A Theory of Alienation
Ortiz
Socialist Workers Party
(Britain) Published July 1998 Copyright © International
Socialism
Summer 1998
AN INTRODUCTION TO MARX'S THEORY OF ALIENATION
Judy Cox
We live in a world where technological achievements
unimaginable in previous societies are
within our grasp: this is the age of space travel, of the
internet, of genetic engineering. Yet
never before have we felt so helpless in the face of the forces
we ourselves have created.
Never before have the fruits of our labour threatened our very
existence: this is also the
age of nuclear disasters, global warming, and the arms race.
For the first time in history we
can produce enough to satisfy the needs of everyone on the
planet. Yet millions of lives are
stunted by poverty and destroyed by disease. Despite our power
to control the natural
world, our society is dominated by insecurity, as economic
recession and military conflict
devastate lives with the apparently irresistible power of
natural disasters. The more
densely populated our cities become, the more our lives are
characterised by feelings of
isolation and loneliness. To Karl Marx these contradictions
were apparent when the system
was still young. He noted that:
On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and
scientific forces, which no epoch
of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other
hand, there exist symptoms
of decay, far surpassing the horrors of the Roman Empire. In
our days everything seems
pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the
wonderful power of shortening and
fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking
it. The new-fangled sources
of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources
of want. The victories of art
seem bought by loss of character.1
Marx developed his theory of alienation to reveal the human
activity that lies behind the
seemingly impersonal forces dominating society. He showed how,
although aspects of the
society we live in appear natural and independent of us, they
are the results of past human
actions. For Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács Marx's theory
'dissolves the rigid, unhistorical,
natural appearance of social institutions; it reveals their
historical origins and shows
therefore that they are subject to history in every respect
including historical decline'.2 Marx
showed not only that human action in the past created the
modern world, but also that
human action could shape a future world free from the
contradictions of capitalism. Marx
developed a materialist theory of how human beings were shaped
by the society they lived
in, but also how they could act to change that society, how
people are both 'world
determined' and 'world producing'. For Marx, alienation was not
rooted in the mind or in
religion, as it was for his predessesors Hegel and Feuerbach.
Instead Marx understood
alienation as something rooted in the material world.
Alienation meant loss of control,
specifically the loss of control over labour. To understand why
labour played such a central
role in Marx's theory of alienation, we have to look first at
Marx's ideas about human
nature.3
What is human nature?
Marx opposed the common sense idea that humans have a fixed
nature which exists
independently of the society they live in. He demonstrated that
many of the features
attributed to unchanging human nature in fact vary enormously
in different societies.
However, Marx did not reject the idea of human nature itself.
He argued that the need to
labour on nature to satisfy human needs was the only consistent
feature of all human
societies, the 'ever lasting nature-imposed condition of human
existence'.4 Human beings,
like all other animals, must work on nature to survive. The
labour of humans, however, was
distinguished from that of animals because human beings
developed consciousness. Marx
gave a famous description of this at the beginning of Capital:
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver,
and a bee puts to shame
many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what
distinguishes the worst
architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect
raises his structure in imagination
before he erects it in reality. At the end of every
labour-process, we get a result that
already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its
commencement.5
In a useful introduction to Marx's ideas, How to Read Karl
Marx, Ernst Fischer also described
what is unique about human labour. He explained how, because we
act on nature
consciously, we build on our successes and develop new ways of
producing the things we
need. This means that we have a history, whereas animals do
not: 'The species-nature of
animal is an eternal repetition, that of man is transformation,
development and change'.6
Working on nature alters not only the natural world, but also
the labourer himself. Marx
frequently reinforced this idea, as in the following quote from
Capital: 'By thus acting on
the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes
his own nature. He
develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in
obedience to his sway.' Thus
labour is a dynamic process through which the labourer shapes
and moulds the world he
lives in and stimulates himself to create and innovate. Marx
called our capacity for
conscious labour our 'species being'.
Our species being is also a social being, as Marx explained in
the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts (1844): 'The individual is the social
being.' People have to enter
into relationships with each other regardless of their personal
preferences because they
need to work together to get what they need to live. In the
Grundrisse, Marx emphasised
the point: 'Society does not consist of individuals; it
expresses the sum of connections and
relationships in which individuals find themselves.' Humanity
relates to the physical world
through labour; through labour humanity itself develops and
labour is the source of human
beings' relationships with each other. What happens to the
process of work, therefore, has
a decisive influence on the whole of society.
Our ability to work, to improve how we work and build on our
successes, has tended to
result in the cumulative development of the productive forces.
One such development gave
rise to class society. When society became capable of producing
a surplus, it also became
possible for a class to emerge which was liberated from the
need to directly produce and
could live from its control over the labour of others. This
process was necessary in order to
develop and direct the productive forces, but it also meant
that the majority of society, the
producers, lost control of their labour. Thus, the alienation
of labour arose with class
society, and Ernst Fischer has given a brilliant description of
how it reversed the limitless
potential of labour:
The first tool contains within it all the potential future
ones. The first recognition of the
fact that the world can be changed by conscious activity
contains all future, as yet
unknown, but inevitable change. A living being which has once
begun to make nature his
own through the work of his hands, his intellect, and his
imagination, will never stop. Every
achievement opens the door to unconquered territory... But when
labour is destructive, not
creative, when it is undertaken under coercion and not as the
free play of forces, when it
means the withering, not the flowering, of man's physical and
intellectual potential, then
labour is a denial of its own principle and therefore of the
principle of man.7
The emergence of class divisions in which one class had control
over the means of
producing what society needed, led to a further division
between individuals and the society
to which they belonged. Certain forms of social life 'drive a
wedge between the two
dimensions of the self, the individual and the communal',8
producing a separation between
individuals' interests and those of society as a whole.
However, alienation is not an
unalterable human condition which exists unchanged in every
class society.
