Marcuse discusses the traditional conservative role of art in society, artistic challenges to traditional art forms in the 1970s - and what role art might still play in a liberated society.
"Art itself appears as part and force of the tradition which perpetuates that which is, and prevents the realization of that which can and ought to be."
"Only if the vast capabilities of science and technology, of the scientific and artistic imagination direct the construction of a sensuous environment, only if the work world loses its alienating features and becomes a world of human relationships, only if productivity becomes creativity, are the roots of domination dried up in the individuals. No return to precapitalist, pre-industrial artisanship, but on the contrary, perfection of the new mutilated and distorted science and technology in the formation of the object world in accordance with “the laws of beauty.” And “beauty” here defines an ontological condition—not of an oeuvre d’art isolated from real existence…but that harmony between man and his world which would shape the form of society."
(Towards a Critical Theory of Society; p.138-139 - Marcuse, ed. Kellner.)
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Art as Form of Reality (Herbert Marcuse - 1972)
The thesis of the end of art has become a familiar slogan: radicals take it as a truism; they reject or 'suspend' art as part of bourgeois culture, just as they reject or suspend its literature or philosophy. This verdict extends easily to all theory, all intelligence (no matter how 'creative') that does not spark action and practice, that does not noticeably help to change the world, that does not - be it only for a short time - break through the universe of mental and physical pollution in which we live. Music does it, with song and dance: the music which activates the body; the songs which no longer sing but cry and shout. To measure the road travelled in the last thirty years, compare the 'traditional', classical tone and text of the songs of the Spanish Civil War with today's songs of protest and defiance. Or compare the 'classical' theatre of Brecht with the Living Theatre of today. We witness not only the political but also, and primarily, the artistic attack on art in all its forms, on art as Form itself. The distance and dissociation of art from reality are denied, refused, and destroyed; if art is still anything at all, it must be real, part and parcel of life - but of a life which is itself the conscious negation of the established way of life, with all its institutions, with its entire material and intellectual culture, its entire immoral morality, its required and its clandestine behaviour, its work and its fun.
A double reality has emerged (or re-emerged), that of those who say 'no', and that of those who say 'yes'. Those engaged in whatever artistic effort is still 'valid', refuse to say 'yes' to both reality and to art. Yet the refusal itself is also reality - very real are the young who have no more patience, who have, with their own bodies and minds, experienced the horrors and the oppressive comforts of the given reality; real are the ghettos and their spokesmen; real are the forces of liberation all over the globe, East and West; First, Second, and Third World's. But the meaning of this reality to those who experience it can no longer be communicated in the established language and images - in the available forms of expression, no matter how new, how radical they may be.
The Domain of Forms
What is at stake is the vision, the experience of a reality that is so fundamentally different, so antagonistic to the prevailing reality that any communication through the established means seems to reduce this difference, to vitiate this experience. This irreconcilability with the very medium of communication also extends to the forms of art themselves, to Art as Form.(1) From the position of today's rebellion and refusal, Art itself appears as part and force of the tradition which perpetuates that which is, and prevents the realization of that which can and ought to be. Art does so precisely inasmuch as it is Form, because the artistic Form (no matter how anti-art it strives to be) arrests that which is in motion, gives it limit and frame and place in the prevailing universe of experience and aspirations, gives it a value in this universe, makes it an object among others. This means that, in this universe, the work of art, as well as of anti-art, becomes exchange value, commodity: and it is precisely the Commodity Form, as the form of reality, which is the target of today's rebellion.
True, the commercialization of Art is not new, and not even of very recent date. It is as old as bourgeois society. The process gains momentum with the almost unlimited reproducibility of the work of art, by virtue of which the oeuvre becomes susceptible to imitation and repetition even in its finest and most sublime achievements. In his masterful analysis of this process, Walter Benjamin has shown that there is one thing which militates against all reproduction, namely, the 'aura' of the oeuvre, the unique historical situation in which the work of art is created, into which it speaks, and which defines its function and meaning. As soon as the oeuvre leaves its own historical moment, which is unrepeatable eor negatively) to the different historical situation. Owing to new instruments and techniques, to new forms of perception and thought, the original oeuvre may now be interpreted, instrumented, 'translated', and thus become richer, more complex, refined, fuller of meaning. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is no longer what it was to the artist and his audience and public.
Yet, through all these changes, something remains identically the same: the oeuvre itself, to which all these modifications happen. The most 'updated' work of art is still the particular, unique work of art updated. What kind of entity is it which remains the identical 'substance' of all its modifications ?
It is not the 'plot': Sophocles' tragedy shares the `story' of Oedipus with many other literary exprcssions ; it is not the 'object' of a painting, which recurs innumerable times (as general category: portrait of a man sitting, standing; mountainous landscape, etc); it is not the stuff, the raw material of which the work is made. What constitutes the unique and enduring identity of an oeuvre, and what makes a work into a work of art - this entity is the Form. By virtue of the Form, and the Form alone, the content achieves that uniqueness which makes it the content of one particular work of art and of no other. The way in which the story is told; the structure and selectiveness of verse and prose; that which is not said, not represented and yet present; the interrelations of lines and colours and points - these are some aspects of the Form which removes, dissociates, alienates the oeuvre from the given reality and makes it enter into its own reality : the realm of forms.
The realm of forms : it is an historical reality, an irreversible sequence of styles, subjects, techniques, rules - each inseparably related to its society, and repeatable only as imitation. However, in all their almost infinite diversity, they are but variations of the one Form which distinguishes Art from any other product of human activity. Ever since Art left the magical stage, ever since it ceased to be 'practical', to be one 'technique' among others - that is to say, ever since it became a separate branch of the social division of labour, it assumed a Form of its own, common to all arts.
This Form corresponded to the new function of Art in society: to provide the 'holiday', the elevation, the break in the terrible routine of life - to present something 'higher', 'deeper', perhaps 'truer' and better, satisfying needs not satisfied in daily work and fun, and therefore pleasurable. (I am speaking of the social, the 'objective' historical function of Art; I am not speaking of what Art is to the artist, not of his intentions and goals, which are of a very different order.) In other, more brutal words: Art is not (or not supposed to be) a use value to be consumed in the course of the daily performances of men; its utility is of a transcendent kind, utility for the soul or the mind which does not enter the normal behaviour of men and does not really change it - except for precisely that short period of elevation, the cultured holiday: in church, in the museum, the concert hall, the theatre, before the monuments and ruins of the great past. After the break, real life continues: business usual.
With these features, Art becomes a force in the (given) society, but not of the (given) society. Produced in and for the established reality, providing it with the beautiful and the sublime, elevation and pleasure, Art also dissociates itself from this reality and confronts it with another one: the beautiful and the sublime, the pleasure and the truth that Art presents are not merely those obtaining in the actual society. No matter how much Art may be determined, shaped, directed by prevailing values, standards of taste and behaviour, limits of experience, it is always more and other than beautification and sublimation, recreation and validation of that which is. Even the most realistic oeuvre constructs a reality of its own: its men and women, its objects, its landscape, its music reveal what remains unsaid, unseen, unheard in everyday life. Art is 'alienating'.
As part of the established culture, Art is affirmative, sustaining this culture; as alienation from the established reality, Art is a negating force. The history of Art can be understood as the harmonization of this antagonism.
The material, stuff, and data of Art (words, sounds, lines and colours; but also thoughts emotions, images) are ordered, interrelated, defined and 'contained' in the oeuvre in such a manner that they consitute a structured whole - closed, in its external appearance, between the two covers of a book, in a frame, at a specific place; its presentation takes a specific time, before and after which is the other reality, daily life. In its effect on the recipient, the oeuvre itself may endure and recur; but it will remain, as recurrent, a self-contained whole, a mental or sensuous object clearly separated and distinct from (real) things. The laws or rules governing the organization of the elements in the oeuvre as a unified whole seem of infinite variety, but the classical aesthetic tradition has given them a common denominator: they are supposed to be guided by the idea of the beautiful.
This central idea of classical aesthetics invokes the sensibility as well as the rationality of man, Pleasure Principle and Reality Principle : the work of art is to appeal to the senses, to satisfy sensuous needs - but in a highly sublimated manner. Art is to have a reconciling, tranquillizing, and a cognitive function, to be beautiful and true. The beautiful was to lead to the truth: in the beautiful, a truth was supposed to appear that did not, and could not appear in any other form.
Harmonization of the beautiful and the true - what was supposed to make up the essential unity of the work of art has turned out to be an increasingly impossible unification of opposites, for the true has appeared as increasingly incompatible with the beautiful. Life, the human condition has militated increasingly against the sublimation of reality in the Form of Art.
This sublimation is not primarily (and perhaps not at all!) a process in the psyche of the artist but rather an ontological condition, pertaining to the Form of Art itself. It necessitates an organization of the material into the unity and enduring stability of the oeuvre, and this organization 'succumbs' as it were to the idea of the Beautiful. It is as if this idea would impose itself upon the material through the creative energy of the artist (though by no means as his conscious intention). The result is most evident in those works which are the uncompromisingly 'direct' accusation of reality. The artist indicts - but the indictment anaesthetizes the terror. Thus, the brutality, stupidity, horror of war are all there in the work of Goya, but as 'pictures', they are caught up in the dynamic of aesthetic transfiguration - they can be admired, side by side with the glorious portraits of the king who presided over the horror. The Form contradicts the content, and triumphs over the content: at the price of its anaesthetization. The immediate, unsublimated (physiological and psychological) response: vomiting, cry, fury, gives way to the aesthetic experience: the germane response to the work of art.
The character of this aesthetic sublimation, essential to Art and inseparable from its history as part of affirmative culture, has found its perhaps most striking formulation in Kant's concept of interesseloses Wohlgefallen : delight, pleasure divorced from all interest, desire, inclination. The aesthetic object is, as it were, without a particular Subject, or rather without any relation to a Subject other than that of pure contemplation - pure eye, pure ear, pure mind. Only in this purification of ordinary experience and its objects, only in this transfiguration of reality emerges the aesthetic universe and the aesthetic object as pleasurable, beautiful and sublime. In other, and more brutal words: the precondition for Art is a radical looking into reality, and a looking away from it - a repression of its immediacy, and of the immediate response to it. It is the oeuvre itself which is, and which achieves this repression; and as aesthetic repression, it is 'satisfying', enjoyable. In this sense, Art is in itself a 'happy end'; despair becomes sublime; pain beautiful.
The artistic presentation of the Crucifixion throughout the centuries is still the best example for this aesthetic transfiguration. Nietzsche saw in the Cross 'the most subterranean conspiracy of all times - a conspiracy against sanity, beauty, health, courage, spirit, nobility of the soul, a conspiracy against life itself' (The Antichrist 62). The Cross as aesthetic object denounces the repressive force in the beauty and spirit of Art: 'a conspiracy against life itself'.
Nietzsche's formula may well serve to elucidate the impetus and the scope of today's rebellion against Art as part and parcel of the affirmative bourgeois culture - a rebellion sparked by the now intolerable, brutal conflict between the potential and the actual, between the very real possibilities of liberation, and the indeed all but conspiratorial efforts, by the powers that be, to prevent this liberation. It seems that the aesthetic sublimation is approaching its historical limits, that the commitment of Art to the Ideal, to the beautiful and the sublime, and with it the 'holiday' function of Art, now offend the human condition. It also seems that the cognitive function of Art can no longer obey the harmonizing 'law of Beauty': the contradiction between form and content shatters the traditional Form of Art.
The Rebellion Against Art
The rebellion against the very Form of Art has a long history. At the height of classical aesthetics, it was an integral part of the Romanticist program; its first desperate outcry was Georg Buchner's indictment that all idealistic art displays a 'disgraceful contempt for humanity'. The protest continues in the renewed efforts to ' save' Art by destroying the familiar, dominating forms of perception, the familiar appearance of the object, the thing because it is part of a false, mutilated experience. The development of Art to non-objective art, minimal art, anti-art was a way towards the liberation of the Subject, preparing it for a new object-world instead of accepting and sublimating, beautifying the existing one, freeing mind and body for a new sensibility and sensitivity which can no longer tolerate a mutilated experience and a mutilated sensibility.
The next step is to 'living art' (a contradictio in adjecto?), Art in motion, as motion. In its own internal development, in its struggle against its own illusions, Art comes to join the struggle against the powers that be, mental and physical, the struggle against domination and repressionin other words, Art, by virtue of its own internal dynamic, is to become a political force. It refuses to be for the museum or mausoleum, for the exhibitions of a no longer existing aristocracy, for the holiday of the soul and the elevation of the masses - it wants to be real. Today, Art enters the forces of rebellion only as it is desublimated: a living Form which gives word and image and sound to the Unnameable, to the lie and its debunking, to the horror and to the Geist.
Living Art, anti-art in all its variety - is its aim self-defeating? All these frantic efforts to produce the absence of Form, to substitute the real for the aesthetic object, to ridicule oneself and the bourgeois customer - are they not so many activities of frustration, already part of the culture industry and the museum culture? I believe the aim of the 'new act' is self-defeating because it retains, and must retain no matter how minimally, the Form of Art as different from non-art, and it is the Art-Form itself which frustrates the intention to reduce or even anull this difference, to make Art 'real', 'living'.
Art cannot become reality, cannot realise itself without cancelling itself as Art in all its forms, even in its most destructive, most minimal, most 'living' forms. The gap which separates Art from reality, the essential otherness of Art, its 'illusory' character can be reduced only to the degree to which reality itself tends towards Art as reality's own Form, that is to say, in the course of a revolution, with the emergence of a free society. In this process, the artist would participate - as artist rather than as political activist, for the tradition of Art cannot be simply left behind or discarded; that which it has achieved, shown, and revealed in authentic forms, contains a truth beyond immediate realization or solution, perhaps beyond any realization and solution.
The antiart of today is condemned to remain Art, no matter how 'anti' it strives to be. Incapable of bridging the gap between Art and reality, of escaping from the fetters of the Art-Form, the rebellion against 'form' only succeeds in a loss of artistic quality; illusory destruction, illusory overcoming of alienation. The authentic oeuvres, the true avant-garde of our time, far from obscuring this distance, far from playing down alienation, enlarge it and harden their incompatibility with the given reality to an extent that defies any (behavioural) application. They fulfill in this way the cognitive function of Art (which is its inherent radical, 'political' function), that is, to name the Unnameable, to confront man with the dreams he betrays and the crimes he forgets. The greater the terrible conflict between that which is and that which can be, the more will the work of art be estranged from the immediacy of real life, thought and behaviour - even political thought and behaviour. I believe that the authentic avant-garde of today are not those who try desperately to produce the absence of Form and the union with real life, but rather those who do not recoil from the exigencies of Form, who find the new word, image, and sound which are capable of 'comprehending' reality as only Art can comprehend - and negate it. This authentic new Form has emerged in the work (already 'classic') of Schonberg, Berg, and Webern; of Kafka and Joyce; of Picasso; it continues today in such achievements as Stockhausen's Spirale, and Samuel Beckett's novels. They invalidate the notion of the 'end of art'.
Beyond the Established Division of Labour
In contrast, the 'living art', and especially the 'living theatre' of today does away with the Form of estrangement: in eliminating the distance between the actors, the audience, and the 'outside', it establishes a familiarity and identification with the actors and their message which quickly draws the negation, the rebellion into the daily universe - as an enjoyable and understandable element of this universe. The participation of the audience is spurious and the result of previous arrangements; the change in consciousness and behaviour is itself part of the play - illusion is strengthened rather than destroyed.
There is a phrase of Marx: 'these petrified [social] conditions must be forced to dance by singing to them their own melody.' Dance will bring the dead world to life and make it a human world. But today, 'their own melody' seems no longer communicable except in forms of extreme estrangement and dissociation from all immediacy - in the most conscious and deliberate forms of Art.
I believe that 'living art', the 'realization' of Art can only be the event of a qualitatively different society in which a new type of men and women, no longer the subject or object of exploitation, can develop in their life and work the vision of the suppressed aesthetic possibilities of men and things - aesthetic not as to the specific property of certain objects (the objet d'art) but as forms and modes of existence corresponding to the reason and sensibility of free individuals, what Marx called 'the sensuous appropriation of the world'. The realization of Art, the 'new art' is conceivable only as the process of constructing the universe of a free society - in other words : Art as Form of reality.
