|
Economic
and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844
Preface
I have already given notice in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher
of the critique of jurisprudence and political science in the form
of a critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right. In the course
of elaboration for publication, the intermingling of criticism directed
only against speculation with criticism of the various subjects
themselves proved utterly unsuitable, hampering the development
of the argument and rendering comprehension difficult. Moreover
the wealth and diversity of the subjects to be treated, could have
been compressed into one work only in a purely aphoristic style;
whilst an aphoristic presentation of this kind, for its part, would
have given the impression of arbitrary systematizing. I shall therefore
issue the critique of law, ethics, politics, etc., in a series of
distinct, independent pamphlets, and at the end try in a special
work to present them again as a connected whole showing the interrelationship
of the separate parts, and finally, shall make a critique of the
speculative elaboration of that material. For this reason it will
be found that the interconnection between political economy and
the state, law, ethics, civil life, etc., is touched on in the present
work only to the extent to which political economy itself ex professo
[1] touches on these subjects.
It
is hardly necessary to assure the reader conversant with political
economy that my results have been won by means of a wholly empirical
analysis based on a conscientious critical study of political economy.
[Whereas
the uninformed reviewer who tries to hide his complete ignorance
and intellectual poverty by hurling the "utopian phrase"
at the positive critic's head, or again such phrases as "pure,
resolute, utterly critical criticism," the "not merely
legal but Social--utterly social--society," the "compact,
massy mass," the "oratorical orators of the masse mass,"
[2] this reviewer has yet to furnish the first proof that besides
his theological family-affairs he has anything to contribute to
a discussion of worldly matters.] [3]
It
goes without saving that besides the French and English Socialists
I have made use of German socialist works as well. The only original
German works of substance in this science, however-- other than
Weitling's writings--are the essays by Hess published in Einundzwanzig
Bogen, [4] and Engels' Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalokonomie
[5] in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher where, likewise, I indicated
in a very general way the basic elements of this work.
[Besides
being indebted to these authors who have given critical attention
to political economy, positive criticism as a whole--and therefore
also German positive criticism of political economy-- owes its true
foundation to the discoveries of Feuerbach, against whose Philosophie
der Zukunft [6] and Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie [7] in the
Anecdotis, [8] despite the tacit use that is made of them, the petty
envy of some and the veritable wrath of others seem to have instigated
a regular conspiracy of silence.]
It
is only with Feuerbach that positive, humanistic and naturalistic
criticism begins. The less noise they make, the more certain, profound,
widespread and enduring is the effect of Feuerbach's writings, the
only writings since Hegel's Phanomenologie and Logik to contain
a real theoretical revolution.
In
contrast to the critical theologians [9] of our day, I have deemed
the concluding chapter of the present work--the settling of accounts
with Hegelian dialectic and Hegelian philosophy as a whole--to be
absolutely necessary, a task not yet performed. This lack of thoroughness
is not accidental, since even the critical theologian remains a
theologian. Hence, either he had to start from certain presuppositions
of philosophy accepted as authoritative; or if in the process of
criticism and as a result of other people's discoveries doubts about
these philosophical presuppositions have arisen in him, he abandons
them without vindication and in a cowardly fashion, abstracts from
them showing his servile dependence on these presuppositions and
his resentment at this dependence merely in a negative, unconscious
and sophistical manner.
[In
this connection the critical theologian is either forever repeating
assurances about the purity of his own criticism, or tries to make
it seem as though all that was left for criticism to deal with now
was some other immature form of criticism outside itself--say eighteenth-century
criticism--and the backwardness of the masses, in order to divert
the observer's attention as well as his own from the necessary task
of settling accounts between criticism and its point of origin--Hegelian
dialectic and German philosophy as a whole--from this necessary
raising of modern criticism above its own limitation and crudity.