Alienation and capitalism: all in a day's work
In feudal society humans had not yet developed the means to
control the natural world, or
to produce enough to be free from famine, or to cure diseases.
All social relationships were
'conditioned by a low stage of development of the productive
powers of labour and
correspondingly limited relations between men within the
process of creating and
reproducing their material life, hence also limited relations
between man and nature'.9 Land
was the source of production, and it so dominated the
feudal-manorial system that men
saw themselves not as individuals but in relation to the land.
Marx described this in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:
In feudal landownership we already find the domination of the
earth as of an alien power
over men. The serf is an appurtenance of the land. Similarly
the heir through primogeniture,
the first born son, belongs to the land. It inherits him. The
rule of private property begins
with property in land which is its basis.10
Ownership of land was dependent on inheritance and blood lines:
your 'birth' determined
your destiny. In an early work Marx described how 'the
aristocracy's pride in their blood,
their descent, in short the genealogy of the body...has its
appropriate science in heraldry.
The secret of the aristocracy is zoology'.11 It was this
zoology which determined your life
and your relationships with others. On the one hand, the low
level of the productive forces
meant constant labour for the peasants, while on the other, the
feudal lords and the church
officials took what they wanted from the peasants by force.
Thus alienation arose from the low level of the productive
forces, from human subordination
to the land and from the domination of the feudal ruling class.
However, there were limits
to these forms of alienation. The peasants worked their own
land and produced most of the
things they needed in their own independent family units. 'If a
person was tied to the land,
then the land was also tied to the people... The peasant, and
even the serf of the middle
ages, remained in possession of at least 50 percent, sometimes
60 and 70 percent, of the
output of their labour'.12 The social relationships in feudal
society were relationships of
domination and subordination, but they were obviously social
relationships between
individuals. In Capital Marx described how 'the social
relations between individuals in the
performance of their labour appear at all events as their own
mutual personal relations, and
are not disguised under the shape of social relations between
the products of labour'.13
However, the constraints of feudalism were very different from
the dynamic of capitalism.
The bourgeoisie wanted a society in which everything could be
bought and sold for money:
'Selling is the practice of alienation'.14 The creation of such
a society depended on the
brutal enclosures of the common land. This meant that, for the
first time, the majority in
society were denied direct access to the means of production
and subsistence, thus
creating a class of landless labourers who had to submit to a
new form of exploitation,
wage labour, in order to survive. Capitalism involved 'a
fundamental change in the relations
between men, instruments of production and the materials of
production'.15 These
fundamental changes meant that every aspect of life was
transformed. Even the concept of
time was radically altered so that watches, which were toys in
the 17th century, became a
measure of labour time or a means of quantifying idleness,
because of the 'importance of
an abstract measure of minutes and hours to the work ethic and
to the habit of punctuality
required by industrial discipline'.16
Men no longer enjoyed the right to dispose of what they
produced how they chose: they
became separated from the product of their labour. Peter
Linebaugh in his history of 18th
century London, The London Hanged, explained that workers
considered themselves
masters of what they produced. It took great repression, a
'judicial onslaught', in the late
18th century to convince them that what they produced belonged
exclusively to the
capitalists who owned the factories. During the 18th century
most workers were not paid
exclusively in money. 'This was true of Russian serf labour,
American slave labour, Irish
agricultural labour and the metropolitan labour in London
trades'.17 By the 19th century,
however, wage labour had replaced all other forms of payment.
This meant labour was now
a commodity, sold on the market. Capitalists and workers were
formally independent of
each other, but in reality inextricably connected. Production
no longer took place in the
home, but in factories where new systems of discipline
operated. The mechanisation of
labour in the factories transformed people's relationship with
machines, 'those remarkable
products of human ingenuity, became a source of tyranny against
the worker'.18 In Capital
Marx compared the work of craftsmen and artisans to that of the
factory worker:
In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a
tool, in the factory, the
machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument
of labour proceed from
him, here it is the movements of the machines that he must
follow. In manufacture the
workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have
a lifeless mechanism
independent of the workman, who becomes a mere living
appendage.19
One of the most important, and devastating, features of factory
production was the division
of labour. Prior to capitalism there had been a social division
of labour, with different
people involved in different branches of production or crafts.
With capitalism there arose
the detailed division of labour within each branch of
production. This division of labour
meant that workers had to specialise in particular tasks, a
series of atomised activities,
which realised only one or two aspects of their human powers at
the expense of all the
others. Harry Braverman pointed out the consequences of this
division: 'While the social
division of labour subdivides society, the detailed division of
labour subdivides humans, and
while the subdivision of society may enhance the individual and
the species, the
subdivision of the individual, when carried on without regard
to human capabilities and
needs, is a crime against the person and humanity'.20 John
Ruskin, the 19th century critic of
industrialisation, made a similar point when he wrote that the
division of labour is a false
term because it is the men who are divided.
In this system workers become increasingly dependent on the
capitalists who own the
means of production. Just as the worker 'is depressed,
therefore, both intellectually and
physically, to the level of a machine, and from being a man
becomes an abstract activity
and a stomach, so he also becomes more and dependent on every
fluctuation in the market
price, in the investment of capital and on the whims of the
wealthy'.21 It became
impossible for workers to live independently of capitalism: to
work meant to be reduced to
a human machine; to be deprived of work meant living death.
Without work, if capital
ceases to exist for him, Marx argued the worker might as well
bury himself alive: 'The
existence of capital is his existence, his life, for it
determines the content of his life in a
manner indifferent to him'.22 There is no choice involved -
work is a matter of survival.
Therefore labour became forced labour; you could not choose not
to work, you could not
choose what you made, and you could not choose how you made it.
