The Dialectic of Actuality and Potentiality
Towards an Immanent Critique of Technologically Advanced Capitalism
Graduate Thesis, Research Master’s in Philosophy
University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Philosophy Author: Emile Ike
Supervisor: dr. Robin Celikates Second reader: dr. Johan Hartle
Table of contents
Introduction. The Crisis of Work and Critical Social Theory 3 Chapter 1. Marx’s Early Anthropology of Labour 8 1.1 Philosophical Anthropology in the Early Works I: Humanism 10 1.2 Philosophical Anthropology in the Early Works II: Species-Being and Human Nature 14 1.3 Marx’s Early Conception of Labour I: Alienation 16 1.4 Marx’s Early Conception of Labour II: Objectification and Self-Realisation 21 Chapter 2. The Critique of Marx’s Early Philosophical Anthropology 23 2.1 The Philosophical Anthropology of Humanist Marxism 24 2.2 Philosophical Anthropology and the Method of Immanent Critique: 25 2.3 The Critique of the Category of Needs 32 2.4 The Critique of Human Nature 33 Chapter 3. The Critique of Ontological Conceptions of Labour: Denaturalising Labour 39 3.1 The Ontological Conception of Labour 40 3.2 The Critique of Political Economy and the Historical Specificity of Labour 43 3.3 Labour and the Method of Immanent Critique 47 Chapter 4. The Dialectic of Actuality and Potentiality: A Reconstruction of Immanent Critique 50 4.1 Marx’s Theory of Commodity Fetishism 51 4.2 Contradiction and Potentiality: On the Nature of Capitalist Social Reality 54 4.3 The Transition from Value to Capital, or: From Ghosts to Vampires 58 4.4 The Dialectic of Actuality and Potentiality 61 Chapter 5. Towards a Communist Politics of Technology and a Post-Work Future 65 5.1 Class Struggle and Technology: Politicising Technological Development 66 5.2 Towards an Emancipatory and Communist Politics of Technology and Machinery 70 5.3 Post-Work Politics and a Future without Work 75 5.4 The Limits of Free Time 80 Conclusion. Reclaiming the Future 82
“We do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one. Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it. […] If constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that
exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives
at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be. […] We do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. […] In short, therefore, we can formulate the trend of our journal as being: self-clarification (critical philosophy) to be gained by the present time of its struggles and desires”
Introduction. The Crisis of Work and Critical Social Theory
Contemporary capitalist society is characterised by the continuing drudgery of work in a world where the liberation from work is technically possible, and the continuation of poverty and material deprivation in the midst of apparent plenty. This gap between what is and what could be, this tension between the actual and the potential, is growing deeper in the context of technologically advanced capitalism.1 Today’s capitalist societies are witnessing rapid technological transformations
and changes in the world of work. According to some economic estimates, nearly 50% of the currently existing activities in work could be automated right now through the adoption of current technologies.2 These estimations fit into the long-term tendency of the capitalist mode of
production towards a condition of secular stagnation and unemployment, denoting a squeeze in profitability due to the fall of relative surplus-value and an increase of populations that are increasingly rendered obsolete to the requirements of capital. Moreover, the work that remains is turning increasingly precarious, with 1.4 billion people worldwide facing precarious and vulnerable forms of employment, most prominently manifested in the rise of short-term and zero-hour contracts.3
This crisis of work, expressed in the combined threats of automation and precarisation of the labour process, poses serious challenges to any critical social theory purporting to analyse and criticise contemporary capitalism. Although Marxist political economists and historians have long described and theorised these trends, Marxist philosophy appears to have reached a deadlock, even though the aforementioned political-economic trends have significant philosophical – both normative and epistemological – implications. Generally, the response from Marxist philosophers and critical theorists has been twofold: humanist Marxists desperately cling to anachronistic and romantic ideas of self-realisation through labour, and consequently perceive automated technologies unequivocally as a threat, whereas post-Marxist and poststructuralist theorists have moved beyond the Marxian critique of political economy altogether, arguing that its categories are obsolete in the postmodern condition.4 This thesis aims to counter both these tendencies through
1 In this thesis, the concept of technologically advanced capitalism primarily refers to the contemporary
phase of capitalism in which the application of science and technology to the production process is becoming increasingly common.
2 Cole 2017: 3. The estimations vary, with some economists suggesting that between 47% and 80% of the
currently existing jobs are at risk of being automated in the near future, see Frey & Osborne 2013: 36-38.
3 Lewis 2017: 4
4 The former position builds on Marx’s early anthropology of labour and will be discussed – and criticised
accordingly – extensively throughout the next chapters. The latter position is perhaps best represented by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, who explicitly self-identify as ‘post-Marxists’, see Mouffe & Laclau 2014: xxiv.
a revitalisation of Karl Marx’s critique of political economy as a mode of immanent social critique that is adequate to the specificities of technologically advanced capitalism.5
The thesis can be broadly divided into two parts. The first part encompasses the first three chapters and is devoted to a critique of Marx’s early anthropology of labour and the mode of criticising capitalism that follows from this. In his early writings, Marx supposedly articulates a philosophical anthropology that is specifically linked to the human capacity for labour. According to the early Marx, the capacity for labour – understood as a process of externalisation and objectification – constitutes human nature or human essence. This anthropological theory of human labour can be divided into two sub-claims: (a) that there exists such a thing as human nature or human essence; and (b) that the activity of labour as such is central to the human condition, hence acquiring a transhistorical or ontological status.6 This anthropology of labour has
subsequently been developed by a range of Marxist theorists, for whom these positive determinations of human nature and labour serve as the external standards and normative basis for a critique of capitalism.
