Preliminary
The critique at work in the Manuscripts represents the most systematic form of the anthropological critique carried out by Marx in the texts of the period 1843–44, on the basis of Feuerbachian anthropology. (It is selfevident that since our aim is simply to sketch the finished outline of this critique, the problem of the relationship between Marx and Feuerbach lies outside the scope of our study.)
Let us try to define this critique by replying to three questions:
1. What is the object of this critique?
2. What is the subject of the critique, i.e. who carries out the critique?
3. What is the method of the critique?
The reply to these questions is provided by the last paragraph of the letter to Ruge of September 1843:
In short, therefore, we can formulate the trend of our journal1 as being: self-clarification (critical philosophy) to be gained by the present time of its struggles and desires. This is a work for the world and for us. It can only be the work of united forces. It is a matter of a confession, and nothing more. In order to secure remission of sins, mankind has only to declare them for what they actually are (Um sich ihre Sünden vergeben zu lassen, braucht die Menschheit sie nur fur das zu erklären, was sie sind, MECW 3, p. 145).
The whole critique hangs on the way in which the three terms that I have indicated – the subject, the object and the method – are linked together.
Let us take the object first. What is involved? It is a question of an experience whose subject is humanity. For a very long time humanity has been going through this experience, but blindly; now however, we have reached the point where it is possible for humanity to understand itself.
The ‘we’ represents the critical consciousness. It is this that first becomes conscious that the time has come when this experience has arrived at its termination, which is knowledge of itself. It is the privileged consciousness in which this experience first becomes clear to itself, or more precisely it is the words in which the language of this human experience expresses itself and at last knows its own truth.
The whole method is contained in this erklären. It means both to declare and to explain. This means that the statement of the facts for what they are (für das was sie sind), the statement of the human experience just as it presents itself, is already their explanation. It is enough for the words to be spoken which give expression to these facts (which Marx calls the sins of humanity). The statement of these facts is already knowledge of them, and their knowledge abolishes them as sins, since what made them sins was precisely not being known, being blind experience.
The most important part of what is said in this erklären is that, fundamentally, the explanation belongs to the same order as the statement, the announcement.
We can express this by means of another metaphor. We may say that the critique is a reading. The text in question is that experience the subject of which is humanity. What is it that constitutes that text, that statement? The text is woven out of contradictions. The form in which the human experience makes its development known is in the form of the contradiction. Every sphere of human experience (political, religious, ethical, economic, etc.) presents a certain number of contradictions. These contradictions are felt by individuals in what Marx calls ‘the present time of struggles and desires’.
The role of the critique is to say or to read – whatever the chosen metaphor – the contradiction, to declare it for what it is. What is it that establishes the difference between this and an ordinary statement, enabling it to be a critique? It is because it perceives behind those contradictions a more fundamental contradiction, that which is expressed by the concept of alienation.
The banal description of the concept of alienation is very familiar: the subject, man, expresses the predicates which constitute his essence in an external object. At the stage of alienation, this object becomes alien to him. The essence of man has passed into an alien being. In its turn this alien being – which is made up simply of man’s alienated essence – presents itself as the real subject and posits man as its object. In alienation, man’s own being exists in the form of his alien being, the human exists in a non-human form – reason in the form of non-reason.
It is this identification of man’s essence with his alien being which defines the position of the contradiction. That is to say, the contradiction is based on the separation of a subject from itself. The contradiction is separation, this is the important point to bear in mind in order to follow the whole logic of the critical discourse.
In experience, however, the structure of the contradiction is not given as such. It is expressed in a particular form. In fact the separation of man from his essence results in a division. Each of the separate spheres of the manifestation of human experience – spheres which correspond to the different predicates of the human essence – take on an autonomous reality. From this it follows that the contradiction always presents itself as the contradiction within a particular sphere. Any statement of the contradiction which restricts itself to that particular form is a unilateral and partial statement. The task of critique is to raise the particular contradiction to its general form.
Different concepts express this change of level. Marx speaks of the general form, the level of abstraction, true meaning. These terms are summed up in the general concept which describes the operation; that of Vermen-schlichung (literally ‘humanization’). To give to a contradiction its general form is to give it its human meaning: that is, the separation of man from his essence. This human meaning, of which the particular contradiction is the manifestation, is discovered by the critique by releasing the general form of the contradiction: the relation between the two terms whose separation is posed in the contradiction.
Let us take an example. In his article ‘On the Jewish Question’ Marx criticizes the way in which Bauer posed the problem of Jewish emancipation. For Bauer the problem is reduced to the relationship between the Jewish religion and the Christian state. Thus he does not consider the state in its general form but takes a particular type of state. Moreover, he considers Judaism in its religious aspect only, instead of giving to it its general human meaning.