Eventually, however, whenever discoveries (such as Feuerbach's)
are made about the nature of his own philosophic presuppositions,
the critical theologian partly makes it appear as if he were the
one who had accomplished this, producing that appearance by taking
the results of these discoveries and, without being able to develop
them, hurling them in the form of catch-phrases at writers still
caught in the confines of philosophy; partly he even manages to
acquire a sense of his own superiority to such discoveries by covertly
asserting in a veiled, malicious and sceptical fashion elements
of the Hegelian dialectic which he still finds lacking in the criticism
of that dialectic (which have not yet been critically served up
to him for his use) against such criticism--not having tried to
bring such elements into their proper relation or having been capable
of doing so, asserting, say, the category of mediating proof against
the category of positive, self-originating truth, etc., in a way
peculiar to Hegelian dialectic. For to the theological critic it
seems quite natural that everything has to be done by philosophy,
so that he can chatter away about purity, resoluteness, and utterly
critical criticism; and he fancies himself the true conqueror of
philosophy whenever he happens to feel some "moment" in
Hegel [10] to be lacking in Feuerbach--for however much he practises
the spiritual idolatry of "self-consciousness" and "mind"
the theological critic does not get beyond feeling to consciousness.]
[11]
On
close inspection theological criticism--genuinely progressive though
it was at the inception of the movement--is seen in the final analysis
to be nothing but the culmination and consequence of the old philosophical,
and especially the Hegelian, transcendentalism, twisted into a theological
caricature. This interesting example of the justice in history,
which now assigns to theology, ever philosophy's spot of infection,
the further role of portraying in itself the negative dissolution
of philosophy--i.e., the process of its decay--this historical nemesis
I shall demonstrate on another occasion.
[How
far, on the other hand, Feuerbach's discoveries about the nature
of philosophy required still, for their proof at least, a critical
settling of accounts with philosophical dialectic will be seen from
my exposition itself.
Estranged Labour [12]
We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have
accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property,
the separation of labour, capital and land, and of wages, profit
of capital and rent of land--likewise division of labour, competition,
the concept of exchange-value, etc. On the basis of political economy
itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to
the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of
commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion
to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary
result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands,
and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; that
finally the distinction between capitalist and land-rentier, like
that between the tiller of the soil and the factory-worker, disappears
and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes--the
property-owners and the propertyless workers.
Political
economy proceeds from the fact of private property, but it does
not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulae
the material process through which private property actually passes,
and these formulae it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend
these laws-- i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the
very nature of private property. Political economy does not disclose
the source of the division between labour and capital, and between
capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship
of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to
be the ultimate cause; i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed
to evolve. Similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained
from external circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently
fortuitous circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course
of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen
how, to it, exchange itself appears to be a fortuitous fact. The
only wheels which political economy sets in motion are avarice and
the war amongst the avaricious-- competition.
Precisely
because political economy does not grasp the connections within
the movement, it was possible to counterpose, for instance, the
doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine
of craft-liberty to the doctrine of the corporation, the doctrine
of the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate--for
competition, craft-liberty and the division of landed property were
explained and comprehended only as fortuitous, premeditated and
violent consequences of monopoly, the corporation, and feudal property,
not as their necessary, inevitable and natural consequences .
Now.,
therefore, we have to grasp the essential connection between private
property, avarice, and the separation of labour, capital and landed
property; between exchange and competition, value and the devaluation
of men, monopoly and competition, etc.; the connection between this
whole estrangement and the money-system.
Do
not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political
economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition
explains nothing. He merely pushes the question away into a grey
nebulous distance. He assumes in the form of fact, of an event,
what he is supposed to deduce--namely, the necessary relationship
between two things--between, for example, division of labour and
exchange. Theology in the same way explains the origin of evil by
the fall of man: that is, it assumes as a fact, in historical form,
what has to be explained.
We
proceed from an actual economic fact.
The
worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more
his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes
an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With
the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion
the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities;
it produces itself and the worker as a commodity--and does so in
the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.
This
fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces--labour's
product--confronts it as something alien, as a power independent
of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been
congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification
of labour. Labour's realization is its objectification. In the conditions
dealt with by political economy this realization of labour appears
as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the
object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.
