Alienation: An Introduction To Marx's Theory

• Publisher: Bookmarks E Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781909026155
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie politique

We live in a world in which human capacity to transform and control our lives has never been greater. Yet for most people the world is radically outside of their control. Their lives are dictated by the demands of employers and politicians. This is the phenomenon of alienation that the young radical Karl Marx began to diagnose in the early 1840s and remained pre-occupied with throughout his life.This accessible guide to the central aspect of Marx's philosophy takes the reader through the development of the concept and its relevence today.

Chapter 1

Alienation and Enlightenment

Marx did not develop his ideas about alienation in a vacuum. They have their roots in much of the political and philosophical debate of the Enlightenment and the years that followed it. This was a time characterised by increasing attempts to challenge the divine rule of kings, and pose the question of how society might be organised differently. This period saw a growing capitalist class rebelling against the backward, aristocratic feudalism which restricted their rights and, just as importantly, their ability to make profit. Radical philosophers and thinkers began to examine questions of political legitimacy: when is it legitimate for some people to rule over others?

A crucial part of this was the growth of what would now be called the social sciences, albeit in a far cruder form than what exists today. Broadly, the idea was that in order to determine the way in which human societies ought to be organised they had to understand human nature, and to examine the basic laws governing human behaviour. Human beings ought to, if possible, live according to their nature. If living according to their nature was impossible, then certain constraints could be enforced. For example, the 17th century English political theorist Robert Filmer used these kinds of arguments to justify the rule of kings, arguing that this was simply a re-creation of the natural authority of fatherhood, and that kings were the descendants of Adam, “the first father”. His contemporary Thomas Hobbes argued that people’s naturally hostile and competitive nature required the authority of a strong and ultimately all-powerful monarch for protection. For others in the Enlightenment, however, these arguments were increasingly turned to more radical conclusions.

The growth of political economy was important among these new ideas. Although these thinkers set the stage for modern economics, their concerns were much wider. Contemporary economics tends to ignore social and political dimensions, whereas these thinkers took them seriously, attempting to offer, as the title of Adam Smith’s most famous work suggests, “an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations”. Smith argued that human beings had a natural “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”,⁷ which gave rise inevitably to the division of labour to some people doing one kind of work and others doing another. This view of human nature is one that is remarkably resilient today, and it is one that emphasises the importance of individual exchange, and therefore of individual property rights.

This emphasis on individual property rights certainly suited the growing bourgeoisie. For the bourgeoisie it was important to be able to own property, but it was just as important to be able to sell property. It is worth noting that this is one of the earliest senses in which the word “alienation” occurs. Alienation was commonly used in writings on political economy to mean sale or transfer. This is the sense in which, for example, the American Declaration of Independence talks about “unalienable rights”—rights that cannot be transferred away to someone else. However, when it came to property, early political economists largely treated alienation in this sense as a positive thing which ought to be extended. As capitalism began to come into conflict with the old feudal order, the question of what things could be “alienated”, ie sold as property, became crucial. Smith wrote about feudalism holding back the “spirit of capitalism” because “the bourgeois cannot alienate the things of the community without the permission of the king”.⁸

An important successor to Adam Smith was David Ricardo. Ricardo developed the project of political economy further, in particular developing what has become known as the labour theory of value. This was a contribution to an argument about the source of the value of particular commodities. Smith had seen the value of commodities as being a combination of the various factors which went into producing them—machinery, rent and so forth. Ricardo argued that it was in fact labour which was the important source of value. The value of a commodity is set by the amount of labour that is required to produce it.

This had two important consequences. Firstly, it meant that there was an antagonistic relationship between capitalists and workers. For capitalists to make profit, they had to pay workers less than the value that their labour produced. Secondly, it meant that different commodities could be understood as “embodying” certain quantities of human labour. In producing commodities workers put their labour into an object, and thus externalise it, place it outside of themselves. This notion becomes important for Marx’s arguments about alienation, as I will discuss in future chapters.

It is worth noting that the sense of alienation employed by the political economists directly informed Marx’s more developed theory. These economists were a huge influence on Marx, and much of his life was spent developing, expanding and criticising their ideas. The influence of this sense of alienation can be seen in some of Marx’s earliest writings, for example in his 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question”, in which he notes that “selling is the practice of alienation”.⁹ Here he is consciously playing on various senses of alienation: selling something involves literally transferring it away; the production and sale of a commodity involves the embodying and externalising of human labour; and, finally, certain forms of economic activity are the root of alienation in the broader sense of not feeling at home in the world.

Another important political theorist of the Enlightenment is the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote a number of radical essays criticising the established order in the 18th century. Rousseau’s ideas were motivated by a radical critique of the right of kings to rule, but also by a deep suspicion of the transformations going on around him. He witnessed the growth of cities and the ensuing poverty and deprivation alongside enormous wealth, and asked the question, “Is this really progress?”

Rousseau entered an essay-writing competition to answer the question, “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?” In other words, had the great strides made in scientific understanding and technology improved the condition of humans? Rousseau’s radical answer was not just that it had not, but that it had made things worse. Culture, science and technology had corrupted humankind. He rejected the idea that human beings were selfish or aggressive by nature. Rather, “Man is naturally good, and it is only through their institutions that men become bad”.¹⁰ There are two radical insights here. Firstly, that technological progress did not automatically bring about improvement in human life, but also brought misery and suffering. Secondly, that the vast range of “moral” problems in society—people’s selfishness and greed, as well as their suffering and unhappiness—are a result of their social institutions, not anything “natural”.

