Revisiting Marx's Concept of Alienation

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Notes

1. Histoire et conscience de classe, trans. Kostas Axelos and Jacqueline Bois, Paris: Minuit, 1960.

2. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971, xxiv.

3. Isaak Illich Rubin, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, Detroit: Black & Red, 1972, 5.

4. Ibid., 28 (trans. mod.).

5. Ibid., 59.

8. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844),” in Early Writings, 324.

6. In fact, Marx had already used the concept of alienation before he wrote the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In one text he published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (February 1844) he wrote: “It is […] the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.” Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” in Karl Marx, Early Writings, London: Penguin, 1992, 244–5.

7. In Marx's writings one finds the term Entfremdung as well as Entäusserung. These had different meanings in Hegel, but Marx uses them synonymously. See Marcella D'Abbiero, Alienazione in Hegel. Usi e significati di Entäusserung, Entfremdung Veräusserung, Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 1970, 25-7.

9. Ibid., 327.

10. Ibid., 330. For an account of Marx's four-part typology of alienation, see Bertell Ollman, Alienation, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971, 136–52.

12. Karl Marx, “Excerpts from James Mill's Elements of Political Economy,” in Early Writings, 278.

11. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844),” 333.

13. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, San Francisco: Harper, 1962, 220–1. In the 1967 preface to his republished History and Class Consciousness, Lukács observed that in Heidegger alienation became a politically innocuous concept that “sublimated a critique of society into a purely philosophical problem” (Lukács, xxiv). Heidegger also tried to distort the meaning of Marx's concept of alienation: in his Letter on “Humanism” (1946), he noted approvingly that, “by experiencing alienation, [Marx] attains an essential dimension of history” (Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, London: Routledge, 1993, 243) – a misleading formulation which has no basis in Marx's writings.

16. Ibid., 25.

14. Herbert Marcuse, “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics,” Telos 16 (Summer, 1973), 25.

15. Ibid., 16–17.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., 14–15.

19. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, Boston: Beacon Press, 1966, 45.

20. Ibid., 46–7. Georges Friedmann was of the same view, arguing in The Anatomy of Work (New York: Glencoe Press, 1964) that the overcoming of alienation was possible only after liberation from work.

21. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 156.

22. Ibid., 155.

23. Ibid., 198.

24. Ibid., 155. Cf. the evocation of a ‘libidinal rationality which is not only compatible with but even promotes progress toward higher forms of civilized freedom’ (199). On the relationship between technology and progress, see Kostas Axelos, Alienation, Praxis, and Techné in the Thought of Karl Marx, Austin/London: University of Texas Press, 1976.

25. Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Seabury Press, 1972, 121.

26. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, New York: Norton, 1962, 62.

28. Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961, 56–7. This failure to understand the specific character of alienated labour recurs in his writings on alienation in the 1960s. In an essay published in 1965 he wrote: “One has to examine the phenomenon of alienation in its relation to narcissism, depression, fanaticism, and idolatry to understand it fully.” “The Application of Humanist Psychoanalysis to Marx's Theory,” in Erich Fromm, ed., Socialist Humanism, New York: Doubleday, 1965, 221.

30. Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel, New York/London: Basic Books, 1969, 88.

27. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, New York: Fawcett, 1965, 111.

29. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

31. Cf. István Mészáros, Marx's Theory of Alienation, London: Merlin Press, 1970, 241 ff.

32. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, 253–4.

33. Ibid., 254.

34. The directors of the Institute of Marxism–Leninism in Berlin even managed to exclude the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 from the numbered volumes of the canonical Marx-Engels Werke, relegating them to a supplementary volume with a smaller print run.

35. Adam Schaff, Alienation as a Social Phenomenon, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980, 21.

36. Cf. Daniel Bell, “The Rediscovery of Alienation: Some notes along the quest for the historical Marx,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. LVI, 24 (November, 1959), 933–52, which concludes: “while one may be sympathetic to the idea of alienation, it is only further myth-making to read this concept back as the central theme of Marx,” 935.

37. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, London: Verso, 1991, 53.

38. Lucien Goldmann, Recherches dialectiques, Paris: Gallimard, 1959, 101.

39. Thus Richard Schacht (Alienation, Garden City: Doubleday, 1970) noted that “there is almost no aspect of contemporary life which has not been discussed in terms of ‘alienation’” (lix); while Peter C. Ludz (“Alienation as a Concept in the Social Sciences,” reprinted in Felix Geyer and David Schweitzer, eds., Theories of Alienation, Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976) remarked that “the popularity of the concept serves to increase existing terminological ambiguity” (3).

40. Cf. David Schweitzer, “Alienation, De-alienation, and Change: A critical overview of current perspectives in philosophy and the social sciences,” in Giora Shoham, ed., Alienation and Anomie Revisited, Tel Aviv: Ramot, 1982, for whom “the very meaning of alienation is often diluted to the point of virtual meaninglessness” (57).

41. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Canberra: Hobgoblin 2002, 13.

46. Ibid., 13.

47. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, London: Sage, 1998, 191.

