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KARL MARX (1818-1883) |
THEMES ON THIS PAGE:
| 1. ALIENATION AT WORK | 2. ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS | 3. HUMAN NATURE |
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher and social revolutionary whose writings had a tremendous influence on modern society and history. His influence was especially profound in the areas of economy, political theory, and social sciences in general, as well as on social movements such as socialism and communism.
Marx was born in Trier, Germany, to a Jewish family, which converted to Christianity to enable his father to work as a lawyer, given Prussia’s anti-Jewish laws. He studied law at the Universities of Bonn and of Berlin, and also attended philosophy classes, and in 1841 received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Jena. He became involved with a group of radical thinkers, and this undermined his hope of getting a university position. He started practicing socialist and anti-establishment journalism, until he moved to France, where he met another German socialist, Friedrich Engels, and the two became friends and collaborators. During that time Marx started developing his basic vision of political economy, which later became known as Marxism. He moved to Belgium, then to London, where he continued writing intensively. After a long period of poor health he died in London at the age of 64.
Marx wrote many essays and books, among them the influential The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels, 1848) and Das Kapital (1867). In his writings he analyzed the socio-economical structure of capitalist society, and the role of factors such as money, power, and division of labor. These create an unjust world of alienation, gap between the poor and the rich, exploitation and repression. His solution was to work towards an equal communist society through a social revolution. Indeed, his books have inspired social revolutions around the world.
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TOPIC 1. ALIENATION AT WORK |
In his famous essay on alienation at work which appear in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx explained how work in the capitalist system necessarily leads to alienation (estrangement): The worker feels alienated from his work because he becomes an instrument of production, and he loses his ability to realize his humanity and human potentials. He becomes alienated in several senses: First, he is alienated from the product he is producing because he has no control over it. Second, he is alienated from the activity of production, because it comes from his need to survive and not from his human strivings and freedom. Third, he is alienated from his essence or identity, since the work does not express the possibility to develop his real potentials. And fourth, he is alienated from his fellow workers because the labor market puts him in competition with them.
In the following text (slightly adapted), Marx explains the first two types of alienation.
The more the worker spends himself working, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him. […] The worker puts his life into the object, but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this working activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product is, the less he is himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something foreign to him, and that it becomes an independent power confronting him. It means that the life which he has given to the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.
Let us now look more closely at the objectification. […] The worker becomes a servant of his object, first, in the sense that he receives work, and second, in the sense that he receives means of subsistence. This enables him to exist, first as a worker, and second as a physical subject. The height of this servitude is that he can maintain himself as a physical subject only as a worker, and he is a worker only as a physical subject.
[…] It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces a lack. It produces palaces – but for the worker it produces shacks. It produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines, but this throws some workers back into barbarous types of labor, and it turns other workers into a machine. It produces intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity.
[…] So far we have been considering the worker’s estrangement or alienation only in one respect: regarding the products of his labor. But the estrangement appears not only in the END-PRODUCT but also in the ACT of production, in the producing activity itself. If the worker relates to the product of his activity as a stranger, how could he not be alienating himself from himself in the act of production? The product is, after all, the summary of the activity of production. If, then, the product of labor is alienation, it follows that production is active alienation – the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. […]
What, then, creates the alienation of labor?
First, the fact that labor is EXTERNAL to the worker, in other words, that it does not belong to his intrinsic nature. Therefore, in his work he does not affirm himself but denies himself, he does not feel satisfied but unhappy, he does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but tortures his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore feels himself outside his work, and in his work he feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but forced – it is FORCED LABOR.
Labor is therefore not the satisfaction of a need, but only a MEANS to satisfy needs that are external to labor. The alien character of labor is clear from the fact that as soon as the worker has no physical or other necessity, he avoids labor like the plague. External labor – labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of torture. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker is clear from the fact that it is not his own labor, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that when he does it he does not belongs to himself, but to another. […]
As a result, therefore, the worker feels himself freely active only in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc. In his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything except an animal. What is animal becomes human, and what is human becomes animal.
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TOPIC 2. ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS |
For Karl Marx, the foundation of human life is not abstract ideals and theories, but real life as it is lived by individuals who eat and sleep and work, who have needs and desires. Even consciousness is not the foundation of human life, but on the contrary: “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” Therefore, to understand human life – including the religion, philosophy, and ideologies which humans produce – we must start with the investigation of the material life of concrete people, not with abstract principles. In contrast, those philosophies that start from abstract ideas and impose them on life, distort life (and Marx accuses especially German philosophers of doing this). As he says in the text below: “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven.”
The following text is adapted from Marx’s book The German Ideology, Volume I (1845-1846). Here he outlines his approach, according to which we start from material human reality, and he demonstrates how it can be used to understand basic aspects of life – language, communication, labor, division of labor, etc.
From the section “First Premises of Materialist Method”
Human beings are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active human beings who are conditioned by a certain development of their productive forces and of their ways of interacting. Consciousness can never be anything other than conscious existence, and the existence of human beings is their actual life-process. […] In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not start from what humans say, or imagine, or conceive – nor from humans as described in stories, thought of, imagined, conceived – in order to arrive at concrete humans. Rather, we start from real, active humans, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate how they develop their ideologies in reaction to this life-process. The phantoms that are formed in the human brain, too, are necessarily products of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and connected to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the other kinds of ideology, as well as their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer seem independent. They have no history, no development. But human beings, when they develop their material production and their material interactions, modify their thinking and the products of their thinking, together with their real existence. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. According to the first methodological approach, the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; according to the second method, which conforms to real life, the starting-point is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.