However, the critique of capitalism implicit in the anthropology of labour ultimately adopts an external method of critique that is methodologically incompatible with Marx’s method of immanent critique, which I consider to be more adequate in analysing and criticising the current capitalist status quo. Moreover, the anthropology of labour is tied to problematic assumptions of human nature and to a traditional and undifferentiated conception of labour, which appears to be rather anachronistic in light of contemporary transformations in the world of work and technology. Chapter one provides a systematic overview of Marx’s early anthropology of labour, discussing Marx’s early humanism as well his conceptions of human nature and labour. This chapter sets the stage for chapter two, which develops a critique of the first sub-claim, i.e. the conception of human nature, especially in relation to its status in a critique of the capitalist mode of production. Chapter three offers a critique of the second sub-claim and aims to denaturalise Marx’s early understanding of labour, arguing that the latter should be revised in light of the historicised categories of Marx’s critique of political economy.
5 In this respect, the arguments developed in this thesis are heavily indebted to the works of Moishe Postone,
who unfortunately passed away last March, in the same period as I was writing this thesis. For a good overview of Postone’s work, see Lange 2018.
6 It is important to note that these two dimensions, i.e. the anthropological dimension and the dimension
of labour, are intricately connected in Marx’s early approach, since Marx offers an anthropological theory of human labour. Hence it makes sense to speak of an ‘anthropology of labour’, and the distinction between the two dimensions is only heuristic in nature and helps to clarify the structure of the argument. For the same reasons, one must criticise both dimensions if one is to come up with a comprehensive critique of the anthropology of labour.
Having shown in part one that the anthropology of labour is inadequate for a critique of contemporary capitalism, part two of the thesis – which encompasses chapters four and five – provides a reconstruction of Marx’s mature method of immanent critique, particularly as elaborated in the Grundrisse (1857-58) and in Capital (1867). Chapter four forms the cornerstone of the thesis and proposes a model of social critique that is immanent to its object, in this case the phenomenon of technologically advanced capitalism. By drawing on the writings of Marx, Theodor W. Adorno, and Moishe Postone, the aim is to develop an immanent critique of technologically advanced capitalism which is rooted in the tension between the actual and the potential referred to in the opening lines of this introduction. This gap between what is and what could be is particularly relevant in the case of automated technologies, which I take to be the most important immanent standards in contemporary society. Capital’s pressing need for increasing productivity gives rise to a technologically sophisticated mode of production that constantly generates the objective possibility of another organisation of social life, yet at the same time hinders that possibility from being realised, thus giving rise to a dialectic of actuality and potentiality.
This dialectic is now more relevant than before, since today we have enough by way of productive forces to feed the entire planet and to reduce labour to a minimum, yet this potentiality cannot be actualised as long as the value-determined social relations of capitalism remain in place. The normative basis of this model of immanent critique is precisely situated in the gap between the actual and the potential, and the normative commitments of this mode of critique can be derived immanently from existing social reality, i.e. from the structural contradictions and gaps that give rise to determinate immanent possibilities for radical social transformation. Moreover, whereas the anthropology of labour provides a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labour, Marx’s mature immanent critique provides a critique of labour in capitalism. Accordingly, communism should not be understood as the historical realisation of labour, which openly emerges as the ontological essence of society; rather, it should be understood as the abolition of labour as such, thus paving the way for a future without work.7
At the same time, however, it is important to note that these objective possibilities for overcoming capitalism can only be actualised through social struggle and political organisation. Chapter five elucidates the political dimensions and implications of the model of immanent critique outlined in chapter four. More specifically, this chapter gives a broad outline of a potential communist politics of technology and machinery, aiming to realise better uses of technology as well as different kinds of technology. This in turn materially enables a post-work politics directed at a future without work, thereby approximating Marx’s determination of communism as the
“realm of freedom”.8 Furthermore, this chapter addresses some of the objections and challenges
facing the model of immanent critique and the post-work politics advanced here. The objections and challenges revolve around charges of technological determinism, the dangers of automation, and the limitations of a politics of free time. A discussion of these problems hopefully allows for a clearer understanding of what a politics directed at a post-work future does and does not entail.
With this thesis, I hope to contribute to a long-standing methodological debate concerning the appropriate method of critique for a critical social theory of capitalism. Consequently, the thesis addresses both the normative and epistemological foundations of immanent critique. At the same time, however, the scope of the thesis is not limited to these methodological considerations, for it also deals with substantive issues in social theory concerning the status of labour and technology in contemporary capitalist societies. It should be noted from the outset that method and substance – or form and content – are not so easily distinguished. It is my contention that contemporary transformations in capitalism, particularly those pertaining to labour and technology, themselves generate the conditions of possibility for the method of immanent critique defended here, and that this method is simultaneously validated by these transformations.9 In this way, immanent critique
is able to account self-reflexively for its own conditions of emergence. In this context it is also interesting to note that Marx’s Capital is generally structured in a rigorously immanent fashion, but that he switches back to a method of genealogical critique precisely when he is addressing the social and political situation prior to the establishment of full-fledged capitalism, i.e. when is discussing the violent transition from feudalism to capitalism in the chapter on the ‘Secret of Primitive Accumulation’.10 It is only with the complete establishment of capitalism that Marx’s critique of
political economy becomes possible in the first place, just as the development of technologically advanced capitalism is a condition of possibility for the method of immanent critique defended here. As a result, this method is historically specific to technologically advanced capitalism and has no pretensions beyond it.11
8 Marx 1991: 959
9 The perspective can also be reversed: for instance, transformations in the organisation of work invalidate
more traditional understandings of labour and call for new conceptions more adequate to present reality.
10 In this chapter Marx exposes the bloody and violent genesis of the capitalist mode of production, see
Marx 1990: 873ff. On the phenomenon of genealogical critique, see Geuss 2002.
11 The scope of the thesis is limited in other respects as well. The thesis focuses more on the objective and
structure-related dimension of Marx’s social theory than on the subjective and agency-related dimension, which is also evidently present in Marx’s own writings. The fifth chapter only provides a very rough outline of the implications for social change and political agency that follow from the objectivist approach adopted here. Furthermore, the role and status of morality in critiques of capitalism – an issue closely related to the subject matter under discussion here – will only be touched upon very briefly.