Marx noted:
The fact that labour is external to the worker, 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 need 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.23
There was another side to the fragmentation of labour in the
factory system. The creation
of the 'detail labourer who performed fractional work in the
workshop meant that the
value-producing class became collective, since no worker
produced a whole commodity'.24
This collectivity expressed itself in constant struggle against
capitalist forms of production
and frequent attempts by workers to assert their right to
control machines rather than be
controlled by them, most famously in the Luddite Rebellion of
the early 19th century, a
revolt so widespread that more troops were deployed to crush it
than were sent to fight
with Wellington at Waterloo.
Four aspects of alienation
The development of capitalism proved irresistible and it
brought alienation on a scale
previously unimaginable. In his Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts (also known as the
1844, or Paris Manuscripts) Marx identified four specific ways
in which alienation pervades
capitalist society.
The product of labour: The worker is alienated from the object
he produces because it is
owned and disposed of by another, the capitalist. In all
societies people use their creative
abilities to produce objects which they use, exchange or sell.
Under capitalism, however,
this becomes an alienated activity because 'the worker cannot
use the things he produces
to keep alive or to engage in further productive activity...
The worker's needs, no matter
how desperate, do not give him a licence to lay hands on what
these same hands have
produced, for all his products are the property of another'.25
Thus workers produce cash
crops for the market when they are malnourished, build houses
in which they will never live,
make cars they can never buy, produce shoes they cannot afford
to wear, and so on.
Marx argued that the alienation of the worker from what he
produces is intensified because
the products of labour actually begin to dominate the labourer.
In his brilliant Essays on
Marx's Theory of Value, I I Rubin outlines a quantitative and a
qualitative aspect to the
production of commodities. Firstly, the worker is paid less
than the value he creates. A
proportion of what he produces is appropriated by his boss; the
worker is, therefore,
exploited. Qualitatively, he also puts creative labour into the
object he produces, but he
cannot be given creative labour to replace it. As Rubin
explains, 'In exchange for his
creative power the worker receives a wage or a salary, namely a
sum of money, and in
exchange for this money he can purchase products of labour, but
he cannot purchase
creative power. In exchange for his creative power, the worker
gets things'.26 This creativity
is lost to the worker forever, which is why under capitalism
work does not stimulate or
invigorate us and 'open the door to unconquered territory', but
rather burns up our energies
and leaves us feeling exhausted.
This domination of dead labour over living labour lies behind
Marx's assertion in the
Manuscripts that 'the alienation of the worker means not only
that his labour becomes an
object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him,
independently of him and alien
to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; that
the life which he has
bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien'.27
For Marx this state of affairs
was unique to capitalism. In previous societies those who work
harder could usually be
expected to have more to consume. Under capitalism, those who
work harder increase the
power of a hostile system over them. They themselves, and their
inner worlds, become
poorer. 'The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more
goods he creates. The
devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation
with the increase in value of the
world of things'.28
The labour process: The second element of alienation Marx
identified is a lack of control
over the process of production. We have no say over the
conditions in which we work and
how our work is organised, and how it affects us physically and
mentally. This lack of
control over the work process transforms our capacity to work
creatively into its opposite,
so the worker experiences 'activity as passivity, power as
impotence, procreation as
emasculation, the worker's own physical and mental energy, his
personal life - for what is
life but activity? - as an activity directed against himself,
which is independent of him and
does not belong to him'.29 The process of work is not only
beyond the control of the
workers, it is in the control of forces hostile to them because
capitalists and their managers
are driven to make us work harder, faster and for longer
stints. In addition, as Harry
Braverman points out, 'in a society based upon the purchase and
sale of labour power,
dividing the craft cheapens its individual parts',30 so the
bosses also have an interest in
breaking down the labour process into smaller and smaller
parts. The resulting rigidly
repetitive process buries the individual talents or skills of
the worker, as Marx described:
Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it
does away with the
many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of
freedom, both in bodily and
intellectual activity... The special skill of each individual
insignificant factory operative
vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the
gigantic physical forces, and
mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and,
together, with that
mechanism, constitute the power of the master.31
Modern methods of production have increased the fragmentation
of the labour process since
Marx's day. The organisation of modern production is still
based on the methods of the
assembly line. Scientific research is used to break the
production process down into its
component parts. This has led, firstly, to the deskilling of
white collar jobs and to a
situation where managers have a monopoly of control over the
production process: 'The
unity of thought and action, conception and execution, hand and
mind, which capitalism
threatened from it beginnings, is now attacked by a systematic
dissolution employing all
the resources of science and the various engineering
disciplines based upon it'.32
Conditions of work, from the length of the working day to the
space we occupy, are
predetermined: 'The entire work operation, down to it smallest
motion, is conceptualised by
the management and engineering staff, laid out, measured,
fitted with training and
performance standards - all entirely in advance'.33 Workers are
treated as machines, with
the aim of transforming the subjective element of labour into
objective, measurable,
controlled processes. In some brilliant passages in History and
Class Consciousness, Lukács
describes how the increasingly rationalised and mechanised
process of work affects our
consciousness. As the following extract shows, his analysis was
prophetic and gives a
strikingly accurate picture of today's white collar work:
In consequence of the rationalisation of the work-process the
human qualities and
idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere
sources of error when contrasted
with these abstract special laws functioning according to
rational predictions. Neither
objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as
the authentic master of this
process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated
into a mechanical system. He
finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions
independently of him and he
has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not.34
Our fellow human beings: Thirdly, we are alienated from our
fellow human beings. This
alienation arises in part because of the antagonisms which
inevitably arise from the class
structure of society. We are alienated from those who exploit
our labour and control the
things we produce. As Marx put it:
If his activity is a torment for him, it must provide pleasure
and enjoyment for someone
else... If therefore he regards the product of his labour, his
objectified labour, as an alien,
hostile and powerful object which is independent of him, then
his relationship to that
object is such that another man - alien, hostile, powerful and
independent of him - is its
master. If he relates to his own activity an unfree activity,
then he relates to it as activity
in the service, under the rule, coercion and yoke of another
man.35
In addition, we are connected to others through the buying and
selling of the commodities
we produce. Our lives are touched by thousands of people every
day, people whose labour
has made our clothes, food, home, etc. But we only know them
through the objects we buy
and consume. Ernst Fischer pointed out that because of this we
do not see each other 'as
fellow-men having equal rights, but as superiors or
subordinates, as holders of a rank, as a
small or large unit of power'.36 We are related to each other
not as individuals but as
representatives of different relations of production, the
personification of capital, or land or
labour. As Bertell Ollman wrote, 'We do not know each other as
individuals, but as
extensions of capitalism: "In bourgeois society capital is
independent and has individuality,
while the living person is dependent and has no
individuality".'37 The commodities of each
individual producer appear in depersonalised form, regardless
of who produced them, where,
or in what specific conditions. Commodity production means that
everyone 'appropriates the
produce of others, by alienating that of their own labour'.38
Marx described how mass commodity production continually seeks
to create new needs, not
to develop our human powers but to exploit them for profit:
Each attempts to establish over the other an alien power, in
the hope of thereby achieving
satisfaction of his own selfish needs...becomes the inventive
and ever calculating slave of
inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites. He places
himself at the disposal of
his neighbour's most depraved fancies, panders to his needs,
excites unhealthy appetites in
him, and pounces on every weakness, so that he can then demand
the money for his labour
of love.39
We see other people through the lens of profit and loss. Our
abilities and needs are
converted into means of making money and so we consider other
human beings as
competitors, as inferiors or superiors.40
Our human nature: The fourth element is our alienation from
what Marx called our species
being. What makes us human is our ability to consciously shape
the world around us.
