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KARL MARXThe essay should be at least 4 pages and must be no more than 5 pages in length (not including title page and reference page). All essays longer than 5 pages will be penalized half a grade point (if you write an essay that receives a B- and is over 5 pages, it will receive a C+). There is no official penalty for going under4 pages, except such essays inevitably get a much lower grade in that the more you say that shows mastery of the material the better.Include:
- Introduction (include an exposition in intorduction)
- Body Paragraphs
- Conclusion
1. Critically evaluate the Alientation aspect of Karl Marx’s theory. Take a position on some aspect of his theory, offer arguments to defend your position, entertain objections, and reply.Use the attached PDF document to make reference too in the paper.
University of Utah
Western Political Science Association
A Reassessment of Alienation in Karl Marx
Author(s): C. E. Grimes and Charles E. P. Simmons
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jun., 1970), pp. 266-275
Published by: University of Utah on behalf of the Western Political Science Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/447071
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A REASSESSMENT OF ALIENATION IN KARL MARX
C. E. GRIMES, University of Idaho
and
CHARLES E. P. SIMMONS, Bradley University
HE TWO CATEGORIES of usage of alienation in contemporary writing
appear, according to Bell, to be associated with the ideas of “estrangement”
and “reification.” Fundamentally, “estrangement” in the current writing is
seen as a socio-psychological condition in which the individual has a feeling of dis-
tance or separateness from community and society. He is or feels, Bell says, that
he “.. . cannot belong. He is deracinated.” 1 The other category, “reification,” is
philosophical in nature but has psychological overtones. For Bell this terms implies
that the individual is treated as an object or thing and has, therefore, lost his
identity – he is depersonalized.2
One need not go far in contemporary social, literary, and political discourse
to find numerous examples of writing which would fall into Bell’s two categories or,
at least, cut across them. In an excellent collection of excerpts from writing in this
vein, the Josephsons provide a useful compilation of comment. One finds E.
Fromm discussing complete alienation as insanity and proposing that man is help-
less before the social forces he creates; P. Lasslett laments the loss of the family as a
defense against loneliness; H. Swados describes the conditions of modern factory
with the workers appearing as trapped animals; R. Maclver finds the leisure of
modern industrial society being misused – men do not have the cultivation and
skill to enjoy leisure; Ernest van den Haag finds man so unhappy with himself that
he must find an image to imitate in order to live with himself; C. W. Mills finds the
conditions of mass society giving rise to lack of expression by individuals – fewer
people expressing opinions than receiving them –and correspondingly fewer
opportunities for meaningful activities.3
Also, in the art forms one finds expression of alienation, particularly that
aspect which suggests that man is separated from his intimates; this seems to be
one of the main themes in what has come to be called the “theater of the absurd.”
Such expression is research of Sociology, Social Psychology, and Political Science.
THE REACTION – MARX AND ALIENATION
A negative reaction to contemporary uses of alienation has come from some
writers who see a generally implicit, but often explicit, reinterpretation of Marx
-a reinterpretation of Marx as an ethical writer whose main prescriptions for
society were founded on a kind of humanism found currently acceptable; a reinter-
pretation which sees Marx’s moral theory as based upon his concept of alienation
of man. Alienation as a conceptual legacy of Marx is derived from some of his
early unpublished writings which have subsequently been published and received
1 Daniel Bell, “The ‘Rediscovery’ of Alienation: Some Notes Along the Quest for the His-
torical Marx,” Journal of Philosophy (November 1959), p. 933n.
2 Ibid.
SEric and Mary Josephson (eds.), Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society (New York:
Dell, 1962).
266
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A REASSESSMENT OF ALIENATION IN KARL MARX 267
wide interest and even acclaim. Some of the writers stressing Marx’s early position
maintain that the theme of alienation, if not central to later Marxist writing, is, at
least, clearly in evidence there and perhaps basic to his sociology and his prescrip-
tions for the good world.