Furthermore, the thesis contributes to Marxological debates surrounding the interpretation of Marx’s writings.12 In contradistinction to most of the currently existing academic literature, the
reconstruction of Marx’s method of immanent critique is based on Marx’s mature writings rather than his early writings. This also sheds new light on the relation between Marx’s early and later writings and on the interrelation of the core problematics of Marx’s critical theory, i.e. alienation, ideology, and fetishism. But before turning to these issues, we must go back to Marx’s early writings on humanism, human nature, and labour in order to elucidate the anthropology of labour.
12 Although I cannot always develop these arguments as extensively as I wish, the main Marxological points
Chapter 1. Marx’s Early Anthropology of Labour
A philosophical anthropology – which defines the essential capacities and needs of human beings in a theory of human nature – explicitly linked to the activity of labour is by no means a straightforward association in the history of philosophy. Within the Western philosophical tradition, attempts to characterise what is essential to the human condition have centred around the capacity for rational contemplation rather than practical activity. Indeed, Hannah Arendt – in
The Human Condition (1958) – suggests that the primacy of contemplation over activity “has ruled
metaphysical and political thought throughout our tradition”.13 Marx appears to be well aware of
this neglect for practice when he opens the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) with the following criticism of traditional materialism: “The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the
object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively”.14 Marx’s
materialism famously reverses this perspective, arguing in the eighth thesis that “all social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice”.15
Subsequently, many philosophers have argued along similar lines. Marx’s eighth thesis on Feuerbach bears resemblance to the late Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), but to a certain extent even Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) shares a similar premise.16 All three
authors share the conviction that many philosophical or theoretical problems are due to the abasement of practical activity and the elevation of a theoretical attitude in a tradition that is primarily concerned with contemplation. With the ‘practice turn’ in the seventies of the twentieth century, in which social practices became the primary objects of investigation rather than intentions
13 Arendt 1998: 16
14 Marx 1976: 3. This traditional form of materialism is already a step beyond the idealism that Arendt
attacks.
15 Marx 1976: 5. Throughout this text, the emphasis in quotations from Marx is always in the original, unless
otherwise indicated.
16 See for example Wittgenstein 2009: §7, in which Wittgenstein famously characterises meaning as use and
language as practice and as language-games comprising both linguistic and extra-linguistic activity. For example, for Wittgenstein the practice of rule-following is ultimately not constituted by intentions or reasons, but by actions: “And then I shall act, without reasons” (Wittgenstein 2009: §211). Marx’s view that the “mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice” is echoed in Wittgenstein’s preferred description of philosophy as therapy, see Wittgenstein 1986: §131. For a Wittgensteinian approach to social practices, see Schatzki 1996. In a similar vein, Heidegger’s distinction between presence-at-hand or Vorhandenheit (which refers to a theoretical attitude) and readiness-to-hand or Zuhandenheit (which is associated with practical activity) draws attention to the different ways in which we encounter objects in the world. According to Heidegger, the former has undue primacy over the latter in the Western philosophical tradition. The famous example of hammering is instructive in this regard, see Heidegger 1996: 64-65. Lucien Goldmann maintains that Heidegger was indirectly influenced by Marx through the writings of Georg Lukács, see Goldmann 1977.
or structures, this development seems to have reached its ultimate consequence.17 Obviously, the
similarities between the aforementioned theorists are only superficial and significant methodological and substantive differences remain. For instance, of the three it was only Marx that saw the need to develop a historically informed critical social theory that supersedes the speculations of pure philosophy.18 And what is distinctive about Marx’s writings dating from the
beginning of the 1840’s is that they are not concerned with practice in general. Rather, these writings address a specific form of practice, i.e. the human activity of labour. Indeed, for the Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 anthropological questions and the activity of labour are heavily intertwined, for the conception of human essence is always linked to the human capacity for labour, and Marx’s positive evaluation of labour rests upon labour’s potential contribution to the realisation of this essence.19
However, the anthropological theory of human labour that Marx advances in these writings is controversial and has been subjected to critique by Marxists and non-Marxists alike. Indeed, questions of interpretation of Marx’s early works gave rise to what has subsequently come to be known the ‘humanist controversy’ in Marxist theory, which will be briefly assessed in the next chapter. Obviously, as the whole field of intellectual history attests to, it is never easy to discern what message a theorist meant to convey at the time of writing, but the subsequent reception and the political struggles involved in interpreting Marx’s early writings appears to be an extra complication. Moreover, as will be clear from the discussion of the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts in this chapter, the interpretation is further complicated by Marx’s negativist method of
immanent critique and the anti-utopian thrust that runs through his work more generally.20 As a
rule, Marx does not put forward a positive vision of what human labouring activity is or what it should be; instead he describes the negative condition of alienated labour, from which – by implication – certain features of what non-alienated labour might look like can be derived.
17 Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1995 [1975]) and Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice
(1977) are commonly associated with this ‘practice turn’.
18 Thanks to Robin Celikates for pointing out this particular point. With regard to the superficial similarity
between Marx and Wittgenstein, for instance, Daniel Brudney comments succinctly: “I think it safe to say that Wittgenstein never sees the source of a philosophical question in socially generated illusions permeating individuals’ lives. Marx always does” (Brudney 1998: 10).
19 Technically, however, one must distinguish between a philosophical approach on the one hand and the
content on which this approach is applied on the other hand. In his early writings, Marx approaches the content of labour from the perspective of a philosophical anthropology, which defines the essential capacities and needs of human beings primarily in terms of the activity of labour. Such a distinction, however, cannot be found in Marx’s own writings. In the context of this thesis the distinction is heuristic in nature and helps to systematise the arguments in subsequent chapters.