[13]
So
much does labour's realization appear as loss of reality that the
worker loses reality to the point of starving to death. So much
does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker
is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but
for his work. Indeed, labour itself becomes an object which he can
get hold of only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular
interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear
as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer
can he possess and the more he falls under the dominion of his product,
capital.
All
these consequences are contained in the definition that the worker
is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For
on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself,
the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates
over-against himself, the poorer he himself--his inner world--becomes,
the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion.
The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. 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 activity
the greater is the worker's lack of objects. Whatever the product
of his labour is, he is not. Therefore the greater this product,
the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product
means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence,
but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien
to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him;
it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts
him as something hostile and alien.
Let
us now look more closely at the objectification, at the production
of the worker; and therein at the estrangement, the loss of the
object, his product.
The
worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external
world. It is the material on which his labor is manifested, in which
it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.
But
just as nature provides labor with the means of life in the sense
that labour cannot live without objects on which to operate, on
the other hand, it also provides the means of life in the more restricted
sense--i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the worker
himself.
Thus
the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world,
sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life in
the double respect: first, that the sensuous external world more
and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labour--to be his
labour's means of life; and secondly, that it more and more ceases
to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical
subsistence of the worker.
Thus
in this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object,
first, in that he receives an object of labour, i.e., in that he
receives work; and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence.
Therefore, it enables him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second,
as a physical subject. The extremity of this bondage is that it
is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical
subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a
worker.
(The
laws of political economy express the estrangement of the worker
in his object thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has
to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the
more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more
deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the
more barbarous becomes the worker; the mightier labour becomes,
the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labour
becomes, the duller becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature's
bondsman.)
Political
economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour
by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour)
and production. It is true that labour produces for the rich wonderful
things--but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces--but
for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty--but for the worker,
deformity. It replaces labour by machines--but some of the workers
it throws back to a barbarous type of labour, and the other workers
it turns into machines. It produces intelligence--but for the worker
idiocy, cretinism.
The
direct relationship of labour to its produce is the relationship
of the worker to the objects of his production. The relationship
of the man of means to the objects of production and to production
itself is only a consequence of this first relationship--and confirms
it. We shall consider this other aspect later.
When
we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labour we are
asking about the relationship of the worker to production.
Till
now we have been considering the estrangement, the alienation of
the worker only in one of its aspects, i.e., the worker's relationship
to the products of his labour. But the estrangement is manifested
not only in the result but in the act of production-- within the
producing activity itself. How would the worker come to face the
product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very
act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product
is after all but the summary of the activity of production. If then
the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active
alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation.
In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarized
the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself.
What,
then, constitutes the alienation of labour?
First,
the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not
belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does
not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but
unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy
but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore
only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside
himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working
he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced;
it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need;
it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien
character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical
or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External
labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice,
of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the
worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else's,
that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself,
but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of
the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates
independently of the individual--that is, operates on him as an
alien, divine or diabolical activity--in the same way the worker's
activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another;
it is the loss of his self.
As
a result, therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to
be freely active in any but his animal functions--eating, drinking,
procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.;
and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything
but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes
animal.
Certainly
eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions.
But in the abstraction which separates them from the sphere of all
other human activity and turns them into sole and ultimate ends,
they are animal.
We
have considered the act of estranging practical human activity,
labour, in two of its aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to
the product of labour as an alien object exercising power over him.
This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external
world, to the objects of nature as an alien world antagonistically
opposed to him. (2) The relation of labour to the act of production
within the labour process. This relation is the relation of the
worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to
him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting
as emasculating, the worker's own physical and mental energy, his
personal life or what is life other than activity--as an activity
which is turned against him, neither depends on nor belongs to him.
Here we have self-estrangement, as we had previously the estrangement
of the thing.
We
have yet a third aspect of estranged labour to deduce from the two
already considered.
Man
is a species being, not only because in practice and in theory he
adopts the species as his object (his own as well as those of other
things), but--and this is only another way of expressing it--but
also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because
he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.