Rousseau’s work began as a criticism of science, technology and high culture, but he quickly broadened to study the inequality among people. He moved from blaming science and culture to blaming inequality for society’s problems: “The first source of evil is inequality; from inequality arose riches… From riches are born luxury and idleness; from luxury arose fine arts, and from idleness the sciences”.¹¹ Rousseau saw political institutions as separating human beings from a “state of nature”. This was not Hobbes’s state of “war of all against all”, but a condition of natural equality in which humans were happy and fulfilled:

I see an animal less strong than some, less agile than others, but, all things considered the most advantageously organised of all: I see him sating his hunger beneath an oak, slaking his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed at the foot of the same tree that supplied his meal, and with that his needs are satisfied.¹²

However, as humans become organised into societies so as to survive, they develop a sort of pride and vanity (amour propre). Their need to be recognised and acknowledged within society leads to hierarchies and eventually divisions.

There is a great deal of debate about how much Rousseau’s arguments about the state of nature and the development of human societies are supposed to be understood as a genuine historical story, or merely as a theoretical construction about human nature. However, this is less significant than the thought that there is something about modern society which persistently denies human nature. People in modern society are separated from the natural conditions in which they might be happy and fulfilled, and as a consequence social problems develop.

However, Rousseau saw this as a general feature of human society. Because inequality was rooted in the vanity and pride caused by living in societies, it could not be avoided. This was partly because for Rousseau human beings were not naturally social animals—after all, his description of man in nature quoted above was a strikingly solitary one. This meant that for humans living in societies it was necessary to make agreements which restricted the effect of these inequalities. This is Rousseau’s famous “social contract”.

The social contract itself was nothing new, but Rousseau’s formulation was different from others’ (John Locke’s, for example). Previous social contract theories tended to argue that people should only agree to give certain powers to the state that are necessary for the common good. Most of their rights, especially to property, they retained for themselves. Rousseau, however, argued that this was impossible. Since there were no rights in the state of nature, rights could come about only through social convention in the social contract. Individuals therefore had to give themselves up entirely to the community or state. Using broadly the same sense of alienation as the political economists, Rousseau described this as “the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community”.¹³

The state, then, was founded on each individual alienating themselves, their rights and their individual liberty. This can be seen as a reaction against the idea of “universal saleability” promoted by some economists. Rousseau argued that it was not legitimate to alienate away certain kinds of liberty except to the state:

To alienate is to give or to sell…but for what does a people sell itself?… Even if each man could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children: they are born man and free; their liberty belongs to them, and no one but they has the right to dispose of it.¹⁴

Thus you could not agree to put yourself into slavery, for example. The solution, however, was collective alienation, where everyone gave up everything to the community.

Rousseau did not, however, argue against private property or individual liberty. He thought that this act of collective alienation was necessary precisely to safeguard private property, to make its concept meaningful. He wrote that the principle of private property was “the most sacred of all the rights of citizenship, and even more important in some respects than liberty itself”.¹⁵ Property, and liberty, meant nothing if they did not exist within a society which recognised them and gave them legitimacy.

Much of Rousseau’s work can undoubtedly be seen as an early reaction to the conditions of capitalism, its degrading effect on working people, and its gross inequalities. However, the radicalism of his critique was blunted by an inability to see beyond the structures of capitalism itself, and by an account of human nature which was pessimistic about the ability of humans to coexist socially.

Chapter 2

Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx

By the time Marx was a student the thinkers of the Enlightenment had given way to another towering figure of Western philosophy, GWF Hegel. Hegel’s ideas and system dominated the philosophical scene, and most people framed their arguments within the terms set by Hegel’s work. Broadly, these could be divided into two camps, with the Right Hegelians emphasising Hegel’s more conservative aspects, and the Left Hegelians emphasising the more radical possibilities of his system. Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, who was to become a lifetime collaborator, found himself among the Left Hegelians, young radicals who attacked the repressive Prussian monarchy.

A crucial feature of Hegel’s philosophy had been his attempts to develop a philosophy of history. It’s easy to understand why this was. He had lived through the period beginning with the French Revolution and culminating with the Napoleonic Wars. Europe underwent enormous turmoil and transformation, and it became of huge importance to grasp that transformation as part of a historical process. Hegel saw history as first and foremost the history of human freedom. An important feature of Hegel’s theory is the way in which it describes how certain stages in human history are superseded by others. Hegel saw stages in the history of humanity as temporary, and containing tendencies towards each being overcome and replaced by a new, higher, and better stage. This was a major advance on theories such as those of Rousseau which tended to see a simple division between “civilisation” and a “state of nature”, with no sense that it might be possible to overcome conflicts in a new form of society rather than go back.

For Hegel, human spirit was free, but it did not always recognise itself as such. The process of history was the process of humans coming to recognise themselves as free. Different social formations offered different possibilities for this kind of recognition, and each successive historical stage came closer to this realisation. For Hegel, Napoleon embodied the spirit of the French Revolution and thus was the human embodiment of this freedom marching across Europe.

Hegel had a very particular conception of freedom, however, which was based on an understanding of freedom as self-realisation. Freedom was not merely about removing obstacles to our liberty, but about actively coming to recognise ourselves in the world. The contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor calls this way of thinking about freedom “expressivism”:

Man comes to know himself by expressing and hence clarifying what he is and recognising himself in this expression. The specific property of human life is to culminate in self-awareness through expression.¹⁶

On this view it is through expressing themselves creatively in the world that human beings come to understand themselves better, and thus live more fulfilling lives.

For Hegel, however, this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Alienation and Enlightenment
• 2. Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx
• 3. A universal class
• 4. Alienation from the labour process
• 5. Alienation from product
• 6. Commodity fetishism
• 7. Alienation from others
• 8. Alienation from self
• 9. Alienation from nature
• 10. Has work changed?
• 11. Species-being and controversies of interpretation
• 12. Collective control
• 13. Revolution
• Further reading
• Notes