Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The German Ideology Philosophy 219 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The German Ideology

Karl Marx (1818-1883) Marx’s life spanned the bulk of the 19th century. Originally interested in the law, he shifted his attention to philosophy, in which he received the doctorate. He spent the bulk of his career as a journalist, moving around Europe as his political activities and writings led to his expulsion from a number of different cities and countries. The focus of his work was on economics and politics.

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Written in Paris, the manuscripts were a series of notes and reflections emerging out of his study of Smith, political history and the emerging communist political movements. Like Smith, Marx was profoundly influenced by the emerging industrial revolution and the transformation it was producing in the lives and conditions of people. His starting point in our selection is the starting point of “political economy,” Smith’s starting point (and Locke’s): the individual and their interests (typically understood in terms of property).

Homo Faber Marx assumes a very different theory of human nature than that of Locke and Smith. In labor human beings make the material they work with part of themselves, transforming nature into an extension of themselves. Labor is thus a form of self-knowledge. You come to know yourself by experiencing the results of your own labor. In experiencing the product of your labor, you are aware of both it and yourself. Writ large, this self-identification in objectification is history revealing himself to us, not only through the material results of our work, but through all of our creations: art, law, religion, technology, society itself. In all of these endeavors, we externalize ourselves and in the process become more self-consciously human.

Homo Faber and Private Property This helps us understand why Marx believes that the traditional starting point of political economy is faulty. He thinks that the prevailing account of the nature of our social and political lives (i.e., Social Contract Theory), assumes private property as a social reality (think Locke), without understanding how and why property has come to have the significance it does. He insists that, “…we have to grasp the essential connection between private property; greed, and the separation of labor, capital and landed property…” What is this connection: estrangement or alienation (cf. 411c1).

The Pin Factory Marx completely reconceives the significance of the example that Smith uses: the pin factory. It’s truth is that it assumes the standpoint of the capitalist, forgetting the effects of the division of labor on the worker. In the factory, the process of becoming self- consciously human by way of externalization through labor has been undermined. “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth [s]he produces, the more h[er] production increases in power and size” (702c1).

Estrangement Pt. 1 This undermining takes four distinct forms: Product Alienation: because they have no stake in what they produce, workers no longer experience the product of their work as themselves. The product of their labor doesn't belong to them, but to the capitalist. All the workers have are their wages (411c2). Self Alienation: because they do not organize their own productive activity, the workers’ relationship to their work, the actual activity they engage in, is now also one of alienation. They experience it as an alienation from themselves. They no longer express themselves in their work; they lose themselves in it (412c2-413c1).

Estrangement Pt. 2 Species Alienation: By "species being,” Marx means our existence as a human being, considered in the aspects in which it differs from the existence of other animals. A unique character of human beings is that they are capable of working to produce things that aren't needed for survival (e.g. art, which is produced for the sake of beauty). Working for wages is work that's necessary for survival -- and so workers lose what's distinctively human about themselves and thus become alienated from themselves as human beings. Social Alienation: because, as a result of the other three forms of alienation, workers are all in competition with each other, they are alienated from each other. Love and trust are replaced by bargaining and exchange. Human beings cease to recognize in each other their common human nature; they see others as instruments for furthering their own egoistic interests.

Against Private Property Marx's assumption that humans are Homo Faber together with his analysis of the inevitable alienation resulting from private ownership of the means of production, serve as a basis from which Marx criticizes private ownership of property. Private property is not only the source of this alienation, it is also the necessary consequence of alienated labor, of the external relation of the workers to nature and to themselves.

Implications Private property sets up a negative feedback situation. The only property owned by workers is what they buy with their wages, so they doesn't own anything that they’ve had a direct hand in producing. However, the need for further possessions generates the need for more wages, and thus more alienated labor. This results in increasing greed: "Man becomes ever poorer as man, his need for money becomes ever greater if he wants to overpower hostile being." Marx’s strategy for curing alienation was radical: to eliminate labor within the capitalist system, the wage system, and private property, i.e., to institute communism.

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) Like Marx, Engels was of Prussian descent, but he spent most of his life in the major cities of Europe. His first hand experience with the productive forms of the industrial revolution radicalized him, and after meeting Marx as young men in Paris, they became friends and partners. The Ideology was one of the first products of their collaboration.

The German Ideology The GI was written in 1845, while Marx and Engels were living in Brussels. It’s theme is history, which Marx and Engels understood as a product of human activity (historical materialism), rather than thought (the “Ideology” of the title). The proponents of this “ideology” are the Young Hegelians, for whom, “Life is… determined by consciousness.” In contrast, Marx and Engels are attempting to demonstrate that, “consciousness [is determined] by life” (420c1).

The Starting Point For Marx and Engels, the only adequate starting point for a concept of history is the actual, concrete existence of living individuals. What this means, as the account of human beings as Homo Faber suggests, is that history starts with the “material conditions determining their production,” “both with what they produce and with how they produce” (417c2). This is true for individual history and that of nations, which can be distinguished, one from the other on the way in which labor is divided in them.

Division of Labor and Property As we’ve already seen in the Manuscripts, there is an intimate connection between the division of labor and property. In the Ideology, we get a developmental account of this connection, from “tribal ownership” through “communal” and “feudal” up to (implicitly) the form that ownership takes in the modern era: “capitalist.”

The Upshot The significance of this genealogy is to lay the groundwork for an account of consciousness which grounds it in specific forms of material existence. What might be labeled “capitalist consciousness” is not a “natural” condition, but the result of a certain ordering of material conditions, including the forms of work specified and required by private ownership of the means of production. This “order” has the effect of limiting human ideas and understanding, in effect blinding us to other possibilities. The point of this “ideology critique” is to open the possibility of recognizing other forms of consciousness, "Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men…”