Alienation is a pervasive feature of modern life. It is one of the few theoretical terms from Marxism that has entered into ordinary language. There it usually denotes a vague feeling of malaise or meaninglessness. In Marx, however, it has a precise meaning derived from Hegel’s philosophy, and it plays a central role in Marx’s economic and social thought. For Marx, alienation is a condition in which our own activities or products take on a form that is independent of us and act against us.1 Moreover, it is not a merely subjective feeling or appearance, it is an objective social and historical condition.
Marx’s discussion of alienation is most prominent and explicit in his early writings, particularly in the 1844 Manuscripts, where the influence of Hegel’s philosophy is most evident.2 The place of these writings in Marx’s work, and the relation of Marx to Hegel more generally, has long been controversial. Although Marx himself went out of his way to stress his allegiance to Hegel,3 there was little recognition of this among his early followers. A mechanistic and economistic interpretation was common. In the Stalin period this was imposed as the Communist orthodoxy. Hegelian Marxists (such as Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Deborin, Ilyenkov, etc) were barely tolerated.
The 1844 Manuscripts suffered a similar fate. These, and other early writings by Marx left unpublished at his death,4 did not see the light of day for many years. The 1844 Manuscripts first appeared in Moscow in 1932.5 The Soviet authorities treated them with suspicion as juvenilia written when Marx was still excessively under the spell of Hegel, and before he had developed his ‘mature’ economic theory and the historical materialist approach. This was the attitude adopted by many other writers on Marxism as well who seldom referred to or discussed these works.6
Things changed rapidly with the ‘thaw’ that followed Stalin’s death in 1953. Translations of the early works into English and other European languages began to appear, and they rapidly became the focus for criticism of the mechanistic and economistic form of Marxism that had been the Communist orthodoxy. They were hailed by a variety of ‘humanist’ Marxists in Eastern and Western Europe and America and by thinkers associated with the New Left, as evidence of a newly revealed humanist, ethical aspect of Marx’s thought.7
These claims were also strongly disputed, most influentially by Althusser. Many were persuaded to refocus their attention away from the Hegelian and ethical themes in Marx’s work and back onto its political, economic and historical ideas. However, in his zeal to expunge any traces of Hegelianism from Marxism, Althusser went to the opposite extreme. He argued that there was a radical ‘break’ – an ‘epistemological break’ – between the Hegelian, ethical ideas of Marx’s early work centred on the concept of alienation, and his mature ‘scientific’ and materialist theory.8 ‘Humanism’ became a term of abuse. From this perspective the concept of alienation has no place in an account of Marxist economics.
An equally strong hostility to the Hegelian themes in Marxism and to the concept of alienation (though on very different grounds) has been a defining feature of the school of analytic Marxism as well, which has been influential in the English speaking world in recent years.9
Now that the political dust has settled somewhat, it has become increasingly clear that the idea of a sharp break between Marx’s early and later thought is untenable. Even Althusser himself abandoned it, and came to recognize that Hegelian themes are present in Marx’s work throughout.10
As regards the idea of alienation, it is true that the term itself is used only rarely by Marx in his later work. However, the concept of alienation, as defined above, is a feature of Marx’s thought throughout. This is clear from Grundrisse,11 the first full draft of what was later to become volume one of Capital. This is a later work in which not only the concept but also the language of ‘alienation’ is used extensively. It is as it were the ‘missing link’ that makes clear that underlying Marx’s shifting attempts to find suitable forms of expression for his ideas, there are deeper continuities in Marx’s thought.12
Althusserian and analytical Marxism have dominated Marxist philosophy for the past fifty years, with the result that little attention has been paid to the theme of alienation, particularly in the context of Marxist economic thought. This is unfortunate. The attempt to understand Marx’s philosophy without reference to Hegel leads to a seriously distorted picture both of Marx’s early and later work. Alienation – even in the early works – is not a merely moral idea. It is at the centre of Marx’s initial attempts to analyse capitalism in social and economic terms. Marx does not abandon this analysis as his thought develops. Rather, it is deepened and enriched and worked out in economic detail in Marx’s later work.
The most extended account of alienation in Marx’s early works occurs in the section of the 1844 Manuscripts devoted to ‘estranged labour’. Indeed, labour is sometimes treated as the main or even as the sole area about which Marx uses the concept, but this is not the case. Marx identifies alienation in many areas of life, including religion, politics, and social and economic relations. In his earliest work, religion is the central example. ‘Man makes religion, religion does not make man’, says Marx,13 and yet the gods that we have created appear to be independent beings, often judgemental and hostile.
