Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

intended to do a history of the Convention; 'he always wants to write on what he has read last, yet continues to read incessantly, making fresh excerpts'.117 If Marx wrote anything substantial on Hegel's politics or the Convention, it has not survived. During July and August, however, Marx had a period of peace and quiet that he put to good use. On i May their first child was born - a girl, called Jenny after her mother. The baby was very sickly and Jenny took her away to Trier for two months to show her to the family there and obtain the advice of her old doctor. While his wife and baby were away Marx made voluminous notes on classical economics, communism and Hegel. Known as the 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts' or '1844 Manuscripts', these documents (when fully published in 1932) were hailed by some as his most important single piece of work. Four of the manuscripts which were to form the basis of this critique of political economy have survived, though in an incomplete form. The first - twenty-seven pages long - consists largely of excerpts from classical economists on wages, profit and rent, followed by Marx's own reflections on alienated labour. The second is a four-page fragment on the relationship of capital to labour. The third is forty-five pages long and comprises a discussion on private property, labour and communism; a critique of Hegel's dialectic; a section on production and the division of labour; and a short section on money. The fourth manuscript, four pages long, is a summary of the final chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology.

The manuscripts as a whole were the first of a series of drafts for a major work, part of which, much revised, appeared in 1867 as Capital. In a preface sketched out for this work Marx explained why he could not fulfil the promise (made in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jarhbiicher) to publish a critique of Hegel's philosophy of law:

While I was working on the manuscript for publication it became clear that it was quite inappropriate to mix criticism directed purely against speculation with that of other and different matters, and that this mixture was an obstacle to the development of my line of thought and to its intelligibility. Moreover, the condensation of such rich and varied subjects into a single work would have permitted only a very aphorisitic treatment; and furthermore such an aphorisitic presentation would have created the appearance of an arbitrary systematization.118

He therefore proposed to deal with the various subjects - among them law, morals, politics - in separate 'booklets', beginning with political economy and ending with a general treatise showing the interrelationship between the subjects, and criticising the speculative treatment of the material. In this project for a lifetime's work, Marx never got beyond the first stage: Capital and its predecessors.

Marx had been reading economics in a desultory manner since the autumn of 1843 and by the spring of 1844 he had read and excerpted all the main economists from Boisguillebert and Quesnay in the late seventeenth century to James Mill and Say. He also mentioned his debt to unspecified French and English socialists and, among his fellow countrymen, to Weitling, Hess and Engels. Marx had been much impressed by Engels' essay in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher entitled 'Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy' and excerpts from it headed Marx's Paris notebooks. Central to the article was an indictment of private property and of the spirit of competition that it engendered. The recurrent crises were the result of anarchy in production; the growth and accumulation of capital involving a lowering of salaries and accentuated the class struggle. Science and technology, which could afford immense possibilities under communism, only served, in a capitalist society, to increase the oppression of the workers.

Marx later called Engels' article a 'brilliant sketch'119 and quoted from it several times in Capital. His reading it marked the real beginning of his lifelong interest in economic questions. Engels (like Hess) would have described himself as a disciple of Feuerbach; and certainly in all of Marx's Paris notes Feuerbach's humanism is quite central. Positive criticism, and thus also German positive criticism of political economy, was founded, Marx claimed, on Feuerbach's discoveries in his 'Thesen' and Grundsatze. 'The first positive humanist and naturalist criticism dates from Feuerbach. The less bombastic they are, the more sure, deep, comprehensive and lasting is the effect of Feuerbach's works, the only ones since Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic to embody a real theoretical revolution.'120

Marx's first manuscript was mainly economic and started with extracts or paraphrases from the books on economics that he was reading at that time.121 He divided these extracts into three sections on wages, capital and rent, each occupying one of the three vertical columns into which Marx had divided his pages. In the first, drawing on Adam Smith, Marx noted that the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker which determined wages also reduced the worker to the status of a commodity. The worker could not win: if the wealth of society was diminishing, it was he who suffered most; if it was increasing, then this meant that capital was being accumulated and the product of labour was increasingly alienated from the worker.

Political economy, said Marx, dealt with man much the same terms as it dealt with, say, a house. It did not deal with man 'in his free time, as a human being'; this aspect it left to other disciplines. And he continued:

Let us now rise above the level of political economy and seek from the

To answer these two questions Marx amassed a series of quotations from three sources: firstly from the German writer Wilhelm Schulz on workers' pauperisation, the dehumanising effect of machinery and the number of women and children working;123 secondly from Constantin Pecqueur on the dependence and degradation forced on workers under capitalism;124 thirdly from Eugene Buret on the wretchedness and exploitation of the proletariat.125

