A Terse Elucidation of Marx’s Concern with Alienation in the Mature Writings

By David Fields

Note: The references below are drawn from The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker.

Is Marx’s concern with aspects of alienation subsumed in his mature writings? To suggest so is a falsity. Marx’s depiction of the proletariat becoming, in the Hegelian sense, emancipated from the objective conditions of estranged labour, is not withered as the analysis moves toward the technical conditions of production. Marx’s humanism is still apparent.

In Wages, Labour, and Capital, Marx explicates that labour power is a life activity (204). It is the manifestation of human creativity, so that when it is sold as a commodity, a worker, in fact, sacrifices his life; the “product of his activity is no longer the object of his activity” (204-205). Life, as such, no longer has meaning.

Marx asks a pertinent question: “And the worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc.-does he consider this twelve hours’ weaving, spinning, drilling turning, building, shoveling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life” (205)? The answer is a resounding no: “On the contrary, life brings for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed […] The twelve hours’ labour, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, drilling etc., but [only] as earnings […] If the silkworm were to spin in order to continue its existence as a caterpillar, it would be a complete wage-worker” (205).

Another example is Marx’s attention to commodity fetishism: “In production, men not only act on nature but also on one another. They produce only by co-operating in a certain way and mutually exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations with one another and only within these social connections and relations does their action on nature, does production, take place” (207). This actuality is mystified given that “the noble reproductive [labour] power that the worker surrenders to the capitalist [for sustenance]” (209) is the mechanism that generates the “means of employment” (210), of which labour, which by definition “possesses nothing but its capacity to labour” (208), socially depends on. This social dependency is the force that manufactures ‘false consciousness for “to say that the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital is […] to say that the more rapidly the worker increases the wealth of [capitalists], the richer will be the crumbs that fall to him” (211).

In Marx’s Grundrisse, there are more examples of where Marx alludes to alienation. For instance, Marx begins his analysis with a scathing critique of Enlightenment ideology: “The [rational] individual [who] belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades […,] which brings natural independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract”, is an “ideal whose existence is [systematically] project[ed] […] by [the] detach[ment] [of the individual] from [his] natural bonds” (222). Hence, “forms of social connectedness confront the individual as mere means toward his private purposes, as external necessity” (223). And to suggest that material production, of which forms the bedrock of society, is determined “by isolated individual[s] […] is as much as an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other” 223). Society “does not consist of [isolated] individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which […] individuals stand” (247).

In continuance with a concrete understanding  of the nature of commodity fetishism, Marx indicates that the unity of production, distribution, and consumption is a mystification that clouds the reality that the worker is inherently an agent in production, of which the worker’s social position determines its pattern of distribution, and ultimately its pattern of consumption (223-234)…the unperceived “mutual interaction” that consummates the capitalist system as an “organic whole” (236).

Furthermore, Marx discerns that when labour exchanges with capital in the selling of labour power, a worker “divests himself” of his “vital forces” to the submission of superfluous “forced labour”, surplus value, of which work in production is in excess of that which is necessary for the means for “mere subsistence”, to generate a “general form of [capitalist] wealth (247-249). This facet of capitalism is striking for that it inevitably blinds the worker from realizing that his social condition is, indeed, a relation of domination similar to that of slavery, or what Marx defines as “direct forced labour” (250). Work in capitalist production is “indirect forced labour” for that wealth generated from labour is not accumulated for the gratification of overlords, but exploited to foster general industriousness that generates the means of employment, the means of subsistence, of which labour, by definition, socially depends on. Workers are nothing else than soulless cogs in a wheel, an “alien person”, whose objective social conditions appear as separated, independent, and of another kind (252-253).

Examples of Marx’s adherence to the thesis of alienation are also prevalent in Das Kapital. We again see commodity fetishism highlighted: “A commodity is […] a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason the products of labour become commodities, social things, whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses” (320). Commodities thus appear, according to Marx, as a social hieroglyphic (322), an alienating state of existence where one “cannot decipher the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them […] in the same way [that] light from an object is perceived […] not as the subjective excitation of the optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself” (321).

