to each other and to a common determinant which

paradoxically makes them oppose each other. But how is such a

paradoxical relationship possible? How does this double alienation come

about?

Before we can make an attempt at elucidating Marx's enigmatic answers to these far from easy questions, we have to embark on a journey back to some fundamentals of Marx's discourse.

Marx's immediate problem is: why is there such a gulf between philosophy and the natural sciences? Why does philosophy remain as alien and hostile to them as they remain to philosophy? This opposition is absurd because:

“natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more

practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human

emancipation, however directly and much it had to consummate

dehumanisation. Industry is the actual historical relation of nature, and

therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived

as the exoteric revelation of man's essential powers, we also gain an

understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of

man. In consequence, natural science will lose its abstractly material

rather, its idealistic-tendency, and will become the basis of human

science, as it has already become the basis of actual human life, albeit

in an estranged form. One basis for life and another basis for science is

a priori a lie. The nature which comes to be in human history – the

genesis of human society – is man's real nature; hence nature as it

comes to be through industry, even though in an estranged form, is

true anthropological nature”.

From this quotation it becomes clear that in his criticism of philosophy

Marx is not led by some misconceived ideal of remodelling philosophy on

natural science. Indeed he sharply criticises both philosophy and the

natural sciences. The first for being “speculative” and the latter for being

“abstractly material” and “idealistic”. In Marx's view both philosophy and

the natural sciences are manifestations of the same estrangement. (The

terms “abstractly material” and “idealistic” indicate that natural science is

now “in an estranged form” the basis of “actual human life”, because of

the fact that it is necessarily interconnected with an alienated form of

industry, corresponding to an alienated mode of production, to an

alienated form of productive activity.) This is why Marx opposes to both

“speculative philosophy” and to “abstractly material, idealistic natural

science” his ideal of a “human science”.

What Marx means by “human science” is a science of concrete synthesis, integrated with real life. Its standpoint is the ideal of non-alienated man whose actual human – as opposed to both “speculatively invented” and to practically dehumanised, “abstractly material” – needs determine the line of research in every particular field. The achievements of the particular fields – guided right from the beginning by the common frame of reference of a non-fragmented “human science” – are then brought together into a higher synthesis which in its turn determines the subsequent lines of investigations in the various fields.

This conception of “human science”, in its opposition to abstractly material and idealistic” natural science, is obviously directed against the fragmentation and “unconscious”, alienated determination of science. Many instances of the history of science testify that the extent to which certain fundamental lines of research are carried out are greatly determined by factors which lie, strictly speaking, far beyond the boundaries of natural science itself. (To take a topical example: there can be no doubt whatever that automation is at least as fundamentally a social problem as a scientific one.) The lines of research actually followed through in any particular age are necessarily finite whereas the lines of possible research are always virtually infinite. The role of social needs and preferences in scaling down the infinite to the finite is extremely important. However – and this is the point Marx is making – in an alienated society the process of scaling down itself, since it is “unconsciously” determined by a set of alienated needs, is bound to produce further alienation: the subjection of man to increasingly more powerful instruments of his own making. The structure of scientific production is basically the same as that of fundamental productive activity in general (all the more because the two merge into one another to a considerable extent): a lack of control of the productive process as a whole; an “unconscious” and fragmented mode of activity determined by the inertia of the institutionalised framework of the capitalistic mode of production; the functioning of “abstractly material” science as a mere means to predetermined, external, alienated ends. Such an alienated natural science finds itself between the Scylla and Charibdis of its “autonomy” (i.e. the idealisation of its “unconscious”, fragmentary character) and its subordination as a mere means to external, alien ends (i.e. gigantic military and quasi-military programmes, such as lunar flights). Needless to say, the subjection of natural science as a mere means to alien ends is by no means accidental but necessarily connected with its fragmented, “autonomous” character, and, of course, with the structure of alienated productive activity in general. Since science develops in a fragmented, compartmentalised framework, it cannot conceivably have overall aims which, therefore, have to be imposed on it from outside.

