BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
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I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
In The Holy Family Marx draws an important distinction between the alienation endured by the worker and the alienation endured by the capitalist in bourgeois society:
The possessing classes and the class of the proletariat present pictures of the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at home in and confirmed by this self-estrangement, recognizes its estrangement as its special power, and enjoys in it the semblance of a human existence; the latter feels annihilated in its estrangement, and glimpses in it its impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.1
My first task is to explain what Marx means in this difficult passage, and why he thinks it is true. It is impossible to fulfill this task without drawing upon material from works other than The Holy Family. This is because the passage is embedded in a section which throws little light on it, since it uses the distinction to argue that the proletariat is revolutionary and the bourgeoisie conservative, without elaborating the distinction itself. Furthermore, almost the entire text of The Holy Family is given over to polemic of an unusually minute, clownish, and altogether dated kind. Serious theoretical discussion occurs only in fragments. I shall therefore explore the meaning of the Holy Family passage by paying attention to a characterization of the human essence which is offered in The German Ideology and to the doctrine of alienation as it unfolds in the Paris Manuscripts. These materials do solve the puzzles in the text I have quoted.2 I begin with The German Ideology:
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.3
I shall treat this as a declaration about man’s essence, because one way of fixing the essence of something is by allocating it to its genus and species, its species being determined by the differentia between it and other species of its genus; and it is man’s differentia which Marx is providing. Men belong to the genus animal, or at any rate to a genus of which animals are the other species. To ask which species man is is to ask what distinguishes men from (other) animals. Marx’s answer is that man himself does the distinguishing. Man makes that part of his essence in virtue of which he is not an animal. This means that it is man’s nature to make his nature,4 that he is by nature a maker, or producer, in the most general sense: he produces what he is.
But Marx is also proposing that man is a producer in a more specific sense. For he performs the act of distinguishing himself from animals—the act which is productive in a general sense—by engaging in particular acts of production, in the making of things. Those acts are the concrete content of man’s universal act of self-creation.
For Marx, a man is self-estranged if his existence is not in conformity with his essence. Since man is really a productive being, he should behave like one in his empirical life,5 and his empirical life conditions should support the possibility of such behavior. Productive activity must be each individual’s purpose, his fundamental interest and aim, since essence is the proper end of existence. To be nonalienated, therefore, is to engage in productive activity as an end-in-itself, to use one’s powers in order to exercise them, and to exult in manifesting them. The fact that neither capitalist nor worker does this explains the first sentence of the Holy Family passage, which asserts that they are both alienated. The capitalist does not produce at all: he is not a producer, but an owner. And the proletarian produces, not in order to realize his powers, but for an alien reason: to stay alive.
But why is the bourgeoisie content in its self-estrangement, and the proletariat not? The answer falls into two parts: (a) the bourgeoisie, unlike the proletariat, cannot hope to escape its alienation; and (b) the bourgeoisie, unlike the proletariat, has no desire to escape its alienation.
(a) Capitalists and workers are, respectively, owners and producers. It is possible to be a nonalienated producer, but it is not possible to be a nonalienated owner. It follows that a worker can hope to become disalienated: the transformation is no threat to his identity. He is identified as a producer, even though he produces for alien reasons, and, as we shall see, in an alien way.6 But a capitalist can hope for no salvation from alienation, for “nonalienated owner” is a contradictio in adjecto. An owner cannot cease to be alienated without ceasing to be. The capitalist must cling to his alienated life, since there can be no nonalienated life for him.
It might be objected that though the capitalist, insofar as he is a capitalist, cannot wish to be disalienated, this need not be true of the man who is a capitalist; it appears true of the man only when we focus on one of his aspects: his ownership of capital. But (at least for some purpose) Marx did treat the capitalist abstractly. He developed a phenomenology of the abstract man who is purely an owner, and nothing besides. The lines of this phenomenology will be traced later in the paper. The justification of the abstract perspective will be provided elsewhere. (A brief version of it is given in IV-3, below.)
(b) The contrasting desires of capitalist and worker are explicable if the following maxim, to which Marx was committed, is accepted: If a person is aware that the conditions of his life are antagonistic to the realization of his essence, he will be dissatisfied with his life situation. To this must be added the general principle that a man can demand or desire only those states of affairs of which he has some conception. The conjunction of these propositions entails that a man will desire to be disalienated if and only if he is in some way aware that he is alienated. It remains to show that the worker is conscious of his alienation, while the capitalist is not. This will explain their discrepant desires.
I shall introduce the explanation by means of an analogy. Let us say that to be nonalienated is analogous to possessing a fine human body. To be alienated is to lack a fine human body. When the capitalist confronts himself in the mirror, he sees a finely clad body. He does not realize that he lacks a fine body, because he does not even see his body—it does not exist for him: he sees only his clothes. When the worker gazes in his mirror he sees a naked but bruised and misshapen human body. He sees his body, and he sees that it is not fine. And so he desires a fine body, while the capitalist does not.
To interpret the analogy. The worker is forced to labor, and in laboring he confronts his specifically human powers, but is frustrated through being unable to exercise them properly. The capitalist never engages with his powers, even in an alienated way. His powers are utterly dormant, because his money exerts power for him: it hides his powers from him as his clothes hide his body in the analogy. He experiences no frustrating exercise of his faculties, for he does not exercise them at all.
We are now close to what Marx meant when he said that the bourgeoisie had a semblance of a human existence. He did not mean that they are nearer to being really human than are the workers. He meant that their capital, their money, the machines they own, are human for them: their possessions take on human powers, in a manner which will be elaborated later. They feel no need to be truly human, for they have the full gamut of human powers in their capital.7 They have a substitute or ersatz humanity. The proletariat lives a truly inhuman life, while the bourgeoisie lives a falsely human life. And this is why the proletariat desires to be truly human and the bourgeoisie does not.