Those opposing this view stress the absence of the alienation theme in Marx’s
later writings and lament the attempt to show precise continuity between the early
and later work. Thus, one finds Sidney Hook opposed to what he calls recent
attempts “. . . to erect a shining image of Marx on the basis of his earliest
unpublished writings, to find not only glints but a new golden vein of ethical
thought in them.”4 And, in an obvious reference to E. Fromm, who is one of the
foremost exponents of the continuous theme of alienation in Marx’s writing, Hook
again explains: “The Marx of the mature years is being made over to fit a model
of a man and thinker approved by some fashionable schools of psychotherapy.” 5
Hook’s position seems to be that while there is some continuity between the early
and later writings of Marx, there is considerably more discontinuity. Another
writer sees the early use of the term “alienation” as a legacy of Marx and Engels’
association with the first circle of the Young Hegelians and Feuerbachians; an
association which they severed after coming to a consciousness of the struggle of the
working man. Thus, Lewis Feuer writes: “As Marx and Engels drew closer to the
realities of working class life and social struggle, they became disenchanted with the
friends of their first circle…. Their erstwhile philosophical associates seemed to
them to make their preoccupation with “alienation” the basis for ridiculous gestures
against society–an adolescent sowing of philosophical wild oats.”6 This, then,
represents in brief outline what has become something of a controversy in the treat-
ment of the theme of alienation by Marx and its treatment by later writers who
attribute to Marx’s writings a distinct ethical coloration deriving from his views on
the alienation of man in industrial society. It will now be useful to see how Marx
used the term and how he came to it as a concept.
MARX’S USE OF THE TERM “ALIENATION”
The origin of Entfremdung, estrangement, or “self-alienation” was religious
in nature and later became metaphysical. Feuer points out that Calvin saw man
as alienated from God due to man’s original sin.7 Hook sees the origin of the idea
in the Hebraic-Christian tradition as the “existential predicament” of man in his
fall from Divine Grace. Moreover, Hook says that in the Greek philosophical tra-
dition one finds the idea of a fall from Ideal Perfection or the One: “The human
soul is alienated from God; salvation is the process by which the self-alienation is
overcome.”8 Hook points out that in Plotinus, the concept derives from the myth
of the soul descending into the world of matter because of its Narcissism, and then
* Sidney Hook, in his new introduction to From Hegel to Marx (Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan
Press, 1962), pp. 3-4.
SIbid.
* Lewis Feuer, “What is Alienation? The Career of a Concept,” New Politics (Spring 1962),
p. 123.
Ibid., p. 117.
SHook, op. cit., p. 5.
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268 THE WESTERN POLITICAL QUARTERLY
returning to eternal totality.9 In Hegel the term is used at one point in regard to
the process of work but, according to Hook, “… the root notion (in Hegel) is still
religious.”‘0 For Hegel, the process of self-alienation is a progression toward ful-
fillment with the Absolute.11
In Marx there are two meanings of alienation expressed by use of the two
German words Entausserung and Entfremdung, neither of which expresses exactly
the meaning which has come to attend contemporary usage in the alienation litera-
ture. According to Daniel Bell the word Entausserung “.. . implies the ‘externali-
zation’ of aspects of ones self, with the overtone that such externalization comes
through the sale (in a legal-commercial sense) of one’s labor. The product that
one sells remains as an object, independent of one’s self, but one with which there
is the two-fold sense of identification and loss.”12 The other word, Entfremdung,
is more psychological in nature and is concerned with the separateness of self. Bell
describes its meaning as implying “… simple estrangement, or the detaching of
one’s self from another, of divorce. (Feuerbach’s usage, while emphasizing the fact
that in religion one externalizes part of one’s self, tended to emphasize the sense of
estrangement.) “13
The question of Marx’s use of the term turns on the meaning of the concept
in the early unpublished writings and its appearance and meaning in Marx’s later
writings. In the early writings Marx uses the two senses of alienation outlined by
Bell; they appear in explicit form in a section of the first of the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts entitled, “Alienated Labour.” The two senses appear-
ing in this early writing include the idea of reification of labor in product and idea
of the self-alienation of the laborer as a man:
We have now considered the act of alienation of practical human activity, labour, from two
aspects: (1) the relationship of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object which
dominates him. The relationship is objects, as an alien and hostile world; (2) the relation-
ship of labour to the act of production within labour. This is the relationship of the worker
to his own activity as something alien and not belonging to him, activity as suffering (pass-
ivity), strength as powerlessness, creation as emasculation, the personal physical and mental
energy of the worker, his personal life (for what is life but activity?), as an activity which
is directed against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him. This is self-aliena-
tion as against the above-mentioned alienation of the thing.”‘
In contrast with this early view of self-alienation, the use of the term in the
later work shows significant differences. In the sections entitled “The Fetishism of
Commodities and the Secret Thereof” and in “Money, or the Circulation of Com-
modities” in Volume I of Capital, Marx seems to express his view of alienation as
alienation of the individual’s private labor from himself by means of a capitalist
1 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
* Bell, op. cit., pp. 933-34.