Philosophy, on the other hand, expresses a twofold alienation of the sphere of speculative thinking (1) from all practice – including the, however alienated, practice of natural science – and (2) from other theoretical fields, like political economy, for instance. In its speculative “universality” philosophy becomes an “end in itself” and “for itself”, fictitiously opposed to the realm of means: an abstract reflection of the institutionalised alienation of means from ends. As a radical separation from all other modes of activity philosophy appears to its representatives as the only form of “species-activity”, i.e. as the only form of activity worthy of man as a “universal being”. Thus instead of being a universal dimension of all activity, integrated in practice and in its various reflections, it functions as an independent (“verselbständigt”) “alienated universality”, displaying the absurdity of this whole system of alienations by the fact that this fictitious “universality” is realised as the most esoteric of all esoteric specialities, strictly reserved for the alienated “high priests” (the “Eingeweihten”) of this intellectual trade.

If the “abstractly material” character of the particular natural sciences is linked to a productive activity fragmented and devoid of perspectives, the “abstractly contemplative” character of philosophy expresses the radical divorce of theory and practice in its alienated universality. They represent two sides of the same coin: labour's self-alienation manifest in a mode of production characterised by Marx and Engels as “the unconscious condition of mankind”.

This takes us back to our original problem. Why is it that the different theoretical spheres apply “a different and opposite yardstick” to man? How is it possible that though both philosophy and political economy express the same alienation, their “language” is so different that they cannot communicate with each other?

In order to simplify these matters to some extent, let us try and illustrate, however schematically, the structural interrelationship of the principal concepts involved in Marx's theory of alienation. (Schematic illustrations of this kind are always problematical because they have to express in a fixed, “two-dimensional” form the complexity of dynamic interchanges. It must be stressed, therefore, that they are not meant to be substitutes for an adequate conceptual understanding – but merely a visual aid towards it.)

The fundamental terms of reference in Marx's theory of alienation are “man” (M), “nature” (N), and “industry” or “productive activity” (I). For an understanding of “the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man” the concept of “Productive activity” (or “industry”, used from now on for the sake of brevity) is of a crucial importance. “Industry” is both the cause of the growing complexity of human society (by creating new needs while satisfying old ones: “the first historical act is the production of new needs” and the means of asserting the supremacy of man – as “universal being” who is at the same time a unique “specific being” – over nature. In considering Marx's views we have to remember that when he applies the term “actual” (wirklich) to man he either equates it with “historical”, or simply implies historicity as a necessary condition of the human predicament. He wants to account for every aspect of the analysed phenomena in inherently historical terms, which means that nothing can be taken for granted and simply

assumed as an ultimate datum. On the contrary, the whole theory hinges on the proof of the historical genesis of all its basic constituents. Accordingly, Marx pictures the relationship between “man” (M), “nature” (N), and “industry” (I) in the form of a threefold interaction between its constituent parts. This can be illustrated as follows:

As we can see, here we have a dialectical reciprocity (indicated by the

double-ended arrows) between all three members of this relationship

which means that “man” is not only the creator of industry but also its

product. (Similarly, of course, he is both product and creator of “truly

anthropological nature” – above all in himself, but also outside him,

insofar as he leaves his mark on nature. And since man's relation to nature

is mediated through an alienated form of productive activity,

“anthropological nature” outside man bears the marks of this alienation in

an ever-extending form, graphically demonstrated by the intensity of

pollution that menaces the very existence of mankind.)

Talking about this process of reciprocal interaction, Marx calls it the “genesis of human society”. At the same time he designates the two main aspects of industry's fundamental (first order) mediating function by the expressions “natural essence of man” and “human essence of nature”. His expression: “man's real nature – as opposed to man's biological or animal nature – is meant to embrace both aspects and thus to define human nature in terms of a necessarily threefold relationship of dialectical reciprocity. Man's biological or animal nature, by contrast, can only be defined in terms of a two-fold relationship, or, to put it the other way round, picturing the basic ontological situation merely in terms of a twofold relationship, between “Man” and “Nature”, would only account for the characteristics of man's biological-animal nature. For human consciousness implies already a specific human relation to “industry” (taken in its most general sense as

“productive activity”). One of the basic contradictions of theories which idealise the unmediated reciprocity between “Man” and “Nature” is that they get themselves into the impasse of this animal relationship from which not a single feature of the dynamism of human history can be derived. Then, in an attempt to get rid of this contradiction – in order to be able to account for the specifically human characteristics – they are forced to assume a “ready-made human nature”, with all the a priorism and theological teleologism that necessarily go with such a conception of philosophy.

