economic and philosophical manuscripts (1844), karl marx [in Tucker]

(67): drawing a sharp distinction between the utopian critic, and the positive science of crticisim (this is two years before the poverty of philosophy)

(68): "settling of accounts with Hegelian dialectic" (final manuscript)

(70): even here, an ambitious, though critical teleology -- "the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes--the property-owners and the propertyless workers." cue arrighi/brenner here.

(70): the contingency of those laws that political economy takes as universal (and here, the formal properties of any ruling ideology--rendering universal the interests of a particular group)

(71): the 'arc' of history is here already present--in this the manuscripts are a critical place in which the "later marx" is united with the "earlier marx."

(71): "Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity"--the reproduction of labor-power, in other words, encompasses all the processes by which the laborer is compelled to remain a worker.

(72): "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... it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien."

(72-73): re-read, but: it reads like a "fall from grace." yet, read the proper way, it is more a commentary on the barbarism of the immediate process--that bourgeois society is producing civilization on a foundation of barbarism (see next paragraph).

(73): "it produces palaces--but for the worker, hovels. it produces beauty--but for the worker, deformity."

(74): "production itself must be active alienation..."

(74): "the worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.. his labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour." this is one of the critical interventions, of course--pinpointing how labour is free, in the double-sense.

(75): a greener marx? here species-being is being defined in terms of man's relationship to inorganic nature ("he must remain in continuous intercourse...")this third form of alienation, in some sense, stands for the contradiction with nature--man has alienated/privatized that which exists in common for the human species. of course there is the more orthodox interpretation, which is not incompatible at all--man has made "productive life a means"--"life itself appears only as a means to life."

(77): and the fourth form--"an immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life-activity, from his species being is the estrangement of man from man."

(78): man's self-estrangement appears to him as servitude to another. it denies his sovereignty over himself and his work--it mystifies the work that he, himself, does in the world. through self-estrangement, indeed, we can arrive at the fact of classes: "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."

(79): private property appears initially as a cause of alienated labour, but marx insists that it be understood as its consequence. this is not very important as either a logical or historical argument, really, but more as a normative claim--it is alienated labour that produces and reproduces the capitalist mode of production. he is recovering the (potential) sovereignty of labour in a process (or system) that destroys him.

(80): the analytic of alienation, as we see here, is a thoroughgoing rebuke to all reformist assessments of capitalism: "a forcing up of wages... would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave..."

(80): here he differentiates himself from Proudhoun, who makes society into an "abstract capitalist," when--on the basis of his misunderstanding of the capitalist mode of production--he demands that everyone be paid an equal wage.

(80): the "universal class": "the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation"

(81): the modernity of contemporary poverty--"propertylessness" is not ancient, or tribal, but produced today. it must be understood as identical to the antithesis of labour and capital.

(82): "Finally, communism is the positive expression of annulled private property--at first as universal private property." already thinking about the transitional phase...

(82-84): here he is discussing those kinds of communism which do not problematize the rule of private property in toto (Proudhon, Fourier, Saint-Simon)--where "the community [is] the universal capitalist." [and, not insignificantly, the envisioned condition of women is symptomatic of the madness of this first model]. but the third model, on pg 84, which positively transcends private property: "communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution."

(85): a few comments on the place of athiesm in the process--interesting, precisely because he centers focus on the "real" battle to be waged ("action" will be necessary, he reminds us), which involves the real abolition of private property in the world. [see also 92-93]

(85-86): man as a social creature (but need to determine more precisely how to assess what is timeless and what is man-in-communism). but perhaps more importantly, we can see from these passages the contingency of man on his community and the society that surrounds him (as on page 85, "just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him.")

(86): against the bourgeois subject: "what is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of 'society' as an abstraction vis-a-vis the individual"

(86): this is so directly hegelian: "man... is the subjective existence of thought and experienced society present for itself"

(87): man has made even his natural functions, his senses, into objective phenomenon (i.e., objects)--there arises the peculiar sensation of "having" (he here refers us to hess), possessing. "the transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human sense and attributes."

(88): the path to apprehending everything in a human (as opposed to objective way)--to liberating society from instrumental rationality--runs through the campaign to socialize object: it "is possible only when the object becomes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being..."

(89): thesis on feuerbach, said differently: "It will be seen how the resolution of the the resolution of the theoretical antithesis is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of men. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one."

