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Alienated Labour

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Heinz Lubasz*
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Abstract

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Type
Review Article and Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1987

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References

Notes

1. [a] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. [MEGA1]. Im Auftrag des Marx-Engels-Instituts Moskau, hrsg. von D. Rjazanow. Frankfurt a. M., 1927ff. Abteilung 1. Band 3, hrsg. von V. Adoratskij: Die heilige Familie und Schriften von Marx von Anfang 1844 bis Anfang 1845. Berlin, 1932.

[b] Marx, Karl, Engels, Friedrich, Werke. [MEW] Berlin, 1956ffGoogle Scholar. Ergänzungsband. Erster Teil [E1]: Schriften, Manuskripte, Briefe, bis 1844. Berlin, 1968.

[c] Marx, Karl, Engels, Friedrich, Gesamtausgabe. [MEGA2] Hrsg. vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der KPdSU und vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED. Berlin, 1975ffGoogle Scholar. Abt.1, Bd. 2: Karl Marx: Werke. Artikel. Entwürfe. Marx 1843 bis August 1844. Berlin, 1982.

[d] Marx, Karl, Early Writings, trans. by Livingstone, Rodney and Benton, Gregor; Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1975 Google Scholar.

The most widely used German text is [b]. It is the one I have used, giving my own translations.

2. More extensive notes and comments by Marx on political economists are contained in notebooks of 1844 now available in MEGA2, Abt. 4, Bd.2: Exzerpte und Notizen 1843 bis Januar 1845, Berlin, 1981.

3. Markus, George, ‘Four Forms of Critical Theory - Some Theses on Marx's development’, Thesis Eleven 1, 1980, pp. 7893 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. See especially, MEW 21 and various editions and translations. This “materialist inversion” thesis was first elaborated in scholarly fashion by Cornu, Auguste, Karl Marx, l'homme et l'oeuvre. De l'hégélanisme au matérialisme historique, Paris, 1934 Google Scholar. It was not Marx, but Engels, an autodidact in matters philosophical, who believed that a “materialist inversion” of Hegel yielded the truth. Marx's critiques of Hegel invoked non-Hegelian - in particular, Aristotelian - perspectives from the first. The thesis that Marx simply carried out an inversion of Hegel is therefore untenable. Equally untenable, for the same reason, is Avineri's, Shlomo notion, advanced in his book, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge, 1968 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, that Marx carried out a wholly “immanent critique” of Hegel.

5. Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, Berlin, 1923 Google Scholar. Eng. trans. History and Class Consciousness, London, 1970 Google Scholar.

6. Marxismus und Philosophie, Leipzig, 1923 Google Scholar. Eng. trans. Marxism and Philosophy, London, 1971 Google Scholar.

7. Marcuse, Herbert, ‘Neue Quellen zur Grundlegung des historischen MaterialismusDie Gesellschaft_ 9, London, 1932 Google Scholar. Eng. trans, in From Luther to Popper, London, 1983 Google Scholar.

8. See Jay, Martin, The Dialectical Imagination, Boston, 1973 Google Scholar; Held, David, Introduction to Critical Theory, London, 1980 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. See Poster, Mark, Existential Marxism in Post-War France: From Sartre to Althusser, Princeton, N.J., 1975 Google Scholar.

10. Fromm, Erich, Marx's Concept of Man, New York, 1962 Google Scholar and Fromm, Erich (ed.), Socialist Humanism, 1967 Google Scholar.

11. Naville, Pierre, De l'aliénation à la jouissance, Paris, 1957 Google Scholar.

12. Marxismusstudien, I – IV, ed. Metzge, E. and Fetscher, I., Tübingen, 19541962 Google Scholar.

13. See Markovic, Mihailo and Cohen, Robert S., Yugoslavia: The Rise and Fall of Socialist Humanism, Nottingham, 1975 Google Scholar.

14. Wood, Allen W., Karl Marx, London and Boston, 1981, p. 4 Google Scholar: “A great deal of paper and ink has been consumed in the attempt to spell out the ‘theory of alienation’ hinted at in this early fragment. But I think to no avail; there are strong reasons to doubt there could be any such theory worth explicating.” Among the less skeptical, who have made the attempt, one should mention Popitz, Heinrich, Der Entfremdete Mensch, Basel, 1953 Google Scholar; Mészáros, István, Marx's Theory of Alienation, London, 1970 Google Scholar; and Ollman, Bertell, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Cambridge, 1971 Google Scholar. A scholarly Soviet study of the young Marx which takes the 1844 Manuscripts fully into account is Lapin, N. I., Molodoy Marks, Moscow, 1968 Google Scholar; expanded German trans., Der junge Marx, Berlin 1974 Google Scholar.

15. This situation has now been remedied. MEGA2 Abt.1, Bd.2: Werke. Artikel. Entwürfe. März 1843 bis August 1844, Berlin, 1982 contains two versions of the 1844 Manuscripts: The first reproduces the arrangement of the original, the second adopts the arrangement of MEGA1 and MEW. In a remarkable piece of detective work Margaret Alice Fay elucidated the complicated arrangement of the original exposition. See her doctoral dissertation, The Influence of Adam Smith on Marx's Theory of Alienation, Berkeley, California, 1979 Google Scholar. The main part of her work, excluding the sections dealing with the arrangement of the text, has now appeared in German translation: Der Einfluss von Adam Smith auf Karl Marx' Theorie der Entfremdung, Frankfurt and New York, 1986 Google Scholar.

16. Althusser, Louis, Pour Marx, Paris, 1966 Google Scholar; Eng. trans. For Marx, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1969 Google Scholar.