From 1844 onwards, Marx’s work focuses increasingly on economics. The 1844 Manuscripts constitutes Marx’s first extended attempt to get to grips with the work of the classical political economists, Adam Smith, James Mill, J. B. Say, etc. This represents a decisive turn in his thought. His notion of alienated labour is often taken to describe a purely subjective condition, a lack of satisfaction in work. Marx, however, uses the concept to analyse the ways in which – in capitalism – our own products take on an independent and hostile form.
Work is our ‘species being’ (Gattungswesen), the activity which distinguishes humans from other species. Other animals are driven by their individual appetites and instincts. For the most part, they satisfy their material needs immediately, by directly consuming what is immediately present to them. Humans, by contrast, are social beings who work to transform what is immediately present to satisfy their needs. Work is thus a distinctively human activity, a social activity, and it leads to self-development and self-realization. In labour man ‘acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature’.14 In conditions of alienation, however, work is reduced to its ‘animal’ characteristics. It loses its distinctively human features and becomes a mere means to satisfy our individual material needs. These ideas originate directly from Hegel’s philosophy; they are developed and given a critical dimension by Marx.15
Mainstream economics regards work as an essentially individual activity to satisfy individual needs. Although it may take place within the context of relations with others, these are treated as purely contingent. For Marx, by contrast, human beings are essentially social. Work, as a human activity, necessarily occurs within a context of social relations. In the 1844 Manuscripts and subsequently, Marx insists that in work we create not only a material product, we also produce and reproduce our social relationships.16
As the products of our labour we should be able to recognize our social and economic relations as a confirmation of our powers and abilities. In conditions of alienation, however, they become independent of us and opposed to us. Individuals are atomised and economic forces take on a life of their own, obeying their own quasi-objective laws. This is a further aspect of alienation: the alienation of ‘man from man’.17
This is how both individuals and the economy are usually regarded in economics. However, individuals are not separate atoms; and economic laws, unlike natural laws, are social products, specific to particular forms of society. Mainstream economics thus presents what are the alienated features of a specific sort of society as though there are objective and universal economic forms. In this way, Marx’s critique of political economy in this area parallels his critique of the economists’ picture of labour.
Marx does not abandon these ideas in his later economic thought, rather he develops and extends them.18 This is evident in his accounts of the concepts of abstract labour and the idea of fetishism which are central features of Marx’s theory of value as it is presented in its finished form in Capital.19 These concepts do not constitute a break but rather an elaboration and expansion of the ideas initially first sketched out in his early works under heading of ‘estranged labour’.
According to the theory of value which is at the core of Marx’s economic thought, a commodity has two aspects: a use value and a (exchange) value. Two kinds of labour go into its creation. In so far as work creates a use value (a product that meets needs), it is concrete labour. Different forms of concrete labour go to create qualitatively different products to meet different specific needs (carpentry is a different activity from shoemaking, and so on). But in so far as the product of labour is destined for exchange, the labour that goes into it creates something of value which can be equated with and exchanged for other things of equal value. According to Marx, this equivalence of value is achieved by equating the quantities of labour embodied in them. The labour involved in this value relation is what Marx terms ‘abstract’, ‘homogeneous’, ‘social labour’.20 Such abstract labour is a mere means to the creation of value, it is indifferent to its specific concrete quality.
The abstraction involved here is not merely conceptual, Marx insists, ‘it is an abstraction which is made every day in the social process of production’.21 It occurs only in conditions in which commodity production has become the prevalent form: i.e., in bourgeois society.
Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form.22
The split between use value and value goes back to beginnings of exchange, but it grows and reaches its fully developed form only with the predominance of commodity production in capitalism.
The product of labour is an object of utility in all states of society; but it is only a historically specific epoch of development which presents the labour expended in the production of a useful article as an ‘objective’ property of that article, i.e., as its value.23
The social effects of the development commodity production were becoming apparent in ancient Athens, a city state whose wealth was founded on commerce and trade. In Plato and Aristotle’s time the distinction between use value and value, concrete and abstract labour, was beginning to assert itself socially; but concrete labour, production for use, was still the predominant form of production.
Plato treats craft work (e.g., shoe making), and money making as two quite separate and distinct activities, and maintains that the ‘proper’ activity of the worker is to pursue his craft and not to make money.24 Aristotle formulates the distinction between use value and value with great clarity, and regards the use value of a product as its ‘proper’ use.25
Every piece of property has a double use … For example a shoe may be used either to put on your foot or to offer in exchange. Both are uses of the shoe; for even he that gives a shoe to someone who requires a shoe, and receives in exchanges coins or food, is making used of the shoe as a shoe, but not the use proper to it, for a shoe is not expressly made for purposes of exchange.26
Now, with the development of capitalism, commodity production has become the predominant form. Most production is not directly for use but for exchange. Exchange value predominates over use value; abstract labour predominates over concrete labour: i.e., labour which is a mere means to an end external to it predominates. We do not usually satisfy our needs directly through our work. Rather, work takes the form of wage labour: it is undertaken in order to earn a wage, and its product is robbed of all specificity, it is simply something of value, destined for exchange.