It is because the capitalist has lost all perception of and contact with his essence that he tolerates his alienation. But the worker daily glimpses his essence at a distance from him and experiences his humanity in a distorted form,8 so that he hopes and desires to live in a nonalienated world. The idea that the worker possesses his humanity in a warped form while the capitalist has lost it completely can be defended by reference to the well-known characterization of alienation as the circumstance in which man becomes a thing. For the thing which the worker is said to become is a thing very like man—namely, a machine, a thing conceived and described in the vocabulary of human powers. But the thing which the capitalist becomes, as we shall see, is much more grotesque, and quite lacking in human qualities, since it lacks all qualities. The capitalist, it will emerge, is a bearer of properties which he does not have.
I have been trying to illuminate the Holy Family passage by means of the notion that the worker is a productive, active being, while the capitalist is not. Additional light is cast in the same direction by Marx’s suggestion that whereas the workers really suffer, the capitalists do not. While not systematizing his views on suffering, Marx does reveal an attitude to it in the Manuscripts. The topic enters the first paragraph of the work, where Marx, following Adam Smith, speaks of the separation of capital, landed property, and labor, which bourgeois society has wrought. It has sundered factors of production which were more integrated at an earlier period of economic history. (The capitalist division of labor is a fragmentation of what is already a fragment.) And Marx points out that this loss of unity (which for him betokens alienation, since he thinks any incidence of discrete spheres in society does) is harmful only for the workers.9
Two pages later, he gives an ontological formulation of this thesis:
[I]t should be noted that where both worker and capitalist suffer, the worker suffers in his existence while the capitalist suffers in the profit on his dead Mammon.10
Earlier we found that the capitalist does not act on the world. Marx is now contending that he is, equally, not acted on by the world; it cannot make him suffer. His money insulates him against the impact of things in the world. It is only when his dead Mammon suffers, when his capital is depleted, that he has any relation to suffering, and that relation is completely external. To return to the mirror analogy: his clothes can be violated, but his body cannot be harmed. Sometimes, when he looks in the mirror, he notices that his garments are torn.
This is obviously meant to be true not of particular capitalists, but of an abstract being who is nothing but an owner of money. Yet empirical exemplification of the point is available. For three-dimensional capitalists worry when their fortunes decline, even when there is no chance that the decline will be great enough to disturb their mode of life in any way. In the Marxian contention, they are upset because they identify themselves with their capital, and they do so because, not being producers, they lack a human identity without it. They can possess human powers only derivatively, through their capital. The worker, by contrast, suffers directly. He suffers inhumanly, but he does suffer, just as he produces inhumanly, but does produce.
Marx’s understanding of the significance of suffering confirms what was urged above: that the workers know that they are alienated, while the capitalists do not. For in Marx’s early thought suffering is a mode of knowledge. In certain later writings he asserts that the workers’ misery prevents them from entertaining illusions about their position and sharpens their insight into social processes in general. He appears to think that he who knows the Woe must know the Vale. But in the Manuscripts the relation between suffering and knowledge is more intimate and less situational: suffering is itself a way of knowing.11 This result is attained through a series of conceptual assimilations. Suffering from something is associated with suffering or undergoing that thing, that is to say, experiencing it, which is in turn related to perceiving it, that is, gaining knowledge of it. It seems that the English word “suffer” has nuances which stimulate a development of this kind. We have only to think of the interchangeability of locutions like “I suffered many years of torment” and “I knew many years of torment.”12 And the German word leiden, which is the one Marx used in the present connection, has similar shadings. So it appears that Marx’s idea of suffering helps to explain the vision of reality of which he speaks in the Holy Family passage. But I am committed to elucidating that passage by means of his account of the essence of man, and suffering, it seems, failed to enter into that account.
It does not enter explicitly, but it is a corollary of the stress on production. Man cannot produce without using his body, without bringing it to bear on things in the world, and in that contact the world acts on man, and must be borne by him. On the Marxian view, activity and passivity entail one another, since each entails and is entailed by commerce with the world: “As soon as I have an object, this object has me for its object.”13 Thus productivity has a passive dimension, and since Marx is prepared to treat any passive relation to the world as a form of suffering, we are able to conclude that suffering is part of man’s natural estate.
In sum: the man who works for a living encounters the world both as agent and as patient, though in an alienated way; while the man who owns for a living is separated by what he owns from both active and passive contact with things outside him. In the rest of the paper I shall explore proletarian and bourgeois alienation in greater detail.
II. THE WORKER’S RELATION TO HIS MACHINE
Capital is the link between the worker and the capitalist, since the former works at a machine, which is a physical form of capital, and the latter owns money, which is convertible into capital. I shall discuss the worker’s alienation in his relation to the machine, and the capitalist’s in his relation to money, since I wish to compare their situations, and capital provides a convenient meeting-point for the comparison.14 This means that I shall neglect certain aspects of alienation, such as man’s distance from his fellow man, and his incapacity for sensuous enjoyment of nature. In treating the capitalist, I shall try simply to expound Marx, since exposition of his views on this subject is rarely offered. By contrast, many discussions of the worker’s alienation are available. Indeed, often what is presented as an account of man’s alienation is restricted to a consideration of the worker. I hope the present paper shows such a procedure to be mistaken. As to the worker, I shall confine myself to three possible criticisms of the relatively familiar Marxian description of his position. They concern (1) product-alienation and process-alienation; (2) aspects of process-alienation; and (3) the dictum that “Man becomes a machine.”
