How crucial is the concept of alienation to the young Marx?
Marx’s philosophy stands or falls with the concept of alienation. Something so central to his overall outlook would necessarily be something that occurred to him at an early stage of life and was succeeded by developments and modifications of this core thesis. To provide an example from other fields, thinkers as varied as psychoanalysts Freud and Jung, political philosopher John Stuart Mill or physicist Albert Einstein had their core ideas, either at an early stage (Freud, Einstein) or found themselves under the shadow of other thinkers and then after a crisis set out with their own philosophy which they modified and developed till their death (Mill, Jung).
Marx too changed his theories in his early years from an almost liberal-democrat position to a communist one. And this process too worked itself out in his youth when he was deeply influenced by Hegel, Bauer and Feuerbach whose concepts he later repudiated or modified. In this way he stands closer to Mill and Jung then Freud and Einstein.
What is of key interest is the core element of his thought process: man’s alienation from himself; was part of his discourse on history and its laws from the outset. His later developments were unique interpretations of the causes of this alienation and the ‘laws’ he believed were at work which gave rise to this condition through history.
It is no surprise that his early influences at the University of Berlin were Hegel, Bauer and Feuerbach; each of these stressed the concept of man alienated from himself. Marx joined the Young Hegelians and went through a series of stormy revisions of theories postulated by the people who influenced him. Added to the list of influencers were Max Stirner and Moses Hess.
I will first briefly go through the conceptions of alienation by these varied thinkers who influenced the young Marx and then put forward his own postulates on the same. I hope to show by the end of this essay my starting point that Marx’s philosophical doctrines stand or fall with his concept of alienation.
In his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel put forward the theory that there is a universal Mind (some translate this as Spirit) of which individual human minds are the parts. However individuals are not aware of the universal Mind but only of their particular minds. In this ignorance they get alienated from themselves and from each other. As Peter Singer puts it in his outline of Hegelian thought, ‘people (who are manifestations of Mind) take other people (who are also manifestations of Mind) as something foreign, hostile and external to themselves, whereas they are in fact part of the same great whole.’ This philosophy shares elements with the non-dualistic or advaita school of Indian Philosophy. Here too there is one universal consciousness of which we are parts and we live in a world of alienation, separation and illusion only when we see the forms, particularities and separation and not experience the whole of which we all are a part.
Hegel was a determinist and believed that eventually man would be conscious of this error and the historical series of conflicts between the ideas of one group that made other groups subservient in an eternally violent, alienating dialectical struggle would be over once they became conscious of this truth.
One can see how the form of dialectic, the historical determinism and concept of alienation attracted Marx. In his early philosophical manuscripts Marx mentions Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind as ‘the true birthplace and secret of his (Marx’s) philosophy’
While Hegel dealt with this Universal Mind as a form of man’s alienation Feuerbach, another Young Hegelian made religion its source. In his Essence of Christianity, he explained that ‘Man imbued God with what was his own essence as a species. The relation between subject and object was thus reversed; henceforth it no longer appeared that Man created God, but that God created Man.’ He critiqued Hegel’s positing a universal Mind outside man as a similar form of alienation as Christianity which put God outside man. His belief was the more we ‘enrich our concept of God, the more we impoverish ourselves…thus humanity can regain its essence , which in religion it has lost.’ Feueurbach’s main thesis was to get back all attributes of man which he had projected outside himself back into himself and thus end his alienation.
Bruno Bauer, a lecturer in theology was another influence on Marx. Similar to Feuerbach he also found religion an alienating process and ‘the chief illusion in the way of self-understanding.’
Moses Hess was credited by Engels for being the first to reach communism by the philosophical path in his Communist Confession. However his approach to Communism did not have the aggressive elements of class war to achieve its ends as Marx would later suggest. Nevertheless Hess had an undoubted influence on Marx. Gareth Stedman Jones outlines Hess’s outlook on communism:
God had seemed outside humanity because humanity itself lived in a state of separation and antagonism. But with the coming of communism, hell would no longer exist on earth, nor heaven beyond it; rather, everything that in Christianity had been represented prophetically and fantastically would come to pass in a truly human society founded upon the eternal laws of love and reason.
Max Stirner’s, The Ego and Its Own, published in 1844 critiqued Feuerbach by stating his idea of Man was again outside man. This Man with a capital M was similar to Hegel’s Mind, or orthodox religion’s God. It had the same depersonalising attribute of being outside of man and by being objectified it contained the essence of man, and thus became a kind of human religion as opposed to a godly religion. It made man appear beneath Man and again a subject to a master and so continued his alienation and lack of freedom.
It is important to show all the influences Marx underwent in the heady years from 1837 to 1844 in Berlin. He was regularly critiquing, learning, adapting, remoulding, modifying, rejecting thinkers he was exposed to. As mentioned earlier the common problem, was the problem of alienation, the removal of which would give all humans their ultimate freedom. After going through the various influences on Marx’s thought we can now dwell on his unique diagnosis and prescription to the problem of alienation. Something uniquely his own and something he developed much before the penning of both his Communist Manifesto in 1848 and his later focus on the economics behind his theories in Capital.
In an essay entitled On The Jewish Question, Marx went away from God, Mind and Man and offered his radical explanation to the problem of alienation. It was Money.
Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.
This money existed only insofar as private property existed. It was private property that had created earlier feudalism and present capitalism. And so Marx went further to state ‘this private property is the material, sensuous expression of alienated human life.’ And it is itself represented by money.
It is from this universal alienation that Marx found himself looking for a class of people that was universally alienated and through which could occur humanity’s universal remedy. He finds this class of people in the proletariat. In his Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right published in 1844, four years before his Communist Manifesto he finds:
A sphere of society having a universal character because of its universal suffering….a sphere in short, that is complete loss of humanity and can only redeem itself through that total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat.
There is very little mention in earlier writings of the proletariat. It appears almost like the universal character of human alienation led him to seek a class of people who suffered almost universally from this condition. In the unregulated working hours, poor wages and squalid living conditions Marx had found a completely alienated class.
Logically, if alienation was to be universal then it had to affect all classes and not only one. Marx fills this gap by writing in his first published book, The Holy Family, about the bourgeoisie or the owners of private property. He writes how, though alienated too, they were comfortable in their alienation, knowing that in this alienation they also possessed their only power and also a superficial existence with material comforts. Alienated in mind, they covered it up with their material comforts.
This was in stark contrast to the unbearable alienation of the proletariat. While the proletariat owned nothing but their labour which they sold, the bourgeoisie owned private property and the means of production but due to this alienation could not see the essence of genuine productive work, they could not see its inherent beauty. In Marxist terms they could not see its ‘use value’ only its ‘exchange value’. In his Early Philosophical Manuscripts he writes about how private property has this dehumanising and alienating quality. ‘The dealer in minerals sees the market value of the jewels he handles, not their beauty.’ To the inherent quality of objects the bourgeoisie was blind. He could only see these as a means to an end, that of more money, their exchange value. Objects were either used for the gratifying sense of possession or for using as a means for more money. This condition occurred as mentioned earlier due to a single cause, private property.
So far I have shown Marx dwelling on the negative aspects of the human condition i.e. its terrible sense of alienation. I will now attempt to show Marx’s vision of the world once this soul-robbing alienation was removed.
For Marx the essence of humanity was a dynamic activity between subject and object. He believed that human beings could not be passive spectators of events. And could not be passive observers who could contemplate the world and thus reach an objective evaluation of it. Such a condition was a philosophical illusion. Every interaction changed both observer and observed or worker and the thing worked upon. He found the essential nature of man in a natural state (that is a state where he is not alienated from himself) as one of productive joyful work. ‘Man produced ‘’universally’’. He produced even when he was ‘’free from physical need’’, he therefore formed objects ‘in accordance with the laws of beauty’’.
Man was not a passive being who could exist without interaction with matter. In fact no living species could. What made man unique was his need to realise himself through his work. Man’s conscious life activity was ‘in creating a world of objects by his practical activity.’ In a state of connectedness with nature man would fully develop his natural powers and essential qualities and find himself in ‘a world that he has created.’ Emancipation in this way would be both a matter of knowing and being. It is only in this state that man would not only realise his bond with his productive work, his inherent and essential qualities but also in his bond with other men that had been robbed and cast into the sphere of debasement, cruelty and competition through the institution of private property and money. This would result in what Marx termed the ‘whole man’. Not one who debases himself, sells his labour, commodifies himself and everything else; and finds a few scraps of satisfaction in the brutish satisfaction of instinctual desires after he has finished his alienating and dehumanising labour, but by actually being the productive person that he naturally is.
Here Marx also critiques the classical economists of a century earlier. He finds in Adam Smith a person who describes the laws of demand and supply, of the invisible hand of the market, of the self-interest of the producer, of the benefits in the division of labour – as though these were natural. In fact Marx posited that Smith merely described a debased alienated condition and detailed it not a natural one. Rather than understanding the historical processes that shaped it and the essence of humanity behind it, Smith and other classical economists merely described it. For Marx classical economics was just a superficial detailing of man’s alienated state.
Marx delved into man’s current state and how society’s cultural mores were but a reinforcement of its material relations by doing so he envisaged a materialist conception of history. Ideas, philosophy, politics, religion, art were all a ‘superstructure’ in a word instruments, used by the ruling class. The classes themselves were ultimately based on their material relations. Relations based on who owned the means of production.
In conclusion, the period 1837-1844 were years when Marx had all but completed his understanding of man and human history. Later works were oriented towards further action and analysis. His Communist Manifesto was an activist agenda explaining what the human condition was at that time and the means of overcoming it. In Capital he explained in economic terms what his theories were based on. But all this rested on the influences in his younger days where he was exposed to the concepts of alienation. His work in those seven years was to rediscover the causes behind this alienation which made him critique all earlier theorists. Not only was the concept crucial to Marx it also was an emotionally fulfilling one. In all the rationalistic style of writing, Marx appears consummately passionate about his theories and ideals. As Gareth Stedman Jones quotes the early Marx in his Early Philosophical Mansucripts:
‘Money was the ‘’alienated ability of mankind’’. In a ‘’human world’’, by contrast, the general confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities expressed by money and exchange value would be impossible. There you could only ‘’exchange love only for love…..’’’