However, under capitalism our labour is coerced, forced labour.
Work bears no relationship
to our personal inclinations or our collective interests. The
capitalist division of labour
massively increased our ability to produce, but those who
create the wealth are deprived of
its benefits. Marx's descriptions of this process in the
Manuscripts are extremely powerful
indictments of the system:
It is true that labour produces marvels for the rich, but it
produces privation for the worker.
It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It procures
beauty, but deformity for the
worker. It replaces labour by machines, but it casts some of
the workers back into
barbarous forms of labour and turns others into machines. It
produces intelligence, but it
produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker.41
Human beings are social beings. We have the ability to act
collectively to further our
interests. However, under capitalism that ability is submerged
under private ownership and
the class divisions it produces. We have the ability to
consciously plan our production, to
match what we produce with the developing needs of society. But
under capitalism that
ability is reversed by the anarchic drive for profits. Thus,
rather than consciously shaping
nature, we cannot control, or even foresee, the consequences of
our actions. For example,
new, cheaper techniques of production may, when repeated across
industry, produce acid
rain or gases which destroy the ozone layer.
Similarly, when one capitalist improves production in his
factory, he is unwittingly
contributing to the slowing up of the rate of profits for his
class as a whole by lowering the
rate of profit.42 One firm can produce to fulfil a particularly
sharp demand, only to find when
the goods hit the market that other firms got there first.
Instead of simply meeting
demand, there is a glut in the market. This means that we
produce more but what we
produce is unwanted. All previous societies suffered from
shortages, famines and the failure
of crops. Under capitalism recessions mean that workers
'consume less because they
produce too much. And they consume less, not because their
labour is inadequately
productive, but because their labour is too productive'.43
There is nothing natural about the
economic crises we face: it is our social organisation which
prevents us enjoying the
potential of our ability to produce.
What is commodity fetishism?
The domination of commodities in our society is so pervasive
that it seems to be an
inevitable, natural state of affairs. All our achievements,
everything we produce, appear as
commodities, as Marx noted: 'The wealth of societies in which
the capitalist mode of
production prevails appears as an immense collection of
commodities'.44 Capitalism is the
first system of generalised commodity production, in which the
commodity has become 'a
universal category of society as a whole'.45 The dominance of
commodity production has
implications for how we experience the world we have created.
The mysterious commodity: In every society human beings have
laboured to created objects
which help them fulfil their needs. So Marx began his analysis
of commodities under
capitalism by asserting that 'a commodity is an external
object, a thing which through its
qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind', regardless
of whether that need comes
from stomach or the imagination.46 Commodities must have a use
value, but they also have
an exchange value. In capitalist society our many different
human needs can only be met
through the purchase of commodities: to eat we have to buy food
in a shop, to travel we
have to buy a car or a bus ticket, to have access to knowledge
we have to buy books, TVs
or computers. Yet the usefulness of all these commodities is
overwhelmed by their
exchange value and the satisfaction of human needs becomes
inseparable from the
workings of the market.47
The circulation of commodities on the market is even more
cloaked in mystery than the
process of their production, where workers have some direct
relationship with the
commodity they produce. This relationship is lost when
commodities are sent to market and
exchanged for money, which, in turn, is exchanged for other
commodities. As Marx wrote,
'The actual process of production, as a unity of the direct
production process and the
circulation process, gives rise to new formations, in which the
vein of internal connections
is increasingly lost, the production relations are rendered
independent of one another, and
the component values become ossified into forms independent of
one another'.48 Marx
explained how the circulation of commodities transforms
relationships between individual
producers into relationships between the commodities they
produce. They are divided from
each other, yet utterly dependent on each other's commodities:
The owners of commodities find out that the division of labour
which turns them into
independent private producers also makes the social process of
production and the relations
of the individual producers to each other within that process
independent of the producers
themselves; they also find out that the independence of the
individuals from each other
has its counterpart and supplement a system of all-round
material dependence.49
In the capitalist system individuals have to possess certain
things - labour power, or
materials of production, for example - in order to enter into
productive relationships with
each other. As a consequence, 'it seems as if the thing itself
possesses the ability, the
virtue, to establish production relations', rather than the
individuals themselves.50
Commodities acquire social characteristics because individuals
enter the productive process
only as the owners of commodities. Marx described this process:
'To the producers,
therefore, the social relations between their private
labours...do not appear as direct social
relations between persons in their work, but rather as material
relations between persons
and social relations between things'.51 Thus it appears as if
the market itself causes the
rise and fall of prices, and pushes workers into one branch of
production or out of another,
independent of human agency. 'The impact of society on the
individual is carried out
through the social form of things'.52 This adds another
dimension to alienated relationships
because, as Marx argued, 'the characters who appear on the
economic stage are merely
personifications of economic relations; it is as the bearers of
these economic relations that
they come into contact with each other'.53
Marx described the whole process of the reification of human