Marx, on the other hand, carries out this transition to the general form. From the particular state/religion contradiction, he goes on to consider the contradiction: the state/assumptions about the state, which leads to the contradiction: the state/private property. At this level the fundamental contradiction appears, the fact that the essence of man exists outside man in the state.
From this example we see that critical discourse is:
1. The explanation of the fundamental meaning of the contradiction;
2. The rediscovery of the original unity.
This original unity is the unity of a subject and its essence. It is this unity of the subject man and his essence which defines the concept of truth in Feuerbach’s critique. This concept of truth enables us to locate the problem of the discourse that is opposed to critical discourse – i.e., speculative discourse. The latter may be characterized as an abstract discourse. This concept of abstraction in the anthropological critique is the basis of a fundamental misunderstanding. It refers both to a process which takes place in reality; and at the same time to the logical steps which belong to a certain type of discourse.
Abstract is in fact taken here in the sense of separated. The abstraction (separation) takes place when the human essence is separated from man, and his predicates fixed in an alien being. Speculation starts off from this abstraction, from this separation from the original unity. In that state the predicate exists separated from the subject. But this separation from the original unity is at the same time the setting up of a new unity – to the advantage of the estranged being in which the essence of the subject is alienated. That is what enables the predicate to pose as the true subject. That is how theologians, who start off from the division between man and his essence alienated in God, make God the real subject. In the same way speculative philosophy, i.e., Hegelian philosophy, starts off from thought separated from its subject, man, in order to make the abstract ideas the real subject of the experience.
Thus we read in Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (thesis 23):
[T]he being of God, according to Hegel, is actually nothing other the being of thought, or thought abstracted from the ego, that is, the thinker. The Hegelian philosophy has turned thought, that is, the subjective being – this, however, conceived without subject, that is, conceived as a being different from it – into Divine and Absolute Being.2
What is important here is that abstraction as an instrument of thought is disqualified. All thinking which seeks to proceed by scientific abstraction (in the sense explained by Marx in the general Introduction of 1857) is accused of maintaining the separation of the abstract moments from the human experience.
Thus in the Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy, Feuerbach characterizes abstraction as alienation:
To abstract means to posit the essence of nature outside nature … the essence of thought outside the act of thinking. The Hegelian philosophy has alienated man from himself in so far as its whole system is based on on these acts of abstraction. Although it again identifies what it separates, it does so only in a separate and mediated way.3
To anticipate, we may say that what is confused here in this theory of abstraction are the two processes which Marx distinguishes as the process of thought and the real process in the general Introduction of 1857.
To sum up these preliminary considerations on the concept of the critique, we distinguish between the three possible types of discourse from the viewpoint of the critique:
a discourse which takes place at the level of the phenomena, a one-sided discourse, which grasps a particular aspect of the contradiction only; two discourses which take place at the level of the essence: the critical discourse or the development of the true essence; and the speculative discussion or the development of the false essence.
We can now tackle the study of the critique in the Manuscripts.
(1) The Level of Political Economy
We shall not deal with the whole theoretical structure of the Manuscripts. We prefer to approach the text indirectly by asking ourselves the question: What is the place of political economy in the Manuscripts? Marx’s preface to these does not define the concept of political economy. Political economy appears as one item in the table of contents. Marx states that he will present the critique of the different kinds of subject-matter (law, ethics, politics, etc.), that he will show their connection later, and that, finally, he will show how speculative philosophy has made use of these materials in order to carry out its own constructions. There is no placing of political economy. In fact two things would have had to be placed: economic reality and economic discourse.
a) No placing of the economic reality
Here the economy does not appear as a basis or as a last resort. There is no setting up of an economic structure in the sense in which Marx understands it from The German Ideology onwards. Neither does it appear as the fundamental alienation produced by the reduction of other alienations (here I refer to Calvez’s outline).4 The alienations are presented right from the beginning as being all on the same level.
As a first placing we may define political economy, law, ethics, politics as different spheres of human experience. (Let us emphasize here the importance of this concept of experience, which comes really from Hegel. It is this concept, which is not worked out theoretically by Marx, which makes his theorizing possible. In his critical examination of Hegel in the Third Manuscript, this is what is not criticized. It is the implicit presence of this unrecognized and uncriticized concept that constitutes the condition which makes the young Marx’s critical discourse possible, and makes a scientific discourse impossible.) For economic reality appears only as one of the spheres, which express, each in its own way, the development and alienation of the human essence.
Nevertheless, this first placing is contradicted by a second placing. In the Third Manuscript Marx states that economic alienation is the alienation of real life (in contrast with religious alienation, which takes place only in consciousness). Therefore the abolition of economic alienation involves the abolition of all other alienations.
How is this transition possible? What we have is an expansion of the concept of the economy, in such a way that it comes to include all the relations of man with nature (in the concepts of production and consumption) and all the relations of men between themselves (in the concept of exchange). Hence the economy covers the whole field of human experience; it is merely the form taken by the very concept of experience.