Rousseau's conception, mutates mutandis, belongs to the latter category, though in a paradoxical way. For in the most generic terms Rousseau is aware of the ludicrous character of idealising nature. He stresses that: “he who wants to preserve, in civil society, the primacy of natural feelings, has no idea of what he wants. Always standing in contradiction to himself, always oscillating between his inclinations and his duties, he will be neither a man nor a citoyen; be will be good neither for himself nor for others. He will be one of those people of our race; a Frenchman, an Englishman, a bourgeois: a nothing. And yet, this insight never induces Rousseau to elaborate a genuinely historical account of man and his relationships. On the contrary, despite his insights he continues to operate with the fictitious notion of “preserving man's original constitution”.” (It must be emphasised that his idealisation of a – hierarchical – family as the anthropological model of “natural” relation opposed to the system which produces an “artificial being” – proves to be a major drawback in his analyses.) Even if he recognises the irrevocable remoteness of the “original” direct unity – in Hegelian terms the inherently past character of “Er-innerung” as opposed to the present actuality of “Ent-äusserung” – he continues, unlike Hegel, to postulate it, often in a negative form, in his sentimental negation of “civilisation”. In Rousseau's conception “industry” (civilisation) exercises an essentially disruptive function, by putting an end to a “natural” relationship. Such an interpretation may enable the philosopher to grasp certain contradictions of a given stage of society, but it does not allow him to indicate a solution that could stand the test of actual historical development. “Industry” (civilisation) comes into the picture as something “evil”, even if Rousseau recognises, nostalgically, that it cannot be done away with. Thus his system, at its very foundations, is profoundly ahistorical. It can be illustrated in contrast to Marx's conception as follows:

As we can see, there is a kind of “short circuit” in this account, and the

one-sided interaction between man and industry results in the tragic

negativity of divorcing or alienating man from nature. (It would be

interesting to inquire into the relationship between Rousseau's conception

of man and nature and the Kantian notion of “das Böse” – “evil” – and in

general the Kantian philosophy of history, its tragic vision of man.) Since

the fundamental ontological relations are pictured by Rousseau in these

terms, his educational ideal of preserving the “original” substance of

humanness by cultivating the “naturally good” in man, is bound to remain

not only utopian but also tragically hopeless. The “short-circuit” produces

a “vicious circle” which cannot be broken except by the unwarranted

assumption of a “ready-made” educator. Rousseau himself is conscious of

the problematic character of such a construction but, given his

fundamental concepts, he cannot do anything against it. The more we

reflect the more we recognise the growing difficulties. For the educator

ought to have been educated for his pupil; the servants ought to have been

educated for their masters, so that all those who are in the pupil's vicinity

would communicate to him the right things; one should go backwards

from education to education up to I do not know which point. Otherwise

how could one expect the proper education of a child from someone who

himself had not been properly educated? Is it impossible to find such a

rare mortal? [An adequately educated educator.] I do not know. In this age

of moral decadence who knows the height of virtue of which the human

soul is still capable? But let us assume that we have found this prodigy.

From considering what he ought to do we can find out what he ought to be

like.

Being is thus derived from ought in order to serve as the pivotal point of this whole system of postulates opposed to the actuality of “civilisation”. Since the foundation of all historicity – which is also the only possible ground of an “education of the educator” – is negated, the educator must be fictitiously assumed and assigned the unreal function of protecting the “natural being” from the temptations of civilisation, money, sophistication, etc., thus educationally rescuing him from the perspectives of becoming an “artificial

being”. The tragic utopianism of this whole approach is manifest in the all-pervasive contradiction that while Rousseau negates the ontologically fundamental mediation of man and nature through “industry” (not only in his explicit polemics against “civilisation” but primarily by postulating “natural man”) he positively affirms the alienated mediations of this mediation (1) by idealising the alleged anthropological primacy of a rigidly hierarchical family; (2) by postulating an – equally hierarchical – system of education in which “the servant is educated for the master”, and “everyone is educated for his own station” etc., and in which the educator is miraculously “set above” the rest of society; and (3) by asserting the atemporal nature and ideal necessity of the capitalistically institutionalised second order mediations – “fair and advantageous exchange”, the eternal permanence of “meum” and “tuum”, etc. as we have seen already. No wonder, therefore, that the overall impression of Rousseau's conception is a static one, adequately expressed in the tragic pathos of a revolt condemned to inertia and impotence. A pathos expressing the unfavourable configuration of a set of contradictions, perceived and depicted from a specific socio-historical standpoint by this great philosopher and writer.