relationships, the attribution
of human powers to inanimate objects, and the way in which
social organisation appears as
independent of human will as commodity fetishism. Commodity
fetishism has increased
with the growth of capitalism, in which 'the capitalist mode of
production takes over the
totality of individual, family, and social needs and, in
subordinating them to the market,
also reshapes them to serve the needs of capital'.54 Today
there is a market for everything,
for sex and art, for labour itself, as well as for TVs and
cars. As Ernst Fischer wrote, 'We
have become so accustomed to living in a world of commodities,
where nature is perhaps
only a poster for a holiday resort and man only an
advertisement for a new product, we
exist in such a turmoil of alienated objects offered cheaply
for sale, that we hardly ask
ourselves any longer what it is that magically transforms
objects of necessity (or fashion)
into commodities, and what is the true nature of the witches'
Sabbath, ablaze with neon
moons and synthetic constellations, that has become our day to
day reality'.55
Money: the 'universal pimp': The creation of exchange values
and the circulation of
commodities requires a commodity which can represent all other
commodities, through
which all other commodities can be compared. Marx described how
the development of
capitalism brought with it the problem of how to evaluate
different commodities and
simultaneously created the solution in the form of money, the
universal commodity.
Physical objects, gold or silver become the 'direct incarnation
of all human labour'. With the
development of money people's relationship to their production
assumes a material shape
which is independent of their control and their conscious
action: 'This situation is
manifested first by the fact that the products of men's labour
universally take on the form
of commodities. The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the
riddle of the commodity
fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes'.56
Marx called money the 'universal pimp', mediating between men
and their desires. The
value of money, the metals in which it was originally embodied,
have long since been
discarded in favour of intrinsically worthless alloy metal
coins or paper money. And yet
money can buy everything - it is the most powerful commodity in
existence: 'Money is all
other commodities divested of their shape, the product of their
universal alienation'.57 The
role of money in the circulation of commodities shapes the
consciousness of human beings
involved in that process. Money takes on the value of the
objects it represents, it appears
to be the force which can create value itself. As Meszaros
explains:
Money is taken to possess these colossal powers as natural
attributes. People's attitude
toward money is, undoubtedly, the outstanding instance of
capitalist fetishism, reaching its
height in interest bearing capital. Here, people think they see
money creating more money,
self-expanding value... workers, machines, raw materials - all
the factors of production - are
downgraded to mere aids, and money itself is made the producer
of wealth.58
Thus money acquires great abilities, but on the other side of
the coin, all our human
desires and abilities contract into what Marx called a sense of
having: 'Private property has
made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours
when we have it, when it
exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat,
drink, wear, inhabit it, etc, in
short, when we use it'.59 Marx also described how this desire
for possession is both
stimulated and denied: 'The worker is only permitted to have
enough for him to live, and he
is only permitted to live in order to have'.60 In a
particularly perceptive passage from the
Manuscripts, Marx explains how money submerges our
personalities. It is a brilliant
rejoinder to those who argue that capitalism allows our
individuality to flourish:
That which exists for me through the medium of money, that
which I can pay for, ie which
money can buy, that am I, the possessor of the money. The
stronger the power of my
money, the stronger I am. The properties of money are my, the
possessors', properties and
essential powers. Therefore what I am and what I can do is by
no means determined by my
individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful
women. Which means to say that
I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its repelling power,
is destroyed by money. As an
individual I am lame, but money procures me 24 legs.
Consequently, I am not lame. I am a
wicked, dishonest, unscrupulous individual, but money is
respected, and so also is its
owner...through money I can have anything the human heart
desires. Do I not therefore
possess all human abilities? Does not money therefore transform
all my incapacities into
their opposite?61
Commodity fetishism and class: Alienation and commodity
fetishism shape all relationships
in society. Those who possess wealth also inhabit a world
beyond their control, in which
relationships are reified. Their individuality is submerged by
the dictates of capitalism - as
Marx wrote, the instinct to enrich himself, which 'in a miser
is a mere idiosyncrasy, is, in
the capitalist, the effect of the social mechanism, of which he
is but one of the wheels'.62
The huge productive forces owned by the ruling class may bring
them riches beyond our
imaginings, but they cannot control the vast economic forces of
the system or even plan
any section of it accurately. The capitalists are caught in a
contradiction, that 'capital is a
social force, but it is privately, rather than collectively,
owned so its movements are
determined by individual owners necessarily indifferent to all
the social implications of their
activities'.63 The capitalist has constantly to compete in
order to keep up with his
competitors and while his actions may be perfectly sensible for
the individual firm, when
generalised across society they cause the economic recessions
which can destroy many
firms. Economic crises are irrefutable proof that the system is
more powerful than any
individual capitalist. This explains why crises are such a
massive blow to the confidence
and ideology of the ruling class. The capitalist may like to
believe that his daring,
entrepreneurial spirit creates his wealth, but in reality he
'rides a wave another has
created'.64 The class struggle, which he cannot prevent, brings
home forcibly how
dependent he is on the labour of his employees, and, like
economic crises, is a wounding
blow to the outlook of the ruling class.