Art as Form of Reality: it is impossible to ward off the horribie associations provoked by this notion, such as gigantic programmes of beautification, artistic corporation offices, aesthetic factories, industrial parks. These associations belong to the practice of repression. Art as Form of reality means, not the beautification of the given, but the construction of an entirely different and opposed reality. The aesthetic vision is part of the revolution; it is a vision of Marx: 'the animal constructs (formiert) only according to need; man forms also in accordance with the laws of beauty.'
It is impossible to concretize Art as Form of reality: it would then be creativity, a creation in the material as well as intellectual sense, a juncture of technique and the arts in the total reconstruction of the environment, a juncture of town and country, industry and nature after all have been freed from the horrors of commercial exploitation and beautification, so that Art can no longer serve as a stimulus of business. Evidently, the very possibility of creating such an environment depends on the total transformation of the existing society: a new mode and new goals of production, a new type of human being as producer, the end of role-playing, of the established social division of labour, of work and pleasure.
Would such realization of Art imply the 'invalidation' of the traditional arts ? In other words, would it imply the 'atrophy' of the capability to understand and enjoy them, atrophy of the intellectual faculty and the sensuous organs to experience the arts of the past? I suggest a negative answer. Art is transcendent in a sense which distinguishes and divorces it from any 'daily' reality we can possibly envisage. No matter how free, society will be inflicted with necessity - the necessity of labour, of the fight against death and disease, of scarcity. Thus, the arts will retain forms of expression germane to them - and only to them: of a beauty and truth antagonistic to those of reality. There is, even in the most 'impossible' verses of the traditional drama, even in the most impossible opera arias and duets, some element of rebellion which is still 'valid'. There is in them some faithfulness to one's passions, some 'freedom of expression' in defiance of common sense, language, and behaviour which indicts and contradicts the established ways of life. It is by virtue of this 'otherness' that the Beautiful in the traditional arts would retain its truth. And this otherness could not and would not be cancelled by the social development. On the contrary: what would be cancelled is the opposite, namely, the false, conformist and comfortable reception (and creation!) of Art, its spurious integration with the Establishment, its harmonization and sublimation of repressive conditions. Then, perhaps for the first time, men could enjoy the infinite sorrow of Beethoven and Mahler because it is overcome and preserved in the reality of freedom. Perhaps for the first time men would see with the eyes of Corot, of Cezanne, of Monet because the perception of these artists has helped to form this reality.
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Originally published in New Left Review, no. 74, 1972.
Footnotes
1) I shall use Art (capitalized) as including not only the visual arts but also literature and music. I shall use the term Form (capitalized) to that which defines Art as Art, that is to say, as essentially (ontologically) different not only from (everyday) reality but also from such other manifestations of intellectual culture as science and philosophy.
Marcuse was engaged in a life-long search for a revolutionary subjectivity, for a sensibility that would revolt against the existing society and attempt to create a new one.
The past decades have witnessed a relentless philosophical assault on the concept of the subject, once the alpha and omega of modern philosophy. Materialists have decried the idealist and essentialist dimensions of the traditional concept of the subject in its various Cartesian, Kantian, and other philosophical forms. More recently, poststructuralist and postmodern theorists have attacked the universalizing pretensions of subject discourse, its positing of a (false) unity, its assuming a centered and grounded status as a linchpin for philosophical systems or knowledge-claims, and its transparent self-certainty from Descartes' cogito to Husserl's phenomenology. Following Nietzsche, poststructuralists have seen the subject as an effect of language, constructed in accord with the forms of grammar (i.e. subject/predicate) and existing linguistic systems, or, with Deleuze, have privileged the flux and flow of bodily experience over more idealist conceptions of consciousness and the self.
For traditional philosophy, the subject was unitary, ideal, universal, self-grounded, asexual and the foundation for knowledge and philosophy, while for the poststructuralist and postmodern critique the human being is corporeal, gendered, social, fractured, and historical with subjectivity radically decentered as an effect of language, society, culture, and history. Yet if the construction of the subject in language, the social, and nature is the key mark of a poststructuralist or postmodern conception of subjectivity, then the Frankfurt School analyses are not antithetical to such conceptions. The entire tradition of critical theory -- which draws on Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber -- posits the historical and social construction of the individual, and members of this tradition can be read as providing aspects of theorizing the social construction of subjectivity in language, social interaction, and culture in specific historical contexts. Habermas in particular has followed this motif and has attacked the philosophy of the subject, while proposing replacing its subject/object model with an ego-alter model that is based upon the ideal of communicative reason.
In this paper, however, I want to pursue Herbert Marcuse's sharp critiques of the rationalist subject of modern philosophy which he counterposes to notions of libidinal rationality, eros, and the aesthetic-erotic dimensions of an embodied subjectivity. Marcuse is part of a historicist tradition of critical theory which rejects essentialism and sees subjectivity developing in history, in interaction with specific socio-political conditions. Following Adorno and Horkheimer and the earlier Frankfurt School tradition, Marcuse also sees dominant forms of subjectivity as oppressive and constraining, while challenging us to reconstruct subjectivity and to develop a new sensibility, qualitatively different than the normalized subjectivity of contemporary advanced industrial societies. In particular, Marcuse was engaged in a life-long search for a revolutionary subjectivity, for a sensibility that would revolt against the existing society and attempt to create a new one.
Hence, I will argue that Marcuse and the Frankfurt School contribute important perspectives for criticizing the traditional concept of the subject and for rethinking and reconceptualizing subjectivity to develop conceptions potent enough to meet poststructuralist, postmodern, materialist, feminist, and other forms of critique. Crucially, the assault on the subject has had serious consequences, for without a robust notion of subjectivity and agency there is no refuge for individual freedom and liberation, no locus of struggle and opposition, and no agency for progressive political transformation. For these reasons, theorists from diverse camps, including feminists, multiculturalists, and poststructuralists who have had second thoughts about the all-too- hasty dissolution of the subject, have attempted to rehabilitate constructive notions of subjectivity and agency, in the light of contemporary critique.
My argument is that the Marcuse anticipates the post- structuralist critique of the subject, that these critiques suggest that the traditional concept of the subject contains too much philosophical and political baggage, and that we need a reconstructed notion of subjectivity which Marcuse and the Frankfurt School helped initiate and enabled us to further develop. In drawing on Nietzsche, Freud, and aesthetic modernism, Marcuse posits a bodily, erotic, gendered, social, and aestheticized subjectivity that overcomes mind-body dualism, avoids idealist and rationalist essentialism, and is constructed in a specific social milieu. Moreover, Marcusean subjectivity is challenged to reconstruct itself and emancipate itself from limited and oppressive forms and to pursue the project of cultivating a new sensibility. In delineating Marcuse's reconstruction of subjectivity, I'll first offer a re-reading of Eros and Civilization to demonstrate how it anticipates the poststructuralist critique of the subject and offers an alternative conception of subjectivity. Then I pursue some of the contributions to rethinking subjectivity in Marcuse's later writings, focusing on his notion of the new sensibility and aesthetic education. At stake is developing a reconstructed Marcusean theory of subjectivity which emphasizes the need for a transformation of the affective dimension, the sensibility, and our very notion of subjectivity to help create new conceptions of subjectivity and to provide conceptions of the subjective conditions for radical social change and of agency in order to promote individual and social transformation.
Re-Reading Eros and Civilization
In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse draws on Freud to depict the social construction of subjectivity in the dramatic clash between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. For Freud, the instincts are originally governed by the pleasure principle: they aim solely at "gaining pleasure; from any operation which might arouse unpleasantness ("pain") mental activity draws back" (E&C 13). From early on, however, the pleasure principle comes into conflict with a harsh environment and after a series of disciplinary experiences, "the individual comes to the traumatic realization that full and painless gratification of his needs is impossible" (E&C 13). Under the tutelage of the reality principle, the person learns what is useful and approved behavior, and what is harmful and forbidden. In this way, one develops one's rational faculties, becoming "a conscious, thinking subject, geared to a rationality which is imposed on him from outside" (E&C 14).
For Marcuse, then, rationality is a social construct and subjectivity is a product of social experience. Thus, like Foucault, Marcuse sees subjectivity not as a natural and metaphysical substance, pre-existing its social gestation, but as a product of societal normalization, whereby the individual is subjected to rationalizing forms of thought and behavior. According to Marcuse's conception, the reality principle enforces the totality of society's requirements, norms and prohibitions which are imposed upon the individual from "outside." This process constitutes for him a domination of the individual by society which shapes thought and behavior, desires and needs, language and consciousness. In Marcuse's words: "neither his desires nor his alteration of reality are henceforth his own: they are now 'organized' by his society. And this 'organization' represses and transsubstantiates his original instinctual needs" (E&C 14-15).
Marcuse employs Freud's theory to produce an account of how society comes to dominate the individual, how social control is internalized, and how conformity ensues. He concludes that "Freud's individual psychology is in its very essence social psychology" (E&C 16), and he repeatedly emphasizes that Freud's psychological categories are historical and political in nature. Hence, Marcuse boldly fleshes out the "political and sociological substance of Freud's theory" to develop what I call a critical theory of socialization. Whereas most theories of socialization stress its humanizing aspects by claiming that socialization makes individuals more "human"-- and thus legitimate dominant social institutions and practices --, Freud exposes the repressive content of Western civilization and the heavy price paid for its "progress." Although industrialization has resulted in material progress, Freud's analysis of the instinctual renunciations and unhappiness it has produced raises the question of whether our form of civilization is worth the suffering and misery (E&C 3ff). In Marcuse's view, Freud's account of civilization and its discontents puts in question the whole ideology of progress, productivity and the work ethic, as well as religion and morality, by "showing up the repressive content of the highest values and achievements of culture" (E&C 17).
Thus, Marcuse, like Foucault, stresses the social construction of subjectivity and the ways that subjectification (i.e. the ways of producing a socially submissive subject) are involved in a process of domination. But whereas Foucault and many poststructuralists call for resistance to domination, they often have no theoretical resources to construct a notion of agency that would efficaciously resist repression and domination. For Marcuse, however, there is a "hidden trend in psychoanalysis" which discloses those aspects of human nature that oppose the dominant ethic of labor and renunciation, while upholding "the tabooed aspirations of humanity": the demands of the pleasure principle for gratification and absence of restraint (E&C 18). He argues that Freud's instinct theory contains a "depth dimension" which suggests that our instincts strive for a condition in which freedom and happiness converge, in which we fulfill our needs, and strive to overcome repression and domination. For Marcuse, memory contains images of gratification and can play a cognitive and therapeutic role in mental life: "Its' truth value lies in the specific function of memory to preserve promises and potentialities which are betrayed and even outlawed by the mature, civilized individual, but which had once been fulfilled in the dim past and which are never entirely forgotten" (E&C 18-19).
Marcuse subtly reformulates the therapeutic role of memory stressed in psychoanalysis. In Freud's theory, the suppression of memory takes place through the repression of unpleasant or traumatic experiences, which are usually concerned with sexuality or aggression; the task of psychoanalysis is to free the patient from the burden or repressed, traumatic memories -- whose repression often produces neurosis -- by providing understanding and insight that would enable the individual to work through painful experiences of the past and to dissolve neurotic behavior. Although Marcuse preserves the psychoanalytic linkage between forgetting and repression, he stresses the liberating potentialities of memory and recollection of pleasurable or euphoric experiences, as well as the unpleasant or traumatic experiences stressed by Freud.
In his reconstruction of Freud, Marcuse suggests that remembrance of past experiences of freedom and happiness could put into question the painful performances of alienated labor and manifold oppressions of everyday life. These memories are embedded in individual experiences of a happier past and historical conditions that offered more and better freedom, gratification, and happiness. Marcuse will link these emancipatory dimensions of memory with phantasy and will argue that both human beings and their cultural tradition contain resources that can be mobilized against suffering and oppression in the present.
Memory for Marcuse thus re-members, reconstructs, experience, going to the past to construct future images of freedom and happiness. Whereas romanticism is past-oriented, remembering the joys of nature and the past in the face of the onslaught of industrialization, Marcuse is future-oriented, looking to the past to construct a better future. Marcuse's analysis implies that society trains the individual for the systematic repression of those emancipatory memories, and devalues experiences guided solely by the pleasure principle. Following Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals, Marcuse criticizes "the one-sidedness of memory-training in civilization: the faculty was chiefly directed towards remembering duties rather than pleasures; memory was linked with bad conscience, guilt and sin. Unhappiness and the threat of punishment, not happiness and the promise of freedom, linger in the memory" (E&C 232).
Marcuse claims that for Freud "phantasy" is a crucial mode of "thought-activity" that is split off from the reality-principle (E&C 14, 140ff). For Freud, phantasy "was kept free from reality- testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. This is the act of phantasy-making (das Phantasieren), which begins already with the game of children, and later, continued as day- dreaming, abandons its dependence on real objects" (E&C 140). Building on this conception, Marcuse suggests that "phantasy" -- in day-dreaming, dreams at night, play, and its embodiments in art -- can project images of integral gratification, pleasure, and reconciliation, often denied in everyday life.
Hence, along with memory, Marcuse argues that phantasy can imagine another world and generate images of a better life by speaking the language of the pleasure principle and its demands for gratification. He stresses the importance of great art for liberation because it refuses "to accept as final the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by the reality principle (E&C 149). Art for Marcuse practices the "Great Refusal," incarnating the emancipatory contents of memory, phantasy, and the imagination through producing images of happiness and a life without anxiety. In Marcuse's view, phantasies and hopes embody the eruption of desires for increased freedom and gratification. The unconscious on this account contains the memory of integral gratification experienced in the womb, in childhood, and in peak experiences during one's life. Marcuse holds that the "psychoanalytic liberation of memory" and "restoration of phantasy" provide access to experiences of happiness and freedom which are subversive of the present life. He suggests that Freud's theory of human nature, far from refuting the possibility of a non-repressive civilization, indicates that there are aspects of human nature that are striving for happiness and freedom.
In defending the claims of the pleasure principle, Marcuse believes that he is remaining true to a materialism which takes seriously material needs and their satisfaction, and the biological "depth-dimension" of human nature. In his view, defence of the validity of the claims of the pleasure principle has critical- revolutionary import in that Freud's analysis implies that the human being can only tolerate so much repression and unhappiness, and when this point is passed the individual will rebel against the conditions of repression. Freud's theory thus contains elements of an anthropology of liberation which analyses those aspects of human nature that furnish the potential for radical opposition to the prevailing society.
Marcuse concludes that Freud's theory contains implications that have been covered over, or neglected, and which he wishes to restore in their most provocative form. He argues that this requires a restoration of Freud's instinct theory, preserving his claims for the importance of sexuality and acknowledgment of its vital and explosive claims. Neo-Freudians who deny the primacy of sexuality have, in Marcuse's view, repressed Freud's deep insights into human sexual being by relegating sexual instincts to a secondary place in their theory (E&C 238ff). Marcuse believes that Freud's theory discloses the depth and power of instinctual energies which contain untapped emancipatory potential. He describes these instinctual energies which seek pleasure and gratification as "Eros." A liberated Eros, Marcuse claims, would release energies that would not only seek sexual gratification, but would flow over into expanded human relations and more abundant creativity. The released Eros would desire, he suggests, a pleasurable aesthetic-erotic environment requiring a total restructuring of human life and the material conditions of existence.
In addition, Marcuse also accepts Freud's concept of Thanatos, the death instinct, as well as the Freudian notion of "the political economy of the instincts," in which strengthening the life instincts enable Eros to control and master Thanatos, and so to increase freedom and happiness, while diminishing aggression and destruction. Thus, surprisingly, Marcuse adopts a rather mechanistic concept of the instincts, building on Freud's biologistic energy-instinct model -- which has been sharply criticized and rejected both within various circles of psychoanalytic theory, as well as within critical theory (Habermas and his students) and poststructuralism. I believe, however, that one can construct a Marcusean theory of subjectivity without deploying the problematic aspects of Freud's instinct theory.