20 In contemporary debates within political philosophy, this is sometimes referred to as non-ideal theory,
It is important to note from the outset that the anthropology of labour as described in this chapter poses a challenge to the overall argument of my thesis, since my aim is precisely to denaturalise the category of labour and to uncouple the Marxist project from a problematic philosophical anthropology. My thesis questions both the political desirability and theoretical necessity of an anthropology of labour for the overall Marxist project, but this does not entail a denial of the fact that Marx actually did entertain such an anthropology throughout a certain period of his life; indeed, it is hard to deny the presence of a certain anthropology of labour in Marx’s early writings. However, in order to grasp why this anthropology of labour is seriously limited for the purposes of a critique of technologically advanced capitalism it is first of all necessary to elucidate this anthropology of labour using Marx’s own words. This chapter provides a systematic reconstruction of Marx’s early writings on the themes of humanism, human nature, and labour by citing extensively Marx’s own formulations found in various articles and manuscripts.21 The first
and second sections of this chapter discuss Marx’s philosophical anthropology, whereas the second and third sections address Marx’s early conception of labour, the combination giving rise to a more determinate account of his anthropology of labour.
1.1 Philosophical Anthropology in the Early Works I: Humanism
The themes of humanism, naturalism and human nature run as a common thread throughout Marx’s early writings. Already in one of Marx’s earliest essays titled ‘Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession’ – written in 1835 at the age of seventeen for his gymnasium examinations – a certain inclination towards a form of humanist perfectionism is visible: “The chief guide which must direct us in the choice of a profession is the welfare of mankind and our own perfection. It should not be thought that these two interests could be in conflict, that one would have to destroy the other; on the contrary, man’s [sic] nature is so constituted that he can attain his own perfection only by working for the perfection, for the good, of his fellow men”.22 Although
this early description of humanism remains somewhat indeterminate, Marx’s humanist impulses become more pronounced in subsequent writings such as the ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’ (1843-44) and ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1843).
In the former article – which was published in the German-Franco Yearbooks – Marx’s humanism is particularly clear in his criticism of religion, which Marx considers to be the ‘premise
21 Since the texts under discussion are very rich and complex, I can only provide a rough outline of the
arguments advanced in these articles and manuscripts.
22 Marx 1975a: 8. In the German original, Marx usually uses the word ‘Mensch’ which is gender-inclusive.
In English, this is often translated as ‘man’ in the generic sense to include all genders. I will refrain from using sexist terminology as much as possible, except for the inevitable circumstances where reference has to be made to Marx’s own formulations.
of all criticism’.23 In the same vein as Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx maintains that it is people who
produce religion and that religious consciousness is consequently inverted in the sense that “religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself”, i.e. his true sun.24 The criticism of religion must ultimately result in the consciousness
that humankind itself rather than a superhuman being such as God is the highest being for humans.25 Nevertheless, Marx is eager to point out that the criticism of religion is not aimed at a
mere transformation of consciousness because the ‘weapon of criticism’ cannot replace ‘criticism by weapons’.26 Accordingly, Marx offers a materialist explanation of the existence of religion: the
inverted ‘world-consciousness’ of religion is to be understood as the effect of a world that is itself inverted.27 Hence, religion is not a contingent or accidental feature of bourgeois society but it is
historically necessary and is necessitated by actual social conditions: “The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions”.28
Thus, what is required “once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked, is to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms”, i.e. to shift the terrain on which criticism operates from religion to politics.29
This shift in the object of criticism – turning ‘theological questions into secular ones’ – is what Marx hopes to accomplish in his critique of the left-Hegelian Bruno Bauer in an article titled ‘On The Jewish Question’.30 Although this text was written a few months before the
aforementioned introduction to a ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’,
23 Marx 1975b: 175. In his 1993 book Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida emphasises that religion “was never
one ideology among others for Marx” (1994: 51). Marx always grants absolute privilege “to religion, to ideology as religion, mysticism, or theology, in his analysis of ideology in general” (Derrida 1994: 185). Indeed, one cannot ignore Marx’s insistent appeals to illusion, fetishism, spectrality, the fantastic, imaginary, phantasmagorical, and hallucinatory. Interestingly, this appears to be an important point of divergence between Marx and Max Weber: whereas the latter wrote about the disenchantment of the capitalist world through processes of rationalisation, Marx draws attention to what is essentially a re-enchantment of the world of capitalism with all its corresponding spectres and fetishes.
24 Marx 1975b: 176 25 Marx 1975b: 182
26 The whole passage reads: “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons,
material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses” (Marx 1975b: 182).
27 Marx 1975b: 175 28 Marx 1975b: 176 29 Marx 1975b: 176
30 Marx 1975b: 151. Some authors consider this article – especially its second part – to be anti-Semitic. I
cannot go into the depth of this controversy here, except for referring to David Leopold’s astute treatment of the subject matter in his book The Young Karl Marx (2007: 163-180). Leopold argues that Marx’s references to ‘Jews’ in ‘On The Jewish Question’ should not be understood in a literal sense, but rather in a metaphorical sense: “The interpretative suggestion advanced here is that Marx’s ‘everyday’ Jew is not in any literal sense a Jew at all, but is rather to be understood as the modern egoistic member of civil society whatever his national, ethnic, or racial, background” (Leopold 2007: 165; emphasis in original).