Thus the localization of economic reality offends in one case by its absence and the other by its excessive presence. But in both the result is the same; Marx did not set up a separate field of political economy.
b) No placing of economic discourse
There is one remarkable fact in the Manuscripts. The problem of political economy as a discourse with claims to be scientific is not really posed. It is true that in the Second Manuscript Marx talks of the progress of political economy, but this is only a progress in cynicism: economists admit more and more frankly the inhumanity of political economy.
In fact, for Marx, the category of discourse does not become a preferential category until it concerns the essence (either as a speculative discourse concerning a false essence, or a critical discourse concerning the true essence). At the level at which we are here, the discourse of the economists is taken only as a reflection of the facts. There is no disjunction between economic facts and economic science. This absence of disjunction is expressed by Marx when he talks of the level of political economy. The expression ‘level of political economy’ defines on the one hand a certain stage of development of humanity, a stage of development which manifests itself by phenomena such as competition, pauperization, etc. But it also refers to the conceptual level at which the economists’ discussion takes place. A considered consciousness proper to it corresponds to this order of the phenomena. In other words, the considered perception of phenomena which in Capital Marx characterizes as the ‘simple conscious expression of the apparent movement’ is validated here, and the concepts of classical economy seem only to express this perception. Note for example in the First Manuscript what Marx calls the ‘laws of the economy’. These are the expression of a state of things that corresponds to the stage of political economy, i.e., to a certain stage of development of humanity.
In his essay Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,5 written several months before, Engels went about things differently. He attempted a critique of the concepts of political economy (for example, the concepts of value). He made the contradiction internal to these concepts the sign of a more fundamental contradiction linked to private property. In Marx’s Manuscripts, on the contrary, no economic concept as such is criticized. All the concepts are validated at the level of political economy. They express the facts adequately. Simply they do not comprehend them.
Thus political economy appears as the mirror in which the economic facts are reflected. This mirror concept is explicitly developed in Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: the state is the mirror in which the contradictions of civil society are reflected in their true significance. This theme is latent also in the letter to Ruge. Marx explains there that although it does not matter from where the critique begins, there are special places where the contradictions come to be reflected; these are the state and religion. Here it is political economy which plays the role of mirror.
We can now understand that phrase from the preface to the Manuscripts: ‘my results have been attained by means of a wholly empirical analysis based on a conscientious critical study of political economy’ (MECW 4, p. 231). It is because the discourse of political economy is a mirror that the reading of the economists can pass for an empirical analysis, and that it can be a critique of the contradictions in economic reality.
(2) The Critical Elaboration
The critique is not located at the level of the terms of political economy. In fact, it uses uncritically all of its concepts, particularly those of Adam Smith, in order to refer to economic phenomena.
In fact the critique is more fundamentally a critique of the text as a whole. Once the statement of economic discourse has been worked out, the critique intervenes. We will raise ourselves above the level of political economy to give in its general form the contradiction set out in the economists’ discourse. This change of level is made clear by Marx at the beginning of the essay on Alienated Labour. It is emphasized by the opposition between the two verbs: fassen (express) and begreifen (to comprehend):
Political economy starts from the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses (fassen) in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend (begreifen) these laws, i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property (MECW 3, pp. 270–1).
Political economy grasps the laws which show the movement of private property. It does not comprehend these laws in their internal connections, it does not comprehend them as expressions of the movement of the essence of private property. It is this comprehension which is the proper task of the critique. How will it operate? Here the problem of the starting-point is posed. The starting-point cannot be an abstraction. It must belong to the category of the phenomena. On the other hand, in principle this phenomenon is unimportant. The starting-point should be what Marx calls ‘an actual economic fact’. Marx first sets out this fact and then formulates its concept:
We proceed from an actual economic fact. The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation (Entwertung) of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value (Verwertung) of the world of things. Labour produces not only commodities: it produces both itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general. This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces – labour’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization (Verwirklichung) of labour, appears as loss of realization (Entwirklichung) for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement (Entfremdung), as alienation (Entäusserung) (ibid., pp. 271–2).
Impoverishment is the economic fact from which Marx begins. The more wealth he produces, the poorer the labourer becomes. From this fact Marx proceeds to an analysis of the essence. This fact expresses something, this phenomenon expresses an essence. Impoverishment manifests the process, the general and human form of which is alienation.
Thus the economic fact undergoes an elaboration which enables him to reveal its meaning. Between these two paragraphs we have the transposition of one structure into another. Beneath the statement of the economic facts, a text of reference has been slipped, the text of the anthropological critique which states the process of alienation. Impoverishment – economic – has become alienation – anthropological.
It all takes place on the level of two statements, which I give in simplified form:
– Man produces God;
– The worker produces an object.