17. Althusser, Louis, Balibar, Etienne, Lire le Capital, Paris, 1968 Google Scholar; Eng. trans., Reading Capital, London, 1970 Google Scholar. See Benton, Ted, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism. Althusser and his Influence, London, 1984 Google Scholar.

18. Compare ‘Was ist orthodoxer Marxismus?’ (in Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, note 5. above, with Ontologie: Marx, Darmstadt, 1972 Google Scholar.

19. See note 14. above.

20. Arthur, C. J., Dialectics of Labour: Marx and his Relation to Hegel, Oxford, 1986 Google Scholar.

21. Zur philosophischen Entwicklung des jungen Marx’, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 2, 1955 Google Scholar.

22. Der junge Hegel, Über die Beziehungen von Dialektik und Ökonomie, Zürich and Vienna, 1948 Google Scholar; Eng. trans., The Young Hegel, London, 1975 Google Scholar.

23. Principles of Political Economy (1767), ed. Skinner, A. S., 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1967 Google Scholar.

24. The Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. Campbell, R. H. and Skinner, A. S., Oxford, 1975 Google Scholar.

25. Lukács completed the typescript of his Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins in 1968. The work was posthumously published in its entirety in volumes 13 and 14 of his Werke, Darmstadt, 1968ffGoogle Scholar, as well as in separate sections. Three sections of The Ontology of Social Being have been translated into English: Hegel's False and his true Ontology, London, 1977 Google Scholar, Marx's Basic Ontological Principles, London, 1978 Google Scholar, and Labour London, 1980.

26. Ontologie: Marx; above, note 18,p. 9.

27. For grave doubts about, and criticisms of, the Ontologie by his own students and disciples, see Heller, Agnes, ed., Lukács Revalued, Oxford, 1983, chs. 6 and 7Google Scholar.

28. ‘Auszüge aus James Mills Buch “Élémens d'économie politique”’ in MEW E1, and “Excerpts from James Mill's Elements of Political Economy”, in Early Writings (note 1.d., above) The phrases quoted by Arthur are on p. 446 and p. 260, respectively. The relevant sentences read as follows: “Sehr gut und das Wesen der Sache auf einen Begriff gebracht, ist es, wenn Mill das Geld als den Vermittler des Austausches bezeichnet. Das Wesen des Geldes ist zunächst nicht, daß in ihm das Eigentum entäußert wird, sondern daß die vermittelnde Tätigkeit oder Bewegung, der menschliche, gesellschaftliche Akt, wodurch sich die Produkte des Menschen wechselseitig erganzen, entfremdet und die Eigenschaft eines materiellen Dings außer dem Menschen, des Geldes wird. Indem der Mensch diese vermittelnde Tätigkeit selbst entäußert…” (pp. 445-46). In my translation: “Mill does very well and hits the matter on the head in describing money as the mediator of exchange. The essence of money is not, in the first instance, that property is externalized in, but that the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by means of which the products of man mutually complement one another, is alienated and takes on the property [quality] of a material thing external to man, namely, money. In alienating this mediating activity itself, man…” It baffles me how anyone can fail to notice that the mediating activity here spoken of is exchange. Arthur compounds confusion and further misleads the reader by embellishing the footnote in which he gives the page reference with a quotation from the Grundriße of 1857-8 - i.e., from a text which belongs, in conceptualization and terminology, to that later “problematic” to which Capital also belongs.

29. It is difficult to be happy with what has been written about Hegel's grasp of political economy: the claims made generally outrun the evidence, sometimes to a ludicrous degree. Lukács's, Der junge Hegel. Über die Beziehungen von Dialektik und Okonomie runs to 720 pagesGoogle Scholar. Admittedly it covers much more than its subtitle suggests; but its net yield on the subject of Hegel's grasp of political economy is pretty modest. Hegel once read Steuart with care, says Lukács, but his notes on Steuart have been lost; and in any case the “unmittelbare Einwirkung einzelner ökonomischer Anschauungen Steuarts auf Hegel läßt sich schwer nachweisen” (p. 229). The Jena manuscripts show the influence of Adam Smith (p. 230), but in fact Hegel never grasped the gist of what Smith was all about (pp. 235, 427). Manfred Riedel, whose scholarship is the very model of probity, speaks of Hegel's, Rezeption der Nationalökonomie”, in (Studien zu Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie, Frankfurt, 1969)Google Scholar; but even he finds it difficult to discover any trace of Smithian doctrine in Hegel. Shlomo Avineri, by way of contrast, doesn't hesitate to advance (in Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, Cambridge, 1972 Google Scholar) the extravagant claim that “Adam Smith is … aufgehoben - both preserved and transcended - into the Hegelian system” (p. 147), without having a shred of evidence to back it. What he makes of Smith's concept of the “invisible hand” (which he refers to as the “hidden hand”) only shows that he doesn't fully understand it. The only judicious and illuminating treatment of the subject I know of is Raymond Plant, Hegel and Political Economy,” New Left Review No. 103, 1977, pp. 79-92, and No. 104, 1977, pp. 103113 Google Scholar. What emerges from a reading of Plant conjoined with Lukács and Riedel is that Hegel had some general grasp of the eminently pre-modern ideas of Steuart, but really none of Adam Smith. As for Say and Ricardo, whom Hegel mentions together with Smith in a parenthesis of §189 of the Philosophy of Right (with what I suspect is a bit of professorial bluff), no-one has yet shown that he had so much as a clue to their views.

30. The Wealth of Nations, I, viii, 1 and 6 Google Scholar.