Marx here elaborates in more detail on the historical and social conditions that produce and require religion in bourgeois society. In his 1843 book titled The Jewish Question, Bauer had demanded that people renounce religion altogether in order to achieve political emancipation, i.e. to receive ‘the universal rights of man’.31 For Marx, however, this reasoning is insufficient because criticism first
needs to inquire what kind of emancipation is in question.32 Accordingly, Bauer’s basic error “lies
in the fact that he subjects to criticism only the “Christian state”, not the “state as such”, that he does not investigate the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation and therefore puts forward conditions which can be explained only by uncritical confusion of political emancipation with general human emancipation”.33
Throughout the article, Marx juxtaposes ‘mere’ political emancipation with ‘true’ human emancipation. Whereas for Bauer the narrowness of religious consciousness represents an obstacle to political emancipation and the corresponding obtainment of liberal-constitutional rights, Marx again shows that the problem is rather the material conditions that require this narrow consciousness.34 Consequently, Bauer’s call for political emancipation is inherently limited, for it
does not address the unholy and unfree conditions of real, actual human beings. Although Marx grants that political emancipation is of course ‘a big step forward’, he nonetheless continues the article by developing a critique of the discourse of liberal rights.35 According to Marx, human beings
lead a double existence in bourgeois society: “Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person”.36 The liberal-constitutional state only grants formal freedom
and equality to its subjects as abstract human beings. The abstract subject is thus ‘ideally emancipated’, yet as a concrete subject she is ‘practically resubordinated’ by the imperatives of civil society, as Wendy Brown aptly describes it in her commentary on Marx’s article in her 1995 book
States of Injury.37 Marx thus arrives at the following paradox: “The limits of political emancipation
31 Marx 1975b: 160 32 Marx 1975b: 149 33 Marx 1975b: 149-150.
34 Moreover, Bauer’s argument mistakenly presupposes the independence and autonomy of the sphere of
(religious) ideas, an idealist fallacy and ontological inversion related to the ideological mechanism of a ‘camera obscura’ that Marx and Engels will criticise in more detail in The German Ideology (1846), see Marx & Engels 1976: 36-37.
35 Marx 1975b: 155
36 Marx 1975b: 168. Marx employs a whole range of binary logics to make this point: abstract vs. concrete
subject, public vs. private man, state vs. civil society, universality vs. particularity, heavenly life vs. earthly life.
are evident at once from the fact that the state can free itself from a restriction without man being
really free from this restriction, that the state can be a free state without man being a free man”.38
More importantly, as Brown points out, it is precisely this discourse of the abstract, liberal rights-bearing subject that serves to legitimise and reproduce the subjugation of the concrete, actual subject: “Although anointed as a sovereign, even a supreme being, man’s sovereignty is ghostly, alienated, and finally punishing, insofar as it casts this isolated and impotent creature as fully accountable for himself. Man is proclaimed king but limited by his powerlessness and alienation: his crown ultimately serves to bewilder, isolate, and humiliate him”.39 The discourse of liberal rights
and the appeal to the universality of the state – supposedly transcending the particularity of civil society – effectively conceals, depoliticises, and hence naturalises the inequality produced by private property: paradoxically, political emancipation turns out to depend ultimately on the ideological mechanism of depoliticisation.40 Thus, what is required according to Marx is a process of
emancipation that moves beyond the limitations of ‘mere’ political emancipation in the direction of ‘true’ human emancipation. Whereas the bourgeois state counts religion and private property among its presuppositions, “the democratic state, the real state, does not need religion for its political completion. On the contrary, it can disregard religion because in it the human basis of religion is realised in a secular manner”.41 Genuine human emancipation continues where political
emancipation leaves off by transforming the material conditions – most prominently the institution of private property – that necessitate illusory beliefs like religion or the ‘the universal rights of man’. What emerges from a reading of these two early articles Marx wrote for the Franco-German
Notebooks is a clear humanist tendency in Marx’s early works. This humanism is occasionally even
Promethean in nature, for example when he writes that man himself is the supreme being for man and when he uses the anthropocentric image of man revolving around his true sun, i.e. man himself. Moreover, Marx’s critique of political emancipation is that it does not go far enough because it leaves a system that is fundamentally inhuman effectively unnoticed and untouched, hence requiring a form of emancipation that is truly human in nature. Accordingly, the normative critique of capitalism that Marx advances in these writings is thoroughly humanist in nature, and appeals to
38 Marx 1975b: 152 39 Brown 1995: 108
40 Again, this seems to prefigure the critique of the ideological mechanism of universalisation, which is more
explicitly formulated in The German Ideology: “For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to present its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones” (Marx & Engels 1976: 60). The critique of ‘the innate rights of man’ appears to be a continuity in Marx’s work, since it is also operative in the first volume of Capital when Marx famously declares that the sphere of capitalist circulation ideologically appears as “the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” (Marx 1990: 280).
the inhumanities and injustices produced by capitalist society: it is the latter that is to blame for the current situation in which “man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being”.42 Underlying
these negative characterisations, however, is a more elaborate and positive conception of what it is like to be genuinely human, which is expressed in the category of ‘species-being’ [Gattungswesen].
1.2 Philosophical Anthropology in the Early Works II: Species-Being and Human Nature
Already in ‘On the Jewish Question’, Marx tentatively describes human emancipation in terms of this rather elusive concept of species-being, a concept that will be all the more important in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts written shortly thereafter. Once again criticising the
narrowness of political emancipation, Marx writes: “Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognised and organised his “forces propres” as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished”.43 In this context, the concept of species-being is thus associated with sociality,
interdependence, and interaction as opposed to the private sphere of civil society characterised by egoism.
However, the notion of species-being is only fleshed out in more detail in the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Although it is somewhat artificial to discuss the nature of
being in Marx in abstraction from a discussion of alienated labour, in which the notion of species-being is conceptually embedded, this is nonetheless what many theorists defending a conception of human nature in Marx have done.44 At this point it is important to distinguish, as these authors
do, between a historical and transhistorical conception of human nature in Marx. According to Norman Geras – one of the most prominent Marxist defenders of human nature – the historical conception of human nature denotes “a variable entity as when it is said that human nature is different in different times or places or according to the influence of different circumstances”.45
This conception is perhaps best expressed in Marx’s 1847 book The Poverty of Philosophy, in which
42 Marx 1975b: 182
43 Marx 1975b: 168. A few pages earlier, Marx writes: “In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived
as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves” (Marx 1975b: 164).
