In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx summarized communism as the abolition of private property. Conservatives argue that this violates individual freedom and the basis of economic prosperity, while leftist thinkers argue that it is only controversial because the power-that-be wishes to hold onto their own power. The two camps often talk past each other and argue in perpetual cycles that only seem to strengthen their own positions. Moreover, in the face of the undeniable, horrific historical consequences of Marxism in the last century, many have adopted the strategy of defending Marxism by appealing to a distinction between “theory” and “practice.” Even though it failed in past practice, the argument goes, the theory is still viable. This all shows that, at the very least, despite its vast political influence, we are still in the middle of grappling with Marxism. In this paper, I will examine Marx’s idea of alienated labor as the basis of his theory of private property. I intend to show that this fundamental idea is diabolical, in the original meaning of the word.
In his essay “Alienated Labor,” part of the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx begins by stating private property as a “presupposition”: “We have proceeded from the presuppositions of political economy… private property, the separation of labor, capital and land.” However, he immediately also describes private property as a “fact”: “Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property. It does not explain private property.”[1] According to Marx, private property is both a theoretical posit and an ontological fact. This may not sound so alarming, because all theorization must start somewhere, upon some basic, irreducible facts that are true. And private property seems to be a fact true enough; our laws protect our individual ownership of material goods. However, this is not what Marx means when he refers to private property as both a theoretical posit and an ontological fact. In Marx, private property is first a theoretical posit, and a fact only by virtue of being such a posit.
The first sign that Marx is doing something different than simply basing his theorization on evidently true and basic facts about the world is his explicit rejection of the need to elaborate on the basic concepts of political economy, which include private property. He writes: “Let us not put ourselves in a fictitious primordial state like a political economist trying to clarify things.” Such “a primordial state clarifies nothing,” he continues, but only “acknowledges as a fact or event what it should deduce.” In other words, private property and other concepts, such as capital and labor, require no clarification, not because they are clearly and self-evidently true, but because basic theoretical concepts require no clarification from a methodological perspective. I cannot overemphasize the importance of noticing the methodological—and, as I will show, ontologically divisive—statement implicit in Marx’s conception of private property. Instead of pointing to our day-to-day reality to justify taking private property as a starting point in his theory, Marx plainly says that he does not need to justify any starting point. All theorists must start somewhere, with some set of theoretical presuppositions, but all can give reasons for starting with X and not Y, and by talking through those reasons, we can change where we start. But Marx disagrees with this. While others may fail to justify their theoretical fundamentals, Marx rejects the very need to justify any fundamentals at all. Marx can only achieve this by treating presuppositions and facts as interchangeable in an ontological sense: just like facts, presuppositions are self-evident and truly existing. That is to say, Marx can only achieve this by rendering what we take to be real to be truly real. Marx’s ontology is thus baked into his methodology. The interchangeability of fact and presupposition is a statement about reality that reflects Marx’s philosophical ambition of making the objective out of the subjective. The very way in which Marx reasons, even before we examine what he reasons about, is but an inversion of reality, and the gateway to all the deception that is to follow.
Immediately after negating the need to explain theoretical fundamentals, Marx presents, as a true “fact”: “The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and ex tent.”[2] In other words, “the object which labor produces, its product, stands opposed to it as an alien thing, as a power independent of the producer.” The product of labor is the realization or objectification of labor, and the product is “the diminution of the worker.” Marx goes on to state the same idea in many different ways without ever explaining why the fruit of one’s own labor is “alien” to him and even “diminishes” him. (I suspect that this is also in fact the basis for Marx’s labor theory of value: the more labor goes “out” of the worker, the more the product of his labor is “empowered.”) The closest he gets is when he says that this is all true “according to this premise: The more the worker exerts himself, the more powerful becomes the alien objective world which he fashions against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, the less there is that belongs to him.”[3] However, this is no explanation at all. It only turns the question of why there is an antagonism between the worker and his product to why there is an antagonism between the worker and the “objective world.”
