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

Fundamental Books by Michael Burawoy Downloadable

Classics by Michael Burawoy, from "Manufacturing Consent" to "The Politics of Production"

See here.

Monthly Review: The Baran–Sweezy Letters Project

By Nicholas Baran

The correspondence of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in the 1950s and early ‘60s is one of the great, unknown legacies of Marxian political economy in the United States. Over the past year and a half, I have been transcribing all of these letters with the goal of having the collection published by Monthly Review press, both as a hardcopy book of selected letters, as well as an unabridged e-book. In commemoration of my father, Paul A. Baran, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death on March 26, 1964, we decided to refer publicly for the first time to the Baran–Sweezy Letters Project and to publish a few important and representative letters.

Read rest here.

Herbert Marcuse on Paul Baran’s Critique of Modern Society and of the Social Sciences

Paul Baran and Herbert Marcuse's (author of One Dimensional Man) friendship went back to their days together at the Institute for Social Research (the foundational school of critical theory in the social sciences, which led to the future establishment of The New School For Social Research in NYC, and became the intellectual impetus for spawning the 'New Left' in the US - for more on this, see here) in Frankfurt in pre-Hitler Germany. Their close connection is revealed in a series of letters they wrote to each other in the 1950s and early ’60s (posted this month on the Monthly Review website).

From John Bellamy Foster:

The following talk, delivered only days after the publication of Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order by Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Marcuse reveals his admiration for Baran’s article on “The Commitment of the Intellectual.”Marcuse also provides his understanding of the critical importance of Baran’s notion of economic surplus, as introduced in The Political Economy of Growth and its significance for the critique of monopoly capital. This throws light on Marcuse’s own use of the concept of monopoly capitalism, which is frequently mentioned in his work (see for example his Counter-Revolution and Revolt).

Marcuse criticizes Baran for rejecting—in “Marxism and Psychoanalysis”—the use of psychological terms and for distancing himself from Freudian psychoanalysis and its left interpretations. Marcuse was clearly disappointed (as he indicated in a letter to Baran on September 22, 1959, where he commented on the galleys to Baran’s article) that Baran had not embraced the kind of argument he himself had put forward in Eros and Civilization. Nevertheless, it is worth adding that Baran—as Marcuse no doubt understood and as their own correspondence reveals—was far from simply rejecting psychological issues out of hand. Baran’s essay on psychoanalysis was aimed at the critique of what he called “psychologism” and “social psychologism”—and not psychology and social psychology. He insisted in this respect that what was needed was a more revolutionary social psychology—that took into account as its initial datum the structure of capitalist society as a whole. He sought to push this view forward near the end of his life through the critique of the cultural apparatus, overlapping in this way with the concerns of such thinkers as Marcuse, Fromm, Williams, and Mills. (See the special July-August 2013 issue of Monthly Review on “The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital”). To the end Baran remained an uncompromising critic of the narrow economic rationalism of monopoly-capitalist society and the damaging effect that it exerted on the material existence, culture, and consciousness of humanity.

Read rest here.

Ideology, Sociology of Knowledge, and the Historic Moment of Production

By Dr. Victor E. Kappeler

In the 1920s, the concept of ideology passed through another transformation in its quest for meaning. Karl Mannheim (1893-1947), a Hungarian-born sociologist, took on the project of developing a “sociology of knowledge.” He directly engaged the subject of ideology as articulated by Marx in hopes of developing an objective, yet interpretative, social science approach to the study of ideas. In his quest to understand “the social and activist roots of thinking” (1936: 4), he hoped to develop a theory of ideology that would guide political action and practice. He resituated de Tracy’s “science of ideas” from the domain of the natural sciences to that of sociology. As an advocate of the social science approach to understanding, he advanced a structuralist view of ideology. He theorized a distinction between “particular” and “total” ideologies. Under this framework, particular ideologies were characterized by distortion and fabrications—the intentional misrepresentation of ideas by individuals. Total ideology was thought of as the whole structure of the mind, a product of the social-historical epoch of a class or group derived from material conditions. Mannheim’s total ideology sought to engulf not only ideas and their origin but also analytic methods into the concept of ideology. In this scheme the scientist’s science and the Marxist critique of ideology were considered products of the epoch.