This is precisely the form of work that Marx analyses under the heading of ‘alienated’ or ‘estranged’ labour in the 1844 Manuscripts. In his later work he gives an account of it under the heading of ‘abstract labour’. This concept is developed fully in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and subsequently in Capital, Volume I, specifically in the context of the theory of value (as outlined briefly above). This notion is just beginning to emerge in Grundrisse (1858): for example in the following passage where the connection between the earlier account of alienated labour and the later concept is clearly evident.
The worker himself is absolutely indifferent to the specificity of his labour; it has no interest for him as such, but only in as much as it is in fact labour and, as such, a use value for capital. It is therefore his economic character that he is the carrier of labour as such – i.e. of labour as use value for capital; he is a worker, in opposition to the capitalist. This is not the character of the craftsmen and guild-members etc., whose economic character lies precisely in the specificity of their labour and in their relation to a specific master, etc. This economic relation – the character which capitalist and worker have as the extremes of a single relation of production – therefore develops more purely and adequately in proportion as labour loses all the characteristics of art; as its particular skill becomes something more and more abstract and irrelevant, and as it becomes more and more a purely abstract activity, a purely mechanical activity, hence indifferent to its particular form.27
Economic and social relations, too, take on an alienated form: a form which is independent and hostile. Marx uses a graphic image to describe this sort of alienation:
Modern bourgeois society … a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.28
In the Grundrisse, again, the connection of alienated forms of economic relation and alienated forms of labour is clearly spelled out.
Activity, regardless of its individual manifestation, and the product of activity, regardless of its particular make-up, are always exchange value, and exchange value is a generality in which all individuality and peculiarity are negated and extinguished … The social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share of individuals in production here appear as something alien and objective, confronting the individuals, not as their relation to one another, but as their subordination to relation which subsist independently of them and which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals.29
In Capital, Marx analyses alienated economic and social relations of this sort under the heading of the ‘fetishism of commodities’. Exchange value achieves a quasi-objective existence, it appears to be a property of the object. Economic relations take on a seemingly objective and independent form as economic laws. In this way social relations take on the ‘fetishized’ form of relations between things.
Mainstream economics regards economic laws as objective and timeless, like laws of nature. According to Marx, however, they are created by the specific social and historical conditions of bourgeois society. With altered social conditions they can therefore be changed.
To maintain that these notions are historically specific is not to suggest that they are mere subjective social appearances or purely conceptual occurrences. On the contrary, economic relations are objective social and historical phenomenon. ‘The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms … of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production.’30
Thus, these categories are not universal. The economic relations that they describe came into being with the rise to predominance of commodity production;31 and they will cease to operate in the future when bourgeois relations of production cease to be the predominant form of economic life.32
These ideas are at the basis of Marx’s criticisms of capitalism. Although there is undoubtedly a moral dimension to Marx’s critique of capitalism, this is not the main character of his critique even in his early work. And, in particular, this is not the main significance of the concept of alienation. Its main purpose rather is to analyse the nature of capitalist economic forms. Their impact is not entirely negative, as the moral interpretation tends to imply, it is more complex and contradictory. Marx understands the effects of capitalism in historical and dialectical terms and this leads towards a historical rather than a merely moral form of criticism.
Precapitalist forms of labour, such as craft work, are limited in content and scope. Such work is restricted to specific materials and techniques and it is individual and small in scale. Economic life before the growth of capitalist relations of production took place within the context of the household and of personal and local relationships. The development of capitalism means that people are detached from these relationships and subjected to new economic relations that involve abstract and alien forms of work and social life. However, the impact of these developments is not entirely negative. For in the process people are progressively freed from the confines of natural and immediate relations. They are subjected to economic relations through which their activities and connections become wider and more universal; and through these they acquire new capabilities and develop in individuality, self-consciousness and freedom.33
This not to say that alienation is a satisfactory condition to be welcomed. It is a condition of distress and suffering. However, these negative aspects themselves give rise to the forces to overcome them. Seen in this light, capitalism and its economic forms – alienation and abstract labour – are not purely negative phenomena. They play also a positive role in the process of human development. Marx’s judgement on them is not one of mere moral condemnation, it is relative and historical.34 Relative to earlier forms of social relation, alienation is a positive development in the way I have indicated; but as conditions for its overcoming are created it becomes something negative and a hindrance to development.