The
life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically
in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on inorganic nature;
and the more universal man is compared with an animal, the more
universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just
as plants, animals, stones, the air, light, etc., constitute a part
of human consciousness in the realm of theory, partly as objects
of natural science, partly as objects of art--his spiritual inorganic
nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make
it palatable and digestible--so too in the realm of practice they
constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man
lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the
form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, or whatever it may be.
The universality of man is in practice manifested precisely in the
universality which makes all nature his inorganic body--both inasmuch
as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material,
the object, and the instrument of his life-activity. Nature is man's
inorganic body--nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the
human body. Man lives on nature--means that nature is his body,
with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not
to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature
means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part
of nature.
In
estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active
functions, his life-activity, estranged labour estranges the species
from man. It turns for him the life of the species into a means
of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and
individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract
form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract
and estranged form.
For
in the first place labour, life-activity, productive life itself,
appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need--the need
to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the
life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character
of a species--its species character--is contained in the character
of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man's species
character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.
The
animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does
not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes
his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness.
He has conscious life-activity. It is not a determination with which
he directly merges. Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes
man from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he
is a species being. Or it is only because he is a species being
that he is a Conscious Being, i.e., that his own life is an object
for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged
labour reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man
is a conscious being that he makes his life-activity, his essential
being, a mere means to his existence.
In
creating an objective world by his practical activity, in working-up
inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being,
i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being,
or that treats itself as a species being. Admittedly animals also
produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees,
beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately
needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man
produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate
physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical
need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces
only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal's
product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely
confronts his product. An animal forms things in accordance with
the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst
man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every
species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard
to the object. Man therefore also forms things in accordance with
the laws of beauty.
It
is just in the working-up of the objective world, therefore, that
man first really proves himself to be a species being. This production
is his active species life. Through and because of this production,
nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour
is, therefore, the objectification of man's species life: for he
duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually
but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself
in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object
of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his
species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage
over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature,
is taken from him.
Similarly,
in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged
labour makes man's species life a means to his physical existence.
The
consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by
estrangement in such a way that the species life becomes for him
a means.
Estranged
labour turns thus:
(3)
Man's species being, both nature and his spiritual species property,
into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence.
It estranges man's own body from him, as it does external nature
and his spiritual essence, his human being.
(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from
the product of his labour, from his life-activity, from his species
being is the estrangement of man from man. If a man is confronted
by himself, he is confronted by the other man. What applies to a
man's relation to his work, to the product of his labour and to
himself, also holds of a man's relation to the other man, and to
the other man's labour and object of labour.
In
fact, the proposition that man's species nature is estranged from
him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them
is from man's essential nature. [14]
The
estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man
stands to himself, is first realized and expressed in the relationship
in which a man stands to other men.
Hence
within the relationship of estranged labour each man views the other
in accordance with the standard and the position in which he finds
himself as a worker.
We took our departure from a fact of political economy--the estrangement
of the worker and his production. We have formulated the concept
of this fact--estranged, alienated labour. We have analysed this
concept--hence analysing merely a fact of political economy.
Let
us now see, further, how in real life the concept of estranged,
alienated labour must express and present itself.
If
the product of labour is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien
power, to whom, then, does it belong?
If
my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien, a coerced
activity, to whom, then, does it belong?
To
a being other than me.
Who
is this being?
The
gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production
(for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and
Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product
belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the
lords of labour. No more was nature. And what a contradiction it
would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labour and the
more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles
of industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production
and the enjoyment of the produce in favour of these powers.
The
alien being, to whom labour and the produce of labour belongs, in
whose service labour is done and for whose benefit the produce of
labour is provided, can only be man himself.
If
the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts
him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to some
other man than the worker. If the worker's activity is a torment
to him, to another it must be delight and his life's joy. Not the
gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over
man.
We
must bear in mind the above-stated proposition that man's relation
to himself only becomes objective and real for him through his relation
to the other man. Thus, if the product of his labour, his labour
objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent
of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is
master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful,
and independent of him. If his own activity is to him an unfree
activity, then he is treating it as activity performed in the service,
under the dominion, the coercion and the yoke of another man.