Mannheim’s schema of distinctions, however, became intellectually problematic because it eroded into an extreme relativism. If all ideologies were created from the same historical and social forces and all forms of analyzing ideology are subject to these same forces, then how can one make an analytic judgment? Evaluation becomes impossible. A side affect of this relativist way of thinking about ideology was the eradication of the aspect of domination made explicit in the Marxist critique of ideology. While Mannheim developed yet another duality to address the relativism issue, it was never satisfactorily resolved.

The following points can summarize the brief history of the meaning of ideology:

• Ideology was initially thought of as the scientific study of ideas. It was thought that ideas could be subjected to the same forms of analysis that predominated in the natural sciences.

• While ideology had political consequences it did not initially carry negative connotations until it was used as a label to silence political critics.

• Ideology had an oppositional character because it stood as an alternative philosophy of understanding and way of explaining social and historical change.

• Ideology took on its critical connotation when it was used as a term of opposition to develop a theory rather than a philosophy of historical change.

• Selective reading of critical theory obscured ideology’s dialectical nature, overemphasized its materialistic basis, and focused on the concept as an intentional distort of reality.

• Reformulation of ideology under the “sociology of knowledge” crystallized its distortion aspect and attempted to engulf the critical theory as an unexceptional case. The domination feature of ideology illuminated by critical theory was replaced by a privileged disciplinary view of the concept. Ideology masqueraded as a self-critical and apolitical “science of ideas.”

The negative connotation of ideology is used to characterize thoughts and positions that oppose prevailing views. The negative use of the term implies that ideology is something less than factual or scientific—an intentionally created illusion based on distortion. Contemporary construction of ideology implies that there is some alternative basis from which we can speak; some factual world distinct from the interplay of the material and mental. Yet, the presentation of selected facts, the differential weight given to some facts, and the values generated from what we perceive facts all flow from highly selective choices about how we see and represent reality— in other words from ideology. Regardless of our values, when most people speak they are speaking from and sustaining a particular ideological order. 

Originally posted here.

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.

On The Rise and Fall of Radical Political Economy In US

The professional eyes of the [social scientist] are on the down people, and the professional palm of the [social scientist] is stretched toward the up people … he is an Uncle Tom not only for this government and ruling class but for any government or ruling class. 

-Martin Nicolaus, “Remarks at ASA Convention,” The American Sociologist 4, 2 (May 1969): 155

The rise and fall of radical political economy in the US is rooted in the rise and ultimate decline of social radicalization there of the 1960s and 1970s. This radicalization was dominated by fuzzy New Left (NL) ideological critiques of American capitalism, notwithstanding that many radicals of the time rejected such critiques as inadequate.

By Al Campbell

Since the term NL was created to refer to everyone with a radical critique of the system other than the ‘Old Left’ (OL), it included many different strands of political thought and ideologies. In addition, in the early years of the NL in the mid-sixties, many prominent members and groups pointedly declared themselves ‘anti-ideological,’ asserting that pure activism would replace ideology. Most currents in the NL fairly quickly came to realise that they had an ideology whether they acknowledged it or not, and so turned to its conscious development. In practice this resulted in approaching one or another of the orientations that existed in the (small) US left, above all Stalinism, Social Democracy, Anarchism, (US) Radical Populism or Marxism. The various NL individuals and currents typically eclectically mixed these and, in addition, continually made major changes to their theories and ideologies over relatively short periods of time. All of these points together indicate the need for caution when referring to ‘a NL ideology’. For a compact treatment of a significant number of the threads in the US NL ideological tapestry, see Young (1977). I will simply refer to ‘the vague NL ideology.’ It was largely a product of the specific history of that US radicalisation. Above all, it was defined by things in the existing society that it was against. Critically absent was an alternative based on a radical social theory – by implication, the alternative was just to eliminate the problems.