From the section “History: Fundamental Conditions”
We must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history: the premise that human beings must be able to live in order to be able to "make history". But life involves, first of all, eating and drinking, a place to live, clothing, and many other things. The first historical act is therefore the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed, this is a historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, just like thousands of years ago, must be fulfilled every day and every hour simply in order to sustain human life. […]
The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need leads to new needs. […] The third condition which enters into historical development, is that humans, who re-make their own life every day, begin to make other human beings, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family. […] The production of life, both of one's own life through labor, and of a new life through procreation, now appears as a double relationship: On the one hand it appears as a natural relationship, on the other as a social relationship. By “social” we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a given mode of production, or industrial stage, is always connected with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a "productive force".
[…]
Language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, to interact with other humans. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter into "relations" with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and it remains so as long as humans exist at all.
[…] The human being's consciousness of the need to associate with other individuals around him is the beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all. […] And now develops the division of labor, which was originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act, and which now becomes the division of labor which develops spontaneously or "naturally" because of natural tendencies (e.g. physical strength), needs, accidents, etc. etc. It becomes a true division of labor only from the moment in which a division of material and mental labor appears. From this moment, consciousness can really boast that it is different from the consciousness of the practice of existing, because it can really imagine something that is not real. From now on, consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to advance to produce "pure" theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.
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TOPIC 3. HUMAN NATURE |
The issue of human nature played an important part in Marx’s philosophy, because it served as a basis for of his rejection of capitalism and development of communism. Capitalism, for him, alienates us from our human nature, while communism allows us to reconnects to it. The question therefore arises: What is human nature?
Marx’s early answer appears in a series of essays which he wrote in 1844, while still living in Paris, which were later known as “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Here Marx derives his answer from Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy, and argues that human nature – or more accurately “species-being” (Gattungswesen) – is true common life. This nature (or species-being) is found both in every individual human and in humanity in general. In order to fulfill our human nature, our life must to be organized in a way that would enable us to relate to ourselves, to others, and to our work. The problem is that the capitalist system objectifies life and thus alienates us from our true nature. Therefore, in order to reconnect to our nature, money and private property have to be abolished.
The following text is adapted from Section 3 of the essay “Private property and communism,” which is part of the 1844 collection. To see Marx’s later view, scroll down to read his “Theses on Feuerbach.”
Just as society itself produces man as man, likewise society is produced by him. Activity and enjoyment are social, both in their content and in their mode of existence: social activity and social enjoyment. The human aspect of nature exists only for social man; because only then does nature exist for him as a bond with man – as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him – and as the life-element of human reality. Only then does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence. Only here, what is to him his natural existence become his human existence, and nature become man for him. Thus, society is the complete unity of man with nature – the true resurrection of nature – the consistent naturalism of man and the consistent humanism of nature.
Social activity and social enjoyment exist not only as direct communal activity and direct communal enjoyment (in other words, in direct association with other people) […] When, for example, I am in scientific activity – an activity which I can rarely perform in direct community with others – then, too, my activity is social, because I perform it as a human being. Not only is the material which I use given to me as a social product (just like the language in which the thinker is active); furthermore, my own existence is social activity. Therefore, what I make of myself, I make for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.
My general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of the real community, the social fabric, although nowadays general consciousness is an abstraction of real life, and as such it confronts life with hostility. The activity of my general consciousness is therefore also my theoretical existence as a social being.
Above all, we must not regard “society” as an abstraction of the individual. The individual is the social being. His manifestations of life – even if they may not appear directly as communal life in association with others – are therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual-life and species-life are not different from each other, even though the individual’s mode of existence is a more particular or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life.
In his species-consciousness, man confirms his real social life, and he simply repeats his real existence in thought, just as, conversely, the being of the species confirms itself in species-consciousness and exists for itself in its generality as a thinking being.
Man is a particular individual (and his particularity makes him an individual social being) just as much as he is the totality – the ideal totality, the subjective existence – of imagined and experienced society for itself. In the same way he exists also in the real world both as awareness and enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of human manifestation of life.
Thinking and being are thus certainly distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each other.
About a year after writing the above text, Marx made some changes to his views on human nature (species-being), and distanced himself from Feuerbach’s views. In his “Theses on Feuerbach” – eleven short philosophical notes which he wrote in Brussels in 1845 – he argued against the idea that human nature is a permanent essence, an abstract object of thought. Rather, human nature can be understood only in terms of the person’s specific economic and social relations, which are determined by his concrete historical and biological factors.
Thesis 2
The question whether objective truth applies to human thinking is not a question of theory, but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth – i.e., the reality and power of his thinking – in practice. The dispute over whether thinking is real or non-real, when it is isolated from practice, is a purely scholastic question.
Thesis 6
Feuerbach places the essence of religion in the essence of man. But the essence of man is not an abstraction which is inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach is therefore forced:
- To abstract from the historical process, and to define the religious feeling regarded by itself, and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual.
- The essence, therefore, can be regarded by him only as ‘species’, as an inner ‘dumb’ generality which unites many individuals only in a natural way.
Thesis 8
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.
Thesis 11
Philosophers have so far only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to CHANGE it.
