Marx’s alienation is an assertion of untrue appearance to human beings; he understands actual humans in their essential nature as species-being, producers with the power to make.
Marx traces human history’s progress and development by investigating the production realm, how, when, and why people produce spatially and temporally, and the impact of production on their social formations and intercourse. The production realm could be organized according to human nature or transcending it. The latter will result in alienation arising as an alien power that supersedes or expropriates the power of the original producers. Freedom amid the production realm is central to Marx’s argument about alienation.
This essay will investigate two interrelated subjects 1) Alienation that arises from transcending human nature. 2) The Freedom that evolves amid the production realm is Marx’s concept of freedom as the free development of individuals and society’s power, possibilities, and potentials, contrary to receiving freedom which arises from separating the producers from their production realm.
Part I will demonstrate a perspective on Marx’s species-being philosophical science. In part II, I will illustrate how Marx characterizes alienation in selected writings, namely On the Jewish Question , where the first time Marx mentioned alienation, the philosophical and economic manuscripts where Marx first provided a framework from which alienation scope constituent elements and baseline can be investigated, and Capital Volume I of his mature work where he applies the dialectic method to reveal how truth is concealed, and consciousness fetishized. In part III, I will discuss alienation considering Hegel’s and Robert Nozick’s philosophies.
Unlike Hegel, Marx distinguishes between estrangement/alienation and objectification; the latter is the relation with the object as either objectification to species-being life or loss of the thing and bondage through abstract labor objectified in commodity in capitalism. The former is ‘appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.’
Part I: Understanding Human Nature
1 Marx’s Species-Being
1.1 Introduction
Marx delimits philosophy, the science whose remit is species being in its essence per se. Marx means by calling something a being that it pertains per se to a kind of nature, necessarily connected to their nature, not accidentally.
Accidentally is distinguished from necessary as the former is something external to humans, not internal in their fabric or structure. The external appears as a power that exerts pressure independent of humans. What is accidental for Marx is contingent, i.e., not necessarily, and bears contradictions that must be resolved.
1.2 Essential Being
Humans are defined according to their species-nature ‘free, conscious activity is man’s species character’-(MANU31). ‘Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, .. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.’ -( MANU31)
Species-being is understood as an infinite progression of humans in history. This is why Marx opposes questions about the existence of "man" and nature and considers it an act of abstraction because asking about the creation of nature and man’s existence presupposes non-existence before creation. Therefore, human beings are understood as historical, constantly becoming and developing.
The argument about timeless species-being and nature means that Marx believes that what is law must be timeless and universal. It binds any metaphysical idea to its law because if natural law isn’t timeless, then an omnipotent magical idea is possible as a changer to the natural law. Species-being are property of themselves as part of nature as free conscious beings and infinitely live. They are not made or exist to serve what is external to them, such as political apparatus ruled by a king or a political power inherited from a supernatural power.
Nature is a common property for free conscious activity; humans should preserve nature from actions that violate nature as common property, such as slavery, serfs, starvation, exploitation, alienation, or ecological deterioration, as they presuppose a license over nature and its law, consequently negating freedom. This indicates that Marx is against hierarchical power that changes the common property through a system of rights distributions such as the right to the king or religious priest.
In this context, objectification is a genuine human activity to perverse nature and humanity, a social process of giving a form or structure to a passive object in nature. At the same time, humans give themselves social existence by coming together through the objectification of a world of their creation and reflection. It’s not individuals acting independently and discreetly from each other. From social objectification, Marx’s notion of freedom is to be a social power; freedom is developing the ability and a tri-mutual development of nature, society, and individuals.
1.3 Essential Power
Humans as species-being can resolve themselves through essential power; in other words, they can reconcile with nature positively through their making abilities, the makers of things, which can be viewed as a self-generating movement or driving force corresponding to a) a physiological fact and b) a work relation.
1.3.1 Individual qualitative activities: ‘For in the first place, however, varied the useful kinds of labor, or productive activities, it is a physiological fact that they are functions of the human organism and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or its form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and sense organs.’-(CAP164) Marx alludes to an organic process of active power, not passive, that bring about new things to life.