(1) Product-alienation resides in the fact that what the worker makes is taken from him. The result of his labor does not benefit him: the more he produces, the more impoverished he becomes. In addition, there is alienation “in the process of production, within productive activity itself.”15 Marx thinks that these two modes of alienation are intimately connected:
How could the worker stand in an alien relationship to the product of his activity if he did not alienate himself in the act of production itself? The product is indeed only the résumé of activity, of production. Consequently, if the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be alienation—the alienation of activity and the activity of alienation. The alienation of the object of labour merely summarizes the alienation in the work activity itself.16
This seems unacceptable. “Active alienation” consists in the soul-destroying effects laboring at the machine has on the worker. It seems that these cannot entail product-alienation, since we can consistently suppose that a man controls the product he makes by inhuman toil. If the division of labor removes this possibility, because under its sway there can be no product on which any man has a special claim, the community of workers could still own the goods they slavishly produce: at the very least those goods need not be used, as product-alienation demands, to enslave them further. Isn’t Marx just wrong in thinking that from what happens to the worker within the factory one can infer what happens to the product after it leaves the factory?
Marx is also committed to the converse implication, that product-alienation entails process-alienation. (A close reading of the text reveals that he thinks the entailment is mutual. His metaphor of summation alone suggests this, since in one sense series and sum entail one another.) And this proposition seems equally dubious. For we can imagine men who have some dignity in the labor-process, although their products are taken away. Indeed many Marxists concede this, when responding to liberal claims that work has been or can be made enjoyable and fulfilling, by arguing that this only conceals alienation, since the product is still taken from the worker. These defenders abandon Marx when they give this answer, for they are separating what he connected.
Notwithstanding these objections, I think the two modes of alienation can be seen to associate naturally with each other. This begins to be clear once we recognize how bizarre it is to suggest that the workers might control the products of the factory in which they slave. For they would have the power to do so only if they owned the factory, and if they owned it, they would not submit themselves to a debasing regimen. If they controlled the product, they would not let the process alienate them. But the man who in fact controls the product is willing to rob the worker of the fruits of his toil. Such a man will naturally make working conditions as exploitative as possible. He shows himself oblivious to the worker’s needs in the way he treats his product. Consistency will lead him to shape the man to the needs of the machine in the process of production. One cannot reply that the capitalist would provide salubrious conditions for the worker if he thought it profitable to do so. For the capitalist with whom we are concerned is only the agent of the machine. It is the machine that exploits the worker. The capitalist exploits him only because he owns the machine. He does not exploit him by means of the machine. (These asseverations are defended in III-3.)
Finally, the worker brings to the factory a consciousness that he is not working for himself, and this affects him negatively in the throes of the labor-process.
It might be thought that the filiation between product- and process-alienation traced here could be short-circuited in the following way. Product-alienation means that the product is used to enslave the worker, and that means that the product is (or is used to build) a new machine, which facilitates further process-alienation. On this interpretation, the product stays within the factory, or within the factory-system, to increase the agony of industrial life. But this solution to the problem eliminates much of what Marx comprehended in the notion of product-alienation.17
(2) We have seen that Marx wishes to fuse product-alienation and process-alienation. He also thinks that a number of seemingly separable elements of process-alienation are inextricable from one another. These are listed in the Manuscripts:18 (i) the worker denies himself instead of fulfilling himself, (ii) he feels miserable, (iii) he does not develop his energies, (iv) he is exhausted, (v) he is debased, (vi) he works involuntarily, (vii) his work is not the satisfaction of a need but the means to the satisfaction of his needs, (viii) he works for another.
These indexes of alienation do take on a certain coherence if we begin with (vii) and use the definition of and principles about human nature which were advanced earlier in the paper. (vii) is outlawed by the definition of man. It therefore entails (v), since “debased” means “dehumanized”; and it entails (iii), since the negation of (iii) is activity in accord with man’s essence. Again, we have seen that the worker knows that he is alienated in his work, and that a man will resent what he knows alienates him. This allows us to infer (ii) and (vi). (viii) is licensed by the insistence that no one would impose alienating work conditions on himself. This leaves (i) and (iv). (i) is simply a way of summarizing aspects already dealt with, and (iv) need not be true if physical exhaustion is intended, but it is certainly warranted by the picture I have tried to compose, if emotional exhaustion is allowed to count.
(3) In the Manuscripts Marx approvingly quotes Wilhelm Schulz, who, one year prior to the time at which Marx was writing, maintained that “the important distinction between how far men work with machines or as machines has not received attention.”19 Marx addresses himself to this question, and selects the second alternative: hence his dictum that man becomes a machine. It is perhaps worth registering that he does not mean this literally. He does not think that what is left of the human being is a robot. What he holds is that man is forcibly adapted to fit the machine, rebuilt to accommodate its demands on him.20 He is accorded the treatment proper to a machine, and in the factory his behavior resembles that of a machine.
I do not think this famous dictum should be retained by Marxists. I think it should be replaced by a formulation which is critically different. It is better to say that man is transformed into a tool, or, in the words of Marx elsewhere, into an appendage of the machine.21 Here is why the latter terminology is preferable. The craftsman wields a tool. The industrial worker cannot be said to wield a machine, for the machines of modern industry cannot be wielded. Marx wishes to say that the machine wields the worker, since he conceives him as placed at its disposal, to be pushed and pulled. A machine in operation is a system in motion and the man is what is moved. But this makes it impossible to characterize the worker as a machine (as opposed to a machine-part). The same conceptual barrier which prevents us from thinking of the worker as wielding the machine blocks the thought that the worker has become a machine once it is asserted that the machine wields him. The machine relates to the worker as the craftsman relates to his tool, and not as the worker ought to relate to the machine, since machines cannot be wielded. If we turn from wielding to the more general concept of controlling, under which it falls, we can then say that the worker ought to control the machine although the machine controls the worker. But if we comprehend this control concretely, then we must allow that what the machine does to the worker is not something the worker can do to the machine.