44 See Geras 2016; Struhl 2016; Byron 2016; and Wallimann 1981, to name but a few. 45 Geras 2016: 23
he comments that “all history is nothing but the continuous transformation of human nature”.46
Through their productive activity, human beings change external nature and in this way they transform their own human nature accordingly, thus allowing for a considerable degree of mutability in human nature over time.47 By contrast, in the case of a transhistorical conception of
human nature “one purports to refer by the term to a constant entity, to qualities of human beings that are all but universal, amongst nature’s regularities so to say, and not part of the variety of history”.48
The transhistorical conception of human nature is obviously much stronger than the historical one and is particularly prevalent in Marx’s early writings. In the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts, Marx first comes up with an important yet rather opaque description of the concept of
species-being, which points in the direction of a transhistorical conception: “Man is a species-being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but – and this is only another way of expressing it – also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore free being”.49 But what does this assumed universality and freedom consist of? In order to illustrate
this, Marx attempts to distinguish what is specifically and uniquely human from what is characteristic of non-human animals.50 Whereas humans make their life activity the object of their
will and consciousness, “the animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity”.51 Thus, what distinguishes human beings from other animals is
their conscious life activity: the latter are immediately identical with their life activity whilst the former can take their own lives as objects of their consciousness. The productive life of human beings is fundamentally a purposeful goal-oriented activity that involves conscious planning and requires imagination.52
46 Marx 2010a: 192. This is similar to Marx’s remark in Capital: “Through this movement he acts upon
external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature” (Marx 1990: 283)
47 As a result, this conception does not necessarily conceive of human nature in an essentialist and ahistorical
way. The Marxist defenders of human nature, however, explicitly rely on the stronger transhistorical conception of human nature, since this conception provides an external standard from which the injustices and inhumanities of capitalism can be criticised. This strategy – and the authors associated with it – will be discussed extensively in the next chapter.
48 Geras 2016: 23 49 Marx 1975b: 275
50 To substantiate their claims, the defenders of a transhistorical conception of human nature regularly refer
to this distinction. In this context, Marx is sometimes accused by animal rights advocates of speciesism, see Benton 1988. For a critical assessment of this accusation, see Gunderson 2011.
51 Marx 1975b: 276
52 One is immediately reminded of the famous passage in the first volume of Capital, in which Marx
distinguishes human productive activity from the construction of spider webs and honeycomb cells: “We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the
That the animal directly merges with its productive activity is further elucidated by the fact that animals only produce “under the dominion of immediate physical need”.53 In
contradistinction, human freedom consists in the fact that “man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom”.54 Freedom is thus defined as
the freedom to produce independently from the necessity of physical and immediate needs. Accordingly, the free and conscious life activity of human beings is expressed in a distinctive world of objects, which forms another contrast with the animal kingdom: “An animal forms objects only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty”.55 The attentive reader will by now have noted that we switched register
and have been discussing Marx’s conception of productive labouring activity already, which is intrinsically bound up with his philosophical anthropology. It is only in the next two sections that the concept of species-being gets more substance by means of an analysis of alienated labour in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.
1.3 Marx’s Early Conception of Labour I: Alienation
Although the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 are among Marx’s most famous and influential writings, they remained unknown for a long time and were only published in 1932, nearly a century after their composition.56 The manuscripts represent Marx’s first systematic engagement
with the field of political economy, even though Marx had already written on issues of economic policy prior to 1844.57 In the manuscripts, Marx argues that bourgeois political economists mystify
their own categories and presuppositions by presenting them as simple facts of nature, thereby
construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already exists ideally. Man not only effects change of form in the materials of nature; he also realises [verwirklicht] his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of” (Marx 1990: 283-284). It is indeed difficult to deny that this passage is heavily indebted to Marx’s earlier work in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.
53 Marx 1975b: 276 54 Marx 1975b: 276 55 Marx 1975b: 277
56 The title of the manuscripts was editorially assigned. The subsequent dissemination of these manuscripts
was from the very beginning pervaded by political and theoretical struggles, with critical Marxists in Western-European countries appropriating the manuscripts for their political purposes in order to criticise the perverted and dogmatic version of Marxism found in the Soviet Union.
57 For instance, in 1842 Marx wrote a series of articles published in the Rheinische Zeitung on Prussian laws
concerning wood theft, wherein Marx defended the material interests of the Mosel peasantry, see Marx 1975a: 224-263.
reproducing a system that is fundamentally alienating and inhuman.58 The description in terms of
alienation and inhumanity is quite revealing, for it again shows that elements of humanism are operative in Marx’s thought, even though Marx’s formulations are negativist in nature, i.e. he merely diagnoses a situation that is inhuman and does not directly describe or prescribe what it is to be human. Already in the first of the three manuscripts, Marx puts himself “wholly at the standpoint of the political economist” and later on he claims to “proceed from an actual economic fact”.59
These negativist formulations are characteristic of Marx’s method of immanent critique, in which Marx adopts the standpoint of bourgeois political economy in order to detect its internal contradictions and to uncover its implicit presuppositions.60 As a consequence, it requires quite
some hermeneutic effort to deduce a positive vision of non-alienated labour from these manuscripts.61 The interpretation is further complicated by the fact that the manuscripts retain an
incomplete and highly fragmentary character and, as Marcello Musto notes, are part of “Marx’s critical production, which then consisted of excerpts from texts he was studying, critical reflections on that material, and drafts that he put on paper, either in one go or in a more thought-out form. To separate these manuscripts from the rest, to extrapolate from their context, may therefore lead to errors of interpretation”.62 In order to avoid such errors, Marx’s notebook containing the
‘Comments on James Mill’ will be analysed in the next section, since it lays down a clearer statement concerning Marx’s positive conception of labour. But first of all, it is important to elaborate on Marx’s discussion of alienated labour.
The last section of the first of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is titled ‘Estranged Labour’.63 Marx again reminds his readers that he has proceeded from the premises of political
economy, hence accepting its language and its laws.64 Whereas political economy takes private
property as its starting point, it does not explain it: the political economist assumes as a natural fact what has to be explained.65 Marx, in contrast, proceeds from an actual economic fact: “The worker
58 Musto 2009: 388 59 Marx 1975b: 239; 271
60 For an overview of the origins and developments of the method of immanent critique, see Antonio 1981. 61 I will return to this issue at the end of this section.