Marx's approach is radically different. He is not talking simply about man's alienation from “nature” as such, but about man's alienation from his own nature, from “anthropological nature” (both within and outside man). This very concept of “man's own nature” necessarily implies the ontologically fundamental self-mediation of man with nature through his own productive (and self-producing) activity. Consequently “industry” (or “productive activity”) as such, acquires an essentially positive connotation in the Marxian conception, rescuing man from the theological dilemma of “the fall of man”.

If such an essentially positive role is assigned to “industry” in the Marxian conception, how then can we explain “alienation” as “self-alienation”, i.e. as the “alienation of labour”, as the “alienation of human powers from man through his own productive activity”.

To anticipate, briefly, the central topic of the next chapter insofar as is necessary in this connection, let us draw up a comparative diagram. Let (M) stand for “man”, (P) for “private property and its owner”, (L) for “wage labour and the worker”, (AN) for “alienated nature”, and (AI) for “alienated industry” or “alienated productive activity”, then we can illustrate the changed relationships as follows:

Here, as a result of “labour's self-alienation” – the objectification of

productive activity in the form of “alienated labour” (or “estranged

essential activity”, to use another of Marx's expressions) – we have a

multiplicity of basic interrelations

(1) (M) is split into (P) and (L);

(2) (P) and (L) antagonistically oppose each other;

(3) the original (M) ↔ (I) ↔ (N) reciprocity is transformed into the

alienated interrelationships between

      (a) (P) ↔ (AI) ↔ (AN) and

      (b) (L) ↔ (AI) ↔ (AN).

Furthermore, since now everything is subordinated to the basic

antagonism between (P) and (L), we have the additional alienated

interrelations of

(4) (P) ↔ (L) ↔ (AI) and

(5) (P) ↔ (L) ↔ (AN).

In these sets of relationships in which the second order mediations of (P)

and (L) have taken the place of “man” (M), the concepts of “man” and

“mankind” may appear to be mere philosophical abstractions to all those

who cannot see beyond the direct immediacy of the given alienated

relations. (And they are indeed abstractions if they are not considered in

terms of the socio-historically concrete forms of alienation which they

assume.) The disappearance of “man” from the picture, his practical

suppression through the second order mediations of (P) and (L) – (we had

to omit the other institutionalised second order mediations, e.g.

EXCHANGE, MONEY, etc., partly because they are already implied in

(P) and (L), and partly in order to simplify the basic interrelations as far as

possible) – means not only that there is a split now at every link of these

alienated relationships but also that LABOUR can be considered as a

mere “material fact”, instead of being appreciated as the human agency of

production.

The problem of the reflection of this “reification” in the various theoretical fields is inseparable from this double mediation, i.e. from the “mediation of the mediation”. The political economist gives a “reified”, “fetishistic” account of the actual social relations of production when, from the standpoint of idealised Private Property (P) he treats Labour (L) as a mere material fact of production and fails to relate both (P) and (L) to “man” (M). (When Adam Smith, as Marx observes, starts to take “man” into account, he leaves immediately the ground of political economy and shifts to the speculative viewpoint of ethics.)

Now we are in a better position for understanding Marx's assertion according to which each theoretical sphere applies a different, indeed opposite yardstick to man, and “each stands in an estranged relation to the other”. For if the foundation of theoretical generalisations is not the fundamental ontological relationship of (M) ↔ (I) ↔ (N) but its alienated form: the reified “mediation of the mediation” – i.e. (M) ↔ (P) ↔ (L) ↔ (AI) ↔ (AN) then political economy, for instance, which directly identifies itself with the standpoint of private property, is bound to formulate its discourse in terms of (P) and (L), whereas ethics, in accordance with its own position which coincides only indirectly with “the standpoint of political economy” (i.e. the standpoint of private property), will speculatively oppose the abstract concept of “Man” to (P) and (L). The fact that both disciplines approach, from different – though only methodologically, not socially different – points of view, the same complex phenomenon, remains hidden from the representatives of both speculative, moralising philosophy and empiricist political economy.