My rejection of the machine dictum as a succinct label for alienation in the factory is supported by Alan White’s enlightening remarks on the meaning of the word “mechanical”:
“Mechanical” describes the manner in which we carry out some continuous train of action, such as knitting or playing the piano. It is typically used of routine or skilled performances which from practice we can go through without attention to the details and, hence, without showing or needing originality or liveliness; in short, like a smoothly functioning machine.22
Now this is perhaps not the noblest kind of work given to man. But it is difficult to see how it is possible or why it should be thought desirable to abolish it, for to do so would be to abridge our repertoire of skilled performances. So the machine dictum not only fails to sum up alienation in the factory; it fails to point at an unambiguously depressing idea. Anyone who insists that all mechanical activity is alienated or objectionable is being overdemanding and even silly. But if supreme value lies in realizing men’s productive powers, then it is necessary to reject activities in which man resembles not a machine, but a tool.
Marx may have overlooked productive work of the kind White mentions because of his wavering perception of the difference between human productivity and what appears to be productivity in animals. He commonly cites advance planning as a distinguishing factor.23 But certain bona fide skills are acquired just because they eliminate the need to apply a plan in the course of the work they enable.
Earlier in this paper I treated the idea that the worker becomes a machine as a mark of his superiority over the capitalist. That idea must be abandoned, but the point can still be made, in a different way. For the worker, though a tool, remains intimately involved in the productive process;24 and he is a living tool, never utterly inert. He is still closer to the essence of man than the capitalist is.
III. THE CAPITALIST’S RELATION TO HIS CAPITAL
(1) At least four images of the capitalist can be found in Marx’s writings: (i) He who owns things instead of producing them, or the capitalist as Owner; (ii) He who accumulates and hoards things instead of enjoying them, or the capitalist as Miser;25 (iii) He who consumes things instead of producing them, or the capitalist as Consumer; (iv) He who is a most stupendously productive individual, as a member of a class under whose dominion man has changed the shape of nature.
The first of these conceptions must be treated as dominant and must be carefully explored if the quotation from The Holy Family is to be understood. It appears irreconcilable with the fourth conception, so boldly sketched in The Communist Manifesto,26 of the capitalist as dynamic director of man’s conquest of nature. In The Holy Family Marx is suppressing this aspect of the capitalist, and in the Manuscripts we see the result of making this abstraction: the capitalist becomes a mere appendage of his capital,27 though he is not appended in the same way as the worker. The legitimacy of the abstraction cannot be considered here. It must suffice to point out that although capitalists are energetic and entrepreneurial in the first phases of capitalism, Marx thought that they would tend to become pure owners, divorced from the productive process, as capitalism developed its distinctive character, so that the first image is more revealing than the fourth.
While (i) appears to exclude (iv), it is plainly compatible with (ii), though it does not entail it. As I expound (i) in detail it may come to seem incompatible with (iii), and (ii) and (iii) are apparently incompatible as they stand. Yet I believe it is possible to entertain an idea of the capitalist which embraces all three elements, in which the profligate life of the self-indulgent bourgeois (iii) is represented as a mode of existence of the capitalist who is a Scrooge (i and ii). This synthesis is articulated in the Manuscripts:
Of course, the industrial capitalist also has his pleasures, … but his enjoyment is only a secondary matter … it is … a calculated, economic enjoyment, for he charges his pleasures as an expense of capital and what he squanders must not be more than can be replaced with profit by the reproduction of capital. Thus enjoyment is subordinated to capital and the pleasure-loving individual is subordinated to the capital-accumulating individual.28
The enjoyment of the capitalist as consumer is “calculated” and “economic” because he does not surrender himself to it. He cannot give himself up to it, because he remains tied to his money. We must now examine the nature of this tie, the nature of capitalist ownership. We must try to answer the question: What is it to be fundamentally an owner?
(2) For Marx, capital cannot exist without a capitalist who owns it. “The concept of capital implies the capitalist.”29 Property must have a human embodiment if it is to be allowed entry into economic equations. But although capital must be possessed by a capitalist, the relation of possession which unites them is most peculiar. For, as I shall try to show, it follows from the fact that the capitalist owns property that he himself lacks properties.30 Only someone who is in a certain sense qualityless can qualify for the role of Owner. In the terms of the mirror analogy, there is no body under the capitalist’s clothes, but only empty space.
Now for Marx all truly human properties are powers, or propensities to have effects on the world. He forbids us to predicate a feature of a human being unless the standard effects of possessing that feature are realized. A capitalist may appear ugly, but if his money buys beautiful women for him, then, Marx says, he is not ugly, since the effect of ugliness, its power to repel, is annulled by money.31 This restriction on what is to count as a human feature derives from Marx’s view of man as an essentially productive being, through a generalization in which productivity covers all powers. It is in this sense of properties that the capitalist has none: his self is not manifested in the world. And the explanation of this is the fact that he owns property, which keeps the world at a distance from him. The workers do operate on the world, in an alienated way, so that they have a dehumanized humanity, but the capitalist’s humanity is a void.