Man produces God, i.e., he objectifies in God the predicates which make up his essence. So now when we say that the worker produces an object we start from the prosaic concept of production, but by means of this concept the slide takes place that enables us to think of the relationship between the worker and his product on the model of the relationship between God and man in religion. So productive activity is identified with generic activity (the activity of man in so far as he affirms his own essence) and the object produced is identified with the objectification of the generic being of man. The fact that this product should go to increase the power of capital then appears as the final stage of alienation, that in which man becomes the object of his object.
So the schema of religious alienation has been projected onto the worker–product relationship. In religious alienation there is in actual fact equivalence between man and his product. God is made up only of man’s predicates. He is thus a completely transparent object in which man can recognize himself, and the end of alienation appears logically as man taking back what he objectified in God. So the transparent nature of the subject/object relationship, given as a basis for the critique of religion and justified by the very nature of the object, is here introduced by Marx into the relationship of the worker to his product. The worker’s product is supposed to be something in which the worker should recognize himself.
This transposition has been made possible because there has been a play of words on the concept of production; also on the concept of object. To say that the worker produces an object appears quite innocent, but into this vague concept of object the Feuerbachian concept of object is introduced. The latter is expressed as follows by Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity:
The object of man is nothing other than his essence, itself, taken as an object.
The object to which a subject relates by its essence and of necessity is none other than the subject’s own essence, but which has been objectified.
Thus the object produced by the worker appears as a Feuerbachian object, as the objectification of man’s own essence.
What makes the operation of the critique possible is a play on the terms production and object. By moving from their vague (undetermined) economic meaning to their anthropological meaning, these two concepts overturn the discussion given in the discourse referred to. This process, which enables an economic law to become an anthropological law (the general form of the contradiction), we will call amphibology.
(3) Amphibology and its Basis
Take on the one hand the structure of alienation that we referred to above. The following inversion is produced in alienation: the generic life of man becomes the means of his individual life; his essence becomes the means of his existence. Thus in ‘On the Jewish Question’ Marx shows how the Declaration of the Rights of Man makes political life, which represents the generic life of man, simply a means of preserving the selfish interests of the members of bourgeois society.
Take on the other hand an economic concept, the concept of means of subsistence. We know that according to classical economics the value of labour is equal to the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the worker. We know also that in Capital Marx brings the critique to bear on the concept of the value of labour itself, and shows that it is no more than an irrational expression of the value of labour-power. At our present level such a critique is not involved; nevertheless it is possible to set out the following equation:
Labour of the worker = Activity providing the worker with his means of subsistence.
However, in the anthropology of the young Marx, labour is the manifestation of the generic life of man. We have, therefore:
Labour of the worker = Manifestation of the generic activity of the worker.
Therefore:
Manifestation of the generic activity of the worker = Activity providing for the worker his means of subsistence;
or:
Manifestation of generic life = Means of maintaining individual existence.
Here we find the means/end reversal characteristic of alienation. The concept of means of subsistence has facilitated the overlapping of the economic law by the anthropological structure.
We have given here an example of an operation which is not stated by Marx explicitly, but on which the possibility of his discourse is based. A similar demonstration could be carried out with a certain number of the other concepts in the Manuscripts. We can now set out a table of the amphibologies in which we shall see how the terms and the connections between the terms (laws) of classical economy are immediately transposable into critical (anthropological) discourse (see the tables below):
1. Table of Amphibologies
| Economy | Critique |
| Worker | Man |
| Labour | Generic activity |
| Product | Object |
| Capital | Estranged being (fremdes Wesen) |
| Means of subsistence | Means of life (Lebensmittel) |
| Value | Value (Wert) = dignity (Würde) |
| Exchange | Community |
| Trade | Intercourse (Verkehr) |
| Wealth | Wealth (Feuerbach’s Sinnlichkeit) |
2. Table of Relevant Oppositions
| Man | Thing |
| Means | End |
Remarks
a) The first amphibology is the worker/man amphibology. The subject of the process at the beginning is the worker. So we might think we are starting here from a point of view which is that of class struggle. In fact this is not so. In the second paragraph of our text that worker becomes a producer. Later that producer becomes simply a man. Let us re-read the beginning of our text: ‘The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size’ (MECW 3, p. 271). Let us compare now the text of the Third Manuscript with this phrase.
‘Man becomes ever poorer as man, his need for money becomes ever greater if he wants to master the hostile power. The power of his money declines in inverse proportion to the increase in the volume of production: that is, his neediness grows as the power of money increases (ibid., p. 306).
