Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts

In earlier passages from the Manuscripts, Marx accepted traditional political economic terms and presupposed – rather than explained – “private property; the separation of labour, capital, and land, and likewise of wages, profit, and capital; the division of labour; competition; the conception of exchange value, etc.”

He, furthermore, showed that under these conditions a) “the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all;” b) “that the misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and volume of his production;” c) “that the necessary consequence of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands and hence the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that, finally,” d) “the distinction between capitalist and landlord, between agricultural worker and industrial worker, disappears and the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.”

The point he makes is that political economy proceeds as though its presuppositions were facts in need of no explanation at treats the relationships between the unexplained facts as if they were laws. Remember here, for those of you who have taken economics courses, that it is assumed that people are rational, utility maximizing and perfectly informed free individuals and that any situation where these foundational assumptions are not found – which includes each and every market on the planet – are then treated as if they were flush with market imperfections rather than flawed assumptions.

As I said Tuesday, Marx wants to start out not from idealist assumptions that are imperfectly realized in the material world, but from actual historical facts. He lists:

• The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent.
• The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces.
• The devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things.
• Labour not only produces commodities; it also produces itself and the workers as a commodity and it does so in the same proportion in which it produces commodities in general.

The argument is “that the object that labour produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer.” Marx writes about the realization and objectification of labour in the product of labor whatever the productive forces and production relations are. Under political economy (capitalism), however, Marx finds that “this realization of labour appears as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.”

“All these consequences are contained in this characteristic, that the worker is related to the product of labour as to an alien object. For it is clear that, according to this premise, the more the worker exerts himself in his work, the more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being over against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, and the less they belong to him.”

Marx writes: “The estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed according to the laws of political economy in the following way:
1. the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume;
2. the more value he creates, the more worthless he becomes;
3. the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker;
4. the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker;
5. the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker;
6. the more intelligent the work, the duller the worker and the more he becomes a slave of nature.”

The key point being made in these passages is: “Political economy conceals the estrangement in the nature of labour by ignoring the direct relationship between the worker and production.”

The idea is that the central concern of political economic, and sociological, analysis needs to be how people make their own lives – how they produce objects and relationships. Under capitalism, Marx is arguing, workers are alienated from the objects they produce – which are owned by others, and alienated from the process of production – which is controlled by others.

This is a classic passage on “the alienation of labour.”
“Firstly, the fact that labour is external to the worker – i.e., does not belong to his essential being; that he, therefore, does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence, the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working, he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His labour is, therefore, not voluntary but forced, it is forced labour. It is, therefore, not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, it is shunned like the plague…. Finally, the external character of labour for the worker is demonstrated by the fact that it belongs not to him but to another, and that in it he belongs not to himself but to another.”

The things that make us human, that differentiate us from animals, our conscious and intentional capacities to socially produce the objects and relationships we want, are felt most keenly outside of the activities and away from the objects and relationships, of work. For Marx, the “result is that man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions – eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and adornment – while in his human functions, he is nothing more than animal.”

What ought to be our life’s activity, the objectification of ourselves in the world, the realization of our intents and relationships – what Marx calls “productive life itself” – appears to us primarily as a means of satisfying other “unproductive” needs. We work to live rather than being fully alive at work.

Marx explores the historical conditions of wage labor in a class-based society in the following manner. Capitalist laborers are estranged/alienated/separated from
1) Nature (they are forced off the land and craftsmen no longer own their own tools/machines);
2) the products of (their) labor (the capitalist disposes of the commodity wage laborers produce and controls the reinvestment or expenditure of any profits);
3) their actions within production (capitalists or managers largely determine the place, pace and relations between productive practices);
4) their own social/universal species-being (this is as much about the realization of social as it is our individual potential, something effectively forestalled by productive specialization at work – among other things); and
5) other men (if you are a free agent on the job market and the market is saturated what impetus to do you have not to seek to undercut those employed when you are unemployed? What impetus, time, or energy do you have to develop quality social relations within the workplace or at home?).

Though he mentions it earlier in what we read, Marx leaves this out of his list, but there is also the estrangement from public space as it is privatized… “He is at home when he is not working and when he is working he is not at home.” (p.74) It is not hard at all to think of the ways that gendered divisions of labor – where women are domestic goddesses and men are public citizens – eventually emerge along these lines… much less the ways that feminism could use Marx’s basic logic to speak of the alienated/alienating experience women have when excluded for “productive activity” at work and bound to “reproductive activities” in the home.

“Every self-estrangement of man from himself and nature is manifested in the relationship he sets up between other men and himself and nature. Thus, religious self-estrangement is necessarily manifested in the relationship between layman and priest, or, since we are dealing here with the spiritual world, between layman and mediator, etc.”

Marx’s argument is that the “private property; the separation of labour, capital, and land, and likewise of wages, profit, and capital; the division of labour; competition; the conception of exchange value, etc.” we started the reading with are the product of an ever-more differentiated process of alienated and alienating labor.

We will see, in Capital (I think) that the five- or six-fold alienation of labor listed above, materially and analytically precedes the development of wage labor as the dominant form of productive relationships. The key is this: “Private property as the material, summarized expression of alienated labour embraces both relations – the relation of the worker to labour and to the product of his labour and the non-workers, and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product of his labour.”