Two central issues divided the NL from the OL. The first was the issue of class. The OL had always recognised the need to fight against all forms of oppression. For example, many though far from all of the leaders of the fight against racism both after and before WWII were part of the OL or strongly influenced by it. But the OL at the same time argued that class oppression played a special role in the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism. Capitalism’s goal was the accumulation of capital which required and rested on class oppression and exploitation. Other forms of oppression could be just as individually damaging as class oppression, but they did not play the same role in the continual reproduction of capitalist social relations. The NL, to the contrary, argued strongly for the absolute theoretical symmetry of all forms of oppression as sources of exploitation, leading to the political idea of ‘multi-vanguardism.’ One of the founding documents of the premier NL RPE group in the USA (discussed further below) reflected this concept: ‘The organization opposes all exploitation on the basis of class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other social/economic/cultural constructs’ (URPE, 1968). As the NL went on to develop its ideologies, it drew on (among other sources) C. Wright Mills’ (1956) model of elites based on power, and consciously opposed this to the Marxist concept of class based at its deepest level on economic exploitation. Mills’ concept was particularly suited to a view of multiple, conceptually equivalent, exploitations.

The other central issue for the NL presented itself Janus-like with two related but conceptually very different faces. Negatively (in several senses of that word), the NL exuded a politically primitive anti-authoritarianism. This was an important endogenous contribution to the NL’s general inability to create sustainable institutions. Positively, the NL championed the concept of Participatory Democracy against both the OL and bourgeois democracy. Long after the NL disappeared, this latter idea has remained as a permanent contribution (or ‘rediscovery,’ as the idea existed before the NL), and is still being debated and developed by many (proto) social movements in the USA that continue to fight against capitalism.

Read the rest here.

Introductory Essay for Newsletter of Marxist Sociology Section of ASA

Below is the introductory essay that I wrote for the recent relaunching of the newsletter for Marxist Sociology Section of the American Sociology Association, which can be seen here.

Over the years, the intellectual agendas of critical social scientists have taken a decidedly pluralist turn. Leading thinkers have begun to move beyond established alternative paradigms opening up new lines of analysis, manifesting a turn to a more cross fertilization of ideas, which seemingly suggests that the once powerful embracement of Marxism by the infamous Radical Caucus has waned. The relaunching of the newsletter of the Section on Marxist Sociology of the American Sociological Association is a testament to the fact that this supposed decline in radical scholarship is certainly not the case. On the contrary, the praxis of the Sociology Liberation Movement carries on as unquestionably substantive in the assessment and articulation of pertinent contemporary and historical social, political, economic, and environmental problems.

Hence, the ambition of the newsletter is to accentuate the perseverance of Marxist social scientific enquiry, especially since it is quite clear that in today’s day in age the oppressive forces of capitalism perpetually act as battering rams that subject humanity to a “dis-embedded” social world, in which collective action problems ensue persistent socioeconomic inequity. We wish to make palpable how the insights of Marxism widely make apparent how the global socioeconomic system does not automatically generate efficient situations whereby unique organizations of production, exchange, and distribution guarantee the attainment of maximum social welfare.

The idea that humans are simple instrumentally rationalists, who supposedly oscillate like a homogenous globule of Hobbesian brutes, is conclusively a fiction. The radical political economy of Karl Marx is ripe to concretely expose the underlying complex fractures embedded in capitalism, which limit the capability of humans to safeguard social assets, social claims, and social ties requisite for sustaining an institutional nucleus of society for human survival. It is our goal to embrace first-rate scholarship that evinces capitalism’s impingement upon the accruement and management of resources vital for catholic cogitation, and realization, of conscious desires for humans to reach their full potential.

The relaunching of the newsletter is thus an attempt to make clear how the Marxist Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association offers not only the effective communicative space, but matchless intellectual tools, capacities, and resources that enable radical social scientists to formulate the methodological lenses that critically challenge the nature of current world dynamics. The general inclination is to pave that tortuous royal road to an emancipated sociological imagination.

"The Endless Crisis" reviewed in Marxist Sociology Section (ASA) Newsletter

 

Book Review: The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China, by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney

Review by David Fields and Daniel Auerbach

The Monthly Review, since its inception, has been carrying on some of the best works in Marxism. The analytical foundations of what has come to be called the Monthly Review School were set out by the economists Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Harry Magdoff. The lucidly rich works like Monopoly Capital by Baran & Sweezy and Magdoff’s piece on Imperialism (along with Harry Braverman’s work on Labor and Monopoly Capital) have sustained Marx’s invaluable insights into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Read rest here.

Innagural Issue of Marxist Sociology Section of American Sociological Association Newsletter

 

Colleagues,

I am sure many of you would be interested to know that the Marxist Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association has relaunched its monthly newsletter, of which yours truly is a co-editor (and wrote an introductory essay). Our inaugural issue can be seen here. Our website is here.