The alienation has become alienation of man in general.
b) The amphibology of value is tangible in the pair Verwertung/Entwertung to which we referred above. Into the classic economic concept of value there has crept an ethical concept of value, in which we can recognize the (Kantian) concept of dignity.
c) The amphibology of exchange is set out principally in Marx’s notebooks in which he commented on the economists he had read before writing the Manuscripts. Exchange is understood anthropologically as intersubjectivity. At the stage of political economy, exchange appears as the alienated form of the human community (Gemeinwesen). The concept of commerce (Verkehr) is also used with the same intersubjective resonance (even in The German Ideology the concept of Verkehrsform posed as the equivalent of the concept of productive relations retains an anthropological content).
d) The other amphibologies have already been explained with the exception of the amphibology of wealth, to which we must return.
We can now define what the begreifen (comprehending) which characterizes the critique is. It consists of a solution by substitution of the terms of the equations in which the contradiction is posed.
These equations are, for example:
Appreciation of the world of things = Depreciation of the world of men;
or
Value of labour = Value of the means of subsistence.
The solution is found when we state the fundamental equation of identity:
Human essence = Alien being.
This equation indicates to us in fact the principle of the contradiction, the separation of the human essence from the human subject. In the Manuscripts this separation is expressed by the concept of alienated labour. Also, alienated labour is the concept (Begriff) which is propounded as the solution for all the equations.
How is it possible, starting from this definition of the concept, to set up the critical discourse of political economy? Marx indicates this to us:
Just as we have derived the concept of private property from the concept of estranged, alienated labour by analysis, so we can develop every category of political economy with the help of these two factors: and we shall find again in each category, e.g., trade, competition, capital, money, only a particular and developed expression of the first elements (ibid., p. 281).
This means that we shall discover the same structure to which we have referred in all the categories of political economy. This should not surprise us; the study of the process of amphibology has shown us that by starting from each category, we may discover an expression of the fundamental contradiction – the separation of the essence from the subject.
We can express what this begreifen is in another way by returning to our first metaphor of language. The begreifen consists in revealing the more fundamental language which is contained within the economic statement. The movement of begreifen, which includes the connections of the facts, is the elaboration of the language in which human experience expresses itself. Or, if you like, the critique is the translation and our table of amphibologies is a dictionary. But it is a very remarkable dictionary. In it we find a term-by-term equivalence, and not just the terms, but the statements themselves correspond to them and are equivalent.
This is only possible through a special kind of encounter, the encounter of an explicit anthropological discourse and the anthropological discourse which is implicit in classical economics. In fact the political economy with which we are concerned here is the ‘pre-critical’ economy which has not yet been subjected to the decisive critique which Marx makes of it in Capital. It is a political economy which speaks of production in general, without being able to formulate the concept of the specificity of a mode of production, which conceives of economic development by starting from the activity of economic subjects.
Let us take one of the definitions of classical economics, that which defines capital as accumulated labour. We see clearly the anthropological schema which can insinuate itself here, the amphibology which will not be removed until in Capital Marx defines capital as a relation of production, so carrying out the radical change which brought the economic discourse over from the field of anthropology into that of science. In the same way, texts such as the celebrated passage in Boisguillebert about money, which should be the servant of man and which has become his master, present themselves for the examination of the anthropological critique. The political economy with which Marx is concerned is thus saddled with a whole implicit anthropology. It usually presents itself in a more or less explicit fashion, varying in particular cases, within the framework of a theory of society. This theory of society refers back to a theory of human subjectivity (which may be presented as a theory of needs, a theory of interests, a theory of passions, etc.), to a theory of intersubjectivity, of relationships between human subjects, and to a theory of the relationships of man to nature. The very concepts which make up its field, those of exchange, industry, etc., are far from being untainted by psychological or anthropological implications. So the anthropological theory of the young Marx presents itself precisely as a general theory of the relationships of man with nature and with man. In the same way there is in classical economics a more or less implicit theory of the natural order and of its perversion (we have an example of this in the text of Boisguillebert mentioned already). So the theory of alienation is the systematization of this theory of the perversion. In this way the anthropological critique may be presented as the clarification and systematization of the anthropological discussion implicit in classical economics.
(I only raise this problem in a very general way. Naturally it ought to be studied much more deeply. Perhaps it could also be approached differently by posing the question of a double relationship: the relationship of the concepts of labour, alienation, etc., in the Manuscripts with the theoretical working out of these concepts in Hegel, and the relationship of Hegel to political economy.)
Let us try now to work out more precisely what it is that makes possible the overlapping of the two discourses; consider the above table of amphibologies. What makes the translation possible, the transition from one column to the other, is the existence of a common bearer. The bearer of the amphibology is a subject, the subject man.
In order to see how this bearer operates, let us study the following sentence: ‘We took our departure from a fact of political economy – the estrangement of the worker and his product. We have formulated this fact in conceptual terms as estranged, alienated labour’ (MECW 3, p. 278).
The necessary condition of the critical transposition is that the subject-predicate-object structure should function. This is made possible thanks to the introduction of the possessive, his product. However little thought we may give to it, we know that this relationship of possession is one merely of appearance, and in relation to the worker in large-scale industry it has very little meaning. But by introducing it the field of economic phenomena, it is possible to centre around a subject. This subject is not given in the worker. It is in his production. In other words it is the release of the predicate which determines the subject.
