Julius Kovesi
To be a Marxist is no longer fashionable as it used to be. I say as it used to be, for we meet a new type of Marxist nowadays who appears terribly fashionable. He is a Marxist, not a Communist; his interests are cultural, not political; he is a humanist, not a terrorist. Far from accepting Party discipline he is its latest critic and far from accepting responsibility for the deeds that have discredited the Parties all over the world he takes up an attitude of ‘I told you so’—even though he did nothing of the kind. He never quotes the Capital or the Manifesto, but—and this is what is so fashionable—he refers to ‘Marx’s earlier writings’. It is not the esoteric air that surrounds the phrase ‘Marx’s earlier writings’ (for we wouldn’t be impressed by anyone who distinguishes between a man’s earlier and later writings) that has created a renewed respectability for an otherwise bankrupt theory. What creates excitement is the claim that a theory of alienation is to be found in these writings. To talk about the concept of alienation immediately brings one up to date, for this is one of the central themes of existentialism.
The reason for this change is manifold. In Eastern Europe one has to find a doctrinal basis for any opposition to Party doctrinaires, so that to turn up some unusual pages of Marx acts as a fresh breeze of free thought there.[1] But in more normal societies where you don’t have to refer to Marx in order to be able to raise your voice the reason for the change is different. For a long time Marxists were able to disregard the practical test of their theory as evidence against its validity by invoking a thoroughly unmarxist maxim: ‘This is all right in theory; only it went wrong in practice’. This maximum is unmarxist because for Marx there is no other test but practice for the validity of a theory. But whether Marxist or not, this is a stupid thing to say. It is like saying ‘this house plan is excellent, except that one cannot live in a house built like that’. But by now not even the theory holds much respect in its orthodox presentation. Hence the need for a new maxim: instead of saying ‘it is all right in theory only in practice it went wrong’, one has to say ‘the theory used to be all right, only later, in the hands of certain Marxists and Leninists it went wrong’. One has to add to this that the criticism of our society today is conducted in the cultural and not in the political field (incidentally, this is why one should rather discuss this matter in a literary than in a political journal) and this is another reason why neo-Marxists prefer to talk in terms of alienation and not in terms of class struggles. Reading the pages of the English Universities and Left Review or the French Arguments one could be excused if one gained the impression that the dialectical progress of class struggles had already come to an end and that the romance of dialectic was continuing now in the cultural field. But all this is oversimplified. One cannot account for the views of such French post-Stalinists as Lucien Goldmann[2] or Edgar Morin in these terms without taking into account the influence on them of present-day French thought.
There is this change of interest even among those who are not committed to Marxism but are its critics or scholars. One searches in vain for Marx’s views on alienation in the standard texts of up to quite recent years. Even in a work which was intended to cover the early developments of Marx, Sidney Hook’s From Hegel to Marx there is not a single reference or mention of alienation. One of the most recent critical works however, Robert C. Tucker’s Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, was originally intended to be published under the title The Alienated World of Karl Marx, while on the Continent, two-thirds of Père Jean-Yves Calvez’s monumental work La Pensée de Karl Marx is devoted to the concept of alienation.