‘a Ibid.
‘4Karl Marx in Bottomore (ed. and trans.), Karl Marx Early Writings, (London: C. A.
Watts & Co., 1963), pp. 125-26. Also, see the manuscript entitled “Private Property
and Communism,” wherein Marx says that communism is the abolition of human self-
alienation, in Bottomore, pp. 155-57, and “Bruno Bauer, ‘Die Judenfrage,’ in Botto-
more, p. 31.
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A REASSESSMENT OF ALIENATION IN KARL MARX 269
exchange system involving exchange value rather than the true value of human
labor.’5 Man cannot see the reasonable and intelligible relations with his fellows
and nature because the productive process renders him impotent – the productive
process has “.. . mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him… .” Because
man does not understand his relation to production, he views the object of his labor
as a “.. . mere commodity, a depository of value, he alienates in exchange for
gold….”,16 In these sections of Capital the idea of alienation is not the “self-
alienation” of the early writing, but rather the idea of reification – of labor mani-
fested in the laborer’s product.
Thus it seems that there is a distinct difference between the early and later
employment of the term in Marx. It is notable that the statement of the two types
of alienation by Marx in the section on “Alienated labor” was followed immedi-
ately by a third characteristic of alienation – alienation of man “from the species
life of the universal and free being that is man.” This statement, Bottomore notes,
is a reproduction of Feuerbach’s argument in Das Wesen des Christentums.’7 It is
in this regard that Hook argues that the notion of alienation expressed in the early
writings was accompanied by Hegelian, Feuerbachian, and Young Hegelian ideas
which Marx later repudiated. The notion of a generic ideal of “man” explicit in
Feuerbach and attributed to Marx raises the question of “what kind of man” is to
be the standard.
ALIENATED FROM WHAT?
If man is alienated from himself – self-alienated – what is the standard of
man qua man from which he is alienated? If one views man as separated from
himself, if his “nature” as Hook puts it, is alienated, then one must assume some
agreed upon ideal or prescription of man’s nature which is different from possible
other examples of his nature. Or, one must assume that there, in fact, exists some
ideal norm which is identical with, “… the natural essence of man, and from
which the forms of human behavior dubbed al;enated are aberrant.”‘8
One can ask where one finds in Marx the standard of man from which man
has become alienated. It can be argued that in the Marxist conception it is history
and the forces of production which determine the nature of man. And, if man acts
upon history and nature, within the limits of nature, his nature is neither fixed nor
static. Hook goes to this point when he remarks: “In the end the view that man
makes himself or creates his own nature even in part renders untenable most
notions of human self-alienation.”‘ 9 In his famous discussion in “A Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy” Marx’s description of how he arrived at the
materialist conception of history and the role of productive forces in shaping man
‘ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Translated from the Third German edition by Samuel Moore
and Edward Aveling, and edited by F. Engels (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing
House, 1959), p. 79.
16 Ibid., p. 105.
7 Bottomore, op. cit., p. 126n.
Hook, op. cit., p. 6.
1 Ibid., p. 7.
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270 THE WESTERN POLITICAL QUARTERLY
and the role of man in producing change seems to be in opposition to a fixed stan-
dard of man from which man could become self-alienated.2″
Nonetheless, there remains the fact that at one point in his intellectual career
Marx did use the concept of self-alienation and, in what have been called the “neo-
revisionist” interpretations of Marx, the idea of self-alienation contained in the
early writings is thought to pervade all Marx’s writing. Opposed to this view is the
argument that the early stage of Marx’s thought was fraught with terminology
inherited from Hegel, Feuerbach, and the romantic socialist with whom Marx asso-
ciated early and later rejected.21 What, then, is the significance of this concept for
an appraisal of Marx? In this regard Feuer says,
… the fact of matter is that “alienation” as first used by Marx, Engels, and their fellow
young Hegelians and Feuerbachians was a romantic concept, with a preponderantly sexual
connotation. It was the language of a group which made a protest of romantic individualism
against the new capitalist civilization, but which soon went on to its post-adolescent peace
with bourgeois society. Marx and Engels discarded a concept which became alien to their
own aims.’