42. Ibid., 9.

43. Ibid., 11.

44. Ibid., 12.

45. Ibid., 11.

48. Ibid., 195–6.

49. Ibid., 196.

50. See for example John Clark, “Measuring alienation within a social system,” American Sociological Review, vol. 24, n. 6 (December 1959), 849–52.

51. See Schweitzer, “Alienation, De-alienation, and Change” (note 40), 36–7.

52. A good example of this position is Walter Kaufman's “The Inevitability of Alienation,” his introduction to Schacht's previously quoted volume, Alienation. For Kaufman, “life without estrangement is scarcely worth living; what matters is to increase men's capacity to cope with alienation” (lvi).

53. Schacht, Alienation, 155.

54. Seymour Melman, Decision-making and Productivity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958, 18, 165–6.

55. Among the questions that Nettler put to a sample considered susceptible to “alien orientation” were: “Do you enjoy TV? What do you think of the new model of American automobiles? Do you read Reader's Digest? … Do you like to participate in church activities? Do national spectator-sports (football, baseball) interest you?” (“A measure of alienation,” American Sociological Review, vol. 22, no. 6 [December 1957], 675). He concluded that negative answers were evidence of alienation; and elsewhere he added: “there seems little doubt that this scale measures a dimension of estrangement from our society.”

56. Ibid., 674. To prove his point, Nettler noted that “to the question, ‘Would you just as soon live under another form of government as under our present one?’ all responded with some indication of possibility and none with rejection” (674). He even went so far as to claim “that alienation is related to creativity. It is hypothesized that creative scientists and artists … are alienated individuals … that alienation is related to altruism [and] that their estrangement leads to criminal behavior” (676–7).

57. Melvin Seeman, “On the Meaning of Alienation,” American Sociological Review, vol. 24, no. 6 (December 1959), 783–91. In 1972 he added a sixth type to the list: “cultural estrangement.” (See Melvin Seeman, “Alienation and Engagement,” in Angus Campbell and Philip E. Converse, eds., The Human Meaning of Social Change, New York: Russell Sage, 1972, 467–527.)

58. Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964, 15.

59. Ibid., 3.

60. Cf. Walter R. Heinz, eds., “Changes in the Methodology of Alienation Research,” in Felix Geyer and Walter R. Heinz, eds., Alienation, Society and the Individual, New Brunswick/London: Transaction, 1992, 217.

61. See Felix Geyer and David Schweitzer, “Introduction,” in idem, eds., Theories of Alienation (note 39), xxi–xxii, and Felix Geyer, “A General Systems Approach to Psychiatric and Sociological De-alienation,” in Giora Shoham, ed. (note 40), 141.

62. See Geyer and Schweitzer, ‘Introduction’, xx–xxi.

63. David Schweitzer, “Fetishization of Alienation: Unpacking a Problem of Science, Knowledge, and Reified Practices in the Workplace,” in Felix Geyer, ed., Alienation, Ethnicity, and Postmodernism, Westport/London: Greenwood Press, 1996, 23.

64. Cf. John Horton, “The Dehumanization of Anomie and Alienation: a problem in the ideology of sociology,” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. XV, no. 4 (1964), 283–300, and David Schweitzer, “Fetishization of Alienation,” 23.

65. See Horton, “Dehumanization.” This thesis is proudly championed by Irving Louis Horowitz in “The Strange Career of Alienation: how a concept is transformed without permission of its founders,” in Felix Geyer, ed. (note 63), 17–19. According to Horowitz, “alienation is now part of the tradition in the social sciences rather than social protest. This change came about with a broadening realization that terms like being alienated are no more and no less value-laden than being integrated.” The concept of alienation thus “became enveloped with notions of the human condition – … a positive rather than a negative force. Rather than view alienation as framed by ‘estrangement’ from a human being's essential nature as a result of a cruel set of industrial-capitalist demands, alienation becomes an inalienable right, a source of creative energy for some and an expression of personal eccentricity for others” (18).

67. Ibid., 203.

69. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, London: Penguin, 1993, 157. In another passage on alienation (158), we read: “Rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons.”

70. Ibid., 461–2.

74. Ibid., 1005–6 (emphasis in the original).

76. Ibid., 1054 (emphasis in the original)

66. Karl Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital,” in Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 9, New York: International Publishers, 1977, 202.

68. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Revelations concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne and Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century.

71. Karl Marx, ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, in idem, Capital, Volume 1, London: Penguin, 1976, 990.

72. Ibid., 1058.

73. Ibid., 1054.

75. Ibid., 1007.

77. Ibid., 1056.

78. See Marcello Musto, ed., Karl Marx's Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 years Later, London/New York: Routledge, 2008, 177–280.

80. Ibid., 164–5.

79. Karl Marx, Capital,Volume 1, 166.

81. Cf. Schaff, Alienation as a Social Phenomenon, 81.

83. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3, London: Penguin, 1981, 959.

82. Capital, Volume 1, 171.

84. For reasons of space, a consideration of the unfinished and partly contradictory nature of Marx's sketch of a non-alienated society will have to be left to a future study.