Every
self-estrangement of man from himself and from nature appears in
the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other
than and differentiated from himself. For this reason religious
self-estrangement necessarily appears in the relationship of the
layman to the priest, or again to a mediator, etc., since we are
here dealing with the intellectual world. In the real practical
world self-estrangement can only become manifest through the real
practical relationship to other men. The medium through which estrangement
takes place is itself practical. Thus through estranged labour man
not only engenders his relationship to the object and to the act
of production as to powers that are alien and hostile to him; he
also engenders the relationship in which other men stand to his
production and to his product, and the relationship in which he
stands to these other men. Just as he begets his own production
as the loss of his reality, as his punishment; just as he begets
his own product as a loss, as a product not belonging to him; so
he begets the dominion of the one who does not produce over production
and over the product. Just as he estranges from himself his own
activity, so he confers to the stranger activity which is not his
own.
Till
now we have only considered this relationship from the standpoint
of the worker and later we shall be considering it also from the
standpoint of the non-worker.
Through
estranged, alienated labour, then, the worker produces the relationship
to this labour of a man alien to labour and standing outside it.
The relationship of the worker to labour engenders the relation
to it of the capitalist, or whatever one chooses to call the master
of labour. Private property is thus the product, the result, the
necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation
of the worker to nature and to himself.
Private
property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated
labour--i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged
life, of estranged man.
True,
it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have
obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) from
political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear
that though private property appears to be the source, the cause
of alienated labour, it is really its consequence, just as the gods
in the beginning are not the cause but the effect of man's intellectual
confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.
Only
at the very culmination of the development of private property does
this, its secret, re-emerge, namely, that on the one hand it is
the product of alienated labour, and that secondly it is the means
by which labour alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.
This
exposition immediately sheds light on various hitherto unsolved
conflicts.
(1)
Political economy starts from labour as the real soul of production;
yet to labour it gives nothing, and to private property everything.
From this contradiction Proudhon has concluded in favour of labour
and against private property. We understand, however, that this
apparent contradiction is the contradiction of estranged labour
with itself, and that political economy has merely formulated the
laws of estranged labour.
We
also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are
identical: where the product, the object of labour pays for labour
itself, the wage is but a necessary consequence of labour's estrangement,
for after all in the wage of labour, labour does not appear as an
end in itself but as the servant of the wage. We shall develop this
point later, and meanwhile will only deduce some conclusions.
A
forcing-up of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including
the fact that it would only be by force, too, that the higher wages,
being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing
but better payment for the slave, and would not conquer either for
the worker or for labour their human status and dignity. Indeed,
even the equality of wages demanded by Proudhon only transforms
the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour into the
relationship of all men to labour. Society is then conceived as
an abstract capitalist.
Wages
are a direct consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour
is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one
aspect must therefore mean the downfall of the other.
(2)
From the relationship of estranged labour to private property it
further follows that the emancipation of society from private property,
etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the
emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone was
at stake but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal
human emancipation--and it contains this, because the whole of human
servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production,
and every relation of servitude is but a modification and consequence
of this relation.
Just
as we have found the concept of private property from the concept
of estranged, alienated labour by analysis, in the same way every
category of political economy can be evolved with the help of these
two factors; and we shall find again in each category, e.g., trade,
competition, capital, money, only a definite and developed expression
of the first foundations.
Before
considering this configuration, however, let us try to solve two
problems.
(1)
To define the general nature of private property, as it has arisen
as a result of estranged labour, in its relation to truly human,
social property.
(2)
We have accepted the estrangement of labour, its alienation as a
fact, and we have analysed this fact. How, we now ask, does man
come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How is this estrangement
rooted in the nature of human development? We have already gone
a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the question
as to the origin of private property into the question as to the
relation of alienated labour to the course of humanity's development.
For when one speaks of private property one thinks of being concerned
with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is
directly concerned with man himself. This new formulation of the
question already contains its solution .