The key to Marcuse's reconstruction of the concept of subjectivity, I would suggest, is the "Philosophical Interlude" in E&C in which he develops a critical analysis of the presuppositions of Western rationality and its concept of the philosophical subject. Marcuse claims that the prevalent reality principle of Western civilization presupposes an antagonism between subject and object, mind and body, reason and the passions, and the individual and society. Nature is experienced on this basis as raw material to be mastered, as an object of domination, as provocation or resistance to be overpowered (E&C 110). The ego in Western thought is thus conceptualized as an aggressive, offensive subject, fighting and striving to conquer the resistant world. Through labor, the subject seeks continually to extend its power and control over nature. The Logos of this reality principle is, Marcuse argues, a logic of domination that finds its culmination in the reality principle of advanced industrial society, the performance principle. The performance principle is hostile to the senses and receptive faculties that strive for gratification and fulfillment. It contains a concept of repressive reason which seeks to tame instinctual drives for pleasure and enjoyment. Its values, which are the governing norms of modern societies, include:
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profitable productivity, assertiveness, efficiency, competitiveness; in other words, the Performance Principle, the rule of functional rationality discriminating against emotions, a dual morality, the 'work ethic,' which means for the vast majority of the population condemnation to alienated and inhuman labor, and the will to power, the display of strength, virility (M&F 282).
This hegemonic version of the reality principle has been challenged, Marcuse argues, from the beginning of Western philosophy. Against the antagonistic struggle between subject and object, an opposing ideal of reconciliation and harmony has been formulated, in which the individual strives for fulfillment and gratification. This 'Logos of gratification,' Marcuse suggests, is found in Aristotle's notion of the nous theos and Hegel's ideal of spirit coming to rest and fruition in absolute knowledge (E&C 112ff). In these philosophical conceptions, the human being is to attain a condition of reconciliation after a process of struggle, suffering and labor, in which alienation and oppression are finally overcome. Schopenhauer advocates a similar idea of the restless, ever-striving "will" seeking peaceful Nirvana. In addition, Marcuse finds a logic of gratification and different conception of subjectivity in Nietzsche's emphasis on the body, the passions, joy and liberation from time and guilt (E&C 119f). The values affirmed in this reality principle would be the antithesis of the repressive performance principle and its dominating subject and would affirm
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receptivity, sensitivity, non-violence, tenderness, and so on. These characteristic appear indeed as opposites of domination and exploitation. On the primary psychological level, they would pertain to the domain of Eros, they would express the energy of the life instincts against the death instinct and destructive energy (M&F 284)
This alternative reality principle and conception of subjectivity also finds expression in Freud's notion of the Nirvana principle, which holds that all instincts aim at rest, quiescence and the absence of pain (E&C 5ff and 124ff). In addition, Marcuse draws on Schiller's conception of aesthetic education and play, arguing that in aesthetic and erotic experience, play, and fantasy, the conflict between reason and the senses would be overcome so that "reason is sensuous and sensuousness rational" (E&C 180). Operating through the play impulse the aesthetic function would 'abolish compulsion, and place man, both morally and physically in freedom.' It would harmonize the feelings and affections with the ideas of reason, deprive the 'laws of reason of their moral compulsion' and 'reconciles them with the interest of the senses' (E&C 182). In the language of poststructuralism, Marcuse thus envisages an embodied subjectivity in which the opposition between reason and the senses, central to the modern philosophical concept of the subject, is deconstructed. For Schiller and Marcuse, the play impulse is connected with the aesthetic function which would mediate between the passive, receptive "sensuous impulse' and the active creative "form impulse," thus reconciling reason and the senses. The play impulse aspires to a condition of freedom from restraint and anxiety, involving "freedom from the established reality: man is free when the 'reality loses its seriousness' and when its necessity 'becomes light'" (E&C 187). This "freedom to play" and to create an "aesthetic reality" requires liberation of the senses and, as both Schiller and Marcuse called for, "a total revolution in the mode of perception and feeling" (E&C 189).
The resultant conception of an aestheticized and eroticized subjectivity preserves the connotation of Sinnlichkeit as pertaining to sensuality, receptiveness, art and eros, thus redeeming the body and the senses against the tyranny of repressive reason and affirming the importance of aesthetics, play, and erotic activity in human life. Hence, against the rational and domineering subject of mastery, Marcuse advances a notion of subjectivity as mediating reason and the senses, as seeking harmony and gratification. Thus, he affirms an intersubjective ideal of a libidinal subjectivity in harmonious and gratifying relations with others and, one might add, with nature itself. Instead of controlling and dominating objects, Marcusean subjectivity seeks gratifying and peaceful relations with others and with the external world.
Moreover, Marcuse proposes a new concept of reason which he describes as "libidinal rationality" (E&C 223ff). In this conception reason is not repressive of the senses, but acts in harmony with them, helping to find objects of gratification and to cultivate and enhance sensuality. Marcuse rejects the dominant philosophical paradigm, which sees reason as the distinctly human faculty and the senses as disorderly, animalic, and inferior. The concept of reason operative in this model, Marcuse suggests, is repressive and totalitarian and does not adequately allow for aesthetic-erotic gratification and development (E&C 119ff), due to its embrace of the mind-body split. Marcuse's ideal is a form of human life in which reason becomes sensuous, protecting and enriching the life instincts, and whereby the unity of reason and the senses help create a "sensuous order" (E&C 223ff). He assumes that as more restrictions are taken away from the instincts and as they freely evolve, they will seek "lasting gratification" and will help generate social relations that will make continual gratification possible. In this way, "Eros redefines reason in its own terms. Reasonable is what sustains the order of gratification" (E&C 224).This could make possible freer, more fulfilling human relations and could create a social order and community based on freedom, gratification, cooperation, and rational authority. Then, "repressive reason gives way to a new rationality of gratification in which reason and happiness converge" (E&C 224).
The New Sensibility, Emancipation, and Revolution: The Late Marcuse
Hence, against the notion of the rational, domineering subject of modern theory, Marcuse posits a subjectivity that is libidinal and embodied, evolving and developing, while striving for happiness, gratification, and harmony. Such subjectivity is always in process, is never fixed or static, and is thus a creation and goal to be achieved, and is not posited as an absolute metaphysical entity. Marcusean subjectivity is thus corporeal, gendered, oppositional, and struggles against domination, repression, and oppression, and for freedom and happiness. There is thus nothing essentialist, idealist, or metaphysical, here. Instead, Marcuse's conception of subjectivity is both materialist and socially- mediated, while active in cultivating the aesthetic and erotic dimensions of experience as it strives for gratification and harmonious relations with others, nature, and itself. Marcuse's radical subjectivity is also political, refusing domination and oppression, struggling against conditions which block freedom and happiness and for a freer and better world.
There is widespread agreement today that we need the discourse of subjectivity and agency for ethics, for politics, and for the positive reconstruction of self and society. Within this context, I have argued that Marcuse's perspectives on subjectivity stand up to at least aspects of the poststructuralist and other critiques of the subject, as well as providing resources for reconstructing the concept of subjectivity in the contemporary era. It is important to note that for Marcuse the reconstruction of subjectivity, the creation of eroticized rationality, and the development of a free creative self, can only take place through practice and the transformation of social relations and activity. Marcuse argued that the existing society is organized precisely to prevent such a reconstruction of subjectivity and new social relations, prescribing instead a regime of domination, authority, repression, manipulative desublimation, and submission. Especially in One- Dimensional Man (hereafter ODM), but throughout his work, Marcuse presents a critique of hegemonic forms of subjectivity and domination and a challenge to overcome the one-dimensional, conformist, and normalized subjectivity of the advanced technological society.
Throughout his later writings, Marcuse was vitally concerned to discover and theorize a "new sensibility," with needs, values, and aspirations that would be qualitatively different from subjectivity in one-dimensional society. To create a new subjectivity, there must be "the emergence and education of a new type of human being free from the aggressive and repressive needs and aspirations and attitudes of class society, human beings created, in solidarity and on their own initiative, their own environment, their own Lebenswelt, their own 'property.'" Such a revolution in needs and values would help overcome a central dilemma in Marcuse's theory -- sharply formulated in One- Dimensional Man -- that continued to haunt him: "How can the administered individuals -- who have made their mutilation into their own liberties and satisfactions... liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is it even thinkable that the vicious circle be broken?" (ODM 250-251).
In order to break through this vicious circle, individuals must transform their present needs, sensibility, consciousness, values, and behavior while developing a new radical subjectivity, so as to create the necessary conditions for social transformation (5L 67). Radical subjectivity for Marcuse practices the "great refusal" valorized in both E&C and ODM. In E&C (149f), the "Great Refusal is the protest against unnecessary repression, the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom -- 'to live without anxiety.'" In ODM (256f), however, the Great Refusal is fundamentally political, a refusal of repression and injustice, a saying no, an elemental oppositional to a system of oppression, a noncompliance with the rules of a rigged game, a form of radical resistance and struggle. In both cases, the Great Refusal is based on a subjectivity that is not able to tolerate injustice and that engages in resistance and opposition to all forms of domination, instinctual and political.
In the late 1960s, Marcuse argued that emancipatory needs and a "new sensibility" were developing within contemporary society. He believed that in the New Left and counterculture there was the beginnings of "a political practice of methodical disengagement and the refusal of the Establishment aiming at a radical transvaluation of values" (EL 6) that was generating a new type of human being and subject. The new sensibility "expresses the ascent of the life instincts over aggressiveness and guilt" (EL 23) and contains a "negation of the needs that sustain the present system of domination and the negation of the values on which they are based" (5L 67). Underlying the theory of the new sensibility is a concept of the active role of the senses in the constitution of experience which rejects the Kantian and other philosophical devaluation of the senses as passive, merely receptive. For Marcuse, our senses are shaped and molded by society, yet constitute in turn our primary experience of the world and provide both imagination and reason with its material. He believes that the senses are currently socially constrained and mutilated and argues that only an emancipation of the senses and a new sensibility can produce liberating social change (EL 24ff and CR&R 62ff).
Instead of the need for repressive performance and competition, the new sensibility posits the need for meaningful work, gratification, and community; instead of the need for aggression and destructive productivity, it affirms love and the preservation of the environment; and against the demands of industrialization, it asserts the need for beauty, sensuousness, and play, affirming the aesthetic and erotic components of experience. The "new sensibility" translates these values and needs into "a practice that involves a break with the familiar, the routine ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding things so that the organism may become receptive to the potential forms of a non-aggressive, non-exploitative world" (EL 6). This total refusal of the dominant societal needs, values, and institutions represents a radical break with the entirety of the society's institutions, culture, and life-style, and supplies prefigurations of a new culture and society.
The new sensibility would be developed, Marcuse claimed, by an aesthetic education that would cultivate imagination, fantasy, the senses, and memory. The new sensibility would combine the senses and reason, producing a "new rationality" in which reason would be bodily, erotic, and political. Far from being an irrationalist, Marcuse always argued that the senses and reason need to be mediated, that reason should to be reconstructed, and that critical and dialectical thinking are an important core of the new sensibility. Marcuse maintained that aesthetic education constituted a cultivation of the senses and that theory and education were essential components of transformative social change.
In the writings of the late 1960s, Marcuse believed that the new sensibility was embodied in the liberation movements of the day, the counterculture, and New Left (see, especially, EL). Of course, he was disappointed that the new sensibility did not become the agent of revolutionary change that he envisaged; he was also dismayed that the New Left and counterculture fell prey to the seductions of the consumer society, or were repressed and fragmented (see Counterrevolution and Revolt, 1972, for a poignant account of Marcuse's failing hopes and continued attempts to theorize emancipation and radical social change). In the 1970s, however, he sought precisely the same values and subjectivity in new social movements, in particular feminism, the environmental movement, peace movement, and various forms of grass-roots activism which came to be described as "new social movements."
In the 1974 lecture on "Marxism and Feminism," Marcuse notes for the first time the constitutive role of gender, while theorizing the differences between men and women in terms of his categories in Eros and Civilization. It is notable that his conception of the feminine is associated with the traits he ascribes to the new sensibility, while the masculine is associated with the features of the Western ego and rationality of domination which Marcuse long criticized, thus anticipating "difference feminism" which would also valorize the feminine and maternal against the masculine. In this article, which generated significant debate, Marcuse argues that "feminine" values and qualities represent a determinate negation of the values of capitalism, patriarchy, and the performance principle. In his view, "socialism, as a qualitatively different society, must embody the antithesis, the definite negation of aggressive and repressive needs and values of capitalism as a form of male-dominated culture"
(M&F 285). Furthermore:
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Formulated as the antithesis of the dominating masculine qualities, such feminine qualities would be receptivity, sensitivity, non-violence, tenderness and so on. These characteristics appear indeed as opposite of domination and exploitation. On the primary psychological level, they would pertain to the domain of Eros, they would express the energy of the life instincts, against the death instinct and destructive energy (M&F 285-286).
Marcuse was, however, criticized by women within the feminist movement and others for essentializing gender difference, although he insisted the distinction was a historical product of Western society and not an essential gender difference. Women, he argued, possess a "feminine" nature qualitatively different from men because they have been frequently freed from repression in the work place, brutality in the military, and competition in the public sphere. Hence, they developed characteristics which for Marcuse are the marks of an emancipated humanity. He summarizes the difference between aggressive masculine and capitalist values as against feminist values as the contrast between "repressive productivity" and "creative receptivity," suggesting that "increased emancipation of feminine qualities in the established society" will subvert the dominant masculine values and the capitalist performance principle.
During the same decade, Marcuse also worked with Rudolf Bahro's conception of "surplus consciousness." He argued that just as Bahro claimed that in the socialist countries a new consciousness was developing which could see the discrepancy between "what is" and "what could be" and was not satisfied with its' way of life, so too was such oppositional consciousness developing in the advanced capitalist countries. "Surplus consciousness," in the Bahro-Marcuse conception, is a product of expanding education, scientific and technical development, and refinement of the forces of production and labor process. On this account, contemporary societies are producing a higher form of consciousness and create needs that cannot be satisfied in the labor process or everyday life, producing resentment and the potential for revolt. In effect, Bahro and Marcuse are arguing that critical consciousness is produced by the very social processes of the technological society and that this subjectivity comes into conflict with existing hierarchy, waste, repression, and domination, generating the need for social change. This position maintains that existing social processes themselves are helping produce a subjectivity that demands participation and fulfillment in the labor process and socio-political life, as well as increased freedom, equality, and opportunities for advancement and development. If these needs are not satisfied, Bahro and Marcuse suggest, rebellion and social transformation will be generated.
Curiously, precisely this process happened in the socialist world in which rebellion against irrational and repressive bureaucratic social forms led to an overthrow of what Bahro termed "actually existing socialism." The critiques of Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s in the increasingly hegemonic discourses of poststructuralism and postmodern theory among the radical intelligentsia, connected, I believe, with the collapse of "actually existing socialism," helped produce a rejection of Marxism, while defaming revolution as utopian and, in many cases, deconstructing concepts of oppositional subjectivity and politics. Such extreme versions of poststructuralism and postmodernism, however, vitiate the project of emancipation and social reconstruction and undermine efforts to develop oppositional politics and alternative conceptions of society, culture, and subjectivity -- alternatives found in the work of Herbert Marcuse who I believe continues to provide important resources for theory and politics in the contemporary era.
The postmodern/poststructuralist conception of subjectivity which stresses decentering, fragmentation, and flexibility reproduces aspects of the crisis of contemporary subjectivity overwhelmed by big corporations, new technologies, seductive media culture, and the complex and contradictory forces of globalization. Many postmodern critiques of traditional notions of the subject or subjectivity thus end with fragmentation, crisis, decentering, and dispersal, that they either cynically affirm without hope of reconstruction, or valorize positively as conditions of the possibility of more flexible subjects that can be in turn rejected, reconstructed, and recreated at one's will and whim. Another possibility, however, is to call for a reconstructive concept of subjectivity and agency in the face of theoretical critique and practical fragmentation and dissipation. This is the position of Marcuse and much of critical theory which begins by recognizing theoretical flaws in the modern concept of the (rational, unitary, ideal) subject, as well as the crisis of subjectivity in contemporary society.