Let us turn to the Manuscripts:
The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have … Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth. And everything which you are unable to do your money can do for you; it can eat, drink, go to the ball and to the theatre. It can acquire art, learning, historical treasures, political power; and it can travel.32
We shall shortly consider how money performs for the capitalist, so that he does nothing himself, and therefore lacks a nature, just because he owns capital, which has such a rich nature (“it is the true opulence”).33 But first I want to indicate how Marx contrasts this form of ownership with the relation the feudal lord enjoys to his property:
[I]n feudal landownership … there is an appearance of a more intimate connexion between the owner and the land than is the case in the possession of mere wealth. Landed property assumes an individual character with its lord, is knightly or baronial with him, has his privileges, his jurisdiction, his political rights, etc. It appears as the inorganic body of its lord.34
It is crucial that the landowner does not see his property as something he can sell. Instead, he has entered into an “honorable marriage with his land.”35 If he comes to treat his property as alienable, he possesses it only contingently, since the very same thing could be possessed by another, and he is on the way to being a capitalist, whose ownership can be so abstract that in some instances neither he nor anyone else can say what he owns, but only how much. Manors maketh men, but factories maketh owners, and the capitalist merely owns his wealth. He engages in no intimate interaction with what he owns; he never really has it, where to have it is to hold it. (I intend that sense of “have” in which it is incorrect to say of an object that I have it when it is neither within my grasp nor under my control. In this sense, I do not have the spectacles I have left at home.) With the advent of bourgeois society “all personal relationships between the property owner and his property … cease.”36 No one is firmly connected with the particular property he owns and the result is that
the medieval adage, nulle terre sans seigneur, is replaced with a new adage, l’argent n’a pas de maître, which expresses the complete domination of living men by dead matter.37
Let us examine the character of this domination.
(3) I have already cited a number of capacities which Marx ascribes to prodigious capital, in its money form. But what is it for my wealth to eat and drink and go to the ball or the theater for me? Well, the ball and the theater are essentially social occasions, where men and women get together. Marx means, I think, that money defines who comes, that I come qua money-owner, and that I am interested in going only qua money-owner. Money attracts me and brings me to these places. It is money which actually pays them a visit, and it drags me along. If eating and drinking are also understood in their social aspects, similar interpretations could be offered.
Chief among the features of capital is its “power of command over labor and its products.” And Marx tells us that “the capitalist possesses this power, not on account of his personal or human qualities, but as the owner of capital,” and that “capital itself rules the capitalist.”38 It would thus be a mistake to conceive the capitalist as a human being who forms the intention of controlling the worker and uses his capital to do so. On the contrary, it is capital, the machine, which controls the worker, and the capitalist does so only derivatively and abstractly, as an extension of capital, not because of any personal aspirations or through any individual virtues, such as were needed by feudal lords, who exacted respect through their own breeding and bearing.
The way in which capital wreaks an alchemical transformation on its owner is most strikingly expressed in the following passage:
What I am and can do is … not at all determined by my individuality. … As an individual l am lame, but money provides me with twenty-four legs. Therefore I, am not lame.39 I am a detestable, dishonorable, and stupid man, but money is honored and so also is its possessor. Money is the highest good, and so its possessor is good. Besides, money saves me the trouble of being dishonest; therefore I am presumed honest. I am stupid, but since money is the real mind of all things, how should its possessor be stupid?40 … I who can have, through the power of money, everything for which the human heart longs, do I not possess all human abilities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their opposites?41
As Bottomore translates the passage, the capitalist has these faculties through rather than by means of money. (The German preposition is “durch,” which can be translated either way.) I believe Bottomore’s decision accords with Marx’s intentions, for I do not think Marx meant that capital is an instrument I use to get what I want. Rather, my capital gets it and has it for me, and I have it only through my capital. Money shines on my life and makes it bright, but the light in my life is always a reflection. Marx is not saying that a woman falls in love with me because I am rich, or that I entice her by means of my money. Rather, she is attracted to my money, she is seduced by my money, not by means of it, and it is even money which satisfies her. Again, when I am honored because of my money, it is my money which is honored, and I only as its keeper. I have neither love nor honor, but complete semblances of both, since my money has both, and my ownership of my money is only a semblance of real possession.42
These theses can be called philosophical: it is not easy to establish precise verification-conditions for them. Yet they correspond to some observable tendencies in capitalist society. Some capitalists do have abilities which decay because they have no need or occasion to use them. When a society tends to make a healthy body and a healthy mind mere means to survival or enrichment, the powers of mind and body tend not to be used when money can secure whatever they enable a man to get. Thus the ontological topsy-turvy is accompanied by psychobiological corruption.
IV. CONCLUDING REMARKS
(1) The contrast between bourgeois and proletarian may now be restated. For Marx, human characteristics are powers, and powers are interpreted as capacities to produce. In bourgeois society property is what is produced, so that to have properties is to create property. The worker does create property, in an alienated way; therefore he has properties, of a deformed sort. The capitalist, as mere Owner of property, has no properties. He does not even have the property he owns, for to have a thing is to be in intimate active contact with it. The capitalist is more distant from being truly human than the worker is. He is not a creator and he is therefore not even a real possessor: he is a sham possessor. The worker is a degenerate creator, and this is thought to be better.
Each is a man who is dominated by a thing, namely capital, whose most immediate form for one is the machine, for the other, money. In the body of the paper I have tried to show the objective differences between the two relations of domination. Now I wish to bring into relief certain more psychological aspects. To this end I propose the following schedule of possibilities.
CHART OF PSYCHOLOGICAL POSSIBILITIES
The chart distinguishes six states of mind. I am using “will” in a very general sense, comprehending any mode of desire or volition. My will conforms to my situation (1, 4) if I enjoy what I am doing, if I feel fulfilled in it. If my will fails to conform (2, 3, 5, 6), this may be because I am opposed to what I am doing and I find it oppressive (3, 6) or because I merely acquiesce in my position, without investing my self in it (2, 5).
The images of capitalist and worker which we have examined both belong on the right-hand side of the schedule, for they are both alienated. Marx usually locates the worker under (6), portraying him as disposed to resent and react against his position. The worker never falls under (4): he never enjoys his alienated life. Some things Marx says about the worker warrant the application of (5). But (6) must be standard for the worker: he can satisfy (5) only temporarily, since otherwise his revolutionism would disappear.