We could illustrate the respective positions of Ethics, Political Economy, and the “abstractly material” Natural Sciences in relation to the alienated and reified social relations of production like this:

As we can see, the “language” of Political Economy and Ethics – not to

mention the Natural Sciences – cannot be common because their central

points of reference are far from being the same. Political Economy's

points of reference are (P) ↔ (AN) ↔ (L) and (P) ↔ (AI) ↔ (AN),

whereas Ethics (and, mutatis mutandis, speculative philosophy in general)

has for its centre of reference abstract “Man” (or its even more abstract

versions, like “World Spirit” etc.), depicted in his relations with “Nature”

and “Industry” or “Civilisation” more often than not in a Rousseau-like

fashion, with all the a priorism and transcendentalism involved in it. (The

points of reference of the Natural Sciences are, of course, (AN) and (AI),

in their dual orientation towards nature, or “basic research”, on the one

hand, and towards productive technology, or “applied science”, on the

other. Intensified “alienation of nature” – e.g. pollution – is unthinkable

without the most active participation of the Natural Sciences in this

process. They receive their tasks from “alienated industry”, in the form of

capitalistic “targets of production” – i.e. targets subordinated to the “blind

natural laws” of the market – irrespective of the ultimate human

implications and repercussions of the realisation of such tasks.)

Moreover, as Marx emphasises, the idealisation of abstract “Man” is nothing but an alienated, speculative expression of the (P) ↔ (L) relationship. The nature of the actual relationships is such that adequately to comprehend them it is necessary to assume a radically critical attitude towards the system of alienations which “externalises” (or “objectifies”) man in the form of “alienated labour” and “reified private property”. “Real man” – the “real, human person” – does not actually exist in a capitalist society except in the alienated and reified form in which we encounter him as “Labour” and “Capital” (Private Property) antagonistically opposing each other. Consequently the “affirmation” of “man” must proceed via the negation of the alienated social relations of production. Speculative philosophy, however, does not negate the (P) ↔ (L) ↔ (AI) ↔ (AN) relationship but merely abstracts from it. And through its abstract concept of “Man” which ignores the basic antagonism of society: the actuality of (P) ↔ (L), speculative philosophy depicts the alienated social relations of production – in accordance with its own specific ideological function – in a “sublimated” fashion, transforming the “palpable reality” of actual social contradictions into a fictitious, and a priori insoluble, opposition between the “realm of here and now” and its “transcendental” counterpart,

It is clear from the Marxian account that the various theoretical spheres reflect – in a necessarily alienated form, corresponding to a set of specific alienated needs – the actual alienation and reification of the social relations of production. They all focus attention “on a particular round of estranged essential activity” (i.e. political economy on the reproduction of the economic cycle of production; speculative philosophy on “spiritual activity” and on the norms regulating human behaviour, in its most general terms; and the c “abstractly material” natural sciences on the conditions of a direct interchange between man and nature) and they stand “in an estranged relation to each other”.

Since neither political economy nor speculative philosophy have a real awareness of the social dynamism inherent in the antagonism between private property and labour – and precisely because they cannot possibly recognise the objective character of this antagonism as one “hastening to its annulment” – their systems must remain static, corresponding to the necessarily ahistorical standpoint of private property which they represent, directly or indirectly. Viewed from such a standpoint they can only perceive – at best – the subjective aspect of this basic contradiction: the direct clash of individuals over “goods” or “property”, but they cannot grasp the social necessity of such clashes. Instead they either interpret them as manifestations of “egoistic human nature” – which amounts to an actual defence of the position of private property under the semblance of a “moral condemnation” of “human egoism” – or, more recently, treat these clashes as problems of a “lack of communication”, as tasks for a “human engineering”, aiming at devising methods for a minimisation of “conflicts about property”, in order to ensure the continued existence of the alienated social relations of production.