Marx also rehashes his argument, albeit in condensed form, of labour power as a life-activity that is ultimately dispossessed in capitalist exchange. When a capitalist purchases labour power for capitalist production, “the labourer, instead of being in a position to sell commodities in which his labour is incorporated, must sell that very labour-power, which exists in his living self” (337). Workers are free in the double sense; on the one hand, “as a free man, [the worker] can dispose of his labour power as his own commodity, on the other hand […] he has no other commodity for sale, which is short of everything necessary for the realization of his labour power”. This is an estrangement whose unadulterated existence makes the so-called rational-maximizing individual a self-perpetuating mythological understood form of social life (324).

In hindsight, Marx’s interest with the social conditions of alienation is not abandoned as he matures. To suggest that this is indeed the case would be to assume that there is supposedly an epistemological break between Marx’s early and later writings. This, however, would ignore a critical comprehension of Marx’s work as a totality.

Originally posted on URPE Blog

Beyond Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: The Foundations for Ethical Political Humanist Social Science

A piece that I wrote for The Hampton Institution: A Working-Class Think Tank has been posted.

Here is a snapshot:

It is pertinent to recognize that social reality is not an aura of perceived characteristics, of which there lays no unifying substance that could account for coherence. There is an evident danger in oversimplifying things. The attempt of this paper is to promote an approach to social science that engages issues concerning social ontology; that is, epistemic positions in regards to the means by which to uncover underlying interconnecting structures that constitute the manifestation of certain types of social reality. In this sense, the very notion of society itself amounts to an immensely complex entity - the broad functioning of which cannot be captured by obscure models of positivistic simplification.

Pragmatism does not tell us about the existence of anything. By not grasping the essence of human behavior that exhibits interconnections, we as human beings are left mystified about the world in which we live in. As such, "the attempt to define some underlying reality beneath the ever-changing surface of human phenomena, to delineate the common psychobiological structure of man, to specify the common blueprint of the human animal." (Wolf, 1974 [1964]: 33) We must abandon our Hegelian selves; social scientists have a responsibility to illuminate the intersections of the latent and visible content of human endeavor such that intelligible conclusions of human social life can be holistically developed.

Read rest here

Barbarism on the Horizon: An Interview With István Mészáros

by Eleonora de Lucena

Lucena: Mr. István Mészáros, you are coming to visit Brazil to talk about György Lukács. As a profound expert of the work of the philosopher, how do you evaluate the importance of his ideas today? 

Mészáros: György Lukács was my great teacher and friend for twenty-two years, until he died in 1971.  He started publishing as a politically conscious literary critic almost seventy years earlier, moving toward the discussion of fundamental philosophical issues as time went by.  Three of his major works in that field -- History and Class Consciousness (1923), The Young Hegel (1948), and The Destruction of Reason (1954) -- will always stand the test of time.  His historical and aesthetic studies on great German, French, English, Russian, and Hungarian literary figures continue to be most influential in many university departments.  Moreover, he is also the author of a monumental aesthetic synthesis which, I am sure, will see the light one day also in Brazil.  More fortunately, his equally monumental volumes on the problems of the ontology of social being are being published right now in this country by Boitempo Editorial.  They address some vital issues of philosophy which also have far-reaching implications for our everyday life and ongoing struggles.  What is less well known about Lukács's life is that he was directly involved at high levels of political organization between 1919 and 1929.  He was Minister of Culture and Education in the short-lived revolutionary government of 1919 in Hungary, which emerged from the great crisis of the First World War.  In the Party he belonged to the "Landler Faction" -- indeed he was its second in command.  This faction -- named after Jenö Landler, who was a leading trade unionist before becoming a high-ranking party figure -- tried to pursue a broader strategic line, with much greater involvement of the popular masses.  Lukács was defeated in direct politics in 1929.  However, way back in 1919, in one of his articles (you can find it quoted in my book on Lukács now published by Boitempo), he warned that the communist movement could face a great danger when "the proletariat turns its dictatorship against itself."  He proved to be tragically prophetic in this warning.  In any case, in all of his public roles, political as much as theoretical, one can find his great moral stature always in evidence.  Nowadays we read so much about corruption in politics.  One can also see Lukács's importance as a positive example, showing that morality and politics not only ought to (as Kant advocated it) but also can go together.