In the Holy Family passage, the capitalist is allocated to category (4): he enjoys his alienated life. I have found confirmation and explanation of this in the Manuscripts, although some of the texts I have used might be construed so as to deposit the capitalist in category (5), making him a dull and passive agent of his capital. But no interpretation could make him satisfy (6).
What would satisfy the descriptions on the left-hand side of the schedule? It seems that (1) applies to the energetic capitalist presiding in the early phases of bourgeois society. Such a capitalist is as close as any can be to being nonalienated. I hesitate to say that he would be regarded as fully nonalienated, since Marx would perhaps consider him too removed from concrete productive processes to deserve this title. Items (2) and (3) could represent resourceful industrialists who, in different ways, get no satisfaction out of their activity. Such types do not occur in Marx’s writings, at any rate not as central characters for the purpose of theory.
A worker who fell under (1) would be a genuinely nonalienated man. There cannot be workers of types (2) and (3), for this would violate the principle that it is satisfying to live in accordance with the definition of one’s essence. Nevertheless many contemporary alienation-hunters would be prepared to find cases of (2) and (3), and would declare that they instantiate alienation, since psychological indexes are now often treated as sufficient for that designation. Again, much of what is now identified as alienation falls under (4), another category containing no workers for Marx. This is the worker as described by semi-Marxist radicals who make concessions, like those I referred to in II-1. C. Wright Mills’s “cheerful robot”43 probably belongs in this category.
(2) The present paper can be read as a reply to a recent article by D. C. Hodges, who claims that the only party to alienation in the Manuscripts is the worker, and that the capitalist is free in the measure that the worker is alienated. I do not know what Hodges would say about the Holy Family passage, for he does not mention it. That his case with respect to the Manuscripts is weak has, I think, been demonstrated here.
Hodges44 deals with the power of money by saying that “to the enlightened bourgeois it is a means and not an end.”45 But we find no such enlightened bourgeois in the Manuscripts. Hodges exploits Marx’s assertion that “if the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must be delight and his life’s joy.”46 But the Holy Family passage shows that Marx took this kind of delight to be compatible with the deepest alienation. I am in qualified agreement with one of Hodges’s theses: Marx’s doctrine of alienation does not refer to “the human situation as such.”47 He is concerned with the alienation of particular kinds of men. But I deny that the worker is the only kind of man who is alienated.
I do not agree with Hodges that to embrace the capitalist within the alienated fold is to reduce emphasis on the proletariat as the agency of revolutionary social change. I am against drawing this inference, for I have sought to explain (in I) why the capitalist cannot be expected to revolt against his situation.
(3) I would like to suggest that, in proposing his concept of the capitalist who merely owns, Marx adumbrates the idea of the separation of ownership and management, which has been so popular since Berle and Means.48 It might be thought that in making this attribution I am trying to vault an impassable gulf between metaphysics and economics, but it is significant that Marx refers to an ownership/management cleavage in the third volume of Capital,49 and assigns a crucial importance to it.
But why, it may be asked, do I suppose that there can be a connection between the phenomenological study of the abstract capitalist, considered in this paper, and the remarks Marx made on a more empirical basis about the tendencies in capitalist development which lead to the atrophy of the capitalist, as far as the production process is concerned? To generalize the objection: why is it supposed that from the sort of analysis provided in this paper one can reach an understanding of real capitalists in the real world?
I believe I can answer these questions, but here I shall only outline the steps I would take: (1) It can be shown that the worker whose alienation Marx describes is also a product of abstraction, and was known to be such by Marx. (2) The justification of treating both worker and capitalist abstractly is that bourgeois political economy implicitly does so. (3) The justification of beginning with the abstractions of political economy in an inquiry which purports to be relevant to three-dimensional people is that, for Marx, that science sums up, anticipates, and even prepares the future development of capitalism, for the movement of modern history is a movement toward abstraction, and political economy is the ideal expression of that movement.50
Complete abstraction can never be achieved because men cannot become completely dehumanized. What halts the increasing alienation is the socialist revolution,51 to which bourgeois economists are blind. But Marx thought and said that their vision was acute when they described the condition of man under capitalism.
1 “Die besitzende Klasse und die Klasse des Proletariats stellen dieselbe menschliche Selbstentfremdung dar. Aber die erste Klasse fühlt sich in dieser Selbstentfremdung wohl und bestätigt, weiss die Entfremdung als ihre eigene Macht, und besitzt in ihr den Schein einer menschlichen Existenz; die Zweite fühlt sich in der Entfremdung vernichtet, erblickt in ihr ihre Ohnmacht und die Wirklichkeit einer Unmenschlichen Existenz.” Karl Marx: Die Frühschriften, p. 317. Translations alternative to the one offered above are given by Bottomore, in Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, p. 231; and by Dixon in The Holy Family, p. 51. They translate the text less literally, though without, I think, any gain in intelligibility.
2 To illuminate one work by means of passages drawn from another is often, exegetically speaking, problematical. In the present case the problems are multiplied, for a number of reasons:
(1) There is the alleged division of Marx’s writings into those which belong to his “young” period and those which belong to his “mature” period. And if there is such a transition in Marx, it may reasonably be located within the time during which the three texts mentioned here were written. The Manuscripts were composed between April and August 1844; The Holy Family from September to November 1844; and The German Ideology in 1845–46. Their composition thus occupies a small number of months, but these were months of great ferment in Marx’s thinking.
(2) Many of Marx’s works were not published: the Manuscripts remained manuscripts, and The German Ideology was “left to the gnawing criticism of the mice.” This fact reduced the pressure on Marx to signal shifts in his use of concepts or changes in his general orientation. Two other facts had the same consequence:
(3) The works which were published were often intended for a largely nonacademic audience.