Critical theory is dialectical, resisting both claims to the primacy of structure or agency, thus overcoming both determinism and idealism. Marcuse problematizes subjectivity and agency, recognizes the force of domination, and yet militates for liberation and transformation. Opposing mechanistic theories of history without agency and subjectivity, as well as idealist notions that see history as the development of humanity or subjectivity (i.e. the subject, spirituality, God, etc.), critical theory seeks to overcome unproductive dichotomies and to produce more sophisticated and transformative perspectives.
This problematization of subject and history discloses an intersection between critical theory and postmodern theory and significant differences between some of the versions. Both unveil the abstractness and mythological constitution of the subject; both reject a universal subject and the equation of the subject with metaphysical rationality. On the whole, critical theory is more reconstructive with theorists like Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, and Habermas offering quite different perspectives on the reconstruction of subjectivity and agency, while many postmodern theorists either revel in difference and heterogeneity (Lyotard), cynically reject any possibility of reconstruction and transformation (Baudrillard), or assume neutral and/or micrological perspectives that eschew ambitious theoretical or political reconstruction (followers of Foucault, Rorty in some moods, and postmodern camp followers who don't yet see its transformative potential); other postmodern theorists, however, urge reconstruction of subjectivity and agency … la feminism and critical theory, and thus present supplementary positive reconstructive positions to critical theory.
Hence, some versions of postmodern theory reproduce liberal reformism and pluralism in their emphasis on difference, reform, and rejection of broader perspectives of social transformation. There is also a tendency that fragmentary, aleatory, and nomadic postmodern subjectivity replicates the self-centered, competitive, yet interactive subjectivity of contemporary capitalism. Yet in view of the complex and contradictory development of contemporary capitalist culture and subjectivity, the sort of critical and oppositional perspectives offered by Marcuse are needed more than ever. As in Marcuse's day, the ambivalent unity of the positive and negative, of production and destruction, continues to operate in the global restructuring of capitalism with its technological revolution and seductions, growing discrepancies between the haves and the have nots, and increasingly power of forces of domination and destruction. Now, more much than ever, critical consciousness and oppositional subjectivity is needed to counter the forces of domination which appear more in the guise of the seductions of AOL and Time Warner, the machinations of Microsoft, and the global maneuvering of near-invisible forces like the WTO, IMF, and World Bank than in the boots and repression of Big Brother.
Some Concluding Comments
In retrospect, the critique of the subject launched by the Frankfurt School, feminism, poststructuralism, postmodern theory, and others have enriched our thinking on subjectivity by challenging us to rethink the problematics of the subject and agency, and have helped us think through and conceptualize various dimensions of experience and action neglected in traditional accounts, as well as to envisage alternative possibilities for thought, action, and everyday life. While traditional and modern conceptions of the subject were excessively rationalist, essentialist, idealist, and metaphysical, I have argued that the contemporary critiques of the subject provide the impetus and occasion to develop more critical and creative conceptions of post- metaphysical subjectivity.
But often discussions of the "crisis of the subject" conflate contemporary critique and rejection of the concept of a metaphysical unitary subject with the fragmentation, decline, or dispersal of subjectivity and agency under the sway of powerful social forces like the compulsion to work and consume, seduction of the media, or disciplinary agencies. I would argue that while critiques of problematic theoretical concepts of the subject are generally salutary, critical theory needs to respond reconstructively to evocations of decline of agency, the will to resist and struggle, and the eclipse of politics in the present era. Marcuse always attempted to ground his conception of radical subjectivity in existing struggles, movements, and tendencies. He was aware that oppositional subjectivity, and the movements and revolts in which it was grounded, were fragile, subject to dispersion and defeat, or absorption and cooptation. Moreover, Marcuse was aware of the contradictions of oppositional subjectivities and movements that on one hand reproduced tendencies of the existing capitalist societies, while opposing other aspects and seeking alternatives.
Hence, subjectivity for Marcuse, whether the dominated subject of advanced capitalism or oppositional subjectivity which he sought in first the New Left and counterculture and then new social movements, was historical, and was always full of contradictions and ambiguities. Marcuse was more aware than most in the Marxian tradition of the need for a robust theory of subjectivity to generate the subjective conditions for change and he was deeply interested in theory, culture, and social experience which would help create a new subjectivity. Hence, his attempts to reconstruct subjectivity are grounded in his political desire for radical social change and preservation of the individual.
In his sometimes tortured attempts to generate new perspectives on subjectivity, and an alternative society and politics, during his last decade of work in the 1970s, Marcuse privileged cultural revolution and the cultivation of a new sensibility as crucial catalysts for social change, as he (unsuccessfully) sought new social movements to embody his oppositional subjectivity and politics. While this work provides important theoretical impulses to rethink radical politics, subjectivity, and culture in the contemporary era, we must move beyond Marcuse in a new historical situation, drawing on the best resources of the most advanced critical theories of our time.
Hence, in conclusion, I would like to make some comments contrasting Habermasian perspectives on subjectivity with Marcusean ones to indicate the specific contributions and strengths, and limitations, of Marcuse's position. I have suggested that Marcuse offers a notion of a corporeal subjectivity with an emphasis on its aesthetic and erotic dimensions, while Habermas's communicative reason lacks a body, grounding in nature and materiality, and the aesthetic and erotic components. That is, while Habermas's conception of subjectivity contains a grounding in sociality and ego-alter relations, he does not offer a notion of aesthetic, erotic, and embodied and sensual subjectivity as in Marcuse's conception. There is also not as strong a critique of the tendencies toward conformity and normalization as in Marcuse's conception, nor is there as forceful a notion of transformation and emancipation. Nor does Habermas offer a notion of revolutionary subjectivity.
There are, on the other hand, problems with Marcuse's conceptions of subjectivity. I have downplayed the extent of Marcuse's dependence on questionable aspects of Freud's instinct theory because I believe that a Marcusean conception of subjectivity can be produced without dependence on Freud's conception of the political economy of the instincts, the death instinct, and the somewhat biologistic notion of Eros that Marcuse draws from Freud. Yet while Marcuse's focus on the corporeal, aesthetic, erotic, and political dimensions of subjectivity constitutes a positive legacy, there are omissions and deficiencies in his account. Crucially, he underemphasizes the ethical and arguably, concerning the political, does not adequately develop notions of justice and democracy. Since notions of ethical, just, and democratic subjectivity are not cultivated in Marcuse's writings, Habermas's analyses provide a necessary complement. Habermas's primary focus on the ego-alter relation and his subsequent treatises on morals and moral development, democracy and law, and the social obligations and constraints on subjectivity offer an important correction to Marcuse's analyses. Hence, both perspectives on subjectivity by themselves are one-sided and require supplementation by the other.
While I have been primarily concerned in this paper to interrogate Marcuse's resources for the rethinking and reconstruction of subjectivity, I would argue that no one thinker has the answer to the question and that we would thus be well advised to draw upon a wealth of thinkers to rehabilitate and reconstruct subjectivity in the contemporary moment. Within the Frankfurt School, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Habermas, Marcuse, and others make important contributions and outside of the tradition many feminist theorists, poststructuralists, and others also advance the project. Marcuse and other critical theorists provide many important contributions to our understanding of subjectivity and agency, while challenging us to further rethink the problematics of subjectivity in relation to the socio-economic developments and political struggles of our own turbulent period. In this way, the contemporary critiques of the subject challenge us to come up with better conceptions and to develop new resources for critical theory and practice.
References
R&R = Marcuse, Herbert: Reason and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941; reprinted Boston: Beacon Press, 1960).
E&C = Marcuse, Herbert: Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955; new edition, Routledge, 1997).
ODM = Marcuse, Herbert: One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964; second edition, 1991).
EL = Marcuse, Herbert: An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
CR&R = Marcuse, Herbert: Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
M&F = Marcuse, Herbert, "Marxism and Feminism," Women's Studies 2, 3 (Old Westbury, 1974): 279-288.
Written: in German in 1932; First Published: as Neue Quellen zur Grundlegung des Historischen Materialismus in Die Gesellschaft; Source:Studies in Critical Philosophy, Beacon Press, Boston, 1972; Transcribed: by Brian Reid; Proofed: and corrected by Chris Clayton.
The publication of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts written by Marx in 1844[1] must become a crucial event in the history of Marxist studies. These manuscripts could put the discussion about the origins and original meaning of historical materialism, and the entire theory of ‘scientific socialism’, on a new footing. They also make it possible to pose the question of the actual connections between Marx and Hegel in a more fruitful and promising way.
Not only does the fragmentary nature of the Manuscripts (substantial sections seem to have been lost and the analysis often breaks off at the crucial points; there are no final drafts ready for publication) necessitate a detailed interpretation constantly relating individual passages to the overall context, but the text also demands an exceptionally high level of technical knowledge on the part of the reader. For, if I may anticipate, we are dealing with a philosophical critique of political economy and its philosophical foundation as a theory of revolution.
It is necessary to place such strong emphasis on the difficulties involved right at the outset, in order to avert the danger that these manuscripts will once again be taken too lightly and hastily put into the usual compartments and schemata of Marx scholarship. This danger is all the greater because all the familiar categories of the subsequent critique of political economy are already found together in this work. But in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts the original meaning of the basic categories is clearer than ever before, and it could become necessary to revise the current interpretation of the later and more elaborate critique in the light of its origins. Perhaps this provisional review of the Manuscripts will sufficeto show the inadequacy of the familiar thesis that Marx developed from providing a philosophical to providing an economic basis for his theory.
We are dealing with a philosophical critique of political economy, for the basic categories of Marx’s theory here arise out of his emphatic confrontation with the philosophy of Hegel (e.g. labour, objectification, alienation, supersession, property). This does not mean that Hegel’s ‘method’ is transformed and taken over, put into a new context and brought to life. Rather, Marx goes back to the problems at the root of Hegel’s philosophy (which originally determined his method), independently appropriates their real content and thinks it through to a further stage. The great importance of the new manuscripts further lies in the fact that they contain the first documentary evidence that Marx concerned himself explicitly with Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind, ‘the true point of origin and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy’ (p. 173).
If Marx’s discussion of the basic problems of Hegel’s philosophy informed the foundation of his theory it can no longer be said that this foundation simply underwent a transformation from a philosophical to an economic basis and that in its subsequent (economic) form philosophy had been overcome and ‘finished’ once and for all. Perhaps the foundation includes the philosophical basis in all its stages. This is not invalidated by the fact that its sense and purpose are not at all philosophical but practical and revolutionary: the overthrow of the capitalist system through the economic and political struggle of the proletariat. What must be seen and understood is that economics and politics have become the economic-political basis of the theory of revolution through a quite particular, philosophical interpretation of human existence and historical realization. The very complicated relationship between philosophical and economic theory and between this theory and revolutionary praxis, which can only be clarified by an analysis of the whole situation in which historical materialism developed, may become clear after a full interpretation of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. I only want to introduce this process in my paper. A rough formula which could be used as a starting point would be that the revolutionary critique of political economy itself philosophy a philosophical foundation, just as, conversely, the philosophy underlying it already contains revolutionary praxis. The theory is in itself a practical one; praxis does not only come at the end but is already present in the beginning of the theory. To engage in praxis is not to tread on alien ground, external to the theory.
With these introductory remarks we can proceed to describe the overall content of the Manuscripts. Marx himself describes their purpose as the critique of political economy – a ‘positive’ critique, and thus one which, by revealing the mistakes of political economy and its inadequacy for the subject, also provides it with a basis to make it adequate for its task. The positive critique of political economy is thus a critical foundation of political economy. Within this critique the idea of political economy is completely transformed: it becomes the science of the necessary conditions for the communist revolution. This revolution itself signifies – quite apart from economic upheavals – a revolution in the whole history of man and the definition of his being: ‘This communism...is the genuine resolution of the conflict, between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution’ (p. 135).
If political economy can gain such central importance it is clear that, from a critical point of view, it must be treated from the outset as more than just another science or specialized scientific field. Instead it must be seen as the scientific expression of a problematic which involves the whole being of man. Thus we must begin by considering more closely what sort of political economy is here subject to criticism.
Political economy is criticized as the scientific justification or concealment of the total ‘estrangement’ and ‘devaluation’ of human reality represented in capitalist society – as a science which treats man as ‘something unessential’ (p. 130) whose whole existence is determined by the ‘separation of labour, capital and land’, and by an inhuman division of labour, by competition, by private property, etc. (p. 106). This kind of political economy scientifically sanctions the perversion of the historical-social world of man into an alien world of money and commodities; a world which confronts him as a hostile power and in which the greater part of humanity ceases to be anything more than ‘abstract’ workers (torn away from the reality of human existence), separated from the object of their work and forced to sell themselves as a commodity.
As a result of this ‘alienation’ of the worker and of labour, the realization of all man’s ‘essential powers’ becomes the loss of their reality; the objective world is no longer ‘truly human property’ appropriated in ‘free activity’ as the sphere of the free operation and self-confirmation of the whole of human nature. It is instead a world of objects in private possession which can be owned, used or exchanged and whose seemingly unalterable laws even man must obey – in short, the universal ‘domination of dead matter over mankind’ (p. 102).
This whole situation has often been described under the headings of ‘alienation’, ‘estrangement’ and ‘reification’ and is a widely known element of Marxist theory. The important point is, however, to see how and from what angle Marx interprets it here at the starting-point of his theory.
At the beginning of his positive critique of political economy, at the point where he takes up the matter of alienation and estrangement, Marx states: ‘We proceed from an economic fact of the present’ (p. 107). But are alienation and estrangement ‘economic facts’ like, for example, ground rent or the price of commodities in its dependence on supply and demand or any other ‘law’ of the process of production, consumption and circulation?
Bourgeois political economy, as criticized here, does not regard alienation and estrangement as such as a fact (the circumstances to which these words refer are covered in the bourgeois theory under quite different headings); for socialist political economy this fact will only ‘exist’ if and in so far as the theory is placed on the foundation which Marx worked out in the context of the studies we are discussing. We must therefore ask what sort of fact this is (since it is essentially different from all other facts in political economy), and on what basis it becomes visible and can be described as such.
The description of the circumstance of alienation and estrangement seems initially to proceed completely on the ground of traditional political economy and its theorems. Marx significantly starts by dividing his investigation into the three traditional concepts of political economy: ‘The Wages of Labour’, ‘The Profit of Capital’ and ‘The Rent of Land’. But more important, and a sign pointing in a completely new direction, is the fact that this division into three is soon exploded and abandoned: ‘From page xxii to the end of the manuscript Marx wrote across the three columns, disregarding the headings. The text of these six pages (xxii-xxvii) is given in the present book under the title, “Estranged Labour“ (publisher’s note, p. 6).
The development of the concept of labour thus breaks through the traditional framework for dealing with problems; the discussion continues with this concept and discovers the new ‘fact’ which then becomes the basis for the science of the communist revolution. Our interpretation must therefore set out from Marx’s concept of labour.
When Marx depicts the manner of labour and the form of existence of the worker in capitalist society – complete separation from the means of production and from the product of his labour which has become a commodity, the balancing of wages around the minimum for mere physical survival, the severance of the worker’s labour (performed as ‘forced labour’ in the capitalist’s service) from his ‘human reality’ – all these features can in themselves still denote simple economic facts. This impression seems to be confirmed by the fact that Marx, ‘by analysis from the concept of alienated labour’, reaches the concept of ‘private property (p.117)and thus the basic concept of traditional political economy.
But if we look more closely at the description of alienated labour we make a remarkable discovery: what is here described is not merely an economic matter. It is the alienation of man, the devaluation of life, the perversion and loss of human reality. In the relevant passage Marx identifies it as follows: ‘the concept of alienated labour, i.e. of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged life, of estranged man’ (p. 117).