Marx, by contrast, grasps this whole complexity of interrelated concepts at their strategic centre: the objective social dynamism of the contradiction between Property and Labour. He recognises that “human life required private property for its realisation” because “only through developed industry – i.e. through the medium of private property – does the ontological essence of human passion come to be both in its totality and in its humanity”.

Alienation, relocation, and their alienated reflections are therefore socio-historically necessary forms of expression of a fundamental ontological relationship. This is the “positive aspect” of labour's self-alienation.

At the same time Marx emphasises the negative aspect as well. The latter is directly displayed in the social contradiction between PRIVATE PROPERTY and LABOUR: a contradiction which, however, cannot be perceived from the standpoint of private property, nor from that of a spontaneous identification with labour in its partiality, but only from the critically adopted standpoint of labour in its self-transcending universality. In Marx's eyes the increasing evidence of an irreconcilable social antagonism between private property and labour is a proof of the fact that the ontologically necessary phase of labour's self-alienation and reified self-mediation – “through the medium of private property” etc. – is drawing to its close. The intensification of the social antagonism between private property and given labour demonstrates the inner-most contradiction of the productive system and greatly contributes to its disintegration. Thus human self-objectification in the form of self-alienation loses its relative historical justification and becomes an indefensible social anachronism.

Ontological necessity cannot be realistically opposed except by another ontological necessity. Marx's line of reasoning – in stressing the relative (historical) necessity of self-alienation as well as the disruptive social anachronism of self-objectification as self-alienation at a later stage of development – establishes “Aufhebung” (the transcendence of alienation) as a concept denoting ontological necessity. Marx argues that what is at stake is the necessity of any actual supersession of the earlier indispensable but by now increasingly more paralysing (therefore historically untenable) reification of the social relations of production. In this respect, too, his theory brings a radical break with the views of his predecessors who could picture “transcendence” either as a mere moral postulate (a “Sollen”) or as an abstract logical requirement of a speculative scheme devoid of practical relevance.

As to the transcendence of alienation in the theoretical fields, it must be clear from what has been said so far that Marx's ideal of a “human science” is not meant to be a programme of remodelling philosophy and the humanities on the natural sciences. Not only because the latter are also specific forms of alienation but, above all, because we are concerned here with a practical, not with a theoretical issue. For whatever model we may have in mind as our ideal of philosophical activity, its applicability will depend on the totality of social practice which generates, in any particular socio-historical situation, the practicable intellectual needs not less than the material ones. The realisation of Marx's ideal of a “human science” presupposes, therefore, the “self-sustaining” (“positive”) existence of such – non-alienated – needs in the social body as a whole. Marx's formulation of the ideal itself, by contrast, corresponds to the needs of negating – under their theoretical aspects – the totality of the existing social relations of production. “Human science”, therefore, becomes a reality to the extent to which alienation is practically superseded and thus the totality of social practice loses its fragmented character. (In this fragmentation theory is opposed to practice and the particular fields of “estranged essential activity” – both theoretical and practical – oppose each other.) In

other words, in order to realise “human science” philosophy, political economy, the “abstractly material” natural sciences, etc., must be reciprocally integrated among themselves, as well as with the totality of a social practice no longer characterised by the alienation and relocation of the social relations of production. For “human science” is precisely this dual integration - in transcendence of the earlier seen dual alienation of the particular theoretical fields (1) among themselves and (2) with the totality of a non-alienated social practice.

The “übergreifendes Moment” (overriding factor) of this complex is, of course, the supersession of alienation in social practice itself. Since, however, alienated social practice is already integrated, in an “inverted” and alienated form, with “abstractly material” science and speculative philosophy, the actual transcendence of alienation in social practice is inconceivable without superseding at the same time the alienations of the theoretical fields as well. Thus Marx conceives the actual process of “Aufhebung” as a dialectical interchange between these two poles – the theoretical and the practical – in the course of their reciprocal integration.

3. Alienation and Teleology

As we have seen, both “alienation” and its “Aufhebung” denote an

ontological necessity in the Marxian system. What we have to consider

now is the kind of teleology which is at work in the developments

depicted by Marx.