(4) Marx did not see his own writings, both published and unpublished, as the work of someone undergoing an exclusively intellectual development. He often wrote in response to (what he conceived to be) the changing demands of the social struggle.
Notwithstanding these reasons for caution, I regard my exegetical procedure as legitimate, since I use the other writings not to embellish a passage which already has a clear meaning, but to establish a meaning where Marx’s intentions are somewhat dark. When a passage is very difficult the interpreter must be liberal in his choice of instruments; the main test of their validity will be their success in rendering the passage less puzzling. But it is also important that Marx wrote The Holy Family immediately after writing the Manuscripts so that they constitute, in a sense, a continuous oeuvre. And although The German Ideology (the other work which flanks The Holy Family) is very different in theme from the Manuscripts, it echoes the latter’s stress on man as an essentially productive being. Finally, I concede that there is a measure of artificiality in distributing so much additional material around the Holy Family passage. My main object is to depict a worker/capitalist contrast which runs inexplicitly through the Manuscripts, and I begin with The Holy Family because in that work the same contrast is explicitly, though obscurely, drawn.
3 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow edition), p. 31 (emphasis in original).
4 Marx’s view should not be overassimilated to Sartrean existentialism. It is not an originally featureless being, or Nothingness, which makes its nature, but a certain kind of animal. Animalhood rather than mere existence precedes essence for Marx.
5 If he fails to behave in this way, he sometimes comes to resemble an animal; he slips back into animalhood, from which he is essentially distinguished. There are suggestions of this kind in the Manuscripts. See Marx, Early Writings, p. 125. [The references to Marx, Early Writings, in this chapter are to the Bottomore edition—Ed.]
6 The worker’s activity is a paradigm of the activity of mankind throughout history, which is also conceived as alienated production. Mankind has revealed its essence through the “history of industry” which is “an open book of the human faculties,” though it shows us the essential human faculties in an alienated form. (Marx, Early Writings, pp. 162–63.)
7 They therefore feel themselves to be active and productive: see Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, p. 182: “[F]ür den Kapitalisten ist diese Verdoppelung der Persön-lichkeit, dieses Zerreissen des Menschen in ein Element der Warenbewegung und in einen (objektivohnmächtigen) Zuschauer dieser Bewegung vorhanden. Sie nimmt aber für sein Bewusstsein notwendig die Form einer—freilich objektiv scheinbaren—Tätigkeit, einer Auswirkung seines Subjekts auf.” “For the capitalist also there is the same doubling of personality, the same splitting up of man into an element of the movement of commodities and an (objective and impotent) observer of that movement. But for his consciousness it necessarily appears as an activity (albeit this activity is objectively an illusion), in which effects emanate from himself.” Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 166.
8 That the worker has his essence in a warped form is suggested in the Manuscripts (Marx, Early Writings, p. 126), where we read that his activity manifests itself as passivity, his strength as powerlessness, his creation as emasculation. (The capitalist lacks activity, strength, and creation in any form.)
9 Marx, Early Writings, p. 69. For the original integration and its dissolution, see Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, pp. 67, 86–87, 97–99. On how capitalism prepares a future integration, see Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Chicago edition), p. 554 (Penguin edition, p. 637). For the most relevant passages in Smith, see The Wealth of Nations, 1:41–48, 57–60.
10 Marx, Early Writings, p. 71. What might be called the empirical manifestation of this is given on p. 76: “In the declining state of society, the worker suffers most. The particular severity of his hardship is due to his situation as a worker, but the hardship in general is due to the condition of society.”
11 Marx, Die Frühschriften, p. 275: “Sinnlich sein ist leidend sein. Der Mensch als ein gegenständliches sinnliches Wesen ist daher ein leidendes und weil sein Leiden empfindendes Wesen ein leidenschaftliches Wesen. Die Leidenschaft, die Passion ist die nach seinem Gegenstand energisch strebende Wesenskraft des Menschen.” “Man as an objective sensuous being is therefore a suffering being, and because he feels his suffering, he is a passionate being. Passion is man’s essential power vigorously striving to attain its object.” Marx, Early Writings (Penguin edition), p. 390. For similar remarks, see Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, especially sec. 33. The latter work appeared in 1843.
12 We also say, “I knew many years of happiness,” which is replaceable not by “I suffered …” but by “I enjoyed many years of happiness.” So knowledge has no special association with suffering, but only with passivity in general. The link with suffering is more obvious to Marx, since he is speaking of suffering and passivity as equivalent.
13 Marx, Early Writings, p. 208.
14 See Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, p. 108, where Marx asserts that money becomes convertible into capital just when labor becomes powerless, when workers cease to own their means of production. Hence the machine achieves its power over the worker just when capitalists become possible.
15 Marx, Early Writings, p. 124 (emphasis in original).
16 Ibid., p. 124.
17 In this section alienation has been rooted in the fact that the worker does not receive the product he makes. Earlier, alienated labor was identified as work not performed for its own sake. These formulations seem at best independent, at worst, inconsistent. But they can be reconciled. Producing is not the worker’s freely chosen end, because he is bound by contract to work, and he enters this contract to satisfy needs other than the need to exercise his powers. That the product is not his is a sign that his activity is alienated, though it does not and need not follow that if the product were his, he would not be alienated. If he does not receive the product, there can be no joy in his work, yet true joy in work is not to be had from the prospect of receiving the product.
18 Marx, Early Writings, p. 125.
19 Ibid., p. 80. The quotation is from Die Bewegung der Produktion. Eine geschichtlich-statistische Abhandlung (Zurich, 1843), p. 69.