62 Musto 2009: 393
63 Marx 1975b: 270-282. It should be noted that this subtitle was editorially assigned as well. The German
original – taken from Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) Abt. I Bd. II – reads ‘Entfremdete Arbeit und Privateigentum’ (Marx 1982: 363). In the Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW), ‘Entfremdung’ is translated as ‘estrangement’, whereas ‘Entäusserung’ is translated as ‘alienation’. Throughout this chapter, I will mostly refer to ‘alienation’ because this remains the most common term used in the secondary literature.
64 Marx 1975b: 270
65 Similarly, “the theologian explains the origin of evil by the fall of man; that is, he assumes as a fact, in
becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. […] The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things”.66 The critical category that the political economist lacks in order to explain this
situation is ‘alienation’ or ‘estrangement’.67 According to Marx, alienation has four interrelated
dimensions. Alienated labour alienates the worker: first, from the product of her labour; second, from the activity of labour; third, from her species-being; and fourth, from her fellow workers and other human beings.68
In his discussion of the first dimension of alienated labour, Marx provides a first definition of labour and its product. The product of labour is labour which has been objectified or embodied in an object: “Labour’s realisation is its objectification”.69 Since the capitalist – i.e. the private owner
of the means of production – appropriates these products of the labour process, the worker is first of all alienated from the product of her own labour. Consequently, the object of labour confronts the worker as a hostile and alien power independent of, and external to, the producer.70 Marx writes:
“Under these economic conditions [i.e. the conditions of private property] this realisation [Verwirklichung] of labour appears as loss of realisation [Entwirklichung] for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation”.71 The worker is forced
to externalise her life activity into an object, only to be robbed of this object at the end of the day. Accordingly, the object acquires a life of its own which stands over and against the worker.72 The
condition of private property thus leads to a situation such that the more powerful labour becomes, the more powerless the worker becomes.
Given that the product of labour is after all but a crystallisation of the activity of labour, it necessarily follows that the activity of labour, the very act of production itself, is alienated as well.73
The labour process is under capitalist command and is hence external to the worker: “It does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his
66 Marx 1975b: 271-272
67 Marx uses the words ‘Entäusserung’ and Entfremdung’ respectively, see Marx 1982: 365. 68 Marx 1975b: 274-277
69 Marx 1975b: 272 70 Marx 1975b: 272 71 Marx 1975b: 272
72 Again, Marx finds an analogy in religion: “The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself.
The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object” (Marx 1975b: 272).
73 Marx writes: “In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarised the estrangement, the
work, and in his work feels outside himself”.74 Marx observes that the worker’s activity is not “his
spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self”.75 Moreover, the labour
performed by the worker is forced rather than voluntary, for it does not satisfy a need but is only a means to satisfying needs.76 Using his favourite figure of speech – the chiasmus – Marx nicely
summarises the second dimension of alienation in the following way: “Man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions […] and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal”.77
The third dimension of alienation concerns the estrangement of human beings from their species-being or species-life. Under conditions of alienated labour, the life of the human species – which Marx defines as conscious and free life activity – is perverted and estranged because our entire productive life is reduced to a means for satisfying needs, hence acquiring an instrumental character: “Life itself appears only as a means to life”.78 Whereas Marx generally adopts an immanent
method throughout the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in the discussion of this third aspect of alienation Marx briefly digresses into a consideration of more general characteristics of human labour. In general, human labour is an intentional activity designed to transform the ‘sensuous external world’.79 Due to this productive transformation, humans are able to recognise themselves
in the world, i.e. nature appears as their work and reality. Marx writes: “The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he seems himself in a world that he has created”.80 Moreover, through their life activity human beings make nature part of their ‘inorganic
74 Marx 1975b: 274. Although only hinted at in this passage, the control of the capitalist over the labour
process will reappear in Marx’s ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ – which appeared as an appendix to the first volume of Capital – in the concept of real subsumption of labour under capital. In general, subsumption designates the degree to which labour is absorbed into capital’s process of value extraction through the imposition of wage-labour. Formal subsumption refers to the takeover by capital of an existing labour process, developed by earlier and different modes of production, see Marx 1990: 1021. The professional worker still provides her own tools and sells her products for money. The conversion from formal to real subsumption takes place when the capitalist begins to own these tools and starts to reorganise the labour process to meet the specific needs of capital, cf. Wendling 2009: 32.
75 Marx 1975b: 274
76 Marx 1975b: 274. Marx also mentions that this is clear from the fact that when there is no compulsion,
“labour is shunned like the plague”.
77 Marx 1975b: 274-275 78 Marx 1975b: 276 79 Marx 1975b: 273
80 Marx 1975b: 277. This conception of labour is heavily indebted to Hegel’s reflections on work. In the
famous section on lordship and bondage from the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel writes the following about form-giving activity: “In fashioning the thing, he [i.e. consciousness, qua worker] becomes aware that being-for-self belongs to him […] The shape does not become something other than himself through being made external to him; for it is precisely this shape that is his pure being-for-self, which in this externality is seen by him to be the truth. Through this rediscovery by himself, the bondsman realizes that it is precisely
body’, since nature provides human beings with both their direct means of life and the material objects of their life activity.81 However, this relation of appropriation with regard to nature is
essentially distorted as long as alienated labour reigns: “In tearing away from man the object of his production […] estranged labour tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken away from him”.82
The fourth dimension of alienated labour, i.e. the estrangement of the worker from other human beings, is then a necessary correlate of the first three dimensions combined: “The proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature”.83 Since labour always involves and
sustains relations with other human beings, it is necessarily a social practice.84 The worker not only
suffers from the inability to be the subject of her own actions; the impossibility to exert control and influence over what she does with others is manifested on a collective level as well and results in the alienation from social relations of cooperation.85
From Marx’s discussion of alienated labour in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts certain features of what non-alienated labour might look like can be derived – at least if we follow Herbert Marcuse’s method of counter-concepts. In an early commentary on the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts titled ‘The Foundation of Historical Materialism’ (1932), Marcuse presents
one possibility to come to terms with the interpretative challenge of negativism by means of counter-concepts, in which implicit positive definitions of non-alienated labour are given precisely through their opposition to the definition of alienated labour.86 Implicit in the discussion of
alienated labour is the idea that labour need not and should not be an alienating and inhuman activity. It contains the promise of a future of non-alienated labour, i.e. a situation in which labour becomes an end in itself as a fulfilling and self-affirming activity in which our form-giving and creative powers are expressed and confirmed rather than distorted and denied, thereby enabling individuals and communities to freely develop their physical and mental energy. But since Marx proceeds in a negativist fashion and is primarily interested in the condition of alienated labour, it remains complicated to deduce and substantiate these implicit claims.