Marx is often accused of “economic determinism”. He is supposed to hold the naive idea according to which economy determines, mechanically, every aspect of development. Such accusations, needless to say, cannot be taken seriously. For – as has been mentioned already – in Marx's view the first historical act of man is the creation of his first new need, and no mechanical determination can conceivably account for that. In Marx's dialectical conception the key concept is “human productive activity” which neither means simply “economic production”. Right from the beginning it is much more complex than that, as Marx's references to ontology in fact, indicate. We are concerned here with an extremely complicated structure and Marx's assertions about the ontological significance of economics become meaningful only if we are able to grasp the Marxian idea of manifold specific mediations, in the most varied fields of human activity, which are not simply “built upon” an economic basis but also actively structure the latter through the immensely intricate and relatively autonomous structure of their own. Only if we succeed in dialectically grasping this multiplicity of specific mediations can we really understand the Marxian notion of economics. For if economics is the “ultimate determinant”, it is also a “determined determinant”: it does not exist outside the always concrete, historically changing complex of concrete mediations, including the most “spiritual” ones. If the “demystification” of capitalistic society, because of the “fetish-character” of its mode of production and exchange, has to start from the analysis of economics, this does not mean in the least that the results of such economic enquiry can

be simply transferred to other spheres and levels. Even as regards the culture, politics, law, religion, art, ethics, etc. of capitalistic society one has still to find those complex mediations, at various levels of historico-philosophical generalisation, which enable one to reach reliable conclusions both about the specific ideological forms in question and about the given, historically concrete form of capitalistic society as a whole. And this is even more evident if one tries to transfer the enquiry to a more general level, as becomes in fact necessary in the course of the structural analysis of any particular form of society, or of any specific form of human activity. One cannot grasp the “specific” without identifying its manifold interconnections with a given system of complex mediations. In other words: one must be able to see the “atemporal” (systematic) elements in temporality, and the temporal elements in the systematic factors.

“Economic determinism”, it goes without saying, negates the dialectical interrelationship between temporality and atemporality, discontinuity and continuity, history and structure. It opposes to the Marxian dialectical conception a mechanical model in which an atemporal structure of determinations prevails. (Some so-called “structuralist Marxists”, with their anti-dialectical rejection of “historicism”, are representatives of “vulgar economic determinism”, dressed in a culturally fashionable “structuralist” cloth. It was this old trend of “vulgar economic determinism” which made Marx say a long time ago: “I am not a Marxist”.) The concept of complex mediations is missing from the vision of economic determinists who – however unconsciously – capitulate to “blind economic necessity” which seems to prevail through the fetish-character of capitalism, through the alienation and relocation of the social relations of production under capitalism. (The Geisteswissenschaften [“sciences of the Spirit”] and – mutatis mutandis – their modern structuralist versions are, as regards their fundamental conceptual structure, a mystified form of economic determinism “upside down”, insofar as the crucial concept of mediation is missing from them. They mirror the immediacy of capitalistic reification, even if in an inverted fashion, asserting the same kind of direct mechanical determinations under “spiritualised” names. Consequently they either display a rigid negation of all historicity, or invent a pseudo-history of the “Spirit”, devoid of the objective dialectical transitions and mediations which characterise a genuine historical account. Significantly enough some “Marxist structuralists” can switch with the greatest ease to and fro between the categories of the Geisteswissenschaften and their own pseudo-Marxist – i.e. vulgar economic determinist – concepts.)

Since both “alienation” and “Aufhebung” must be understood, according to Marx, in terms of ontological necessity, a correct historical conception depends on the interpretation of such necessity. Economic determinism as a historical hypothesis is a contradiction in terms because it implies the ultimate negation of history. If history means anything at all, it must be “open-ended”. An adequate historical conception must be, therefore, open to the idea of a break of the chain of – “reified”, “fetishistic”, “blind”, etc. – economic determinations. (Indeed a transcendence of alienation is inconceivable without the break of this chain.) Such an idea is, needless to say, inadmissible from the view point of economic determinism which must therefore negate history, by taking its own ahistorical standpoint for granted and by turning it into an alleged “permanent structure”.