It is thus a matter of man as man (and not just as worker, economic subject and the like), and of a process not only in economic history but in the history of man and his reality. In the same sense he writes about private property: ‘Just as private property is only the sensuous expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object,...so the positive abolition of private property [is] the sensuous appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life’ (pp. 138ff.).
It is not because Marx is limited by a particular kind of philosophical terminology that he so often speaks here of ‘human essential powers’ and ‘man’s essential being’, or, for example, that he calls ‘the established objective existence of industry...the open book of man’s essential powers’ or wants to grasp its ‘connection with man’s essential being’ (p. 142) and, in the places quoted above, uses a philosophical framework to describe labour and private property. His interpretation rather attempts to make it clear that the whole critique and foundation of political economy grew explicitly on a philosophical basis and out of a philosophical dispute, and that the philosophical concepts used cannot be regarded as remnants which were later discarded or as a disguise which we can strip off. As the result of an idea about the essence of man and its realization, evolved by Marx in his dispute with Hegel, a simple economic fact appears as the perversion of the human essence and the loss of human reality. It is only on this foundation that an economic fact is capable of becoming the real basis of a revolution which will genuinely transform the essence of man and his world.
What we are trying to show is this: from the outset the basic concepts of the critique – alienated labour and private property – are not simply taken up and criticized as economic concepts, but as concepts for a crucial process in human history; consequently the ‘positive abolition’ of private property by the true appropriation of human reality will revolutionize the entire history of mankind. Bourgeois political economy has to be basically transformed in the critique for this very reason: it never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a ‘science of people’ but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities. ‘Crude and thoughtless communism’ (p. 133) is just as sharply criticized for the same reason: it too does not centre on the reality of the human essence but operates in the world of things and objects and thus itself remains in a state of ‘estrangement’. This type of communism only replaces individual private property by ‘universal private property’ (p. 132); ‘it wants to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by all as private property. It wants to do away by force with talent, etc. For it, the sole purpose of life and existence is direct, physical possession. The task of the labourer is not done away with, but extended to all men’ (pp. 133ff.).
The objections to the absolute economism of Marxist theory, which have been thoughtlessly raised time and again right up to the present day, were already raised here by Marx himself against the crude communism which he opposed: for him the latter is merely the simple ‘negation’ of capitalism and as such exists on the same level as capitalism – but it is precisely that level which Marx wants to abolish.
Before starting our interpretation we need to avert another possible misunderstanding. If Marx’s critique of political economy and his foundation of revolutionary theory are here dealt with as philosophy this does not mean that thereby ‘only theoretical’ philosophical matters will be included, which minimize the concrete historical situation (of the proletariat in capitalism) and its praxis. The starting point, the basis and the goal of this investigation is precisely the particular historical situation and the praxis which is revolutionizing it. Regarding the situation and praxis from the aspect of the history of man’s essence makes the acutely practical nature of the critique even more trenchant and sharp: the fact that capitalist society calls into question not only economic facts and objects but the entire ‘existence’ of man and ‘human reality’ is for Marx the decisive justification for the proletarian revolution as a total and radical revolution, unconditionally excluding any partial upheaval or ‘evolution’. The justification does not lie outside or behind the concepts of alienation and estrangement – it is precisely this alienation and estrangement itself. All attempts to dismiss the philosophical content of Marx’s theory or to gloss over it in embarrassment reveal a complete failure to recognize the historical origin of the theory: they set out from an essential separation of philosophy, economics and revolutionary praxis, which is a product of the reification against which Marx fought and which he had already overcome at the beginning of his critique.
I
In capitalist society labour not only produces commodities (i.e. goods which can be freely sold on the market), but also produces ‘itself and the worker as a commodity’, the worker becoming ‘an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates’ (pp. 107ff.). The worker not only loses the product of his own labour and creates alien objects for alien people; he is not only ‘depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine’ through the increasing division and mechanization of labour, so that ‘from being a man [he] becomes an abstract activity and a belly’ (p. 68) – but he even has to ‘sell himself and his human identity’ (p. 70), i.e. he must himself become a commodity in order to exist as a physical subject. So instead of being an expression of the whole man, labour is his alienation; instead of being the full and free realization of man it has become a ‘loss of realization’. ‘So much does labour’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death’ (p. 108).
It should be noted that even in this depiction of the ‘economic fact’ of alienated labour the simple economic description is constantly broken through: the economic ‘condition’ of labour is cast back onto the ‘existence’ of the working man (p. 67); beyond the sphere of economic relations the alienation and estrangement of labour concern the essence and reality of man as ‘man’ and only for this reason can the loss of the object of labour acquire such central significance. Marx makes this quite clear when he states that the ‘fact’ he has just described is the ‘expression’ of a more general state of affairs: ‘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 embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour’ (p. 108), and when he says: ‘All these consequences’ (of the capitalist economic system) ‘result from the fact that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object’ (ibid.). The economic fact of estrangement and reification[2] is thus grounded in a particular attitude by man (as a worker) towards the object (of his labour). ‘Alienated labour’ must now be understood in the sense of this kind of relation of man to the object, and no longer as a purely economic condition. ‘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 on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien’ (pp. 108ff.). And it will further be shown that the economic fact of ‘private property’ too is grounded in the situation of alienated labour, understood as the activity of man: ‘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’ (p.117).
An amazing, idealistic distortion of the actual facts seems to have taken place here: an economic fact is supposed to have its roots in a general concept and in the relation of man to the object. ‘Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labour’ (ibid.) – this is Marx, not Hegel, writing! The apparent distortion expresses one of the crucial discoveries of Marx’s theory: the breakthrough from economic fact to human factors, from fact (Tat’sache’) to act (Tat’handlung’), and the comprehension of fixed ‘situations’ and their laws (which in their reified form are out of man’s power) in motion, in the course of their historical development (out of which they have fallen and become fixed). (Cf. the programmatic introduction of the new approach to the problem on pp. 118-19). We cannot go into the revolutionary significance of this method here; we shall continue to pursue the line of approach outlined at the beginning.
If the concept of alienated labour includes the relation of man to the object (and, as we shall see, himself) then the concept of labour as such must also cover a human activity (and not an economic condition). And if the alienation of labour signifies the total loss of realization and the estrangement of the human essence then labour itself must be grasped as the real expression and realization of the human essence. But that means once again that it is used as a philosophical category. Despite the above development of the subject we would be loth to use the often misused term ontology in connection with Marx’s theory, if Marx himself had not expressly used it here: thus he says that only ‘through the medium of private property does the ontological essence of human passion come into being, in its totality as in its humanity’,[3] and he suggests that ‘man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological phenomena ... but truly ontological affirmations of being (of nature)’ (ibid.).[4]
Marx’s positive definitions of labour are almost all given as counter-concepts to the definition of alienated labour, and yet the ontological nature of this concept is clearly expressed in them. We shall extract three of the most important formulations: ‘Labour is man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man’ (p. 177), it is ‘man’s act of self-creation or self-objectification’ (p. 188), ‘life-activity, productive life itself’ (p. 113). All three of these formulations, even if they did not occur within the context of Marx’s explicit examination of Hegel , wouldstillpoint to Hegel’s ontological concept of labour.[5] The basic concept of Marx’s critique, the concept of alienated labour, does infact arise from his examination of Hegel’s category of objectification, a category developed for the first time in the Phenomenology of Mind around the concept of labour.[6]The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts are direct evidence of the fact that Marx’s theory has its roots in the centre of Hegel’s philosophical problematic.
We can deduce the following from these definitions of labour: labour is ‘man’s act of self-creation’, i.e. the activity through and in which man really first becomes what he is by his nature as man. He does this in such a way that this becoming and being are there for himself;sothat he can know and ‘regard’ himself as what he is (man’s ‘becoming-for-himself’). Labour is a knowing and conscious activity: in his labour man relates to himself and to the object of labour; he is not directly one with his labour but can, as it were, confront it and oppose it (through which, as we shall human labour fundamentally distinguishes itself as ‘universal’ and ‘free’ production from the ‘unmediated’ production of, for example, the nest-building animal). The fact that man in his labour is there ‘for himself’ in objective form is closely related to the second point: man is an ‘objective’ or, more exactly, an ‘objectifying’ being. Man can only realize his essence if he realizes it as something objective, by using his ‘essential powers’ to produce an ‘external’, ‘material’, objective world. It is in his work in this world (in the broadest sense) that he is real and effective. ‘In creating a world of objects by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being. . .’ (p. 113). In this activity man shows himself as the human being he is according to his ‘species’ as distinct from animal, vegetable and inorganic being (we will examine the central concept of objectification at a later stage below). Labour, understood in this way, is the specifically human ‘affirmation of being’ in which human existence is realized and confirmed.
Thus even the most provisional and general characterization of Marx’s concept of labour has led far beyond the economic sphere into a dimension in which the subject of the investigation is human existence in its totality. The interpretation cannot progress any further before this dimension has been described. We must first answer the question of how and from what starting-point Marx defines man’s existence and essence. The answer to this question is a prerequisite for understanding what is really meant by the concept of estranged labour and for understanding the whole foundation of revolutionary theory.
II
There are two passages in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in which Marx gives an explicit definition of man, encompassing the totality of human existence: on pages 112-14 and 179-83. Even if they are only a sketchy outline, these passages give a clear enough indication of the real basis of Marx’s critique. On several occasions (pp. 135, 137, 181) Marx describes ‘positive Communism’, which will achieve the abolition of estrangement and reification, as ‘humanism’ – a terminological hint that for him the basis is a particular kind of realization of the human essence. The development of this humanism, as far as it is a positive definition of the human essence, is here primarily influenced by Feuerbach: as early as in the preface we read: ‘positive criticism as a whole – and therefore also German positive criticism of political economy – owes its true foundation to the discoveries of Feuerbach’ (p. 236, note 3), and ‘it is only with Feuerbach that positive, humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins’ (p. 64). Later the ‘establishment of true materialism and of real science’ is described as Feuerbach’s ‘great achievement’ (p. 172). In our interpretation, however, we shall not follow the road of philosophical history and trace the development of ‘humanism’ from Hegel through Feuerbach to Marx, but attempt to unfold the problem from Marx’s text itself.
‘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 – also because he treats himself as the actual, living, species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being’ (p. 112). The definition of man as a ‘species being’ has done a lot of damage in Marx-scholarship; our passage is so valuable because it exposes the real origins of Marx’s concept of ‘species’. Man is a ‘species being’, i.e. a being which has the ‘species’ (his own and that of the rest of existence) as its object. The species of a being is that which this being is according to its ‘stock’ and ‘origin’; it is the ‘principle’ of its being that is common to all the particular features of what it is: the general essence of this being. If man can make the species of every being into his object, the general essence of every being can become objective for him: he can possess every being as that which it is in its essence. It is for this reason (and this is expressed in the second half of the sentence quoted) that he can relate freely to every being: he is not limited to the particular actual state of the being and his immediate relationship to it, but he can take the being as it is in its essence beyond its immediate, particular, actual state; he can recognize and grasp the possibilities contained in every being; he can exploit, alter, mould, treat and take further (‘pro-duce’) any being according to its ‘inherent standard’ (p. 114). Labour, as the specifically human ‘life activity’, has its roots in man’s nature as a ‘species being’; it presupposes man’s ability to relate to the ‘general’ aspect of objects and to the possibilities contained in it. Specifically human freedom has its roots in man’s ability to relate to his own species: the self-realization and ‘self-creation’ of man. The relationship of man as a species being to his objects is then more closely defined by means of the concept of free labour (free productions).
Man as a species being is a ‘universal’ being: every being can for him become objective in its ‘species character’; his existence is a universal relationship to objectivity. He has to include these ‘theoretically’ objective things in his praxis; he must make them the object of his ‘life activity’ and work on them. The whole of ‘nature’ is the medium of his human life; it is man’s means of life; it is his prerequisite, which he must take up and reintroduce into his praxis. Man cannot simply accept the objective world or merely come to terms with it; he must appropriate it; he has to transform the objects of this world into organs of his life, which becomes effective in and through them. ‘The universality of man appears in practice 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’ (p. 112).
The thesis of nature as a means for man implies more than merely that man is dependent simply for his physical survival on objective, organic and inorganic nature as a means of life, or that under the direct pressure of his ‘needs’ he ‘produces’ (appropriates, treats, prepares, etc.) the objective world as objects for food, clothing, accommodation, etc. Marx here explicitly speaks of ‘spiritual, inorganic nature’, ‘spiritual nourishment’ and ‘man’s physical and spiritual life’ (p. 112). This is why the universality of man – as distinct from the essentially limited nature of animals – is freedom, for an animal ‘produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need’ while man ‘only truly produces in freedom there from’ (p. 113). An animal thus only produces itself and ‘what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally’ (ibid.). Man does not have objects merely as the environment of his immediate life activity and does not treat them merely as objects of his immediate needs. He can ‘confront’ any object and exhaust and realize its inner possibilities in his labour. He can produce ‘in accordance with the laws of beauty’ and not merely in accordance with the standard of his own needs (p. 114). In this freedom man reproduces ‘the whole of nature’, and through transformation and appropriation furthers it, along with his own life, even when this production does not satisfy an immediate need. Thus the history of human life is at the same time essentially the history of man’s objective world and of ‘the whole of nature’ (‘nature’ in the wider sense given to this concept by Marx, as also by Hegel). [7] Man is not in nature; nature is not the external world into which he first has to come out of his own inwardness. Man is nature. Nature is his ‘expression’, ‘his work and his reality’ (p. 114). Wherever we come across nature in human history it is ‘human nature’ while man for his part is always ‘human nature’ too. We can thus see provisionally to what extent consistent ‘humanism’ is immediately ‘naturalism’ (pp. 135, 181).
On the basis of the unity thus achieved between man and nature Marx moves towards the crucial definition of objectification, through which the specifically human relationship to objectivity, the human way of producing, is more concretely determined as universality and freedom. Objectification – the definition of man as an ‘objective being’ – is not simply a further point appended to the definition of the unity of man and nature, but is the closer and deeper foundation of this unity. (Objectification as such belongs – like his participation in nature – to the essence of man, and can thus not be ‘superseded’; according to revolutionary theory only a particular form of objectification – reification, ‘estrangement’ – can and must be superseded.)
As a natural being man is an ‘objective being’, which for Marx is a ‘being equipped and endowed with objective (i.e. material) essential powers’ (p. 180), a being who relates to real objects, ‘acts objectively’, and ‘can only express hislife in real, sensuous objects’ (pp. 181ff.). Because the power of his being thus consists in living out (i.e. through and in external objects) everything he is, his ‘self-realization’ at the same time means ‘the establishment of a real, objective world, which is overpowering because it has a form external to him and is thus not part of his being’ (p. 180). The objective world, as the necessary objectivity of man, through the appropriation and supersession of which his human essence is first ‘produced’ and ‘confirmed’, is part of man himself. It is real objectivity only for self-realizing man, it is the ‘self-objectification’ of man, or human objectification. But this same objective world, since it is real objectivity, can appear as a precondition of his being which does not belong to his being, is beyond his control, and is ‘overpowering’. This conflict in the human essence – that it is in itself objective – is the root of the fact that objectification can become reification and that externalization can become alienation. It makes it possible for man completely to ‘lose’ the object as part of his essence and let it become independent and overpowering. This possibility becomes a reality in estranged labour and private property.
Marx then attempts to implant objectification and the conflict appearing within it even more deeply into the definition of man. ‘An objective being...would not act objectively if the quality of objectivity did not reside in the very nature of his being. He creates, posits objects alone, because he is posited by objects – because at bottom he is nature’ (p. 180). The quality of being posited by objects is, however, the fundamental determinant of ‘sensuousness’ (to have senses, which are affected by objects) and thus Marx can identify objective being with sensuous being, and the quality of having objects outside oneself with the quality of being sensuous: ‘To be sensuous, i.e. real, is to be an object of the senses, a sensuous object, and therefore to have objects outsideoneself which are subject to the operations of one’s senses’, and this passage: ‘To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneselfto be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing’ (p. 181). (The second identification also included here will be discussed below.) Thereby ‘sensuousness’ for Marx moves into the centre of his philosophical foundation: ‘Sensuousness (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science’ (p. 143).