1.3.2 Work as productive social capacity: Work is an intelligible powerful practice; a subjective capacity as power, an inner motion of conscious mediation to actualize human life; Marx writes that work is “a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.’-(CAP133)
Marx used the word “Werktätigkeit” to describe the human species-being, which expresses that humans in their practices create works (Werk = a work, Tätigkeit = practice, Werktätigkeit = practices that create works)…’ .
By essential power, which is intrinsic in humans, Marx affirms that since we make things, we know the cause of it. We can demonstrate it by deducing the qualitative consequence from the precedent or the consequent work from the precedent. Marx echoes Thomas Hobbes’s argument “of the arts, some are demonstrable, others indemonstrable. And the demonstrable are those the construction of the subject … The reason whereof is this, that the science of every subject is derived from a precognition of the causes, … And consequently, where the causes are known there is place for demonstration, but not where the causes are to seek for.’
1.4 Society
What is central to defining society, according to Marx, is not anthropological identity or language or skin color or ethnic features, as these are not species-being essentials; in the Aristotelian terminology, these are not the substance of species, but mere accidental features as a predication of species.
Instead, society is defined, according to Marx, based on 1) the kind of relation of production that includes labor power, which can be organized according to a) human nature of essential power and being or b) a deviation from (a, in other words, by alienating their essentials. 2) The means of production, which includes infrastructure, natural resources, machine-equipment, objects of producers, and technology. What is crucial is whether workers are separated from the means of production. Marx called the forces of production the organizing system and governance of means of production and relation of production. ‘The productive forces are a system in which subjective productive forces (human labor power) make use of technical productive forces (part of the objective productive forces)…to transform parts of the nature or culture so that a product emerges.’
Marx believes in the constituent of production relation by the essentials of species-being, which should be preserved and lift-up at the individual level as a social being, not in inverse association with the society ‘Man is in the most literal sense of the word a zoon politikon, not only a social animal, but an animal which can develop into an individual only in society.’
Society is formed with human needs and the practice of human essentials to progressively fulfill these needs, such that the essential power becomes effective whilst meeting the need. This eventually develops social ability by mutual development of both capacity-power and conditions.
1.5 Summary
Human nature, a subject constituted by essential beings and power, is immanent transcendental. The former means that the essentials are built into the human fabric and structure. And transcendental in two senses, 1) that precede work experience, i.e., that which is not empirical but necessary, intrinsic, and per se, and 2) that which constitutes work experience, i.e., qualitative formation of concrete use-value of products by productive work relation for integrated objectification.
Alienation arises from the transcendent praxis in polity, economy, and culture in that it’s empirical, contingent, and extrinsic because it goes beyond work experience, negating work relations and objectification. This results in transfers of control from producers to alien, external power. Under alienation, people continue to produce, but their common property as social goods, which affirms their social influence, is alienated from them, and their society fades away.
A society that Marx envisions is one ‘when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man’s essential powers … and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers – that all objects become for him the objectification of himself……realize his individuality…… that is, man himself becomes the object…..’-(MANU46)
1.6 Centricity of Freedom
According to Marx, the free development of human essentials means that freedom arises in the production realm that is structured according to what pertains per se to human nature. To that, freedom arises amid the free exchanges between producers of their product’s qualitative properties and sustain productive work relations (see 1.3), practicing objectification as free-conscious activity (see 1.2). Hence, subjective freedom is preserved in the realm of production. And society does not transcend subjective freedom but promotes it and lifts it in itself and for itself. Therefore, society should stand with subjective freedom in the substantial realm of production. A society serving that purpose is an extension of nature or a second nature that organizes society according to human-nature governing principles (see 1.4). It’s not freedom as ought to be as a pearl of ultimate or super wisdom; instead, it’s the freedom that evolves amid complexities of production realities; it’s a development of power, potential, and possibilities of integrated objectification.
Under alienation, productive relations that preserve human nature are transcended, and freedom cannot be developed while people are alienated. What emerges as the opposite of development freedom is receiving freedom, such as freedom to possess something and or redistribution of income through the lenses of equality.
Alienated people are a cause of alienating enterprises, namely the capitalist private property of commodity possessions and a cog in it, where they exchange their personal power and products as a commodity based on quantitative value measures. Labor power as a commodity is equated with subsistence wage, which sets the existing terms and conditions of the alienated. The exchange realm that emerges from the alienated is the free market of commodity exchange. Marx considers the freedom in the commodity exchange realm unscientific and a form of ideation, an antithesis of species-being freedom.