In The Holy Family Marx gives a brilliant description of the
situation of the ruling class:
The possessing class and the class of the proletariat present
the same human
self-alienation. But the former class feels at home in this
self-alienation, it finds
confirmation of itself and recognises in alienation its own
power; it has in it a semblance of
human existence, while the class of the proletariat feels
annihilated in its self-alienation; it
sees therein its own powerlessness and the reality of an
inhuman existence.65
Thus, no matter how deeply alienation affects them, the ruling
class will always be driven
to defend the system that creates their alienation with all the
power and brutality at their
disposal because of their material position within it. In
addition to this, Lukács argued that
the ruling class can never rise above the commodity fetishism
of capitalism. The
bourgeoisie can never recognise the real nature of capitalism
without confronting their own
role as exploiters and upholders of the system. Therefore the
capitalists do not want to
recognise the real social relationships which underlie the
institutions of capitalist society.
They prefer to continue believing that the relations of
production are natural and inevitable.
In contrast, Lukács argued that workers, though also shaped by
commodity fetishism, were
not permanently blinded to the reality of capitalism. Rather he
argued that the working
class is in a unique position to be able to tear the veil of
reification from capitalism
because its struggle against capitalism reveals its real own
role in producing the wealth of
society. Class struggle means that workers no longer see
themselves as isolated
individuals. It means that they can become conscious of the
social character of labour.
Lukács suggests that when workers glimpse the reality behind
commodity fetishism it can
help them to realise the need for a revolutionary
transformation of society: 'This enables us
to understand why it is only in the proletariat that the
process by which a man's
achievement is split off from his total personality and becomes
a commodity leads to a
revolutionary consciousness'.66
The uses and abuses of Marx's theory
The concept of alienation is a central but controversial aspect
of Marxism. When Marx's key
work on alienation, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
was eventually published
in 1932, it had a dramatic impact on the tradition known as
'Western Marxism', which
included writers like Herbert Marcuse and John Paul Sartre.67
However, in the hands of the
Western Marxists, the theory of alienation became intermingled
with idealist theories,
which explained alienation in terms of psychology rather than
the organisation of society.
The New Left which emerged in the late 1950s reacted against
the theory and practice of
Stalinism, but some of the writers associated with the New Left
threw the Marxist baby out
with the Stalinist bathwater. They abandoned some central
aspects of Marxism, such as the
central role of the economic structure in shaping the rest of
society and the objective class
antagonisms at the heart of capitalism. As Perry Anderson
wrote, 'The most striking single
trait of Western Marxism as a common tradition is thus perhaps
the constant presence and
influence on it of successive types of European idealism'.68
Alienation was seized upon to
explain the miseries of modern life, and the 'lonely crowd',
'those aggregations of atomised
city dwellers who feel crushed and benumbed by the weight of a
social system in which
they have neither significant purpose nor decision-making
power'.69 Alienation came to refer
predominately to a state of mind, rather than an understanding
of how social organisation
affected human beings.
Typical of the confused ideas about alienation fashionable in
some quarters at this time is
a book edited by Eric and Mary Josephson, Man Alone: Alienation
in Modern Society, first
published in 1962 and reprinted eight times before 1968. For
the Josephsons, alienation
describes 'the untold lives of quiet desperation that mark our
age', and the long list of
those suffering from alienation includes such diverse group as
women, immigrants, sexual
deviants, drug addicts, young people and artists.70 But the
editors understand alienation
exclusively as a psychological state, 'referring to an
extraordinary variety of psycho-social
disorders, including loss of field, anxiety states, anomie,
despair, depersonalisation,
rootlessness, apathy, social disorganisation, loneliness,
atomisation, powerlessness,
meaninglessness, isolation, pessimism, and the loss of beliefs
and values'.71 If alienation
is only a specific psychological problem, then it follows that
the solution to alienation must
be sought exclusively in the individual consciousness. If
alienation is predominantly a state
of mind, there is an implication that it can be cured without
fundamentally changing the
organisation of society. As Eric Fromm suggested, forms of
alienation were 'chains of
illusion' which can be broken within the context of capitalist
society, because they arise
from 'stereotyped alternatives of thinking'.72
However, Marx's writings on alienation, from the Manuscripts to
the Grundrisse and Capital,
demonstrate that for him alienation was not merely a state of
mind. The roots of the
individual psyche were to be located in how society as a whole
is organised. As one Marxist
described it, 'The life activity of the alienated individual is
qualitatively of a kind. His
actions in religion, family affairs, politics and so on, are as
distorted and brutalised as his
productive activity... There is no sphere of human activity
that lies outside these prison
walls'.73 Marx's theory offers us an indispensable method of
understanding how the
production process shapes the whole of society. There are two
areas of activity which are
particularly controversial in relation to alienation. This
first is the place of intellectual, or
mental labour, and creativity in alienated production.
The division of labour described in this article leads to a
sharp division between work and
creativity. Work is regimented, broken down into separate
tasks. The creative elements in
each process are dispersed into a million fragments. Labour
itself is a commodity and its
value is determined by the labour time which went into its
creation, for example, the
amount spent on training or educating a worker. A highly
skilled technician or engineer will
therefore be paid more than an unskilled labourer. As Braverman
wrote, 'In this way, a
structure is given to all labour process that at its extremes
polarises those whose time is
infinitely valuable and those whose time is worth almost
nothing'.74 However, this does not
mean that the intellectual whose time is valuable escapes from
the general pattern of
alienation. On the contrary, one of the features of modern
capitalism is the
commercialisation of knowledge.75 The design of a microchip or
computer software is just
as much the property of the capitalist as a tin of beans or a
car. Capitalists enrich
themselves through the appropriation of mental labour in the
same way as they do through
material labour.