How can this ‘his’, this relationship of subject/predicate possession, be introduced? It is the concept of production itself from which it is inferred. Because it is not defined scientifically, as it will be in Capital, i.e. situated within a process, this concept has only to indicate an act taking place in the sphere of activity of a subject, in a subject/object relationship. More generally, the concepts of classical economics (society, product, wealth, revenue, etc.), because they have not been subjected to a critique, determine the place of a subject.
If we anticipate and confront the concept of production which is involved here with the concept of process of production in Capital, we see that it is the concept of relationship of production which makes it possible to cancel the amphibologies by carrying out the de-subjectification of the economic categories. Here it is its absence which determines the subject/man as the necessary bearer of these categories.
We see now why the non-critique of the terms of political economy is the condition for the critique of political economy, how the non-determination of a domain of political economy is the condition for the determination of economic phenomena as expressions of an anthropological process.
In this connection it is not unimportant to ask who the representatives of political economy in the Manuscripts are. If we refer to the texts quoted in the First Manuscript we find that they belong to two categories – some, the majority, are taken from Adam Smith, others are taken from Buret and Sismondi (representing the humanist critique of Ricardo’s cynicism). It is from these texts that Marx derives the laws of political economy, which he transposes in the anthropological theory. On the other hand, we may note in this same collection of First Manuscript texts an almost complete absence – that of Ricardo. No doubt Ricardo is mentioned several times, mainly in the Second Manuscript. It is he who expresses cynically all the inhuman consequences of political economy. But Marx does not reflect here what it is that provides Ricardo’s originality in the heart of classical economics. It is Ricardo who expresses from within political economy the difference between the essence and the phenomenon. For the young Marx, however, this difference falls outside the economic discourse. It is this precisely which defines the difference between the economic discourse and the critical discourse that is its meaning.
In Capital, Marx grasps Ricardo’s originality and locates at this level his own differences with the conceptions of Ricardo, in so far as they represent what is most fundamental in classical economics. At the level of the Manuscripts Ricardo appears as the man of abstraction, he who, having defined competition as something accidental, denies the apparent economic phenomena in order to impose his own abstractions. (This is what Marx reproaches him with in his notebooks.)
In the same way it is Ricardo who reduces the importance of subjective factors in economics. The young Marx thinks of this reduction only as an expression of the inhumanity of the laws of political economy.
And if Marx does not grasp the importance of Ricardo at his true level, it is because we are involved in the Manuscripts less with a critique of the principles of political economy than with a real theory of wealth. (We shall see later what we must understand by this.)
Below the table of the amphibologies I have written what I call the table of relevant oppositions – person/thing and means/end. It is these oppositions which give the anthropological discourse its meaning. At the same time we are directed by them to the field in which the relevance of these oppositions is located, that of Kantian ethics.
Here I want only to draw attention to a problem. Although there has been abundant theorizing about the problem of the relationship between Marx and Hegel, no one has thought about the relationship which is, perhaps, decisive in order to be able to understand the break between the critique of the young Marx and that of the mature Marx, the Kant/Marx relationship.
We may wonder whether the territory in which the young Marx stands is not that outlined by the Kantian oppositions (heteronomy/autonomy, person/thing, means/end). It would then be necessary to study the displacement of these oppositions in Capital; for example the displacement of the opposition person/thing in the concepts of bearer and personification. Likewise we would have to ask to what extent the concepts of means and ends of the mode of capitalist production bring about this desubjectification of the means/end contradiction.
These few remarks may help to explain why the supersession of the problematic of the First Manuscript carried out in the Third Manuscript is a Hegelian supersession.
(4) Development of the Contradiction: History and Subjectivity, or Motors and Motives
This critical discussion has enabled us to define the fundamental contradiction; the loss of man in his object, his separation from himself, the alienation of the human essence in the movement of private property.
We know how the theoretical method of the problematic of the Manuscripts develops; alienated labour appears first as a consequence of private property, but the analysis reveals that private property is itself a consequence of alienated labour. The problem of the origin of alienated labour is then posed: either alienated labour is an accident, and we are then driven back to a problematic of the origin of bad history, similar to that of the philosophy of the Enlightenment; or alternatively alienation is a necessary process, which is inherent in the development of humanity. It is this second solution which is chosen by Marx in the Third Manuscript, in which the alienation of the human essence appears as the condition of the realisation of a human world.
Here again we are not going to take up a position at the centre of Marx’s explicit problematic. Our purpose is to reply to the following question: What is there in the relationship between the activity of economic subjects and the historical development of private property which makes possible the setting up of the field of political economy?