While the orthodox expositions of Marx’s thought emphasised his break with Hegel and the idealist tradition and consequently left many puzzling elements in that thought unexplained, this new emphasis, by connecting Marx more closely with Hegel, helps in resolving these puzzles. To take just one crucial example. It has always been an embarrassing question not only in our classrooms but also for my well-trained Marxist teachers in Hungary, why the dialectical progress of history comes to an end with communist society; and closely connected to this is the question why each successive stage in the dialectical development is a better one, culminating in an absolutely good society, for how can the description of a factual historical process, supposedly purely scientific, be used as an evaluative and even moral measuring rod? But, of course, talk about dialectical contradictions makes sense only in the world of thought, and this is why, whether it is true or false, Hegelian dialectic at least makes sense. The development of history is Thought’s efforts to regain its own self by eliminating all contradictions stage by stage from within itself. (Economic conditions by themselves cannot be self-contradictory without reference to our conceptions about them compared to what they ought to be, and contradictions can be a driving-force in this field only because we want to avoid them.) But if it is Thought that develops through the stage of history, and if moreover the progress of Thought is to regain its own Self, its own essential nature, then naturally, this process consists of Thought progressively eliminating all contradictions from itself, eliminating all that is not its Self. This mystical Entity contains its own driving-force by wanting to regain its own Self (like a Grand Ventriloquist using our human thoughts and institutions as puppets on the stage of history) and once all self-contradictions have been eliminated then there is no more reason why Thought should change: we have arrived at the truly rational. History is the history of the alienated Self towards regaining its essential nature. Whether it is true or false, without these Hegelian notions the dialectical process does not even make sense and this is why the rediscovery of Marx’s notions on alienation supplies a vital link for our understanding of Marx.
All the left-Hegelians inherited the problem of the alienated Self from Hegel, indeed they regarded the solution of this problem as their principal task and what divided them was the various solutions they found to this problem. The goal of Man is to regain his own essential nature, for then Man will be free. The condition in which Man is not free is the condition in which he is divided, where part of his Self is presented as an ‘object’, as ‘not-Self’, and this alien element imposes a restriction on him. To regain freedom is to regain one’s own self. For Feuerbach alienation took the form of religion where man projected the best part of himself into a transcendent Being, alienated this part of himself and worshipped it as a ‘Thou’. To regain one’s self and one’s freedom is to repossess this divine element, to dethrone God and worship Man—the best conscious formulation of our original sin. Bruno Bauer saw our alienation in terms of our unconscious motives and assumptions which take on an objective impersonal life of their own and impose their oppressive limitations on us. The solution for him lies in critical philosophy: by criticising all our assumptions and accepted modes of behaviour we regain our freedom and repossess our rational nature.
In the hands of Marx alienation took yet another form. Part of one’s life-activity became objectified, alienated, not in the form of religion nor in the form of conventions but in the form of commodities, especially money. Work is part of man’s life-activity but it does not stay with the person as part of his personality but departs from him and takes on an independent existence in the form of commodities and money. These objectified, reified parts of the human self (and let us pause to imagine money as part of a human self turned into an impersonal object in order to realise the full force of Marx’s metaphysical and moral indignation at capitalist social relationships) act as alien outside forces restricting the full realisation of the human self. But this reification or externalisation of one’s self is only part of the story. We must remember that Hegel was not talking about individual human beings, nor was Marx. For Hegel it is Thought or Spirit which is alienated from its own nature throughout history and for Marx it is Historic Man in the form of Society which reifies itself; history is the Entfremdungsgeschichte of Man with a capital M.[3] It is not even the case as G.D.H. Cole sees it in his Introduction to the Capital: ‘In essence there is … but one gigantic associated capitalist and but one many-handed labourer yoked to the task of creating Surplus Value …’; for Marx ‘not individuals, but only social classes possess ultimate reality’. This is not how Marx looks at the world for this would mean that there are two ‘large’ persons making up Society, when in fact Society is only one large person with a split personality, one Alienated Self. This is Hegel all over again. Unless we understand this we do not understand what makes Society move towards the classless Society where the Alienated Self at last regains its own essential nature. Classes are not the ultimate reality for Marx. The existence of classes represents only a mode of existence of that Self which is only ultimate reality for Marx, or rather, which will come into its own reality when it has eliminated all that is non-Self, when it will be undivided, i.e. classless. This is all that Marx achieved by turning Hegel upside down. For Hegel the only ultimate reality is Thought or Spirit after it has eliminated all that is alien to itself, that is, all self contradictions. Here that which is real, which fully is and that which ought to be, coexist and are one and the same. Marx only made an alteration within the content of this fantastic system.
