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Fall, 2004 |
Ernesto Verdeja |
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Introduction
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[ Recommended Reading ]
For the purposes of this colloquium, Marx can best be read as sharing many of Rousseau's ideas regarding human nature and society. For Marx, humans are social beings in that their "nature" is socially created, and it changes as their society changes, which in turn is at least in part a result of their own activities. He rejects any "fixed" conception of human nature; humans are essentially historical and their needs and capacities change in fundamental ways over time. Like Rousseau, Marx places great emphasis on self-consciousness as a distinctive trait of human beings, on human activity as a process of self-creation and on positive freedom. He envisions a society which enables its members to express the capacities and satisfy the needs to which it has given rise.
In addition to these continuities, there are also profound differences between Marx and Rousseau. Unlike Rousseau, Marx thinks that history is progressive; for Marx, human history is a process of social change culminating in a condition of full human freedom. In this process, humans create their own needs and capacities through their own activity. There is nothing outside of us – no God, state, spirit, no higher force that determines what we will be and do. And history is largely a process through which our capacities become enlarged and our understanding and control over nature increase. In many ways, then, Marx shares the Enlightenment views we examined last week.
The critical sphere of activity, the sphere which largely controls historical change, is production. Marx begins with the idea that humans are animals who must reproduce the material and social means of their existence through labor, through working (in cooperation with other humans) on nature. It is in this work that they create themselves, and it is for this reason that the material basis of social life is the primary determinant of other aspects of society, such as its legal, political, and cultural characteristics. We must understand ourselves first of all in terms of the ways in which we produce the material means of our own existence, because they will constrain all other aspects of our social life.
In working on nature and in social interaction people "objectify" themselves: they create a world of objects and institutions which express, and are the result of, their activities, their capacities, their needs. Human nature, the external world, and the social world are not simply given; they are (at least in large part) the products of human activities and must be created through conscious, practical work.
This concept of humans as self-creative beings expresses an ideal that is immanent in the historical process, but which has not (yet) been realized. What actually happens is that we do not recognize the world we have created as our own world; rather, we experience it as something that is different, something "just there," something alien. This alienation, however, does not exist only in the mind or "consciousness": it is not simply a matter of our failing to recognize that the world in which we live is actually our own creation. Nor is it simply a matter of our feeling estranged from the world. On the contrary, alienation or estrangement is an objective condition rooted in the real, material conditions of our existence, in actual forms of domination and inequality which prevent us from being self-determining beings. In an alienated world, our activity is often imposed on us, something we perform because we have to, and so it is not expressive of our own purposes and aspirations. In many cases we are not fully conscious of what we do, nor why, nor how it is related to larger social or natural processes. In many ways our lives are frustrating and mysterious to us.
Human estrangement (in capitalist society) is rooted in part in private property, as Marx explains in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Under capitalism, workers can gain access to the means of production only by selling their labor as a commodity to the capitalists who own the means of production. They have to do this because only by gaining access to the means of production can they produce the goods or earn the wages that are necessary to satisfy their needs. But when one has sold one's labor, when one's own life-activity has been alienated to an employer, one's activity in working is no longer one's own, for it is controlled and directed by someone else. And the product of one's activity does not express one's own purposes and plans, but those of one's employer. Thus, workers confront a world they have made, a world that is the objectification of their labor. But they experience that world, and themselves and, indeed, their own activity in production, as alien, as estranged from them. The workers' activity and the objects they produce in capitalist society do not express the workers' purposes; rather, these products come to have an independent existence, over and apart from the workers, and are used to dominate them.
In producing goods for the market using the workers' labor, capitalists are able to realize a profit by paying the workers less than they actually produce with their labor. This profit is then reinvested in the business in the form of capital, thereby augmenting the very power which capitalists used to dominate the workers in the first place. Workers are forced to produce the very means that dominate them.
This condition of alienation or estrangement does not only characterize production; rather, it pervades every aspect of life. In religion and in politics, for example, humans, through their own activity, create objects, such as God or the state, which come to have an independent existence over and apart from us, and which dominate and control us. One of the conditions of this alienation is that we understand ourselves and our situation in a "mystified" or ideological manner, and so fail to understand the reality of our situation and our own role in creating it. In the case of religion, for example, we believe in God as an object or power that exists outside of ourselves. But this belief is an illusion. In reality, it is we who create God by displacing our own human powers of self-creation onto "God" which we conceive as an external, all-powerful being. We are driven to do this in part because we seek consolation for the real loss of these powers in our lives:
Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people (p. 54).
In politics, as Marx explains in "On the Jewish Question," we conceive of ourselves as individuals who are separate, independent atoms of society who form a moral community only in that we are by nature bearers of rights. But by thinking of ourselves in this way we fail to see that we are social beings, whose "rights" are the historical products of a particular form of society. In his "Theses on Feuerbach" Marx argues that "the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations" (p. 145). If we are to realize ourselves as the social beings we necessarily are, we must no longer see society "as a limitation of man's original independence, as wholly external to the individual" (p. 43). Genuine human emancipation requires that we overcome the split between the individual and society, public and private, and that in our day-to-day lives we live, act, and work as social beings who recognize and organize our own powers as social powers. Thus, we can see that the realization of communism will involve the abolition of such bourgeois notions as "rights," including the differential claims and inequalities to which rights give rise. More generally, the overcoming of alienation in religion, in politics, and in other spheres of society will be possible only through a transformation of the real, material conditions of our lives, through the abolition of capitalism.