We will pose this problem by following the misfortunes of a particular character, and about whom we shall have to speak again with regard to Capital – the capitalist. We will begin with a phrase from Adam Smith which Marx quotes: ‘The plans and speculations of the employers of capitals regulate and direct all the most important operations of labour’ (MECW 3, p. 250).
We see that Marx returns in several places to settle accounts with this determination of the subjectivity of the capitalist as the motor for the development of the economy, declaring that the working of the economy is regulated by the decisions of the capitalist. Two concepts express this function of the capitalist’s subjectivity; the concepts of mood (Laune) and calculation (Berechnung). This theory of subjectivity and calculation is particularly clear in the text of the Third Manuscript entitled ‘Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property’. It involves a new definition of political economy; it now appears as the science of calculation. For example the law of the value of labour shows the fact that political economy calculates for the worker the most restricted life possible. Political economy is thought of here – which was already the case in Engels’s text – as the direct expression of capitalist subjectivity. The laws of political economy then appear to be orders expressing the will of the capitalist. These laws express economic phenomena to the extent that they are those which determine the development of private property.
This is where in the text such expressions as ‘to obey the laws of the economy’ come from, as well as ‘to conform to the lessons of the economy’. Thus the worker obeys the laws of the economy in obeying the orders of capitalist calculation, of which the economist is the spokesman.
But should this capitalist subjectivity – the role of which we have just examined – be itself lost in the movement of private property, in the development at the stage of political economy? It is not without interest to see how this loss takes place.
A first model which presents itself to Marx to conceive this is the Adam Smith model of competition bringing about the balancing of subjective attitudes and so establishing the harmony of society as the result of egotistical interests. This model is recalled by Marx (MECW 3, p. 250). We may make a remark on this subject. The importance accorded to competition in the Manuscripts – and even more in Engels’s text – marks the still ideological nature of this critique of political economy, the confusion between what Marx in Capital distinguishes as the real movement and the apparent movement. However, in this Manuscript Adam Smith’s model is not retained by Marx. He criticizes Adam Smith’s thesis of the fall in profit due to competition.
Also Marx makes use of a second model which we can see at work in the text ‘Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property’. Here Marx develops the idea of the transition from squandered wealth to industrial wealth. The first stage of this dialectic is that of squandered wealth, the capitalist who enjoys himself. This first stage is called on to disappear into the second stage, that of calculation. The calculating capitalist is the industrial capitalist. He carries out the subordination of enjoyment to calculation to wealth. The stage of the calculating capitalist is the last stage in the development of private property.
Pleasure is therefore subsumed under capital, and the pleasure-taking individual under the capital-accumulating individual, whilst formerly the contrary was the case. The decrease in the interest rate is therefore a symptom of the annulment of capital only inasmuch as it is a symptom of the growing domination of capital perfecting itself – of the estrangement which is growing and therefore hastening to its annulment (MECW 3, p. 316).
Why is this stage of capitalist calculation that which precedes the suppression of the capitalist? It is because capitalist subjectivity (calculation) has created the objectivity in which it will disappear, which will make possible the end of alienation, i.e., wealth.
Let us make clear the amphibology which is posed above. The wealth which is the result of calculation is the deployed wealth of human powers. It represents the humanization of the perceptible world which alienation has made possible, the end of the movement by which the natural objects of the world have become natural human objects, constituting a world in which man can discover and recognize his own essence, that alienated essence which, in the form of alienated labour, constituted wealth.
The amphibology consists in this: that which is included in the (economic) concept of essence is the concept of Sinnlichkeit. The Sinnlichkeit is for Feuerbach the perceptible externality in which man recognizes himself. For Marx, this recognition, this identity of the Sinnlichkeit (perceptible reality) and the human can be only a result. It is the result of alienated labour the creator of wealth:
Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being (MECW 3, p. 301).
We see here what this loss of the economic subject in the development of private property means. In its disappearance the real subject of the movement, humanity, appears. Through the motives of capitalism it is the development of the human essence which has made a path for itself, which has played the part of motor.
What we find here is the Hegelian model of the Preface to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History. The real subject of history makes use of illusory subjective states in order to impose its laws. The real motor of history is human essence. And the stage of wealth is that in which humanity can recapture it, by recognizing itself in the perceptible world.
So, now we can state precisely what the level of political economy is. The stage of political economy is that in which the subjective essence of wealth appears, i.e., labour. The discourse of political economy recognizes the essence of man as the essence of wealth, but it does not know the alienation of that essence. It does not recognize that labour, the source of wealth, is alienated labour. What the economy knows as the essence of man is his alienated essence.