(90): industry and estrangement

(92): refuting the Creation narrative through an assertion of the founding thesis of "socialist man": "the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through human labour..."

(93): in capitalist society, "man becomes every poorer as man; his need for money becomes ever greater if he wants to overpower hostile being... his neediness grows as the power of money increases. The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the modern economic system..."

(94): more reflections on the advance of history, and progress: "this estrangement manifests itself in that it produces refinement of needs and of their means on the one hand, and a bestial barbarization, a complete, unrefined, abstract, simplicity of need, on the other; or rather in that it merely resurrects itself in its opposite. even the need for fresh air cease for the worker. Man returns to living in a cave..."

(95-96): "Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of denial, of want, of thrift, of saving--and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. The science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism... Self-denial, the denial of all life and of all human needs, is its cardinal doctrine... The less you are, the more you have... all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and drink, go to thd dance hall and the theatre..."" (brilliant!)

(96): "The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have enough."

(97): his own emphatic defense of the interdisciplinary approach--political economy refuses to be a moral science, even as it (or perhaps precisely because it) facilitates and enshrines the most mad and unethical forms of behavior: "Recardo is allowing political economy to speak its own language, and if it does not speak ethically, this is not Ricardo's fault." It is worth remembering this passage when we come to the argument that Marx wanted communism to be justified scientifically (and that is extended into the claim that his defense was a-moral)

(99): "In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property."

(100): attentiveness to "dwelling," to "home"--"But the cellar-dwelling of the poor man is a hostile dwelling, 'an alien, restraining power which only gives itself up to him in so far as he gives up to it his blood and sweat'--a dwelling which he cannot look upon as his own home where he might at last exclaim, 'Here I am at home,' but where he instead finds himself in someone else's house, in the house of a stranger who daily lies in wait for him and throws him out if he does not pay his rent."

(102-103): the famous passages on money--"Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good."

(104): "Money is the alienated ability of mankind. That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money."

(104): this is obviously critically important--the market recognizes only effective demand.

(107): a searching critique of the idealism of the old philosophy, even after it turned (unsuccessfully, to attempt critique)

(108): Feuerbach founded his philosophy on the second stage of the Hegelian dialectic ("actual, sensuous, real, finite, particular"), which--understood on its head--represented the annulment of all religion and philosophy. but it is for this reason that Marx here is wary of the negation of the negation--that threatens relapse into idealism: "The position or self-affirmation and self-confirmation contained in the negation of the negation is taken to be a position which is not yet sure of itself, which is therefore burdened with its opposite..."

(109-110): "Hegel's Encycopedia... is in its entirety nothing but the display, the self-objectification of the philosophic mind, and the philosophic mind is nothing but the estranged mind of the world thinking within its self-estrangement..."

(110): [A KEY PASSAGE:] "The whole history of the alienation-process and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefor nothing but the history of the production of abstract thought--of logical, speculative thought. The estrangement, which therefore forms the real interest of this alienation and of the transcendence of this alienation, is the opposition of in itself and for itself, of consciousness and self-consciousness, of object and subject--that is to say, it is the opposition, within thought itself, between abstract thinking and sensuous reality or real sensuousness."

(111): the focus on estrangment links the two systems of thought, obviously: "The Phenomenology is, therefore, an occult critique--still to itself obscure and mystifying criticsm; but inasmuch as it keeps steadily in view man's estrangement..."

(112): Hegel's virtue, in part, was to call attention to history as process and estrangement (the dialectic, in this sense)

(114-115): important pages that build to Marx's attempt to build a different sort of materialism: "Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism distinguishes itself both from idealism and materialism, constituting at the same time the unifying truth of both. We see also how only naturalism is capable of comprehending the act of world history."

(119): Hegel sees the negation of the negation as a confirmation of the true essence--however, Marx is arguing that this it, in fact, is "the confirmation of the pseudo-essence" This seems to be the second arm of his three-pronged critique (in addition to Hegel mistaking the thinking world for the real world, i.e.)[but we need to read Hegel before we can make sense of these pages]

(119): "Thirdly... the subject emerges as a result. This result--the subject knowing itself as absolute self-consciousness--is therefore God--absolute Spirit--the self-knowing and self-manifesting Idea. Real man and real nature become mere predicates..."

(122): Marx endeavoring to restore "positivity" and real activity to the "negation of the negation"

(125): abstract thought remains the "essence" of Hegel's system, and the subject of the act of annulment (or, of the negation of the negation)