At this point the paradoxical character of Hegel's achievements proves to be particularly instructive. Lukács, in his History and Class Consciousness, emphasises that: “Hegel's tremendous intellectual contribution consisted in the fact that he made theory and history dialectically relative to each other, grasped them in a dialectical, reciprocal penetration.” Ultimately, however, his attempt was a failure. He could never get as far as the genuine unity of theory and practice; all that he could do was either to fill the logical sequence of the categories with rich historical material, or rationalise history, in the shape of a succession of forms, structural changes, epochs, etc., which he raised to the level of categories by sublimating and abstracting them.

What Lukács could not see at the time of writing History and Class Consciousness was the fact that the Hegelian historical conception as a whole – conceived from the necessarily ahistorical “standpoint of political economy” which carried with it the identification of “alienation” and “objectification” – had to be thoroughly ahistorical or, more exactly, pseudo-historical. For no matter how fine and sensitive were Hegel's particular historical insights, because of his ahistorical assumptions – i.e. “objectification” = “alienation”, etc. – he had to negate history in its totality by assigning to it an “end”, in accordance with an a priori “goal” It was not the case, therefore, that – in order to complete his system – Hegel inconsistently left the ground of his historical conception but right from the beginning his conception was inherently ahistorical. This is why he had to operate with the method of rationalising history and relativising the logical sequence of categories. And this is why he had to “deduce” a sublimated human history from the categories of thought, instead of elucidating the latter in terms of the former. (The recognition of a “humanly natural and naturally human” agent of history – necessarily carrying with it a specific objectivity which can only be grasped in terms of a dialectical social ontology – would have prevented him from conveniently putting an end to history at the point of the “reconciliation of the World Spirit” with capitalistic reality anticipated by the Hegelian system from the very moment of its inception.) Thus – however paradoxical this may sound despite his (abstract) programmatic criticism of “immediacy” Hegel ended up by idealising the immediacy of the fetishism of capitalism manifest in the historically determinate identity of capitalistic objectification and capitalistic alienation.

Human actions are not intelligible outside their socio-historical framework. But human history – in its turn is far from being intelligible without a teleology of some kind. If, however, the latter is of a “closed”, aprioristic kind – i.e. all varieties of theological teleology – the philosophical system which makes use of such a conception of teleology must be itself a “closed system”.

The Marxian system, by contrast, is organised in terms of an inherently historical – “open” – teleology which cannot admit “fixity” at any stage whatsoever. This we can illustrate, briefly anticipating some main points of the subsequent chapters, with reference to two Marxian assertions in particular:

(1) According to Marx all necessity is “historical necessity”, namely “a

disappearing necessity” (“eine verschwindende Notwendigkeit”). This

concept not only makes intelligible the multiple transformations and

transitions of social phenomena in terms of historical necessity but at the

same time it leaves the doors wide open as regards the future development

of human society. (More about this in Chapter VIII.)

(2) The “goal” of human history is defined by Marx in terms of the

immanence of human development (as opposed to the a priori

transcendentalism of theological teleology), namely as the realisation of

the “human essence”, of “humanness”, of the “specifically human”

element, of the “universality and freedom of man”, etc. through “man's

establishment of himself by practical activity” first in an alienated form,

and later in a positive, self-sustaining form of life-activity established as

an “inner need”. Man as the “self-mediating being of nature” must

develop – through the objective dialectics of an increasingly higher

complexity of human needs and aims – in accordance with the most

fundamental objective laws of ontology of which – and this is vitally

important – man's own active mediatory role is an essential part. Thus the

Marxian system remains open because in this account the very “goal” of

history is defined in inherently historical terms, and not as a fixed target.

In Marx's account history remains open in accordance with the specific

ontological necessity of which self-mediating human teleology is an

integral part: for there can be no way of predetermining the forms and

modalities of human “self-mediation” (whose complex teleological

conditions can only be satisfied in the course of this self-mediation itself)

except by arbitrarily reducing the complexity of human actions to the

crude simplicity of mechanical determinations. Nor can there be a point in

history at which we could say: now the human substance has been fully

realised”. For such a fixing would deprive the human being of his

essential attribute: his power of “self-mediation” and “self-development”.