It is already clear from the above deduction that ‘sensuousness’ is here an ontological concept within the definition of man’s essence and that it comes before any materialism or sensualism. The concept of sensuousness here taken up by Marx (via Feuerbachand Hegel) goes back to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. There it is said that sensuousness is the human perception through which alone objects are given to us. Objects can only be given to man in so far as they ‘affect’ to him. Human sensuousness is affectibility. [8] Human perception as sensuousness is receptive and passive. It receives what it is given, and it is dependent on and needs this quality of being given. To the extent to which man is characterized by sensuousness he is ‘posited’ by objects, and he accepts these prerequisites through cognition. As a sensuous being he is an affixed, passive and suffering being.
In Feuerbach, to whom Marx explicitly refers in the passage quoted, the concept of sensuousness originally tends in the same direction as in Kant. In fact when Feuerbach, in opposition to Hegel, wants to put the receptivity of the senses back at the starting-point of philosophy, he initially almost appears as the preserver and defender of Kantian criticism against ‘absolute idealism’. ‘Existence is something in which not only I, but also the others, and especially the object, participate.’ [9] ‘Only through the senses does an object in the true sense become given – not through thinking for itself’; ‘an object is given not to my Ego but to my non-Ego, for only where I am passive does the conception of an activity existing outside me, i.e. objectivity, come into being’ (ibid., pp. 321ff.). This accepting, passive being with needs, dependent on given things, which finds its expression in man’s sensuousness, is developed by Feuerbach into the ‘passive principle’ (ibid., pp. 257ff) and placed at the apex of his philosophy – although he goes in a direction quite different from that of Kant. The definition of man as purely a passive being ‘with needs’ is the original basis for Feuerbach’s attack on Hegel and his idea of man as a purely free, creative consciousness: ‘only a passive being is a necessary being. Existence without needs is superfluous existence . . . A being without distress is a being without ground...A non-passive being is a being without being. A being without suffering is nothing other than a being without sensuousness and matter’ (ibid., pp. 256f).
The same tendency to go back to sensuousness is now also discernible in Marx – a tendency to comprehend man’s being defined by needs and his dependence on pre-established objectivity by means of the sensuousness in his own being. This tendency in turn is subject to the aim of achieving a real, concrete picture of man as an objective and natural being, united with the world, as opposed to Hegel’s abstract ‘being’, freed from pre-established ‘naturalness’, which posits both itself and all objectivity. In line with Feuerbach, Marx says: ‘as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being [man] is a passive, conditioned and limited creature’ (p.181) and: ‘To be sensuous is to be passive. Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a passive being – and because he feels what he suffers, a passionate being’ (p. 182). Man’s passion, his real activity and spontaneity is ascribed to his passivity and neediness, in so far as it is an aspiration to a pre-established object existing outside him: ‘Passion is the essential force of man energetically bent on its object’ (p. 62). [10] And: ‘The rich man is simultaneously the man in need of a totality of human manifestations of life – the man in whom his own realization exists as an inner necessity, as need’ (p. 144).
We can now understand why Marx emphasizes that ‘man’s feelings, passions, etc....are truly ontological affirmations of being of [nature]’ (p. 165). The distress and neediness which appear in man’s sensuousness are no more purely matters of cognition than his distress and neediness, as expressed in estranged labour, are purely economic. Distress and neediness here do not describe individual modes of man’s behaviour at all; they are features of his whole existence. They are ontological categories (we shall therefore return to them in connection with a large number of different themes in these Manuscripts).
It was necessary to give such an extensive interpretation of the concept of sensuousness in order to point once again to its real meaning in opposition to its many misinterpretations as the basis of materialism. In developing this concept Marx and Feuerbach were in fact coming to grips with one of the crucial problems of ‘classical German philosophy’. But in Marx it is this concept of sensuousness (as objectification) which leads to the decisive turn from classical German philosophy to the theory of revolution, for he inserts the basic traits of practical and social existence into his definition of man’s essential being. As objectivity, man’s sensuousness is essentially practical objectification, and because it is practical it is essentially a social objectification.
III
We know from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach that it is precisely the concept of human praxis that draws the line of demarcation between himself and Feuerbach. On the other hand, it is through this (or more exactly, through the concept of labour) that he reaches back beyond Feuerbach to Hegel: ‘The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology and of its final outcome...is thus... that Hegel...grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour’ (p. 177). Things are thus not as simple as we would expect; the road from Feuerbach to Marx is not characterized by a straight rejection of Hegel. Instead of this, Marx, at the origins of revolutionary theory, once again appropriates the decisive achievements of Hegel on a transformed basis.
We saw that man’s sensuousness signified that he is posited by pre-established objects and therefore also that he has a given, objective world, to which he relates ‘universally’ and ‘freely’. We must now describe more closely the way in which he possesses and relates to the world.
In Feuerbach man’s possession of, and relation to, the world remains essentially theoretical, and this is expressed in the fact that the way of relating, which really permits ‘possession’ of reality, is ‘perception.’ [11] In Marx, to put it briefly, labour replaces this perception, although the central importance of the theoretical relation does not disappear: it is combined with labour in a relationship of dialectical interpenetration. We have already suggested above that Marx grasps labour, beyond all its economic significance, as the human ‘life-activity’ and the genuine realization of man. We must now present the concept of labour in its inner connection to the definition of man as a ‘natural’ and ‘sensuous’ (objective) being. We shall see how it is in labour that the distress and neediness, but also the universality and freedom of man, become real.
‘Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers of life – he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities – as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature.... That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs – essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers’ (p. 181). Objects are thus not primarily objects of perception, but of needs, and as such objects of the powers, abilities and instincts of man. It has already been pointed out that ‘creed’ is not to be understood only in the sense of physical neediness: man needs ‘a totality of human manifestations of life’ (p. 144). To be able to realize himself he needs to express himself through the pre-established objects with which he is confronted. His activity and his self-affirmation consist in the appropriation of the ‘externality’ which confronts him, and in the transference of himself into that externality. In his labour man supersedes the mere objectivity of objects and makes them into ‘the means of life’. He impresses upon them the form of his being, and makes them into ‘his work and his reality’. The objective piece of finished work is the reality of man; man is as he has realized himself in the objectof his labour. For this reason Marx can say that in the object of his labour man sees himself in objective form, he becomes ‘for himself’, he perceives himself as an object. ‘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’ (p. 114).
Objectification of the ‘species life’: for it is not the isolated individual who is active in labour, and the objectivity of labour is not objectivity for the isolated individual or a mere plurality of individuals – rather it is precisely in labour that the specifically human universality is realized.
Thus we can already discern the second basic characteristic of objectification: it is essentially a ‘social’ activity, and objectifying man is basically ‘social’ man. The sphere of objects in which labour is performed is precisely the sphere of common life-activity: inand through the objects of labour, men are shown one another in their reality. The original forms of communication, the essential relationship of men to one another, were expressed in the common use, possession, desire, need and enjoyment, etc. of the objective world. All labour is labour with and for and against others, so that in it men first mutually reveal themselves for what they really are. [12] Thus every object on which a man works in his individuality is ‘simultaneously his own existence for the other man, the existence of the other man, and that existence for him’ (p. 136).
If the objective world is thus understood in its totality as a ‘social’ world, as the objective reality of human society and thus as human objectification, then through this it is also already defined as a historical reality. The objective world which is in any given situation pre-established for man is the reality of a past human life, which, although it belongs to the past, is still present in the form it has given to the objective world. A new form of the objective world can thus only come into being on the basis, and through the supersession of an earlier form already in existence. The real human and his world arise first in this movement, which inserts the relevant aspect of the past into the present: ‘History is the true natural history of man’, his ‘act of origin’ (p. 182), ‘the creation of man through human labour’ (p. 145). Not only man emerges in history, but also nature, in so far as it is not something external to and separated from the human essence but belongs to the transcended and appropriated objectivity of man: ‘world history’ is ‘the emergence of nature for man’ (ibid.).
It is only now, after the totality of the human essence as the unity of man and nature has been made concrete by the practical social-historical process of objectification, that we can understand the definition of man as a ‘universal’ and ‘free’ species being. The history of man is at the same time the process of ‘the whole of nature’; his history is the ‘production and reproduction’ of the whole of nature, furtherance of what exists objectively through once again transcending its current form. In his ‘universal’ relationship [13] to the whole of nature, therefore, nature is ultimately not a limitation on or something alien outside him to which he, as something other, is subjected. It is his expression, confirmation, activity: ‘externality is...the self-externalizing world of sense open to the light, open to the man endowed with senses’ (p. 192).
We now want to summarize briefly the definitions brought together in the concept of man as a universal and free being. Man ‘relates’ to himself and whatever exists, he can transcend what is given and pre-established, appropriate it and thus give it his own reality and realize himself in everything. This freedom does not contradict the distress and neediness of man, of which we spoke at the beginning, but is based upon it in so far as it is freedom only as the transcendence of what is given and pre-established. Man’s ‘life-activity’ is ‘not a determination with which he directly merges’ like an animal (p. 113), it is ‘free activity’, since man can ‘distinguish’ himself from the immediate determination of his existence, ‘make it into an object’ and transcend it. He can turn his existence into a ‘means’ (ibid.), can himself give himself reality and himself ‘produce’ himself and his ‘objectivity’. It is in this deeper sense (and not only biologically) that we must understand the sentence that ‘man produces man’ (pp. 136, 137) and that human life is genuinely ‘productive’ and ‘life-engendering life’ (p. 113).
Thereby Marx’s definition returns to its starting-point: the basic concept of ‘labour’. It is now clear to what extent it was right to deal with labour as an ontological category. As far as man, through the creation, treatment and appropriation of the objective world, gives himself his own reality, and as far as his ‘relationship to the object’ is the ‘manifestation of human reality’ (p. 139), labour is the real expression of human freedom. Man becomes free in his labour. He freely realizes himself in the object of his labour: ‘when, for man in society, the objective world everywhere becomes the world of man’s essential powers – human reality, and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers – ... all objects become for him the objectification of himself become objects which confirm and realize his individuality, become his objects: that is, man himself becomes the object’ (p. 140).
IV
In the preceding sections we have attempted to present in its context the definition of man underlying the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and to reveal it as the basis of the critique of political economy. It almost appears, despite all protestations to the contrary, as if we are moving in the field of philosophical investigations, forgetting that these Manuscripts are concerned with the foundation of a theory of revolution and hence ultimately with revolutionary praxis. But we only need to put the result of our interpretation next to its starting point to find that we have reached the point where the philosophical critique in itself directly becomes a practical revolutionary critique.
The fact from which the critique and the interpretation set out was the alienation and estrangement of the human essence as expressed in the alienation and estrangement of labour, and hence the situation of man in the historical facticity of capitalism. This fact appears as the total perversion and concealment of what the critique had defined as the essence of man and human labour. Labour is not ‘free activity’ or the universal and free self-realization of man, but his enslavement and loss of reality. The worker is not man in the totality of his life-expression, but a non-person, the purely physical subject of ‘abstract’ activity. The objects of labour are not expressions and confirmations of the human reality of the worker, but alien things, belonging to someone other than the worker – ‘commodities’. Through all this the existence of man does not become, in estranged labour, the ‘means’ for his self-realization. The reverse happens: man’s self becomes a means for his mere existence. The pure physical existence of the worker is the goal which his entire life-activity serves. ‘As a result, therefore, man [the worker] only feels himself freely active in 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’ (p. 111).
We have seen that Marx describes this estrangement and loss of reality as the ‘expression’ of a total perversion of the behaviour of man as man: in his relationship to the product of his labour as an ‘alien object exercising power over him’ and simultaneously in the relationship of the worker to his own activity as ‘an alien activity not belonging to him’ (ibid.). This reification is by no means limited to the worker (even though it affects him in a unique way); it also affects the non-worker – the capitalist. The ‘dominion of dead matter over man’ reveals itself for the capitalist in the state of private property and the manner in which he has and possesses it. It is really a state of being possessed, of being had, slavery in the service of property. He possesses his property not as a field of free self-realization and activity but purely as capital: ‘Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., in short, when it is used by us...the life which they [realizations of possession] serve as means is the life of private property, labour, and conversion into capital’ (p. 139). (We shall return to thedefinition of ‘true possession’ underlying this description of ‘false property’ below.)
If historical facticity thus reveals the total perversion of all the conditions given in the definition of the human essence, does it not prove that this definition lacks content and sense, and that it is only an idealistic abstraction, which does violence to historical reality? We know the cruel derision with which, in his German Ideology, which appeared only a year after these Manuscripts, Marx destroyed the idle talk of the Hegelians, such people as Stirner and the ‘true socialists’, about the essence, the man, etc. Did Marx himself, in his definition of the human essence, give in to this idle chatter? Or does a radical change take place in Marx’s fundamental views between our Manuscripts and the German Ideology?
There is indeed a change, even if it is not in his fundamental views. It must be emphasized again and again that in laying the foundations of revolutionary theory Marx is fighting on various fronts:onthe one hand against the pseudo-idealism of the Hegelian school, on the other against reification in bourgeois political economy, and then again against Feuerbach and pseudo-materialism. The meaning and the purpose of his fight thus varies according to the direction of his attack and defence. Here, where he is principally fighting reification in political economy, which turns a particular kind of historical facticity into rigid ‘eternal’ laws and so-called ‘essential relationships’, Marx presents this facticity in contrast to the real essence of man. But in doing this he brings out its truth, because he grasps it within the context of the real history of man and reveals the necessity of its being overcome.
These changes, then, result from shifts in the terrain of the conflict. But the following point is still more decisive. To play off essence (the determinants of ‘the’ man) and facticity (his given concrete historical situation) against each other is to miss completely the new standpoint which Marx had already assumed at the outset of his investigations. For Marx essence and facticity, the situation of essential history and the situation of factual history, are no longer separate regions or levels independent of each other the historical experience of man is taken up into the definition of his essence. We are no longer dealing with an abstract human essence, which remains equally valid at every stage of concrete history, but with an essence which can be defined in history and only in history. (It is therefore quite a different matter when Marx speaks of the ‘essence of man’, as opposed to Bruno Bauer, Stirner and Feuerbach!) [14] The fact that despite or precisely because of this it is always man himself that matters in all man’s historical praxis is so self-evident that it is not worth discussing for Marx, who grew up in a direct relationship with the most lively period of German philosophy (just as the opposite seems to have become self-evident for the epigones of Marxism). Even in Marx’s extremely bitter struggle with German philosophy in the period of its decline, a philosophical impetus lives on which only complete naïveté could misconstrue as a desire to destroy philosophy altogether.
The discovery of the historical character of the human essence does not mean that the history of man’s essence can be identified with his factual history. We have already heard that man is never directly ‘one with his life-activity’; he is, rather, ‘distinct’ from it and ‘relates’ to it. Essence and existence separate in him: his existence is a ‘means’ to the realization of his essence, or – in estrangement – his essence is a means to his mere physical existence (p. 113). If essence and existence have thus become separated and if the real and free task of human praxis is the unification of both as factual realization, then the authentic task, when facticity has progressed so far as totally to pervert the human essence, is the radical abolition of this facticity. It is precisely the unerring contemplation of the essence of man that becomes the inexorable impulse for the initiation of radical revolution. The factual situation of capitalism is characterized not merely by economic or political crisis but by a catastrophe affecting the human essence; this insight condemns any mere economic or political reform to failure from the outset, and unconditionally requires the cataclysmic transcendence of the actual situation through total revolution. Only after the basis has been established in this way, so firmly that it cannot be shaken by any merely economic or political arguments, does the question of the historical conditions and the bearers of the revolution arise: the question of the theory of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Any critique which only pays attention to this theory, without coming to grips with its real foundation, misses the point.