Let us digress for a while in order to see what it amounts to when a political theory takes Society as the ultimate reality and talks of this Society as if it were a Large Animal, a Man writ large. We remember how Plato in his Republic, when he was looking for Justice, told us that it is easier to find out what Justice is if we look at the city instead of looking at the individual. He said that if we find the very same thing written in large letters let us read it there instead of straining our eyes over the small letters. Here is a classic example of turning something which makes very good sense when applied to an individual, into something disastrous when applied to the Large Animal, the City conceived as an individual writ large. For it makes very good sense to say that in our individual lives our reason should control our spirit and our inclinations. When there is a conflict between my inclinations and what my reason tells me, the resolution of this conflict cannot be anyone else’s job but my own; it is my own effort that brings the conflict to a solution. And when I follow my reason I follow my own decision. But now let us see all this writ large. Society is divided into Reason, Spirit and Inclination. Reason is represented by the Philosopher-King, Spirit by the Guardians and the rest is us. Or let me be so impertinent as to assume that I, with a few of my collaborators will be the Philosopher-King. Now I am not divided into reason and inclination any more, nor are you as an individual. I, the whole of me is Reason, whatever I say is the expression of the City’s Reason, and whatever you say is the expression of what you represent, the City’s Inclination. The conflict between reason and inclination will be a conflict between you and me, and you remember we agreed that reason should control inclinations, for only then are we moral, happy and free. The more you disagree with me the more you prove that your reason is not in order, and the more I force you to follow me the more you become what you ought to be, your true self. Or again, we may say that the Kantian ethics concerned with individual human beings makes excellent sense: we have many inclinations, formulated in various maxims, and when we come to decide on which of these maxims we should act we should ask which of these maxims could be made a universal law. A maxim which cannot be turned into a universal law that all human beings should follow expresses only a particular wish of my own. To act morally is to act on universalisable maxims. But let us see what consequences this type of theory could have when again it is applied to a Large Animal—not by Kant himself but by Rousseau before him. He creates a new organic Entity by his Social Contract. As he puts it: ‘Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.’ Now this indivisible whole should be governed by the General Will. But should we go out to the street and ask anyone what the General Will is? How would they know? He will express only what he wants. ‘In fact’, Rousseau says, ‘each individual, as a man, may have a particular will contrary or dissimilar to the general will which he has as a citizen.’ (This is how 90% of the population can be the ‘enemy of the people’). We see here the split personality again: your will as an individual and your will as a citizen. But all this is discussed in terms of Society, for the General Will is not my or your will, it is the will of Society. Out of the various wills only those should be acted on that can be made universal, the General Will, but this decision is not mine or yours; we have to call in Society’s Reason and the selection will not be made out of my own maxims, for all my maxims as an individual are only particular maxims but all the maxims of the one who knows the General Will (and again, we should need a Philosopher-King for this) are universal. To be compelled to follow this Will is simply to be compelled to follow my real will as a citizen. To deny my will as an individual is simply to eliminate what is not the will of my real self. This is again the Hegelian way to freedom. As Rousseau says: ‘Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free’.
Similarly, the notion of alienation is a fruitful, useful and penetrating conceptual tool in analysing and talking about individual human beings. But in the case of Marx it is essentially wedded to talking about a fictitious Big Animal, Society.
The notion of alienation had a long history before Hegel but to us it came mainly from him through many channels. I have mentioned only some of the forms it took in the hands of the left-Hegelians. Even what we have from them assumed many new and diverse forms—as Martin Buber’s I-Thou language is one example of Feuerbach’s influence. Through Kierkegaard and from Hegel himself it reached the existentialists, while again German sociology made extensive use of the notion, as we can see from Mannheim and Weber. These and many others worked out the notion of alienation into a useful and penetrating tool. What value this notion has is due to them and one cannot read their achievements back into Marx. For as soon as Marx got hold of the notion he turned it into a strange kind of political economy, describing the split personality of a Big Animal in the terms of the classical economists. I cannot therefore agree with those who claim by reference to Marx’s early writings on the concept of alienation that his theory started all right but went wrong in the course of time. One cannot say that he had a good theory of alienation but a bad political economy because his theory of alienation is his political economy and it is bad precisely because its foundation is the Hegelian notion of alienation. As we have seen, the value of emphasising these early writings of Marx is that it enables us to see what makes his dialectic and class-struggle click. His theory of alienation will not make him up to date but reveals only the Hegelian foundations of his economics.