This movement away from their early associates and away from the philosophic
legacy of Feuerbach and Hegel to a concern with social realities, it is argued, is
amply demonstrated in Marx and Engel’s abundant criticism. Hook points out
that Marx regarded Hegel as a theologian and “… the entire Hegelian philosophy
as a transliteration into obscure prose of the underlying ideas of Western Christian-
ity and therefore shot through, despite itself and the dialectical method, with
dualism.”23 Moreover, while infected with the terminology of Hegel in their early
writings, there is reason to believe that Marx and, assuredly, Engels thought the
early terminology excessive and probably absurd.24 Additionally, good evidence is
presented by Hook that the repudiation of some of their early colleagues conduces
to dispell the view that their early ethical concepts had persistence over time. The
romanticism which enjoyed great vogue among the Young Hegelians, following the
publication of Feuerbach’s work was later expressly repudiated by Engels: Ludwig
Feuerbach and the end of Classical German Philosophy.
Its [Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity] literary, sometimes even high-flown, style secured for
it a large public and was at any rate refreshing after long years of abstract and abstruse
Hegelianizing. The same is true of its extravagant deification of love, which, coming after
the now sovereign rule of “pure” reason,” had its excuse, if not justification. But what we
must not forget is that it was precisely these two weaknesses of Feuerback that “true social-
ism,” which had been spreading like a plague in “educated” Germany since 1844, took as its
starting point, putting literary phrases in place of scientific knowledge, the liberation of
mankind by means of “love” in place of the emancipation of the proletariat through the
economic transformation of production – in short, losing itself in the nauseous fine writing
and ecstacies of love typified by Herr Karl Grun.”
” In Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, (Garden
City: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 43-44.
”
Feuer, “. . . The Career of a Concept,” pp. 116-18.
SIbid., p. 118. 2
Hook, op. cit., p. 5.
‘
Feuer, “. . . The Career of a Concept,” p. 125.
‘Friedrich Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” in
Feuer, Basic Writings… , p. 205.
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A REASSESSMENT OF ALIENATION IN KARL MARX 271
Additionally, there were other ideas of man held by the early circle which were
bound up in this romantic trend. Hook points to Marx’s criticism of Stirner in
this regard. Stirner, for Marx, had exploded the idealism of German philosophy –
of the “ghostly dualists” but their own method. What Stirner had done, according
to Marx, was to replace the abstractions of “God” and “Man” with the abstrac-
tions of the “ego.” What, Marx asks, is the self if not an abstraction from social
relationships. Such an abstraction should be avoided as being in the same class
as the unsound and “fantasy” abstractions of God and the Absolute.” Man will
not come out of his alienation of self because there is no ultimate self, rather, differ-
ent social systems will give rise to different personalities.27
It is in this vein of criticism that the significant blow to the early concept of
alienation was levied by Marx and Engels. The blow was dealt in the Communist
Manifesto where the more or less psychological concept of alienation as the condi-
tion of man was repudiated (along with those writers continuing to use it), as a
romantic blanket obscuring the vital and real interests of the proletariat. It is here
that Marx and Engels describe the annexation by German writers including the
“true socialists” of French historical criticism and their attempt to describe the
conditions of man by abstractions devoid of social reality: “They wrote their philo-
sophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French
criticism of the economic functions of money they wrote Alienation of Human-
ity.” 28 Thus the ideas of their former colleagues were seen as touching “… not the
interests of the proletariat, but the interests of human nature, of man in general,
who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philo-
sophical fantasy.”” Whatever its affinity with the early writing of Marx and
Engels themselves, this “philosophical nonsense” seems to be effectively shunted
into the oblivion of intellectual ruminations of an earlier period.
THE “NEO-REVISIONISTS” AND SELF-ALIENATION
There are contemporary writers who see a conception of self-alienated man
originating in the early manuscripts and persisting throughout Marx’s writing. For
these later writers this conception includes the possibility of man’s self-alienation
from some standard or ideal of man and, moreover, that within this conception are
specifically moral and ethical postulates based upon a more or less psychological
picture of man as self-alienated. Of this new school of interpretation of Marx,
two writers, Tucker and Fromm, will be examined as examples.
For Tucker, Marx’s concept of man includes the idea that man has been in
universal alienation from himself. Tucker admits “… that Marx does not make his
position on this cordial question fully explicit.”30 Not daunted by the absence of a
clear statement by Marx, Tucker goes on to make a full statement of Marx’s posi-
tion. This is necessary for Tucker for he sees Marx as an ethical, in fact religious,
” Hook, op. cit., p. 176.
w Ibid., p. 176.
* Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Feuer, Basic
Writings…, p. 33.
SIbid., p. 177.
3 Robert Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge U. Press, 1961), p. 135.
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272 THE WESTERN POLITICAL QUARTERLY
thinker whose goal is bringing man to himself via a religious doctrine of revolu-
tion.3′ Despite the repeated repudiations by Marx and Engels of the idea of an
abstract category of man or “love” as a point of departure for social analysis,
Tucker says that there was a transition in the conception of self-alienation from a
psychological construct to sociological conception of alienation as a social relation
of man to man. Tucker’s argument here is that the original idea of alienation in
Marx persisted in different form to the later writings:
The transition to the seemingly “dehumanized” mature Marxism actually occurred at that
point in the manuscripts of 1844 where Marx decided, uncertainly but irrevocably, that
man’s self-alienation could and should be grasped as a social relation “of man to man.”
Only man himself can be this alien power over man, he said, but this relation of man to him-
self takes practical shape as a relation between the alienated worker and “another man out-
side him,” i.e. the capitalist. In this way the inner conflict of alienated man with himself
became in Marx’s mind, a social conflict between “labor” and capital,” and the alienated
species-self became the class-divided society. Self-alienation was projected as a social phe-
nomenon, and Marx’s psychological original system turned into his apparently sociological
mature one.32
Later Tucker writes: “What Marx sees in society, then, is a self-system in conflict,
a split self writ large.”33
At this point it is fair to ask: What, then, is the “split self writ large” split
from? From what standard is the system alienated, i.e., what kind of social norm
must prevail for the reintegration of man or society – what is unalienation? Pre-
sumably this is the future state of communism. Communism as the future state of
society is a term devoid of substantive content, however, and thus Tucker attempts
to supply us with the standard which Marx allegedly saw as the state of unaliena-
tion – communism: “What will remain is life of art and science in a special and
vastly enlarged sense of these two terms. Marx’s conception of ultimate commun-
ism is fundamentally aesthetic in character.””34 Tucker takes the position that for
Marx man has always been alienated and that communism is thus the overcoming
of alienation. Such a view must meet the criticism of Marx and Engels in the
Communist Manifesto of the Alienated Humanity of the “true socialists” as well
as the expressly rejected notion of man in general or, man as an abstraction or
abstract category severed from the productive forces which form his personality.35
For Erich Fromm, Marx is interested in human needs – not as needs con-
trived for purposes of profit in the market place, but essentially human needs.
Fromm admits, conveniently for his argument, that Marx saw the worker as the
most alienated class. Fromm, however, says that Marx has been “corrected” by
history. The people who manipulate symbols and machines are, in this century, the
“3Robert Tucker, “The Marxian Revolutionary Idea,” unpublished paper presented at the
annual meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, New York
City, September 1963, pp. 37-38.
32 Tucker, Philosophy and Myth …, p. 175.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., pp. 157-58, Tucker’s emphasis.
5 It can be argued that the decline of the early notion of self-alienation as central to Marx
began in 1843 and not, as Tucker claims, in 1844. In the 1843 manuscript. “Bruno
Bauer, ‘Die Judedfrage,’ ” Marx is already talking of the social relationship of “man
to man” in his discussion of the abolition of private property and the political state.
Bottomore, op. cit., pps. 28 and 31.
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A REASSESSMENT OF ALIENATION IN KARL MARX 273
most alienated: 36 “If anything, the clerk, the salesman, the executive, are even
more alienated today than the skilled manual worker.” What does Fromm see as
the standard from which man is alienated? What is the ideal from which man is
separated – what is the self from which man’s behavior is abberrent? There
appear to be two elements in Fromm’s writing which go to this point. First, he
takes the view that work is unsatisfactory for man – the nature of present-day
occupations is unrewarding or unfulfilling. This seems at first glance a restatement
of what Marx was saying. However, in Fromm it is not the idea of reification of
man’s labor in the product which is the sense of Marx’s use of Entausserung, rather
from Fromm, the idea is the absence of creativity in work. Here one finds a dis-
tortion of Marx’s meaning by a kind of artistic humanism in Fromm.