The social division of labour undermines the potential of
intellectuals to discover new truths
about society. As Franz Jakubowski wrote,
The social division of labour creates a series of sub-spheres,
not only in the economy but in
the whole of social life and thought. These develop their own
autonomous sets of laws. As
a result of specialisation, each individual sphere develops
according to the logic of its own
specific object.76
Intellectual activity takes place within these limitations, in
isolation from society as a
whole. In the end, the individual sciences 'cannot understand
either the method of the
principle of even their own concrete substratum of reality'.77
All the potential we have to
develop new techniques and methods is subordinated to
competition. The very structure of
capitalist society condemns our intellectual developments to
the chase of facts in blind
isolation from the real movements of society. This does not
mean that nothing useful can
be developed, rather that research takes place within a
framework which constrains and
limits its development.
The same processes are at work in the production and
consumption of art in capitalist
society. As Eugene Lunn explained in his excellent book Marxism
and Modernism, bourgeois
society offers artistic freedom on one hand and snatches it
back with the other: 'Bourgeois
society - with all its progressive advance over "feudal"
constrictions - is also inimical to
many forms of art, for example because of division of labour,
the mechanisation of many
forms of human activity, and the predominance of quantitative
over qualitative concerns'.78
Marx argued that artists, like scientists and intellectuals,
could not escape from the general
conversion of all human creativity into commodities. Firstly
this is because artists, like all
other workers, are dependent on their ability to make money:
'The bourgeoisie has stripped
of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to
with reverent awe. It has
converted the physician, the lawyers, the priest, the poet, the
man of science, into its paid
wage labourers'.79 Secondly, Lunn points out how commodity
production shapes art. The
fact that works of art are sold on the market shapes every
level of their conception and
production. Marx gave one example of this in his critique of
the novels of Eugene Sue, in
which he 'stresses the influence upon the author of the ethical
and political assumptions of
its intended bourgeois public'.80 Neither can art escape
commodity fetishism: 'If one form
of spiritualising mystification has been eroded by expansion of
commerce - the romantic
apotheosis of the arts as soaring above material reality - a
new fetishism has replaced it:
the fetishism of commodities'.81 This also points to how new,
challenging cultural
developments are rapidly incorporated into the system as mere
commodities.
This does not mean that works of art can be reduced to exactly
the same status as a tin of
beans. Art stimulates our imagination and emotions. It enriches
our understanding of
society and can reveal something of the contradictions behind
reified appearances: 'It can
pierce through the ideological clouds which enshroud social
realities.' Some artists devote
their energies to attempting to reach beyond capitalism, while
others choose to celebrate
the system as it exists, but even then the art they produce can
penetrate the reified
appearance of capitalism. As Lunn wrote:
We cannot reduce art to exchange rates reflecting the pervasive
alienation. Even with its
halo removed, art was capable of diagnosing, and pointing
beyond alienating social and
economic conditions... All art has the capacity to create a
need for aesthetic enjoyment and
education which capitalism cannot satisfy. Although coming
increasingly under the influence
of the marketplace, art is produced and consumed in relative
autonomy and is not identical
to factory work or to a pure commodity.82
The second controversial application of Marx's theory of
alienation is in the formulation of
an analysis of other activities outside the sphere of work,
which we undertake through
choice rather than necessity. The more the world of work
confronts us as hostile,
exhausting and miserable, the more people pour their energies
into their lives outside work.
As the system develops new markets are constantly being carved
out of our needs and
wishes. For example, consider the multimillion pound industries
which have developed
around commodities which are said to make us look thin or
young, our desire to play
games, to experience nature or enjoy art. The very fact that we
have the 'leisure industry'
and the 'entertainment industry' points to the fact that the
separation of work from leisure
has left a void in our free hours: 'Thus filling time away from
the job also becomes
dependent upon the market, which develops to an enormous degree
those passive
amusements, entertainments, and spectacles that suit the
restricted circumstances of the
city and are offered as substitutes for life itself'.83
The retreat into the privatised world of the individual and the
family is a pronounced
feature of life in the 1990s. Adopting particular lifestyles
seems to offer the only real
chance of personal fulfilment. Hence the increasing fascination
for TV programmes and
magazines about fashion, cooking, holidays and gardening and
the boom in the
Do-It-Yourself market. The family and the home have become
leisure activities in and of
themselves; they have also become subject to the priorities of
the market. All the
commodities which could increase our free time simply reinforce
the family as a unit of
consumption not an emotional haven: 'As the advances of modern
household and service
industries lighten the family labour, they increase the
futility of family life; as they remove
the burden of personal relations, they strip away its
affections; as they create an intricate
social life, they rob it of every vestige of community and
leave in its place the cash
nexus'.84
In addition, Meszaros describes how the retreat into private
life simply increases the power
of capitalism over us: 'The cult of privacy and of individual
autonomy thus fulfils the dual
function of objectively protecting the established order
against challenge by the rabble, and
subjectively providing a spurious fulfilment in an escapist
withdrawal to the isolated and
powerless individual who is mystified by the mechanisms of
capitalist society which
manipulate him'.85 Meszaros also makes the point that
alienation has deprived us of our
ability to have genuinely human relationships. We are forced to
seek compensation for the
loss of our humanity in the limited area of our privatised
personal lives, yet this merely
reinforces our alienation from each other: 'To seek the remedy
in autonomy is to be on the
wrong track. Our troubles are not due to a lack of autonomy
but, on the contrary, to a social
structure - a mode of production - that forces on men a cult of
it, isolating them from each
other'.86
Our attempts to express the creativity of which capitalism has
deprived us cannot negate
the totality of alienation. The eradication of alienation
depends on the transformation of
society as a whole. However we organise our personal lives and
leisure time, we cannot
individually fulfil our collective ability to shape the natural
world we live in. Lifestyles and
leisure activities cannot liberate us from alienation, or even
create little islands of freedom
in an ocean of alienation. As alienation is rooted in
capitalist society, only the collective
struggle against that society carries the potential to
eradicate alienation, to bring our vast,
developing powers under our conscious control and reinstitute
work as the central aspect of
life. As Marx wrote in Capital, 'The veil is not removed from
the countenance of the social
life process, ie the process of material production, until it
becomes production by freely
associated men and stands under their conscious and planned
control'.87
Notes
1 K Marx, 'Speech at the Anniversary of the Peoples' Paper'
quoted in E Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (University
of California Press, 1984), p31.