Read rest here.

Beyond Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: The Foundations for Ethical Political Humanist Social Science

There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, come and find out.

-From Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness"

It is pertinent to recognize that social reality is not an aura of perceived characteristics, in which there lays no unifying substance that could account for coherence. There is an evident danger in oversimplifying things. The attempt of this post is to promote an approach to social science that engages issues concerning social ontology, that is, epistemic positions in regards the means by which to uncover underlying interconnecting structures that constitute the manifestation of certain types of social reality.

In this sense, the very notion society, itself, amounts to an immensely complex entity, the broad functioning of which cannot be captured by obscure models of positivistic simplification.
Pragmatism does not tell us about the existence of anything. By not grasping the essence of human behavior that exhibit interconnections, we as human beings are left mystified about the world in which we live in. In essence, “the attempt to define some underlying reality beneath the ever changing surface of human phenomena, to delineate the common psychobiological structure of man, to specify the common blueprint of the human animal” (Wolf, 1974 [1964]: 33). Hence, we must abandon our Hegelian selves; social scientists have a responsibility to illuminate the intersections of the latent and visible content of human endeavor such that intelligible conclusions of human social life can be holistically developed.

The intention is to build the foundations for an ethical political humanist social science that allows for normative discussion concerning the inherent relationship between the quest for knowledge creation and matters with respect to collectively shared notions of morality (Heyman, 2005). As such, it is not enough to simply explain or predict, but also describe what possibilities exist for human social action. In this sense, humans, regardless of social location, are envisaged as a unified field of study giving rise to generalizations about humanity—“a manner of looking at man and a vision of man” (Wolf, 1974 [1964]: 88). This calls for sedulous scrutiny of ‘what is’ and demands a sociological imagination of ‘what could be’ (Heyman, 2005), which creates the analytical space to study and evaluate particular collective arrangements, according to how they cultivate and sustain the people within them along with an assessment as to the extent to which treatment is consistent with broadly notions of, for example, what constitutes social justice.

This approach is not without criticism, especially from those of postmodern bent. It is argued that such an orientation towards social scientific enquiry is inherently essentialist; social formations, rather, and thus social phenomena, exist through the ideas that envision them—generalization is impossible for ideas (‘knowledges’) are held, bound, and delimited to historically-specific locally contextual social contingencies. Intuitively, moral claims to ‘Enlightenment ideas as social justice are culturally hegemonic, and encompassing conceptions of humanity construct an invasive ‘panopticon’, which reduces human subjects of study to mere ‘objects’ of ‘invariant scientific gaze’ (Shcheper-Hughes, 1995), that is, a designation of a singular human subjectivity and the erasure of alternative subjectivities.

Particular moralities are, nevertheless, the sediment of power projects (Heyman, 2005). It is not unjustified to abandon articulations of humanity. The solution, rather, is a philosophical anthropology that draws on the essence of social conflict, that is, contextual predicaments over human potentialities. From a Marxist historical-materialist point of view, human senses are shaped and refined through working and transforming nature into useful things. It is through one’s relations with what one produced that an individual achieves pleasure and satisfaction. Through visible direct interdependent social production, recognitions of one’s ability, dexterity, and talent are palpable.

What is stressed is that issues of morality are squarely placed within the parameters and social practices of various modes of production. Under capitalism, for instance, authentic human development is limited given that the actually existing physical world forces mankind to be subservient to constrained subjectivities; that is, for those who are forced to sell their labor power for sustenance are severed from their creativity—a condition of alienation that ensues neurotic anxiety. The social organization of production is not oriented to human needs and aspirations, but rather by profit calculations estimated by legally protected extortionists [capitalists]. The social effects are total degradation and total dehumanization of working people, in which they are reduced to nothing but disconnected brutes performing simple animalistic functions, while not developing freely their physical and mental energy for self-actualization.