The second sense in which Fromm deals with the concept of self-alienation is
in terms of Fromm’s own prescription for the sane society – love. The true self,
for Fromm, is the capacity for spontaneous love – a capacity absent in modern
man, and hence, the alienation of man from self. Marx, according to Fromm, pur-
sues this theme and Fromm goes to the early manuscripts for Marx’s support. In
both his, Marx’s Concept of Man and in The Art of Loving Fromm cites Marx’s
short unpublished manuscript on “Money”37 where, Fromm says, Marx expresses
“beautifully” the idea of love as the answer to alienation. It can be effectively
argued that the short piece on money is not concerned with love but with money
as “… a disruptive power for the individual and for the social bonds, which claim
to be self-subsistent entitles.”3 Marx is merely saying that money is an exchange
function under capitalism forces the “fraternization of incompatibles” and he uses
the idea of love being exchanged for love as an illustration of exchange among
compatibles without the intercession of money.39 If Fromm was interested in
making a stronger case he could have gone to some of the writing dealing expressly
with love during the romantic period of Marx and Engels.40 However, which one
of the early sources Fromm uses is of little importance if Marx and Engels broke
with the early romantic period and repudiated their former colleagues and the
theme of love.41 Engels’ remarks on the love theme in the piece on Feuerbach
make clear the break with this past (quoted earlier in this paper). And, the criti-
cism of their early associates may be, in part, criticism of themselves. Hook points
out that one of Marx’s biographers, Riazanov, has suggested: “Up to a point the
severe criticism of German or “true” socialism contained in the manifesto is self-
criticism.. . of Marx’s own philosophical development.”42
Both Fromm and Tucker view Marx’s later work as essentially based on the
early idea of the alienation of man. Thus, they are at pains to show the theme’s
persistence while recognizing that in the “mature” Marx the idea of self-alienation
is not apparent. This leads them to discuss Marx’s ultimate view of society as con-
Erick Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Ungar, 1961), p. 57.
3 Bottomore, op. cit., pp. 189-94.
38 Ibid., p. 193.
39 Ibid.
40 Feuer, “… The Career of a Concept,” pp. 119-20.
41 Ibid., p. 120.
42 Hook, op. cit., p. 188n.
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274 THE WESTERN POLITICAL QUARTERLY
sistent with the underlying theme of alienation running through this thought from
the early unpublished manuscripts to Capital and the consequent prescriptions for
a communist society. Since this conception of the future world is, at best, vague in
Marx, it forces these writers to take liberties with the available evidence. It is
fairly explicit break with the socialist romantics which appears to weaken the
argument of Fromm and Tucker. Other factors tend to weaken the argument as
well; particularly the absence of references to alienation in the later work of Marx
and Engels except as related to reification of labor in product and expropriation
of the product from the laborer in the capitalist exchange function. And, even
in the early writing, it is not always clear just what kind of alienation Marx is
speaking of – alienation of the worker’s product or separation of self.43 Addition-
ally, it would appear that both Fromm and Tucker would have come to grips in a
more explicit way than they do with the derogatory reference to Alienation of
Humanity in the Manifesto.
It could be that Marx’s revolutionary prescriptions for ridding the worker of
the pain of being exploited – of the worker’s labor being expropriated or alienated
from him by the capitalist system – was in a sense merely the idea of destroying
the influences of society in the Rousseauian sense.44
CONCLUSION
It would be erroneous to contend that the writing of Hegel and Feuerbach,
the associations with Moses Hess and the Young Hegelians and Feuerbachians were
without affect upon Marx and Engels. Clearly the early use of the term alienation
was drawn from Hegel and from Feuerbach’s concern with the discovery of self.45
But, the statements of Marx and Engels on their early work and the direction of
their later interest, research, writing, and political activity is clearly away from their
early concerns. Feuer makes a strong case for the interest Marx took in the work-
ing men’s clubs and of Engel’s statement that he became aware of the conditions
of work and workers in the factories of Manchester as the starting point of their
sociology.
There are scholars who maintain that Marx and Engels came to their socialist standpoint and
materialistic conception of history through a study of Hegelian and Feuerbachian texts. The
truth is rather that they imbibed a certain terminology from the philosophers, but the impell-
ing force was their own sensitivity to social movements and their own deep sympathies for
the working man.””
It must be remembered that it is the proletariat who will develop the revolutionary
consciousness and this means that the effects of different economic conditions pro-
duce different kinds of men; different types of personalities. There is no single self
from which one might be alienated in the conceptual framework of Capital. It is
not human alienation which is to be eliminated, rather it is the productive relations
attending private property in its highest form – capitalism.