These dialectical and Hegelian themes are central to Marx’s account of alienation and his critique of bourgeois society. However, they are ignored or even positively denied in much of the recent discussion of Marx’s thought. For example, these Hegelian aspects of Marx’s thought are rejected entirely by Althusser and his followers;35 and they are usually overlooked by analytical Marxists as well.36
Overcoming alienation means regaining control of our productive activity and economic life. This cannot be achieved by a return to immediate production for use without the mediation of exchange relations. That is what sometimes appears to be implied by thinkers unduly influenced by Aristotle, or by various forms of Green romanticism.37 Such regression is now out of the question and, in any case, it would be undesirable: it ignores the progress – both material and moral – that economic development has brought about. Rather what Marxism envisages is that the economic development will eventually create the conditions through which alienation can be overcome by the social appropriation of control over the economy by the ‘associated producers’. Then, economic life will no longer take an alienated and hostile form.
This does not require the complete elimination of the role of exchange, or consideration of value, or of abstract labour, which would be possible only with a return to the simplest and most primitive form of economic and social life. Rather what is envisaged is the social organization and control of production and exchange. This will involve the overcoming of the subordination of use value to exchange value, of the domination of commodity production in economic life, and the re-appropriation of control over our social relations and economic life, and with that the end of fetishism.
The concept of alienation and its expression in the ideas of fetishism and abstract labour, embodies these wider – social, moral, political, economic – themes. It has a fundamental role in Marx’s economic thought.
1 ‘Alienation’ is one of the standard translations of both Entfremdung and Entäuβerung in Marx’s work. I am not aware of any clear evidence that Marx uses these terms to denote different concepts. Like most other authors in English I will not distinguish between these terms.
2 Esp Marx 1975a; Marx 1975b.
3 Marx 1976, 102–3.
4 Esp Marx 1975a; Marx 1975b.
5 Marx and Engels 1927.
6 Musto 2010, 89.
7 For example, Tucker 1961, Fromm 1963, Schaff 1963. See Kolakowski 1978, Vol. 3 ch. 13.
8 Althusser 1969.
9 Cohen 1978, Roemer 1986.
10 Althusser 2006, 211, 258; cf Roche 2005, McLellan 1973, Introduction.
11 Marx 1973. First published in 1953.
12 McLellan 1973.
13 Marx 1978, 53.
14 Marx 1976, 283.
15 For a fuller account of the relation of Marx’s ideas to Hegel’s, see Sayers 2011b, Chapter 2.
16 ‘Through estranged labour man not only produces his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to alien and hostile powers; he also produces the relationship in which other men stand to his production and product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men’ (Marx 1975a, 331).
17 Marx 1975a, 330. Marx identifies four aspects of alienated labour in this passage (alienation from the product, the activity of labour, our species being, and of man from man). For a fuller account see Ollman 1971 and Sayers 2011b, Chapter 6.
18 Esp. in Marx 1971, Marx 1973, Marx 1976.
20 Marx 1976, 134–5. There are significant theoretical problems with Marx’s account of abstract labour, but these are not relevant to the continuities of Marx’s thought to which I am pointing here (Kay 1999, Meikle 2007; Arthur 2013).
21 Marx 1971, 30, cf. Marx 1973, 103–6.
22 Marx 1973, 104.
23 Marx 1976, 153–4.
24 Plato 1987, Book I, Sayers 1999, 14–15.
25 Meikle 1995.
26 Aristotle 1981, 1257a1255, 1281–1252. Associated with this, Aristotle distinguishes a ‘natural’ from an ‘unnatural’ method of ‘acquiring goods’ (chrēmatistikē), Aristotle 1981, I.ix.
27 Marx 1973, 297.
28 Marx and Engels 1978, 478.
29 Marx 1973, 157.
30 Marx 1976, 169.
31 There is some apparent ambiguity in Marx about whether alienation is specific to capitalism, for at times he appears to imply that alienation is a feature of all class divided societies. However, the main account given in the 1844 Manuscripts, and the later notions of fetishism and abstract labour, clearly imply that alienation is specific to capitalism. For a fuller discussion see Sayers 2011b, 87f.
32 There has been considerable controversy about whether the law of value will continue to operate in communist society (Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii 1969, Mandel 1968).
33 Sayers 2011a.
35 Cowling 1989, Cowling 2006, Cullenberg 1995, Resch 1992.
36 Exceptionally, however, G. A. Cohen gives an excellent account of them in places (Cohen 1988, Cohen 1978, Introduction). Otherwise, unfortunately, the anti-historical and anti-Hegelian assumptions of Cohen’s analytical approach entirely eclipse his awareness of these themes.
37 MacIntyre 1998, Gorz 1989.
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