in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own” (Hegel 1977: §196; emphasis in original). On the Hegel-Marx relation concerning the status of labour, see Sayers 2005: 613; Sayers 2009: 145-146.
81 Marx 1976b: 275-276; cf. 273 82 Marx 1975b: 277
83 Marx 1975b: 277
84 Sean Sayers even goes so far as to argue that “sociality is inscribed in our very biology” (Sayers 1998: 7). 85 Jaeggi 2016: 12-13
1.4 Marx’s Early Conception of Labour II: Objectification and Self-Realisation
This interpretative complexity is significantly reduced once we shift our attention to Marx’s manuscript titled ‘Comments on James Mill’, which contains excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of
Political Economy accompanied by Marx’s own commentary.87 The positive conception of labour that
remained implicit in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts comes to the fore more explicitly in these notebooks. Near the end of this text, Marx shortly leaves the negativist method behind and switches to a more positive register, wherein he supposes “that we had carried out production as human beings”.88 The question then arises: what would labour be like under non-alienated
conditions, i.e. if we were to produce as genuine human beings? Marx states that through our productive activity we would affirm ourselves and others: “In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt”.89 The
feeling of powerlessness is thus overcome, the self is retrieved, and the worker sees her own individuality objectified in the product of labour. Marx continues to emphasise the dimension of intersubjective recognition that is inherent in labour as a fulfilling activity providing needs for others: “In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature”.90 In
brief, “in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature”.91
The last statement is particularly relevant, for it adequately illustrates that Marx is genuinely developing an anthropology of labour. What emerges from the foregoing discussion of Marx’s early works is a philosophical anthropology that is specifically focused on the activity of labour. Marx offers a conception of human beings as active, productive, and creative beings who desire to
87 Marx’s process of composition during the Paris years alternated among different groups of manuscripts,
making it difficult to trace the precise chronological order of the Paris manuscripts. Contrary to common understanding, however, Musto suggests that the ‘Comments on James Mill’ were written only after the section on ‘Estranged Labour’ in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Based on philological research, Musto dates the composition of the former back to September 1844, whereas the latter were written from late May to June 1844, see Musto 2009: 399-400. This chronology presents problems for the Althusserian thesis of an epistemological break occurring in Marx’s writings in 1845, since the ‘Comments on James Mill’ are temporally situated in-between ‘Marx’s Early Works’ and ‘the Works of the Break’, to use Althusser’s own classification (Althusser 2005: 34). A further elaboration of the anthropology of labour – situated right before the alleged rupture – does not fit well in this classificatory scheme.
88 Marx 1975b: 227 89 Marx 1975b: 227 90 Marx 1975b: 227-228 91 Marx 1975b: 228
exercise their powers as freely as possible.92 The themes of humanism and productive activity are
heavily intertwined, and it is through labour that human beings express, realise, and confirm their human nature. The speculative description of non-alienated labour in the ‘Comments on Mill’ gives us an idea of what genuine human emancipation would be like. In brief, labour is understood as an intentional activity aimed at transforming nature through a process of externalisation and objectification: the activity of labour becomes embodied and is materialised in a concrete external object. As a result of this objectification, we realise ourselves, reconcile with nature and other human beings, and come to recognise our activities and products as our own activities and products.93
By way of conclusion, it is important to point out once again that the anthropology of labour as described in this chapter poses a challenge to my overall thesis. The theory of alienation sets up two particular problems, since the concept seems to presuppose, first, that we are alienated from our human nature as species-beings, for the very concept of alienation seems to suggest that one is alienated from a certain essence or origin; and second, that the activity of labour need not and should not be alienating, since it implicitly contains the promise of non-alienated forms of labour.94 The reconstruction offered in this chapter does indeed show that an anthropology of
labour is present in Marx’s early writings, and subsequent Marxists – mostly of a humanist inclination – have built on this anthropology of labour, drawing on its normative resources and standards for a critique of capitalism. However, it should also be noted at this point that there are other textual fragments – even in the early writings – that suggest a different interpretation, more in line with the one I pursue in subsequent chapters. The following chapters are partly devoted to substantiating the claim that Marx’s critique of political economy in later writings – and in some of his early writings – does not necessarily rely on an anthropology of labour. I contend that this is rightfully so, for the romanticist traces of an anthropology of labour are both inadequate to our theoretical analysis of contemporary capitalism and undesirable in our political struggle against capitalism.
92 Sayers 2005: 610
93 Jaeggi 2016: 11-16; Sayers 2005: 610-614
94 Moreover, Chris Byron argues one cannot defend Marx’s theory of alienation without simultaneously
accepting his idea of human nature and vice versa (2016: 376). However, Rahel Jaeggi’s recent book Alienation (2016) seems to be an excellent counter-example to this since Jaeggi develops a social-philosophical account of alienation that does not presuppose a (thick) conception of human nature. In subsequent chapters, I will similarly argue that Byron’s thesis does not hold by drawing on works of Moishe Postone and Michael Heinrich, who provide a more historical and socio-theoretical interpretation of the theory of alienation.