43 Bottomore, op. cit., p. xix.
44 John Plamenatz, Man and Society (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), II, 376-78.
4 Bottomore, op. cit., “Introduction.”
46 Feuer, “… The Career of a Concept,” p. 123.
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A REASSESSMENT OF ALIENATION IN KARL MARX 275
The literary and socio-psychological writing on the alienation theme may seek
its origin in the early Marx and may even attempt to show the persistence of the
theme in Marx’s sociology but, the popularity of the concept should not obscure or
disorient the study of Marx. Alienation has become part of the intellectual baggage
of today and, not without reason. To attempt to contribute to the dialogue over
alienation in Marx is not to disavow or degrade the reasons for the tenacity of the
concept in our time. Several reasons have been advanced for the appeal of the con-
cept to modern intellectuals; most of them have to do with the intellectual’s per-
ception of himself as devoid of role, of being denied on the one hand by the labor
movement and on the other of being disenchanted with the results of the one great
distorted experiment with Marxist socialism. While this is true in part, there are
other factors as well. One might be the impact of Freudian pessimism on the mod-
ern intellectual. Another might be the thrust of what is sometimes called “modern
philosophy,” the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and its branches, including
linguistic analysis. The idea of being sense-imprisoned and unable to know or even
to express ideas in a meaningful fashion, if accepted, could have influenced the
intellectual’s concern with his role and led to possible dispair and its projection
onto the rest of the society. Clearly, the research into the sociology of work which
was surely influenced by Marx has led to a body of literature in at least one vein of
the theme of alienation. The position of man in an industrial society, his work and
his leisure, remains a source of great concern for contemporary society. If man is
to feel his life is worthwhile, that part of his life spent in securing a livelihood
becomes of critical importance. It is this issue which probably induced Daniel Bell
to write of Marx: “… that in the young Marx there was a double vision of the
nature of alienation… Marxist thought developed along one narrow road of eco-
nomic conceptions of property and exploitation, while the other road, which might
have led to new humanistic concepts of work and labor, was left unexplored.”‘
It may be that the interest generated by the young Marx will continue to supply
motivation for search and imaginative thinking in exploring the nature of work
and its effects on the individual.
The essential dualism in the early writing of Marx may provide less insight
into the nature of the problems of political and social man than the more impor-
tant methodological aspects of his sociology. His sociology, however unpleasant in
its prescription, remains his profound contribution to knowledge and to leven it
with his early dualism is mistaken. On the other hand it may be that the legacy
of Hegel and Feuerbach turned to a comment on social man in the early writing
of Marx may make alienation a useful term for analyzing society. The results are
not yet in.
‘ Bell, op. cit., p. 251.
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- Article Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
p. 266
p. 267
p. 268
p. 269
p. 270
p. 271
p. 272
p. 273
p. 274
p. 275
The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jun., 1970), pp. 231+235-440
Front Matter [pp. 231-231]
Political Questions about Social Indicators [pp. 235-255]
Prologue to the Study of Justice: Republic 327a-328b [pp. 256-265]
A Reassessment of Alienation in Karl Marx [pp. 266-275]
The Division of Germany and American Policy on Reparations [pp. 276-293]
Urban Renewal: A Comparative Study of Twenty-Two Cities, 1950-1960 [pp. 294-304]
The Group Life of a State Delegation in the House of Representatives [pp. 305-320]
State Party Chairmen: A Profile [pp. 321-332]
The Role of British Backbenchers in the Modification of Government Policy [pp. 333-347]
Recent Trends in Canadian Politics [pp. 348-363]
Political Change in the Chilean Electorate 1952-1964 [pp. 364-383]
A Case for Essential Abandonment of Basic U. S. Cold War Objectives [pp. 384-411]
Book Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 412]
Review: untitled [pp. 413]
Review: untitled [pp. 413-414]
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Review: untitled [pp. 422-423]
Review: untitled [pp. 423-425]
Review: untitled [pp. 425-426]
Review: untitled [pp. 426]
Review: untitled [pp. 427-428]
Review: untitled [pp. 428-429]
Review: untitled [pp. 429-430]
Review: untitled [pp. 430-431]
Review: untitled [pp. 431-432]
Review: untitled [pp. 432-433]
Review: untitled [pp. 433-434]
Review: untitled [pp. 434-435]
Review: untitled [pp. 436-437]
News and Notes [pp. 438-439]
In Memoriam: Charles McKinley, 1889-1970 [pp. 440]