20 For the empirical content of this idea in contemporary factory work, see Blauner, Alienation and Freedom, pp. 19–22.
21 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1:40. “Appendage” is predicated of the worker in many places throughout Marx’s writings. See, for example, Capital, vol. 1 (Chicago edition), pp. 421, 462, 530, 708. But note that in ibid., p. 436, “machine” rather than “appendage” is used. [Note that some of the above page numbers have been corrected from the previously published versions of this essay. The corresponding page numbers in the Penguin edition (Fowkes translation) are, respectively: 508 (note the term “appendage” is not used here), 548, 614, 799, and 523.—Ed.]
22 White, Attention, p. 123 (emphasis added).
23 He offers other differentiae as well. See Marx, Early Writings, pp. 126–28; Capital, vol. 1 (Chicago edition), pp. 197–205, esp. pp. 199–200 (Penguin edition, pp. 283–291, esp. pp. 285–66); Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, p. 91.
24 This becomes less true in those modern industrial settings in which workers do not engage with machines but merely “tend” them. See Bell, The End of Ideology, p. 270.
25 Marx, Early Writings, p. 171.
26 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 35. For the values latent in capitalist production, see Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, pp. 84–85.
27 See also Capital, vol. 1 (Chicago edition), p. 365 (quoted in fn. 34 below) and pp. 648–69 (Penguin edition, p. 450, pp. 738–39).
28 Karl Marx, Early Writings, p. 179 (emphases in original). Cf. Capital, vol. 1 (Chicago edition), p. 650–51 (Penguin edition, pp. 740–41). It may also be possible to bind (ii) and (iv), and hence all the four images, thereby rendering unnecessary the concession that (i) excludes (iv). The relevant text is A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, pp. 178–80, where Marx asserts that “the hoarding of money for the sake of money is the barbaric form of production for production’s sake” (Cf. ibid., p. 217). This permits us to call capitalist production (iv) a sophisticated form of hoarding or miserliness (ii). Capitalist (ii) and capitalist (iv) both seek to collect as much exchange-value as possible, but the latter realizes that exchange-value can be acquired more effectively by producing than by hoarding.
29 Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, p. 118. See Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 45.
30 Marx plays in a similar way with the two senses of “property” in The German Ideology, pp. 248–49.
31 Marx, Early Writings, p. 191. Cf. Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, sec. 16: “The more qualities I have … the greater is the circumference of my effects and influence.”
32 (a) Marx, Early Writings, p. 171 (emphases in original). It should be noted that Marx is speaking of anyone’s money, not just the capitalist’s. I take the liberty of applying what he says to the capitalist in particular, since while the worker’s money latently possesses similar powers, there is never enough of it for these powers to spring into action. (b) The next sentence but one after this excerpt reads: “But although it can do all this, it only desires to create itself, and to buy itself, for everything else is subordinated to it.” This confirms and extends what was argued above, that the Scrooge notion of the capitalist subjugates and limits the Consumer idea. (c) For one sense in which money can travel see Capital, vol. 2 (Chicago edition), pp. 169, 184 (Penguin edition, pp. 225, 242).
33 Marx, Early Writings, p. 171.
34 Ibid., p. 114 (emphasis in original; I have corrected the translation). Note that here property assumes the features of its owner, rather than vice versa, as is the case in capitalism. The bond between a person and his property counts as personal if it depends on the person’s characteristics. See Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 93.
At one point in Capital Marx refuses to offer special compliments to the feudal lord: “It is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist. The leadership of industry is an attribute of capital, just as in feudal times the functions of general and judge were attributes of landed property” (Chicago edition, 1:365; Penguin edition, p. 450). Contrast ibid., vol. 3 (Chicago edition), p. 1027 (Penguin edition, p. 1021). For further nuances see Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, p. 30.
35 Marx, Early Writings, p. 115. Cf. Capital, vol. 1 (Chicago edition), p. 101 (Penguin edition, p. 183).
36 Marx, Early Writings, p. 105.
37 Ibid. Cf. Capital, vol. 1 (Chicago edition), note, p. 163 (Penguin edition, p. 247); vol. 3 (Chicago edition) p. 724 (Penguin edition, p. 755). Similar to Marx’s discussion is Hannah Arendt’s distinction between property and wealth. See The Human Condition, p. 56. The distinction between feudal lord and capitalist takes a radical turn in and is essential to the work of Schumpeter. See Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, pp. 137ff.
38 Marx, Early Writings, 85 (emphases in original).
39 Therefore I cannot even suffer. See above.
40 “Stupid” and “mind” are translations of geistlos and Geist.
41 Marx, Early Writings, p. 191 (emphases in original). On the ignorant capitalist’s ownership of knowledge, see Capital, vol. 1 (Chicago edition), pp. 397, 422n, 462 (Penguin edition, pp. 483, 508n, 548).
42 For the meaning of real possession, see Marx, Early Writings, pp. 193–94.
43 Wright Mills, White Collar, p. 233. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, p. 171.
44 Hodges, “The Young Marx—A Reappraisal.”
45 Ibid., 228.
46 Ibid., 227. Quoted from Martin Milligan’s translation: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 79.
47 Hodges, “The Young Marx—A Reappraisal,” 224. The first sentence of the Holy Family passage (“… the same human self-estrangement”) shows that the argument must be qualified.
48 Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property.
49 Marx Capital, vol. 3 (Chicago edition), pp. 449–59, 516–18, (Penguin edition, pp. 535–45, 601–3). Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, pp. 174ff., provides an original and illuminating discussion of the passages.
50 The Manuscripts passages most relevant for establishing these interpretations are in Marx, Early Writings, pp. 76–77, 82, 137–39, 181.
51 In which the proletariat brings human existence into harmony with the human essence: Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 54–55.