We shall now look at the Manuscripts to see what they contribute to the preparation of a positive theory of revolution and how they treat the real supersession of reification, the supersession of alienated labour and of private property. We shall once again limit ourselves to the basic state of affairs expressed in the economic and political facts. What also belongs to this positive theory of revolution is – as we shall show – an investigation of the origin of reification: an investigation of the historical conditions and emergence of private property. Two main questions must therefore be answered: 1. How does Marx describe the accomplished supersession of private property, i.e. the state of the human essence after the total revolution? 2. How does Marx handle the problem of the origin of private property or the emergence and development of reification? Marx himself explicitly asked both these questions: the answer is given mainly on pages 115-17 and 135-42.
The total estrangement of man and his loss of reality had been traced back to the alienation of labour. In the analysis, private property had been revealed as the manner in which alienated labour ‘must express and present itself in real life’ (p. 115) and as the ‘realization of alienation’ (p. 117) (we shall return to the close connection between alienated labour and private property below). The supersession of alienation, if it is to be a genuine supersession (and not merely ‘abstract’ or theoretical), must supersede the real form of alienation (its ‘realization’); and so ‘the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property – more precisely, in that of the economy’ (p. 136).
Through this connection with alienated labour private property is already more than a specific economic category: this extra element in the concept of private property is sharply emphasized by Marx: ‘Material, immediately sensuous private property is the material, sensuous expression of estranged human life. Its movement – production and consumption – is the sensuous revelation of the movement of all production until now, i.e. the realization of the reality of man’ (pp. 136ff.). Through the explanatory ‘i.e. the realization ... of man’ which he adds Marx expressly emphasizesthe fact that ‘production’, of which the movement of private property is the ‘revelation’, is not economic production but the self-producing process of the whole of human life (as interpreted above). The extent to which private property expresses the movement of estranged human life is more closely described in the following passage: ‘Just as private property is only the sensuous expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object: just as it expresses the fact that the assertion of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realization is his loss of reality...so the positive transcendence of private property. . .’ is more than economic transcendence: namely the positive ‘appropriation’ of the whole of human reality (pp. 138ff.). Private property is the real expression of the way in which estranged man objectifies himself, ‘produces’ himself and his objective world and realizes himself in it. Private property therefore constitutes the realization of an entire form of human behaviour and not just a given physical ‘state’ external to man, [15] or ‘a merely objective being’ (p. 128).
But if an estranged form of behaviour which has lost reality is this realized in private property, then private property itself can only represent an estranged and unreal form of true and essential human behaviour. There must therefore be two real ‘forms’ of property: an estranged and a true form, a property which is merely private and a property which is ‘truly human’ (p. 119). [15] There must be a form of ‘property’ belonging to the essence of man, and positive communism, far from meaning the abolition of all property, will be precisely the restoration of this truly human form of property.
How can one ‘define the general nature of private property, as it has arisen as a result of estranged labour, in its relation to truly human and social property’ (p. 118)?The answer to this question must at the same time make clear the meaning and goal of the positive supersession of private property. ‘The meaning of private property – apart from its estrangement – is the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of gratification and as objects of activity’ (p. 165).
This is the most general positive definition of true property: the availability and usability of all the objects which man needs for the free realization of his essence. This availability and usability is realized as property – which is by no means self-evident, but is based on the idea that man never simply and directly has what he needs, but only really possesses objects when he has appropriated them. Thus the purpose of labour is to give to man as his own possessions objects which have been treated and to make them into a world through which he can freely engage in activity and realize his potentialities. The essence of property consists in ‘appropriation’; a particular manner of appropriation and realization through appropriation is the basis of the state of property, and not mere having and possessing. We must now more closely define this new concept of appropriation and property which underlies Marx’s analysis.
We have seen how private property consists in an untrue mode of having and possessing objects. In conditions of private property an object is ‘property’ when it can be ‘used’; and this use consists either in immediate consumption or in its capacity to be turned into capital. ‘Life-activity’ stands in the service of property instead of property standing in the service of free life-activity; it is not the ‘reality’ of man which is appropriated but objects as things (goods and commodities) and even this kind of appropriation is ‘one-sided’: it is limited to the physical behaviour of man and to objects which can immediately ‘gratify’ or be turned into capital. In contrast to this, ‘true human property’ is now described in its true appropriation: ‘the sensuous appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements – should not be conceived merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided gratification – merely in the sense of possession, of having. Man appropriates his total essence in a total manner, that is to say, as a whole man.’ This total appropriation is then more closely described: ‘Each of his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individual being...are in their objective orientation or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of that object’ (pp. 138-9).
Beyond all economic and legal relations, appropriation as the basis of property thus becomes a category which comprehends the universal and free relationship of man to the objective world: the relationship to the object which is becoming one’s own is ‘total’ – it ‘emancipates’ all the human senses. The whole man is at home in the whole objective world which is ‘his work and his reality’. The economic and legal supersession of private property is not the end, but only the beginning of the communist revolution. This universal and free appropriation is labour, for as we saw, the specifically human relationship to the object is one of creating, positing, forming. But in this case labour would no longer be an alienated and reified activity, but all-round self-realization and self-expression.
The inhumanity represented by reification is thus abolished at the point where it was most deeply rooted and dangerous: in the concept of property. Man no longer ‘loses’ himself in the objective world, and his objectification is no longer reification, if objects are withdrawn from ‘one-sided’ ownership and possession and remain the work and reality of the one who ‘produced’ or realized them and himself in them. It is not, however, the isolated individual or an abstract plurality of individuals which has been realized in them, but social man, man as a social being. Man’s return to his true property is a return into his social essence; it is the liberation of society.
V
‘Man is not lost in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is possible only when the object becomes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for him in this object’ (p. 140).There are thus two conditions for breaking through reification as outlined above: the objective relations must become human – i.e. social – relations and they must be recognized and consciously preserved as such. These two conditions are fundamentally interrelated, for the objective relations can only become human and social if man himself is conscious of them as such, i.e. in his knowledge of both himself and the object. Thus we again encounter the central role which a particular kind of insight (man’s ‘coming-to-be for himself’) plays in the foundation of Marx’s theory. To what extent can cognition, the recognition of objectification as something social, become the real impulse for the abolition of all reification?
We know that objectification is essentially a social activity and that it is precisely in his objects and in his labour on them that man recognizes himself as a social being. The insight into objectification, which breaks through reification, is the insight into society as the subject of objectification. For there is no such thing as ‘society’ as a subject outside the individual; Marx expressly warns against playing society as an independent entity off against the individual: ‘Above all we must avoid postulating “Society” again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being. Hislife, even if it may not appear in the direct form of a communal life in association with others, is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life’ (pp. 137-8).
Insight into objectification thus means insight into how and through what man and his objective world as social relations have become what they are. It means insight into the historical-social situation of man. This insight is no mere theoretical cognition or arbitrary, passive intuition, but praxis:the supersession of what exists, making it a ‘means’ for free self-realization.
This also means that the insight which defines this task is by no means available to everyone: it can only be known by those who are actually entrusted with this task by their historical-social situation (we cannot pursue the way in which the proletariat becomes the bearer of this insight in the situation analysed by Marx: its content is presented at the close of Marx’s Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right).It is not a matter of the task for man as such but of a particular historical cask in a particular historical situation. It is therefore necessary that ‘the transcendence of the estrangement always proceeds from that form of the estrangement which is the dominant power’ (p. 154). Because it is dependent on the conditions pre-established by history, the praxis of transcendence must, in order to be genuine transcendence, reveal these conditions and appropriate them. Insight into objectification as insight into the historical and social situation of man reveals the historical conditions of this situation and so achieves the practical force and concrete form through which it can become the lever of the revolution. We can now also understand how far questions concerning the origin of estrangement and insight into the origin of private property must be an integrating element in a positive theory of revolution.
Marx’s handling of the question of the origins of private property shows the pioneering new ‘method’ of his theory. Marx is fundamentally convinced that when man is conscious of his history he cannot fall into a situation which he has not himself created, and that only he himself can liberate himself from any situation. This basic conviction already finds its expression in the concept of freedom in the Manuscripts. The phrase that the liberation of the working class can only be the work of the working class itself resonates clearly through all the economic explanations; it onlyenters into ‘contradiction’ with historical materialism if thelatter is falsified into a vulgar materialism. If the relations of production have become a ‘fetter’ and an alien force determining man, then this is only because man has at some stage himself alienated himself from his power over the relations of production. This is also true if one sees the relations of production as being determined primarily by the given ‘natural’ forces of production (e.g. climatic or geographical conditions, the condition of the land, the distribution of raw materials) and ignores the fact that all these physical data have always existed in a form historically handed down and have formed a part of particular human and social ‘forms of intercourse’. For the situation of man which exists through such pre-existing forces of production only becomes an historical and social situation through the fact that man ‘reacts’ to what he finds pre-existing, i.e. through the manner in which he appropriates it. In truth these relations of production which have been reified into alien, determining forces are always objectifications of particular social relations, and the abolition of the estrangement expressed in these relations of production can only be total and real if it can account for economic revolution in terms of these human relations. Thus the question of the origin of private property becomes a question of the activity through which man alienated property from himself: ‘How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development?’ And being aware of the crucial importance of this new way of formulating the question, Marx adds: ‘We have already gone a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the question of the origin of private property into the question of the relation of alienated labour to the course of humanity’s development. For when one speaks of private property, one thinks of dealing with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution’ (pp. 118-19).
The answer to this question is not contained in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts; it is worked out in his later critiques of political economy. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts do, however, contain a proof within the definition of man’s essence that objectification always carries within it a tendency towards reification and labour a tendency towards alienation, so that reification and alienation are not merely chance historical facts. In connection with this it is also shown how the worker even through his alienation ‘engenders’ the non-worker and thus the domination of private property (pp. 116-17), and how he therefore has his fate in his own hands at the origin of estrangement and not just after liberation.
Marx gives his definition of estrangement as self-estrangement in a reference to the real achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology: ‘The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species being...is only possible through the utilization of all the powers he has in himself and which he has as belonging to a species ... , treating these generic powers as objects and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement’ (p. 177; my italics).
We fail to find an explanation here as to why this is, to begin with, only possible in the form of estrangement; and it is, strictly speaking, impossible to give one, for we are confronted with a state of affairs that has its roots in man – as an ‘objective’ being – and which can only be revealed as such. It is man’s ‘need’ – as already interpreted above – for objects alien to him, ‘overpowering’ and ‘not part of his being’, to which he must relate as if they were external objects, although they only become real objects through and for him. Objects first confront him directly in an external and alien form and only become human objects, objectifications of man, through conscious historical and social appropriation. The expression of man thus first tends towards alienation and his objectification towards reification, so that he can only attain a universal and free reality through ‘the negation of negation’: through the supersession of his alienation and the return out of his estrangement.
After the possibility of alienated labour has been shown to have its roots in the essence of man the limits of philosophical description have been reached and the discovery of the real origin of alienation becomes a matter for economic and historical analysis. We know that for Marx the starting point for this analysis is the division of labour (cf., for example, p. 159); we cannot go further into this here and shall only look quickly at the way Marx shows that already with the alienation of labour the worker ‘engenders’ the domination of the capitalist and thereby of private property. At the head of this analysis there stands the sentence: ‘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’ (p. 116; my italics). We are already acquainted with the context of this sentence: the relation of man to the object on which he works is directly his relation to other men with whom he shares this object and himself as something social. So that although the worker in the self-alienation of his labour ‘possesses’ the object as something alien, overpowering and not belonging to him, this object nowhere confronts him as an isolated thing, belonging to no one and, as it were, outside humanity. The situation is rather this: ‘If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker’ (p. 115). With the alienation of labour the worker immediately stands as ‘servant’ in the service of a ‘master’: ‘Thus, if the product of his labour...is for him an alien...object...then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien....If he is related to his own activity as to an unfree activity, then he is related to it as an activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion, and the yoke of another man’ (pp. 116ff.).
It is not a case of a ‘master’ existing first, subordinating someone else to himself, alienating him from his labour, and making him into a mere worker and himself into a non-worker. But nor is it a case of the relationship between domination and servitude being the simple consequence of the alienation of labour. The alienation of labour, as estrangement from its own activity and from its object, already is in itself the relationship between worker and non-worker and between domination and servitude.
These distinctions seem to be of only secondary importance, and they do in fact disappear into the background again in the later, purely economic analysis. Nevertheless they must be expressly emphasized in the context of the Manuscripts, if only for the fact that they are relevant to Marx’s crucial reaction to Hegel. Domination and servitude are here not concepts for particular (pre- or early capitalist) formations, relations of production, etc. They give a general description of the social condition of man in a situation of estranged labour. In this sense they point back to the ontological categories of ‘domination and servitude’ developed by Hegel in his Phenomenology (II, pp. 145ff). [17] We cannot discuss here Marx’s further description of the relation between domination and servitude, but we shall select one important point: ‘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’. (p. 19).
We know that the transcendence of estrangement (a state in which both master and servant find themselves, although not in the same way) can only be based on the destruction of reification, i.e. on the practical insight into the activity of objectification in its historical and social situation. Since it is only in labour and in the objects of his labour that man can really come to understand himself, others and the objective world in their historical and social situation, the master, as a non-worker, cannot come to this insight. Since what is actually a specific human activity appears to him as a material and objective state of affairs, the worker has an (as it were) irreducible advantage over him. He is the real actor of transformation; the destruction of reification can only be his work. The master can only come to this revolutionary insight if he becomes a worker, which, however, would mean transcending his own essence.
From every point of approach and in all directions this theory, arising out of the philosophical critique and foundation ofpolitical economy, proves itself to be a practical theory, a theory whose immanent meaning (required by the nature of its object) is particular praxis; only particular praxis can solve the problems peculiar to this theory. ‘We see how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of man. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of understanding, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one’ (pp. 141-2). We could add to this sentence: which philosophy can solve, however, if it grasps it as a practical problem, i.e. if it transcends itself as ‘only theoretical’ philosophy, which in turn means, if it really ‘realizes’ itself as philosophy for the first time.
Marx calls the practical theory which solves this problem, in so far as it puts man as a historical and social being in the centre, ‘real humanism’ and identifies it with ‘naturalism’ to the extent to which, if it is carried through, it grasps the unity of man and nature: the ‘naturalness of man’ and the ‘humanity of nature’. If the real humanism outlined here by Marx as the basis of his theory does not correspond to what is commonly understood as Marx’s ‘materialism’, such a contradiction is entirely in accordance with Marx’s intentions: ‘here we see how consistent naturalism and humanism distinguishes itself both from idealism and materialism, constituting at the same time the unifying truth of both’ (p. 181).
VI
Finally we need to examine briefly Marx’s critique of Hegel, which was envisaged as the conclusion of the whole Manuscripts. We can make the discussion brief because we have already gone into Marx’s elaboration of the positive foundations of a critique of Hegel (the definition of man as an ‘objective’, historical and social, practical being) in the context of our interpretation of the critique of political economy.
Marx begins by pointing out the necessity of discussing a question which has still not been adequately answered: ‘How do we now stand as regards the Hegelian dialectic?’ (p. 170). This question, coming at the conclusion of his positive critique of political economy and the foundation of revolutionary theory, shows how much Marx was aware of working in an area opened up by Hegel and how he experienced this fact – in contrast to almost all the Hegelians and almost all his later followers – as a scientific-philosophical obligation towards Hegel. After briefly dispatching Bruno Bauer, Strauss, etc., whose ‘critical critique’ makes the need to come to terms with Hegel anything but superfluous, Marx immediately gives his support to Feuerbach: ‘the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field’ (p. 172). Marx mentions three such discoveries: Feuerbach (1) recognized philosophy (i.e. the purely speculative philosophy of Hegel) as a ‘form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man’, (2) established ‘true materialism’ by making ‘the social relationship “of man to man” the basic principle of his theory’ and (3) precisely through this principle opposed Hegel’s mere ‘negation of negation’, which does not go beyond negativity, with a ‘self-supporting positive, positively based on itself’ (pp. 172ff.). With this enumeration, Marx simultaneously articulated the three main directions of his own critique of Hegel, and it is to these that we now turn.