As
to (1): The general nature of private property and its relation
to truly human property.
Alienated
labour has resolved itself for us into two elements which mutually
condition one another, or which are but different expressions of
one and the same relationship. Appropriation appears as estrangement,
as alienation; and alienation appears as appropriation, estrangement
as true enfranchisement.
We
have considered the one side--alienated labour in relation to the
worker himself, i.e., the relation of alienated labour to itself.
The property-relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labour
we have found as the product, the necessary outcome of this relation
of alienated labour. Private property, as the material, summary
expression of alienated labour, embraces both relations--the relation
of the worker to work, to the product of his labour and to the non-worker,
and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product
of his labour.
Having seen that in relation to the worker who appropriates nature
by means of his labour, this appropriation appears as estrangement,
his own spontaneous activity as activity for another and as activity
of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, production of the object
as loss of the object to an alien power, to an alien person--we
shall now consider the relation to the worker, to labour and its
object of this person who is alien to labour and the worker.
First
it has to be noticed, that everything which appears in the worker
as an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears in the non-worker
as a state of alienation, of estrangement.
Secondly,
that the worker's real, practical attitude in production and to
the product (as a state of mind) appears in the non-worker confronting
him as a theoretical attitude.
Thirdly,
the non-worker does everything against the worker which the worker
does against himself; but he does not do against himself what he
does against the worker.Let
us look more closely at these three relations. [15]
END NOTES
1. Particularly.
2.
Marx refers here to the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, who had published
in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung two long reviews dealing with books,
articles and pamphlets on the Jewish question. Most of the quoted
phrases are taken from these reviews in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,
vol. 1, December, 1843; vol. 4, March, 1844. The expressions "utopian
phrase" and "compact mass" can be found in Bauer's
article "Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?" published
in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, vol. 8, July, 1844.
Allgemeine
Literatur-Zeitung (General Literary Gazette), a German monthly,
was published by Bauer in Charlottenburg from December, 1843, to
October, 1844.
3.
Passages enclosed in brackets were crossed out by Marx in his manuscript.
4.
The full title of this collection of articles is Einundzwanzig Bogen
aus der Schweiz (Twenty-One Sheets from Switzerland), Erster Teil,
Zurich and Winterthur, 1843.
5.
Engels' "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy."
6.
Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsatze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles
of the Philosophy of the Future), Zurich and Winterthur, 1843.
7.
Ludwig Feuerbach, Vorlaufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie
(Preliminary Theses on the Reformatlon of Philosophy) published
in Anekdota, vol. II.
8.
Marx's abbreviation for Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie
und Publicistik (Unpublished Materials Related to Modern German
Philosophy and Writing), a two-volume collection published by Arnold
Ruge in Switzerland. It included Marx's Notes on the Latest Prussian
Instruction to Censors and Luther--the Arbiter Between Strauss and
Feuerbach, and articles by Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich
Koppen, Arnold Ruge, etc.
9.
Marx has in mind Bauer and his followers, who were associated with
the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung.
10.
"Moment" is a technical term in Hegelian philosophy meaning
a vital element of thought. The term is used to stress that thought
is a process, and thus that elements in a system of thought are
also phases in a movement.
11.
In Hegel, "feeling" (Empfindung) denotes a relatively
low form of mental life in which the subjective and the objective
are still confused together.
"
Consciousness" (Bewusstein)--the name given by Hegel to the
first major section of his Phenomenology of Mind--denotes those
forms of mental activity where a subject first seeks to comprehend
an object. "Self-consciousness" and "mind" denote
subsequent higher phases in the evolution of "absolute knowledge"
or "the absolute."
12.
Die Entfremdete Arbeit. See the Note on Texts and Terminology, p.
xli, above, for a discussion of this term. [R. T.]
13.
"Alienation"--Entausserung.
14.
"Species nature" (and, earlier, "species being")--Gattungswesen:
"man's essential nature"-- menschlichen Wesen.
15.
At this point the first manuscript breaks off unfinished.
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