At the same time we understand the basis of the difficulty which we emphasized in the first section – the absence of a dislocation between the economic reality and the economic discourse, which is expressed in the concept of the level of political economy. That concept expresses a certain stage in the development of that human experience, of which we spoke at the beginning, it expresses a certain consciousness of itself of humanity. But this self-awareness of humanity is an indirect consciousness of itself. Humanity only knows its essence in the form of alienation, or, what expresses the same situation, it knows it only as one of its determinations (political economy, says Marx, knows man only as a capitalist or as a worker, it knows labour only as activity directed towards profit, etc.). By making the economy an anthropological history of the relationships of man with nature and with man, and so by knowing economic objectivity only in the form of intersubjectivity and feeling (Sinnlichkeit), Marx made possible the approach which caused this objectivity to disappear into a dialectic of human experience, which finally is no more than a dialectic of consciousness of self.
(5) Critical Discourse and Scientific Discourse
If we collect together all the elements of the critical discourse we see that they assume a certain shape, which is the shape of the conditions of the impossibility of scientific discourse.
The starting-point of the critical discourse is the rejection of abstraction. What is involved is in effect the history of a subject. The abstraction of thought being identified with the separation from the elements of reality, this abstraction can only consider a separate stage of the history of the subject. It does not allow the attainment of an understanding of that history. But because of its theory of the concrete, the critique condemns its discourse to be only reduplication. It is a reduplication of its own starting-point, i.e., what is provided for it by ordinary experience and the already established discourses.
To try to show this, we refer to the scheme provided by Althusser to think out the concept of theoretical practice (‘On the Materialist Dialectic’, in For Marx). We know that theoretical practice is a process of transformation which produces a specific object – knowledge. By means of the concepts of a ‘theory’, a Generality II, it transforms the given, i.e., the generalities already worked out by previous theoretical practice (Generality I), thus producing new concepts, some new knowledge (Generality III).
Here the Generality I is represented by the economic concepts of classical political economy (production, labour, capital, revenue, wealth…). Generality II is the anthropological theory whose work, referred to by such terms as Erklärung, Vermenschlichung, begreifen, produces the anthropological concepts of production, labour, wealth, alien being, etc. We can characterize this transformation in two ways:
– From the viewpoint of the relationship between Generality I and Generality III, the anthropological concepts are, as we have seen, the translation of economic concepts. The whole transformation is reduced to this translation. No new economic concept is produced.
– From the viewpoint of the relationship between Generality II and Generality III. The concepts of the ‘theory’ (Generality II), the concepts of essence, alienation, generic activity, etc., are only reproduced, reduplicated in the anthropological concepts of Generality III.
Thus the process of transformation carried out by the critique is only the caricature, the begrifflose Form, of theoretical practice. It is in this very special structure of the process of transformation which transforms nothing that the young Marx’s ideological theory is presented.
We see everything that is implied in the young Marx’s theory of abstraction. It is not by chance that, in the 1857 Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the touchstone which distinguishes science from ideology is the theory of abstraction. Neither is it by chance that most of the distortions of Marxist theory have in common that they are based on a certain ideology of the concrete.
In the same way we can see how the pair: theory of abstraction/theory of the subject, prevents posing the problem of the setting up of the field of political economy as a field of objectivity.
So we see:
1) The setting up of objectivity is in fact reduced to the development of the history of a subject. The latent concept of experience removes the possibility of setting up a field of science.
2) On the other hand, if we are never concerned with anything other than a history of the human essence, it is not possible to set up specific objectives which would give rise to specific scientific discourses. In effect we are discovering the same history everywhere. Everywhere it is the human essence which is being expressed.
This is what Feuerbach expresses in his Preliminary Theses (no. 62):
According to language, the name ‘man’ is clearly a particular one, but according to truth it is the name of all names. The predicate ‘many-named’ duly belongs to man; whatever man names or expresses, he always expresses his own essence.6
In the same way as it is the name of man which we should discover in each object, so, also, it is a theory of man which we rediscover in each of the theses in which the young Marx’s critical theory is expressed.
We can now set them out in a sort of table:
| Theory of critique | Thesis of the irrelevance of the starting-point. Thesis of the mirror. Thesis of non-abstraction. |
| Theory of contradiction | Concept of contradiction as the separation of subject from its essence, and the inversion of act and subject. |
| ‘Theory of objectivity’ | Objectivity is made up by the development of the history of a subject. There are no specific fields of objectivity. |
All of these theses which sketch out the form of the critical theory reflect one another, and all express the same theory of man. This theory reaches its ultimate point in the Manuscripts. It finds its complete form in the text of the Third Manuscript on communism.
In this essay in which Marx develops a strictly Hegelian dialectic, in which communism is defined in the same terms used by Hegel to define absolute knowledge, we are involved in a discussion which is both perfect in its logical rigour, and also untenable (i.e., untenable within the framework of a theory which has in view effective revolutionary activity).
In addition this discussion has no sequel. The new object discovered by the critique, political economy, appears to have been absorbed entirely by the critique. In reality it is this object which imposes the shattering of the critical model and the re-organization of the whole of Marx’s problematic.