In this sense, an ethical political humanism assesses social life from a preview that sees society as composed of differentiating relationships, involving conflict and contradiction (Heyman, 2005). Once it is possible to visualize a mode of production, for instance, it is then possible to visualize the mode of political power—the characteristics of social decision-making and the ordering of rights, privileges and responsibilities. In other words, the determination of how the products of labor are distributed determines power differentials concerning how society is to be structured and coordinated. As such, it can be argued that postmodern critiques as mentioned above are tantamount to a justifying the credence of cultural relativism, which turns social scientists into a mere spectators of social situations of human deprivation. The end result is the intellectual paralysis of ‘waiting’—the process by which the social world slips away from the researcher, and, in turn, becomes, muted, numb and dead, a passive acquiescence to manifestations of human suffering.

An outstanding example of a commitment to ethical political humanism is anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom’s Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering In the Twenty-First Century. Through the use of comparative ethnography of war zones, quite similar, in practice, to sociologist Michael Buraway’s (1998) advocation of ‘The Extended Case Method’, Nordstrom delves into the brutish, harrowing, loathsome world of complex production, transport, distribution, and consumption systems of well-developed global networks of extra-state trade that merge war and capitalist profiteering.

Using the war in Sri Lanka of 1983, and its aftermath as backdrop, Nordstrom demonstrates how such a criminal mundane system of profit unfolds on the front-lines where the eventuation of social instability metamorphoses into persistency. Poor internally displaced are forced to fend for any means of sustenance to feed their families—this includes scrapping anything together to sell for a meager standard of living. Due to the destruction of infrastructure and economic sustainability, the military and police then force people to give up such goods as means of payment for their services. Just as these troops demand payment from the poor, so must they pay up the ladder—compensating commanding officers that demand far greater goods due to their control over valuable resources. The commanders then use such power and manipulation of the social turmoil of their society to forge partnerships and alliances with international corporate wildcatters to trade valuable resources to secure items like weapons, artillery, and consumer products—in the final instance, wealth and ascendancy in the continuousness of warfare, at the expense of those at lower echelons of influence, association, and access to means of production, are fortified. The entire process is an unequivocal example of how the merging of war and profiteering on the global political, economic, and social landscape is forged.

The wealth generated through such system of payola cannot, and does not, stand outside what constitutes the formal global economy. Wealth, by definition, is the accumulation goods and resources having value in terms of production, exchange, and use. For wealth to in fact become wealth it must be involved in a mechanism of fructification. How does the accumulation of goods and resources in the shadow network of extra-state trade evolve into wealth, i.e. how can it acquire the all important use and exchange values? Nordstrom answers this question by stating that it is the combination of the internationalized deregulated financial powerhouses and markets of the cosmopolitan world and the relative freedom of controls found in war zones that permit such abhorrent accumulation to be laundered into legitimacy. The functionality of bamboozlement is efficient due to the fluidity of legality in the apparatus of extra state trade, which bears truth to sociologist Manuel Castells' observation that there exists is a thin line between criminal traffic manifested in war zones from distant parts of the social world and established international trade networks.

Essentially, an ethical political humanist social science provides the necessary sociological lens so as to produce critical arguments about actually existing circumstances concerning human nature. It can provide the means by which to construct effective solutions to collectively recognized interconnected social problems that span the globe, and is an invaluable paradigm for a researcher traveling that tortuous royal road to science.

Works Cited:

Burawoy, Michael. 1998. “The Extended Case Method.” Sociological Theory 16(1):4–33.

Conrad, Joseph. 1990. Heart of Darkness. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.

Heyman, Josiah. 2005. “Eric Wolf’s Ethical-Political Humanism, and Beyond.” Critique of Anthropology 25(1):13–25.

Nordstrom, Carolyn. 2004. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-first Century. University of California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 36(3):409–40.

Wolf, Eric R. 1974 [1964]. Anthropology. New York: W.W. Norton.