‘One must begin with Hegel’s Phenomenology, the true point of origin and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy’ (p. 173). From the beginning Marx tackles Hegel’s philosophy where its origin is still visible in an unconcealed form: in the Phenomenology. If at the beginning of the critique it may still have looked as if it was really only a critique of what one is accustomed to regard as Hegel’s ‘dialectic’, we now see that what Marx criticizes as the dialectic is the foundation and actual ‘content’ of Hegel’s philosophy – not its (supposed) ‘method’. And while Marx criticizes, he simultaneously extracts the positive aspects, the great discoveries made by Hegel – i.e. only because for Marx there are genuinely positive discoveries in Hegel, on the basis of which he can and must do further work, can and must Hegel’s philosophy become for him the subject of a critique. We shall begin with the negative part of his critique – Marx’s collation of Hegel’s ‘mistakes’ – so that we can then extract the positive aspects from these negative ones and show that the mistakes are really only mistaken interpretations of genuine and true states of affairs.
In the Phenomenology Hegel gives ‘speculative expression’ to the movement of the history of the ‘human essence’, but not of its real history, only its ‘genetic history’ (p. 173). That is, he gives the history of the human essence, in which man first becomes what he is and which has, as it were, always already taken place when the real history of man occurs. Even with this general characterization Marx has grasped the sense of the Phenomenology more profoundly and accurately than most interpreters of Hegel. He then proceeds to a critique of the core of Hegel’s own problematic: Hegel’s philosophical description of the history of the human essence fails at the start, because Hegel from the outset grasps it only as abstract ‘self-consciousness’ (‘thought’, ‘mind’) and thus overlooks its true concrete fullness: ‘For Hegel the essence of man – man – equals self-consciousness’ (p. 178); the history of the human essence runs its course purely as the history of self-consciousness or even as history within self-consciousness. What Marx had shown to be crucial for the definition of man’s essence and what he had put at the centre of his conceptual structure – the ‘objectivity’ of man, his ‘essential objectification’ – is precisely what is ominously given a different meaning and perverted by Hegel. The object (i.e. objectivity as such) is in Hegel only an object for consciousness in the very strong sense that consciousness is the ‘truth’ of the object and that the latter is only the negative side of consciousness: having been ‘posited’ (created, engendered) by consciousness as its alienation and estrangement, it must also be ‘transcended’ by consciousness again, or ‘taken back’ into consciousness. The object is thus, by the nature of its existence, a purely negative thing, a ‘nullity’ (p. 182); it is merely an object of abstract thought, for Hegel reduces self-consciousness to abstract thought. ‘The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness – self-consciousness as an object....The issue, therefore, is to surmount the object of consciousness. Objectivity as such is regarded as an estranged human relationship which does not correspond to the essence of man’ (p. 178). For Marx, however, objectivity was precisely the human relationship in which man could alone come to self-realization and self-activity; it was ‘real’ objectivity, the ‘work’ of human labour and certainly not the object of abstract consciousness. From this standpoint Marx can say that Hegel fixes man as ‘a non-objective, spiritual being’ (p. 178). This being never exists with genuine objects but always only with the self-posited negativity of itself. It is actually always ‘at home with itself’ in its ‘otherness as such’ (p. 183). It is thus ultimately ‘non-objective’, and ‘a non-objective being is a...non-being’ (p. 182).
This also constitutes a critique of the Phenomenology in so far as it claims to present the movement of the history of man’s essential being. If this being whose history is being presented is a ‘non-being’,then this history must also be ‘inessential’ in the full sense of the word. Marx perceives Hegel’s discovery of the movement of human history in the movement of ‘objectification as loss of the object, as alienation’ (p. 177) and in the ‘transcendence’ of this alienation as it recurs in many forms in the whole of the Phenomenology. But the objectification is only apparent, ‘abstract and formal’, since the object only has ‘the semblance of an object’ and the self-objectifying consciousness remains ‘at home with itself’ in this seeming alienation (pp. 183ff.). Like estrangement itself, its supersession is only a semblance: alienation remains. The forms of estranged human existence which Hegel cites are not forms of estranged real life but only of consciousness and knowledge: what Hegel deals with and supersedes are not ‘real religion, the real state, or real nature, but religion as a subject of knowledge, i.e. Dogmatics; the same with Jurisprudence, Political Science and Natural Science’ (pp. 186-7). Because alienation is thus only superseded in the mind and not in reality, i.e. because ‘this supersession of thought leaves its object standing in reality’, Marx can say the whole Phenomenology, and indeed the whole of Hegel’s system in so far as it is based on the Phenomenology, remains within estrangement. This comes out in Hegel’s system as a whole in the fact, for example, that ‘nature’ is not grasped as man’s ‘self-externalizing world of sense’ in its existential unity with man or its ‘humanity’, but is taken as externality ‘in the sense of alienation, of a mistake, a defect, which ought not to be’, – a ‘nothing’ (p. 192).
We shall not go into the other features of the negative critique here: they are already familiar from the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; e.g. the conversion of mind into an absolute, the hypostatization of an absolute subject as the bearer of the historical process, the inversion of subject and predicate (p. 188), etc. What must be borne in mind is that Marx regards all these ‘inadequacies’ as within a real state of affairs. If Hegel posits the human essence as a ‘non-being’, then it is the non-being of a real being and thus a real non-being; if he has ‘only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history’ (p. 173), then this is still an expression for the movement of real history; if he has described objectification and estrangement in their abstract forms, then he has still seen objectification and estrangement as essential movements of human history. The emphasis of Marx’s critique of Hegel is definitely on the positive part, to which we now proceed.
‘The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man...as the outcome of man’s own labour’ (p. 177). The full significance of the interpretation of the Phenomenology given here by Marx could only be grasped if we unfolded the central problematic of Hegel’s work, which we obviously cannot do here; it would also only then become apparent with what unheard of sureness Marx sees through all the mystifying and misleading interpretations (which begin even within Hegel’s work) and gets back to the bedrock of the problems which were raised, for the first time in modern philosophy, in the Phenomenology.
In the sentence quoted above Marx has brought together all the discoveries of Hegel which he recognizes as crucial: in what follows we want briefly to explain these, for Marx, ‘positive moments of the Hegelian dialectic’.
The Phenomenology presents the ‘self-creation of man’, which means, after what has already been said, the process in which man (as an organic, living being) becomes what he is according to his essence – i.e. human essence. It thus gives the ‘genetic history’ (p. 173) of the human essence or man’s essential history. Man’s ‘act of creation’ is an ‘act of self-genesis’ (p. 188), i.e. man gives his essence to himself: he must first make himself what he is, ‘posit’ himself, and ‘produce’ himself (we have already gone into the meaning of this concept). This history which is given into man’s own hands is grasped by Hegel as a ‘process’ characterized by alienation and its supersession. The process as a whole stands under the title of ‘objectification’. The history of man thus occurs and fulfils itself as objectification: the reality of man consists of creating real objects out of all his ‘species powers’, or ‘the establishing of a real, objective world’ (p. 180). It is this establishing of an objective world which Hegel treats merely as the alienation of ‘consciousness’ or knowledge, or as the relation of abstract thought to ‘thinghood’, while Marx grasps it as the ‘practical’ realization of the whole of man in historical and social labour (ibid.).
Hegel defines the relation of knowledge to the objective world in such a way that this objectification is simultaneously the loss of the object, i.e. the loss of reality or estrangement, so that, ‘to begin with, [it] is again only possible in the form of estrangement’ (p. 177). That is to say: knowledge, in the process of becoming objective, initially loses itself in its objects: they confront it as something alien and other, in the form of an external world of things and matters which have lost their inner connection with the consciousness which has expressed itself in them and now continue as a power independent of consciousness. In the Phenomenology, for example, morality and right, the power of the state and wealth appear as estranged objective worlds and it is here that Marx accuses Hegel of dealing with these worlds only as ‘worlds of thought’ and not as real worlds (pp. 174ff.), since for Hegel they are externalizations of ‘Mind’ only and not of real, total human existence.
Although objectification consists initially in the loss of the object or estrangement, it is precisely this estrangement which in Hegel becomes the recovery of true being. ‘Hegel conceives man’s self-estrangement, the alienation of man’s essence, man’s loss of objectivity and his loss of realness as self-discovery, change of his nature, objectification and realization’ (pp. 187-8). The human essence – always conceived in Hegel as exclusively knowledge – is such that it must not only express but alienate itself, not only objectify itself but lose its object, to be able to discover itself. Only if it has really lost itself can it come to itself, only in its ‘otherness’ can it become what it is ‘for itself’. This is the ‘positive meaning’ of negation, ‘the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle’ (p. 177). We should have to go into the foundations of Hegel’s ontology to justify and clarify this assertion: here we need only show how Marx interprets this discovery by Hegel.
Through the positive concept of negation just referred to, Hegel conceives ‘labour as man’s act of self-genesis’ (p. 188); ‘he grasps labour as the essence of man – as man’s essence in the act of proving itself’ (p. 177). With reference to this Marx goes so far as to say: ‘Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy’ (ibid.) – a seemingly paradoxical statement in which, however, Marx summarizes the colossal, almost revolutionary concreteness of Hegel’s Phenomenology. If labour is here defined as man’s essence in the act of proving itself this obviously refers to labour not purely as an economic, but as an ‘ontological’ category, as Marx defines it in this very passage: ‘Labour is man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man’ (p. 177). How does it come about that Marx should take precisely the category of labour to interpret Hegel’s concept of objectification as self-discovery in estrangement and of realization in alienation?
It is not only because Hegel uses labour to reveal the objectification of the human essence and its estrangement, or because he depicts the relation of the labouring ‘servant’ to his world as the first ‘supersession’ of estranged objectivity (II, pp. 146 ff). It is not only because of this; although the fact that this is viewed as the real beginning of human history in the Phenomenology is neither a coincidence nor the result of a purely arbitrary decision, but expresses the innermost direction of the entire work. Marx has thereby – albeit in an exaggerated form – discovered the original meaning of the history of the human essence as it is elaborated in the Phenomenology in the form of the history of self-consciousness. It is praxis, free self-realization, always taking up, superseding and revolutionizing pre-established ‘immediate’ facticity. It has already been pointed out that Marx holds Hegel’s real mistake to be the substitution of ‘Mind’ for the subject of this praxis. Hence for Marx, ‘the only labour which Hegel knows and recognizes is abstract mental labour’ (p. 177). But this does not alter the fact that Hegel grasped labour as man’s essence in the act of proving itself – a fact which retains its vital importance: despite the ‘spiritualization’ of history in the Phenomenology, the actual leading concept through which the history of man is explicated is transforming ‘activity’ (II, pp. 141, 196, 346, 426, etc.).
If the inner meaning of objectification and its supersession is thus praxis, then the various forms of estrangement and their supersession can also be more than mere ‘examples’ taken out of real history and put alongside each other with no necessary connection. They must have have their roots in human praxis and be an integral part of man’s history. Marx expresses this insight in the sentence that Hegel has found ‘speculative expression for the movement of history’ (p. 173) – a sentence which (as already stated) must be understood positively just as much as negatively and critically. And if the forms of estrangement are rooted as historical forms in human praxis itself, they cannot be regarded simply as abstract theoretical forms of the objectivity of consciousness; under this logical-speculative ‘disguise’ they must have ineluctable practical consequences, they must of necessity be effectively superseded and ‘revolutionized’. A critique must lie hidden already in the Phenomenology:critique in the revolutionary sense which Marx gave to this concept. ‘The Phenomenology is, therefore, an occult critique – still to itself obscure and mystifying: but inasmuch as it keeps steadily in view man’s estrangement...there he concealed in it all the elements of the critique already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint’. In its separate sections it contains ‘the critical elements of whole spheres such as religion, the state, civil life, etc. – but still in an estranged form’ (p. 176).
Thereby Marx has expressed in all clarity the inner connection between revolutionary theory and Hegel’s philosophy. What seems amazing, as measured by this critique – which is the result of a philosophical discussion – is the decline of later interpretations of Marx (even – sit venia verbo – those of Engels!) by people who believed they could reduce Marx’s relationship to Hegel to the familiar transformation of Hegel’s ‘dialectic’, which they also completely emptied of content.
These suggestions will have to suffice; above all we cannot go into the question if and how the ‘mistakes’ with which Marx charges Hegel can really be attributed to him. It has perhaps become clear through this paper that the discussion really starts at the centre of Hegel’s problematic. Marx’s critique of Hegel is not an appendage of the preceding critique and foundation of political economy, for his examination of political economy is itself a continuous confrontation with Hegel.
Notes
1. Volume 3 of the first section of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). They appeared almost simultaneously under the title Nationalökonomie und Philosophie in Kröner’s Pocket Editions, Volume 91 (K. Marx, Der Historische Materialismus. Die Fruhschriften I) pp. 283ff. This edition does not include the piece printed as the First Manuscript in MEGA, which is essential for an understanding of the whole. The reading of the text is at variance with MEGA in numerous instances.
2. ‘Reification’ denotes the general condition of ‘human reality’ resulting from the loss of the object of labour and the alienation of the worker which has found its ‘classical’ expression in the capitalist world of money and commodities. There is thus a sharp distinction between reification and objectification (the latter will be discussed more fully below). Reification is a specific (‘estranged’, ‘untrue’) mode of objectification.
4. Cf. the passage in Feuerbach which clearly underlies the sentence quoted: ‘Human feelings thus do not have an empirical, anthropological significance in the sense of the old transcendental philosophy; they have ontological, metaphysical significance’ (Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, § 33; Sämtliche Werke II, 1846, p. 324).
5. Cf. for example: Being-for-itself ‘comes into its own through labour’. In labour the consciousness of the worker ‘is externalized and passes into the condition of permanence’, ‘in working, consciousness, as the form of the thing formed, becomes an object for itself’ (Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, London, 1966, pp. 238-40).
6. For these connections I must refer the reader to the extensive interpretation of Hegel’s concept of labour in my book, Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit. Cf. Hegel’s definition of labour in the new edition of the Jenenser Realphilosophie II (Leipzig, 1931, especially pp. 213ff.).
7. Cf. Phenomenology of Mind, p. 220, the concept of ‘inorganic nature’, and pp.234ff. of my book Hegels Ontologie, etc.
10. The ontological concept of passion is found similarly in Feuerbach(Werke II, p. 323).
11. e.g. Werke II, pp. 258, 337. The indications of a more profound definition, which doubtless exist in Feuerbach, are not followed through. Cf., for example, the concept of ‘resistance’ (II, pp. 321ff.), etc.
12. Cf. the comprehensive formulation in The Holy Family: ‘that the object as being for man or as the objective being of man is at the same time the existence of man for other men, his human relation to other men, the social relation of man to man’ (The Holy Family, Moscow, 1956, p. 60).
13. Feuerbach: ‘Man is not a particular being like the animal, but a universal being, thus not a limited and unfree but an unlimited and free being, for universality, absence of limitations, and freedom are inseparable. And this freedom does not for example exist in a particular capacity...but extends over his whole being’ (Werke, II, p. 342).
14. The German Ideology says of the critique in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher: ‘Since at that time this was done in philosophical phraseology, the traditionally occurring philosophical expressions such as ‘human essence’, ‘species’ etc., gave the German theoreticians the desired excuse for ... believing that here again it was a question merely of giving a new turn to their theoretical garments . . .’ (The German Ideology, Moscow, 1968, p. 259).
15. This turn from a state outside men to a human relation again illustrates the new problematic of Marx’s theory: his penetration through the veil of abstract reification towards the comprehension of the objective world as the field of historical-social praxis. Marx emphasizes that this way of posing the question had already entered traditional political economy when Adam Smith recognized labour as the ‘principle’ of economics, but its real sense was immediately completely concealed again since this kind of political economy ‘merely formulated the laws of estranged labour’ (p. 117; my italics).
16. Marx directs his heaviest attacks in the German Ideology precisely against the concept of ‘truly human property’ (particularly in his polemic against the ‘true socialists’, op. cit., pp. 516ff.); here, within Marx’s foundation of the theory of revolution, this concept obviously has a significance quite different from that in Stirner and the ‘true socialists’.
17. I have gone into this in my essay ‘Zum Problem der Dialektic’ (Die Gesellschaft, 12, 1931).
