Modern Political thought Term B – Week 6 The Early Marx: Alienation, Emancipation, and Species-Being

What is to be done… Context and biography On The Jewish Question (1843) Human emancipation What is species-being? Estranged Labour (1844) Relations of production j.hoover@qmul.ac.uk, also you can find additional lecture notes on personal website at: https://joe- hoover.org/ModernPoliticalThought/

Context and biography Karl Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) German of Jewish ancestry Young Hegelians Radical activism and exile from Germany Influence Philosophy Economics Sociology Politics Wider intellectual developments Modern secular nation-state Technological change Development of social science Development of global economy

On The Jewish Question (1843) Response to Bruno Bauer Bauer claims that there can be no special emancipation – universal emancipation found in renunciation of religion / religious authority. Marx asks, “what kind of emancipation are we concerned with?” Critique of the state as such, not just the Christian state “The state can be free without man being free.”  Political emancipation is not human emancipation! The abstract freedom of the state Civil Society : The State : : Material Existence : Species-Being Citizen as universal but abstract status, contrasting with other real distinctions Formal equality obscures actually existing inequalities Do the rights of man provide for human emancipations beyond the rights of the citizen?

“At times of special self-confidence, political life seeks to suppress its prerequisite, civil society and the elements composing this society, and to constitute itself as the real species-life of man, devoid of contradictions. But, it can achieve this only by coming into violent contradiction with its own conditions of life, only by declaring the revolution to be permanent, and, therefore, the political drama necessarily ends with the re-establishment of religion, private property, and all elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace.”

Human Emancipation The rights of man are the rights of man in civil society  egotistical man, separated from others as individuals without community Liberty  freedom to do whatever harms no one else Property  freedom to dispose of one’s property in accord with self-interest Equality  of one’s individuality and isolation Security is the highest value of civil society and politics is a means to secure private life Abstract emancipation of revolutionary politics does not provide any content to political life as species-being, and thus falls back on the sensuous reality of individual material need.

“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.”

What is Species-Being? Species-being refers to human capacity to have a self-conscious purpose to our acts beyond survival Like Hegel, Marx thinks our species-being is Freedom The damage done by political emancipation, is that it renders that freedom as abstract equality, while subjugating actual human freedom to the work of maintaining material existence and serving individual ends. Human emancipation requires reuniting the bifurcated aspects of humanity created by political emancipation Political power—abstract freedom—must be transformed into concrete social power developed and deployed as equal creative freedom

Estranged Labour (1844) Studying political economy from its root causes: the estrangement of labour Objectification Worker is not producing for herself, yet is bound to the act of producing Labour is done only for the sake of survival and the labourer is reduced to a mere physical body Self-alienation The ends of our labouring are external to us, leading us to deny ourselves and affirm the ends of others Ourlabour, then, is forced labour done to meet needs external to our labour—we commodify ourselves Alienation of species-being We are world creating animals because of capacity for self-conscious freedom Alienated labour denies our freedom to create without necessity and in accord with beauty

Relations of production… To whom is our labour alienated? Other humans! “Alien, hostile, powerful, and independent.” We create commodified relationships Worker creates the domination/power that the owner and the produce of labour have Emancipation requires non-alienated labour that creates human and social property rather than private property