Based on such “factual” statements of oppositional relationships between the worker and his product (or nature), Marx concludes: labor, the appropriation of nature, alienates man. All starts with the presupposition of a fundamental tension between worker and his own production, a tension that is not only ontological but mythical: the worker’s “production increases in power” and confronts him “as an alien thing.” The alienation of labor does not only occur when a factory worker gets the rubber band that he just made taken away from him. It occurs when any production takes place at all—and I mean any. It is not something that takes place within a specific circumstance that everyone will agree is undesirable, but an ontological statement about how man relates to his “external reality.” Alienated labor does not require an evil capitalist. An evil capitalist requires alienated labor. Marx writes: “The relationship of the rich to the objects of production” is “only a consequence” of “the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production.”[4] In other words, how the worker relates to his own labor produces “the relation of the capitalist to labor, or whatever one wishes to call the lord of labor.”[5] In short, alienated labor is the basis for “the relation in which he stands to these other men.”[6] This is a most amazing point: capitalists come into being through alienated labor. According to the “fact” of alienated labor, man does not own his own product of labor. Who does the ownership belong? It can’t be gods, Marx argues, so therefore it must be to other men: “The alien being who owns labor and the product of labor, whom labor serves and whom the product of labor satisfies can only be man himself.”[7] Viola, “evil capitalists” are born. Tellingly, Marx uses “product” and “capital” interchangeably. The more the worker produces, Marx writes, the more the worker “falls under the domination of his product, of capital.”[8] As much as the worker falls under the “domination of his product,” then, as much as he falls under the domination of capitalists, whoever they may be. The oppressive nature of capital is a derivative of man’s subjugation to his own production, and man’s subjugation to his own production is, according to Marx, a simple ontological fact. Put another way, according to Marx, the capitalist exists because the worker cannot own his product of labor, and the worker cannot own his product of labor because of an ontologically irreducible antagonism between man and the objective world. In this way, without any reference to how people relate to each other in reality, Marx derives the concept of “the capitalist” a priori and concludes that there is a fundamental “antagonism between man and man.” Because oppression is the more fundamental ontological fact than the oppressor, communism cannot but be a never-ending fight. Since the victim comes before the culprit, absolutely anyone can be this culprit. Hence the need for perpetual “class struggle” and the ever-changing faces of the “class enemies.”
Our discussion so far can shed light on why Marx refuses to explain private property—along with capital and labor—in the beginning of his essay. Private property, as the exploitative relationship between the capitalist and the worker, is a fact as much as alienated labor is a fact, which is to say, not very much a fact at all. Here, I want to point out that the way Marx sets the stage for the fact of alienated labor is highly tautological. He presents the “fact” of alienated labor after using the examples of private property, capital, and labor to argue that there is no need to explain the basic facts of political economy. But his conceptions of private property, and, more obviously, of capital and labor, are all derivatives of alienated labor. In Marx’s own words, alienated labor is the “direct cause” of private property.[9] And alienated labor itself rests on an ontological division between man and reality. Not only does Marx directly speak about this division, but his very methodological approach, by virtue of obfuscating the difference between a presupposition and a fact from the beginning, also embodies this division. Both the substantive and methodological basis of Marx’s theory is an inversion of reality, and one can try to hide this only with tautological reasoning.
Despite private property being only a derivative of alienated labor, Marx calls not for the abolishment of alienated labor, the purported cause, but for the abolishment of private property, the purported effect. For example, in “Private Property and Communism,” Marx writes that communism, as “the overcoming of private property,” is the overcoming of “human self-alienation” and thereby “the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man.”[10] Here and in The Communist Manifesto, Marx treats the abolition of private property as the solution to the problem of human self-alienation. But, according to his own logic in “Alienated Labor,” this would not work. The negation of an effect would not negate its cause.
Similarly, in “Free Human Production,” Marx also contradicts himself by treating private property as the cause of alienated labor. In this piece, Marx presents a positive vision of labor, something he calls “free” production, in which we would produce things as “human beings” and where labor would be “a free manifestation of life and an enjoyment of life.”[11]Communism would be the realization of this possibility. In other words, according to Marx here, although alienated labor is a fact, it is not a necessary fact, and the only reason why we do not have free production now is private property: it is under the “presupposition of private property” that labor is “an externalization of life… and indubitable expression of my self-loss and my powerlessness.”[12] In other words, alienated labor is now not the cause of private property, but private property the cause of alienated labor. This again directly contradicts “Alienated Labor.” It seems to me that whenever Marx is talking about a positive vision of labor and life, he treats private property, instead of alienated labor, as the fundamental fact. However, when it comes down to the inner-connections between these basic concepts, Marx puts alienated labor—more precisely, juxtaposition between man and the objective world—before private property as its cause.