Human estrangement can be overcome, and human emancipation achieved, only by abolishing private ownership of the means of production, so that control over the means of production cannot be used by some to dominate others. With the abolition of private property, the workers – and all will then be workers – can collectively organize production in accordance with their own purposes and plans, in accordance with human needs and not for profit. But this will only be possible when the means of production are developed to the point where production is genuinely and fully social; at this point it will not be possible to organize production effectively except through the community as a whole. While capitalism was at one time a revolutionary force that broke the fetters that feudalism placed on the expansion of the means of production, it will increasingly come to retard their development. This will be manifested in the deep crises of unemployment and inflation that capitalism causes, the increasing concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands, and in the increasing polarization of society into opposed classes of a small number of capitalists and a vast majority of workers. As these "objective conditions" come to be realized, the workers will come to see their condition as insufferable, and to understand that what must be changed is the capitalist system itself. The writings of Marx and other socialists who correctly understand the dynamics of capitalist society will be instrumental in enabling the workers to come to this realization, which will satisfy the "subjective conditions" necessary for the revolution. At this point it will be possible to bring about the revolution that will establish communism.
Communism, Marx emphasizes, is a condition "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (p. 491). Its premise is human emancipation, not the imposition of a dull uniformity and equality on all people through state control of the means of production. This latter image Marx calls "crude communism," and he rejects it unequivocally. Rather, communism makes it possible for people collectively to determine the conditions under which they will live, and to do so in a self-conscious manner. It creates for the fist time a form of society in which individuals freely decide on their activities, so that they produce a world of objects that expresses their purposes and needs. It is thus a human world in which they can find themselves and feel at home. And because the conditions of their lives are consciously chosen, rather than being imposed on them, or being the unintended results of their own activities, people will then be fully self-creative beings who make their own history.
The readings for this week include Marx's first formulations of his critique of capitalism. His essay "On the Jewish Question" examines the ways in which the liberal state, based on a commitment to human rights, fails to realize its own ideal of human emancipation because it reproduces the very conditions of alienation and separation that are characteristic of capitalist society. It is a troubling essay in part because Marx employs anti-Semitic language to make his point. The argument could easily be made without using such language; that Marx chose to put it that way, is a testament to the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in the culture of his time. The second reading, Marx’s “Introduction” to a manuscript he prepared but did not publish on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right offers a powerful, early statement of his account of alienation. The third reading, his "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," provides the earliest analysis of alienation in which economic relationships are seen as central. This work was never prepared for publication, and it is heavily laden with abstruse, Hegelian terms. Note that I have not asked you to read the last section, which is exceptionally difficult. Finally, "The Communist Manifesto" provides an early overview of Marx's ideas. You may even wish to read it first, to get a sense of Marx's overall theory. I would also recommend Engels' "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," which is assigned for next week. It offers a very clear statement of what Engels took to be the core of Marxist theory as it had taken shape late in Marx's life.
Assignment: Marx, "On The Jewish Question," in Tucker, pp. 26-52.
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Tucker, pp. 53-65.
Marx, "The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts," in Tucker, pp. 66-105.
Marx and Engels, "The Communist Manifesto," in Tucker, pp. 469-500.
There will be no essay assigned this week. Instead, you should prepare notes on the following questions:
1. What does Marx mean by "alienation," and in what ways is it central to his concept of the person and society? In thinking about this question you should consider the relationships between alienation and such ideas as objectification, the person as a social being, communism, and private property.
2. Critically assess Marx's views of "human rights".
1. What is "objectification"?
2. Why is labor so important according to Marx?
3. Why does Marx think that human nature is not fixed and given for all places and time?
4. Why does Marx say that political emancipation is not human emancipation?
5. What does Marx mean by saying humans are "species-beings"?
6. What are the four aspects of alienated labor, and how are they related to each other?
7. Are wealthy capitalists alienated?
8. What is crude about "crude communism"?
9. How is money "the alienated power of humanity"?
10. Why is private property a manifestation and cause of alienation?
The readings this week are short, but difficult. There is a vast secondary literature on Marx. The best on this aspect of Marx's thought is Shlomo Avineri's The Political Thought of Karl Marx, especially chs. 3 and 4. See also A. Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, the first chapter on Marx. A very brief, but very good account of Marx is David McLellan, Karl Marx; an excellent study of Marx and the intellectual and political movements which formed the context of his writings, and which he may be said to have inspired, is George Lichtheim, Marxism. Finally, Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, offers an explication and critique of Marx and virtually all significant thinkers in the Marxist tradition.
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