2 G Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Merlin, 1971),
p47.
3 Marx was not the first to develop an analysis of human
alienation. Marx's philosophical predecessor, Hegel, saw
alienation as part of the development of the human mind. Ludwig
Feuerbach put forward a materialist analysis of
alienation, pointing out how men transfer the power to change
the world to imaginary gods, but he believed that
religious alienation could be eradicated through rational
argument alone. Marx broke from both Hegel's idealist
concept of alienation and the ahistorical materialism of
Feuerbach. For an introduction to Marx's theorectical
background, see A Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl
Marx (Bookmarks, 1996), ch 3.
4 Quoted in E Fischer, How to Read Karl Marx (Monthly Review
Press, 1996), p53.
5 Ibid, p52.
6 Ibid, p51.
7 Ibid, p54.
8 T Eagleton, Marx (Phoenix, 1997), p27.
9 K Marx, Capital, vol 1 (Penguin, 1976), p173.
10 K Marx, Early Writings (Penguin, 1975), p318.
11 Quoted in P Walton and A Gamble, From Alienation to Surplus
Value (Sheed and Ward, 1972), p20.
12 E Mandel and G Novak, The Marxist Theory of Alienation
(Pathfinder, 1970), p20.
13 Capital, op cit, p170.
14 K Marx quoted in I Meszaros, Marx's Theory of Alienation
(Merlin Press, 1986), p35.
15 P Linebaugh, The London Hanged (Penguin, 1993), p396.
16 Ibid, p225.
17 Ibid, p374.
18 Ibid, p24.
19 Capital, op cit, p460
20 H Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capitalism (Monthly Review
Press, 1974), p73.
21 K Marx, Early Writings, op cit, p285.
22 Ibid, p335.
23 Ibid, p326.
24 P Linebaugh, op cit, p225.
25 B Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge University Press, 1996),
p143.
26 I I Rubin, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (Black Rose
Books, 1975), pxxv.
27 K Marx, Early Writings, p324.
28 E Fischer, op cit, p67.
29 Ibid, p327.
30 H Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capitalism (Monthly Review
Press, 1974), p80.
31 E Fischer, op cit, pp58-9.
32 H Braverman, op cit, p171.
33 Ibid, p180.
34 G Lukács, op cit, p89.
35 K Marx, Early Writings, op cit, p331.
36 E Fischer, op cit, p63.
37 B Ollman, op cit, p144.
38 Rubin, op cit, p15.
39 K Marx, Early Writings, op cit, p359.
40 There is a brilliant description of one facet of this
experience in C Caudwell, The Concept of Freedom
(Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), p49.
41 K Marx, Early Writings, op cit, p325.
42 See C Harman, Economics of the Madhouse (Bookmarks, 1995).
43 E Mandel, op cit, p22.
44 K Marx, Capital, op cit, p125.
45 Ibid, p125.
46 Ibid, p1.
47 See ibid, p165.
48 Quoted in B Ollman, op cit, p187.
49 K Marx, Capital, op cit, pp202-203.
50 Ibid, p21.
51 Ibid, pp165-165.
52 Ibid, p24.
53 Ibid, p179.
54 H Braverman, op cit, p271.
55 E Fischer, op cit, p68.
56 Ibid, p187.
57 Ibid, p205.
58 I Meszaros, op cit, p197.
59 K Marx, Early Writings, op cit, p351.
60 Ibid, p361.
61 Ibid, p377.
62 K Marx, quoted in G Lukács, op cit, p133.
63 Ibid, p63.
64 B Ollman, op cit, p154.
65 K Marx, The Holy Family, quoted in F Jakubowski, Ideology
and Superstructure in Historical Materialism (Pluto,
1990), p87.
66 G Lukács, op cit, p171.
67 P Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (New Left
Books, 1976), pp50-51.
68 Ibid, p56.
69 E Mandel, op cit, p6.
70 E and M Josephson, Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society
(Dell Publishing Co, 1968), p12.
71 Ibid, p13.
72 Ibid, ch 1.
73 B Ollman, op cit, p202.
74 H Braverman, op cit, p83.
75 See, for instance, G Carchedi, Frontiers of Political
Economy (Verso, 1991), p18.
76 F Jakubowski, op cit, p96.
77 Ibid, p96.
78 E Lunn, op cit, p15.
79 Ibid, p16.
80 Ibid, p12.
81 Ibid, p16.
82 Ibid, pp15-16.
83 H Braverman, op cit, p278,
84 Ibid, p282.
85 I Meszaros, op cit, p26.
86 Ibid, p267.
87 K Marx, Capital, op cit, p173.
Return to Contents page: Return to International Socialism
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Raymond Falcon-Lugo
We could spend a lifetime studying Marx, Lukacs and "3 lifespans" trying to
convince the common people.
The common people have to approve all this?
At least capitalism have saved the world 2 times in the last century! It
deserves some "credit"?
The internet, computers, advances in medicine are directly associated with
capitalism.
Ortiz
going back to the worst of it.
Raymond Falcon-Lugo wrote:
>
> Is this is too "pure", "irrealistic", "archaic" .... impractical??
> We could spend a lifetime studying Marx, Lukacs and "3 lifespans" trying to
> convince the common people.
You could spend far longer studying the ideological writings of
the cuban exiles, and the far-right. You just don't know it or
don't acknowledge it.
> The common people have to approve all this?
The "common people" do what it needs to do.
> At least capitalism have saved the world 2 times in the last century! It
> deserves some "credit"?
Saved the world? sure.. from itself.
> The internet, computers, advances in medicine are directly associated with
> capitalism.
Which is perhaps why we should not discard all forms of
capitalist organizations. The real question is how do we
reform this system, preserving those institutions which serve
humanity best.