Why does Marx contradict himself in such a direct manner? I think this is a serious problem for Marxist scholars. Here, I will only offer some preliminary remarks. First, if something just exists—and such a thing Marx makes the juxtaposition between man and his products of labor to be—how can anyone negate it? While the abolition of private property and the elimination of capitalists are actionable items, the negation of alienated labor is not: it just is. In Marxism, the problem that communism sets out to address—“human self-alienation”—just is and always will be. In other words, communism is impossible on a theoretical level. Marxism would stand, regardless of how many times it fails, but precisely because it has always been futile on its own terms. Communism is devoid of a possible positive outcome on a theoretical level, and therefore able to justify itself in the face of anything at all. Such is the cynical nature of its utopianism.
Alienated labor stems directly from Marx’s view of human existence. Towards the end of “Private Property and Communism,” Marx explicitly forbids the question of creation and writes that a “being only regards himself as independent when he stands on his own feet, and he stands on his own feet only when he owes his existence to himself.”[13] Owing existence to himself, rather than to the pure act of Existence sourced in God, man would only be able to actualize himself through separationfrom the rest of reality. Any relationships at all—interpersonal or productive—would infringe upon his independence and be oppressive for him. In other words, the idea that man’s own products of labor stand opposed to him as some alien power is a result of Marx’s view that man self-creates and self-subsists. But to oppose ourselves to nature is to slander its goodness and separate us from Life; it is diabolical, in the original sense of the word.
The English word “devil” comes from the Greek word διάβολος (diabolos), literally to “throw across.” The devil is the one who separates, divides, which is to say, who accuses, slanders, and severs a relationship. The serpent in Eden divided man from God, not by making Adam and Eve want to become like gods, but by making them think that God does not want them to become like gods. That is to say, the serpent painted a picture of reality in which man’s interests are fundamentally at odds with God’s. Marx does the same: “The more man attributes to God, the less he retains in himself.”[14] Indeed, I don’t think the story of man’s Fall is primarily one of arrogance, for we can still understand arrogance via a framework of man versus God, the human versus the divine. Rather, I think man’s Fall is a story of false ontology. The serpent’s deceit lies not in making Adam and Eve want to become like gods, but in making them think that they are not becoming like gods already under God’s providence. The ultimate choice in life is to view reality and man as harmonious or as conflictual. Both the serpent and Marx chose the latter.
We can only disagree about what is real if we agree that the question of what is real is worthy of pursuit. But if we reject the fundamental goodness of reality, the question of what is real (metaphysics) becomes worthless. This is why Karl Marx has to forbid questioning in “Alienated Labor” and elsewhere. Objectivity is thus entirely subjectivized via a choice made on behalf of an imagined “self” whose interests are thought of as not being accounted for by the reality that it cannot but be a part of. What can only come out of this inversion of reality is the destruction of all interpersonal relationships as well as a destitution of the material world.
In Paradise Lost, when the seraphim Abdiel objects to Satan’s incitement of rebellion, he says to Satan, God made “Thee what thou art,” and implores him to repent. But Satan’s reply, demonstrating his ontological worldview, finally seals his Fall:
who sawWhen this creation was? rememberst thouThy making, while the Maker gave thee being?We know no time when we were not as now;Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d (856-860).
As Satan declares himself to be “self-begot, self-rais’d,” despite being an angel, Abdiel no longer implores him to repent but only forecasts his destruction: “O alienate from God, O spirit accurst, / Forsak’n of all good; I see thy fall / Determined” (877-879). There is nothing more to say because Satan’s error is a choice, a way of looking at the world. Similarly, there is not much more for Marx to explain about the fundamental tension between man and his products of labor, which is to say, the fundamental tension between man and nature. It is a choice. As Karl Marx summarizes, communism is “the abolishment of private property.” In light of our discussion of alienated labor and its relation to the concept of private property, what Marx’s summary of communism really means is that communism is a choice to see ourselves as self-begotten beings who win by opposing and negating nature and others, rather than as creatures whose nature is harmonious with the rest of reality and God. While we may think that there is something to gain in absolutizing ourselves against reality, there is nothing outside of reality, and in absolutizing ourselves in this way, we only destroy ourselves. Such is sin. According to communism, oppression could only end on the day when there is no juxtaposition between self and world, and the “fight” must go on until then. However, there is no such juxtaposition to begin with except in our own mind. As much as it is groundless, as much as it is diabolical thinking.
[1] “Alienated Labor,” 1. [2] Ibid. [3] Ibid., 2[4] Ibid., 3. [5] Ibid., 6. [6] Ibid. [7] Ibid., 6. [8] Ibid., 2.[9] Ibid., 6. [10] Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “Private Property and Communism,” 304. [11] Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “Free Human Production,” 281. [12] Ibid., 281-282. [13] Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “Private Property and Communism,” 313. [14] “Alienated Labor,” 2.
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