In his second section Marx noted a number of passages under the heading 'Profit of Capital'. First, quoting Adam Smith, he defined capital as the power of command over labour and its products. He then described the means by which capitalists made a profit both from wages and from raw materials advanced; the motives that inspired the capitalist; and the accumulation of capital and competition among capitalists. Marx's third section was on rent and he outlined the similarities between landlord and capitalist: in the last analysis there was no distinction between them and society was divided into two classes only - workers and capitalists. The character of landed property had been utterly transformed since feudal times and neither the preservation of large estates nor their division into small properties could avoid precipitating a crisis. Later in the manuscript Marx offered his own trenchant critique of the 'Protestant ethic' enshrined in the classical economists:

Thus, despite its worldly and pleasure-seeking appearance, it is a truly moral science and the most moral of all sciences. Its principal thesis is the renunciation of life and of human needs. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house, and the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt - your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.126

At this point in his manuscript Marx broke off writing in three parallel columns and began to write straight across the page. He also changed his style, writing now without recourse to quotation from other writers. This passage on alienated labour is the best-written part of the manuscripts.

In it Marx criticised the concept of labour found in the classical economists from whom he had just been quoting, on the general grounds that their conceptions were superficial and abstract whereas his own gave a coherent account of the essential nature of economics. Having started from their presuppositions Marx claimed to show that the more the worker produced the poorer he became. But this analysis remained superficial:

Political economy starts with the fact of private property, it does not explain it to us. It conceives of the material process that private property in fact goes through in general abstract formulae which then have for it the value of laws.. . . But political economy tells us nothing about how far these external, apparently fortuitous circumstances are merely the expression of a necessary development. We have seen how it regards exchange itself as something fortuitous. The only wheels that political economy sets in motion are greed and war among the greedy: competition.127

But because the classical economists had failed to understand the necessary connection and development of different economic factors, they could give no coherent account of economics. He, on the contrary, aimed 'to understand the essential connection of private property, selfishness, the separation of labour, capital and landed property, of exchange and competition, of the value and degradation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. - the connection of all this alienation with the money system'.128 The usual method of the economist was to suppose a fictitious primordial state and to proceed from there; but this simply accepted as a fact what it was supposed to be explaining: 'Similarly the theologian explains the origin of evil through the fall, i.e. he presupposes as a historical fact what he should be explaining.'129

Before introducing his main point, Marx once more insisted on its empirical basis. 'We start', he says, 'with a contemporary fact of political economy.'130 This fact was the general impoverishment and dehumanisation of the worker. Marx developed the implications of this, thus introducing the theme of this section:

The object that labour produces, its product, confronts it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour that has solidified itself into an object, made itself into a thing, the objectification of labour. The realization of labour is its objectification. In political economy this realization of labour appears as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as a loss of the object or slavery to it, and appropriation as alienation, as externalization.131

Simply stated, what Marx meant when he talked of alienation was this:

it is man's nature to be his own creator; he forms and develops himself by working on and transforming the world outside him in co-operation with his fellow men. In this progressive interchange between man and the world, it is man's nature to be in control of this process, to be the initiator, the subject in which the process originates. However, this nature has become alien to man; that is, it is no longer his and belongs to another person or thing. In religion, for example, it is God who is the subject of the historical process. It is God who holds the initiative and man is in a state of dependence. In economics, according to Marx, it is money or the cash-nexus that manoeuvres men around as though they were objects instead of the reverse. The central point is that man has lost control of his own destiny and has seen this control invested in other entities. What is proper to man has become alien to him, being the attribute of something else.132

Having discussed this relationship of the worker to the objects of his production, Marx defined and analysed three further characteristics of alienated man. The second was his alienation in the act of production. 'How would the worker be able to confront the product of his work as an alien being if he did not alienate himself in the act of production itself?'133 Marx distinguished three aspects of this type of alienation: firstly, labour was external to the worker and no part of his nature; secondly, it was not voluntary, but forced labour; and thirdly, man's activity here belonged to another, with once more the religious parallel: 'As in religion the human imagination's own activity, the activity of man's head and his heart, reacts independently on the individual as an alien activity of gods or devils, so the activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. It belongs to another and is the loss of himself.'134 The result of this was to turn man into an animal, for he only felt at ease when performing the animal functions of eating, drinking and procreating - in his distinctly human functions he was made to feel like an animal.

Marx had analysed man as alienated from the product of his labour and also as alienated in the act of production (this second he also called 'self-alienation'). He then derived his third characteristic of alienated labour from the two previous ones: man was alienated from his species, from his fellow men. Marx then defined what he meant by 'species', a term he took over from Feuerbach. The two chief characteristics of a species-being were self-consciousness and universality: 'Man is a speciesbeing not only in that practically and theoretically he makes both his own and other species into his objects, but also, and this is only another way of putting the same thing, he relates himself as to the present, living species, in that he relates to himself as to a universal and therefore free being.'135 This universality consisted in the fact that man could appropriate