We can also see now an additional reason for saying that it is not the case that Marxist theory is all right, but that in the hands of Leninists and Stalinists it went wrong. It is an essential feature of political theories that do not talk about individuals but about a Big Animal that they call for a Philosopher-King or for a group of them, who represent the Reason of the Big Animal. The Leninist Party which is the most conscious element of the proletariat expressing the voice of History is Marxism and not its misuse. For Marx has nothing at all to say on how we should organise our society, what sort of institutions we should have and how should we conduct our lives by and through those institutions. Consequently no political practice can be a misuse of these non-existing recommendations. What he has given us is a metaphysical justification for a Party to identify their egos with the demiurge of History and then left it at that. Speculations about good political institutions he called ‘utopian socialism’. His were scientific and his science amounts to this: Once Society regains its Self all our problems are solved and there is no need to think about how to conduct our affairs.
Karl Popper claims that dialectical materialism is not a scientific theory because you cannot test it, there is no possible crucial experiment that could either verify or falsify it. Consequently it does not even tell us anything informative either. This is an impressive and illuminating criticism. But to say this of a theory which is designed to be put into practice and which accepts only practice as the test of its validity this criticism is not damning enough. There has been an experiment and it is still going on. Someone might say that it is not yet a crucial experiment. One could indeed go on experimenting with inanimate objects waiting for a crucial experiment after large quantities of those objects have been destroyed. But even if we were experimenting with mice this sort of talk could be irresponsible. As it is, when we put Hegel’s theory of alienation dressed in economic terms to a test on human beings one should say that even one experiment was crucial. If someone even after such a crucial experiment still tries to justify the ways of Marx to men by reference to his earlier writings he only makes himself more pathetic.
[1] The case of the perhaps only original Marxist philosopher in a communist country, that of George Lukács is quite different. Except when he had to recant his views to the Communist Academy in 1934 he has always understood Marx in a way that the recent developments can only vindicate him. He was able to do this because he came to Marx not through such exegetes as Kautsky, Plekhanov or Lenin but through the more Hegelian tradition of the German sociologists, especially through Simmel and Weber who drew his attention to the problem of alienation. This enabled him to understand Marx better than the members of the Communist Academy to whom he had to confess his deviations.
[2] Cf. Lucien Goldmann: ‘La Reification’ in Les Temps Moderne, February-March 1959.
[3] Marx’s terminology is confusing. The translation of the English edition of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts gives a salutary but short warning on the differences between the word Entäussern and Entfremden both of which are used by Marx in talking about alienation. Marx doesn’t even treat the problem of alienation for its own merit and so he never distinguishes between the many widely different problems associated with it: The psychological state when you have lost the feeling of belonging either to your society or to your work, the sociological state when you are treated as an object rather than a subject, the existentialist moral sense of living in “bad faith”, the metaphysical notion of part of your essential self turning into something external etc., to mention only some of the major variations on the theme.
Though Marxist philosophers never treated the subject seriously it is significant that whenever they refer to existentialists they do so in the same spirit as when they refer to other deviationists or revisionists. It is significant because it indicates that they feel the family-resemblance between themselves and others who talk about alienation. Cf. for instance the summary of an article from Voprosy Literatury in the July-September 1959 number of Soviet Survey. The article ends with the standard Marxist philosophical argument used against revisionists: ‘The vicissitudes of the existentialist novel shows us perhaps particularly clearly that in political life and in literature also a third path, between the path of reaction and progress, is impossible.’