During the early Enlightenment project, the sort of society conceived was the one that should preserve and promote human rights as constituents of the subjective essence of individuals. John Locke, for example, in secularizing the concept of right and law, argued that we have rights to what we make, or which arises from human making, become a property right. The government must preserve the property rights of individuals by sanctioning the law of private property. ‘Freedom is therefore possession.’ Thomas Hobbes distinguishes right and law ‘Right, consisteth in liberty to do, or to forbear; Whereas Law, determineth, and bindeth to one of them..’ (Leviathan). Marx is critical of the separation between rights and law due to its negative impact on the essentials of humanity and freedom, which will be discussed in the next Part.
Part II: Marx’s Characterization of Alienation
2 Three selected works
The three selected works differ in the starting point of the investigation. In the Jewish Question from the political emancipation, in the manuscripts, it’s an actual economic fact because political economy ‘go back to a fictitious primordial condition’ which ‘explains nothing’ and ‘theologian explains the origin of evil by the fall of man, that is, he assumes a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained.’ And in the capital, it’s a multiplicity of a series of ones as commodities.
2.1 On the Jewish question
The political emancipation from feudalism dissolved the civil society of the time, and a new civil society emerged in which individuals’ civil lives and material elements were at center stage. The state recognized people through individual rights such as the right to property. The concept of freedom has changed, but Marx argued that people are not freed from religion, property, and egoism but receive religious freedom, freedom to own property, and freedom to engage in business. Receiving freedom contrasts with Marx’s concept of freedom as the free development of individuals and society.
The law and rights of individuals drive their relationship with one another. The ‘rights of man’ appear as ‘natural rights,’ constituting the civil law as the basis of their existence. It follows that right is subjective right; it’s located in and is a possession with its locus in individuals.
Marx pointed to two types of men 1) the individual in his immediate existence (egoistic individual), which he calls the real man, 2) the political in his abstract, artificial man, as an allegorical, juridical person, he calls the true man.
Marx affirms what Rousseau correctly described the abstract idea of political man as follows: “Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature, of transforming each individual, who by himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole, from which, in a sense, the individual receives his life and his being, of substituting a limited and mental existence for the physical and independent existence. He has to take from man his own powers, and give him in exchange alien powers which he cannot employ without the help of other men.”
The argument refers to a reduction of man to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual from the whole of society, and, on the other hand, abstracts citizen. Both objectify their nature by resorting to an alien power; for instance, just as in the grip of religion, humans turn their nature into something alien, ‘so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity – money – on them.’
Marx describes man in civil society as a ‘man in his fortuitous existence,’ that is, life is subjugated to existing contingent conditions, and the whole organization of our society has corrupted man and been alienated. Marx then writes that the alienation conditions can be reversed ‘Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life….’
I conclude that alienation is a social process of political, economic, and cultural. The realm of production is derogated by 1) Transcending human nature by an “egoistic individual” and “political is his juridical,” 2) taking from humans their power and replacing it with alien power, and 3) a society that preserves civil law of individuals’ rights to receive citizens’ freedom, including religious and property.
2.2 Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts (1844.)
Marx frames alienation in four interrelated constituents 1) the relation of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object exercising power over him, 2) the relation of labor to the act of production within the labor process, 3) Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect, 4) estrangement of man from man.
2.2.1 Estrangement (1 & 2)-essential power
I argue that (1) & (2) above are estrangements from essential power.
2.2.1.1 Estrangement (1)-qualitative formation.
Product sensuous properties result from the qualitative formation by producers where they relate dialectically to the product, to the qualitative properties by the interactions of the human brain, including thinking and imagination with nerves, muscles, and sense organs with the product. Producers preserve the properties amid production. By estrangement, producers are barred from exchanging their products where they can persevere in their active role in the production realm. Estrangement then means the product is governed by the terms of exchange in a free market by alien power setting the terms over producers. The product will acquire new properties from the exchange realm that transcend the sensuous properties. This alienation is one of the aspects that directly relate to fetishism.
2.2.1.2 Estrangement (2)- work- Werktätigkeit.
Estrangement from the creation of work that mediates human life and with nature. People’s relation to the act of production is alienated, which means their relation to the production function doesn’t create work. Instead, what negates work, which is unproductive relations. When work is alienated, the form of work has been substituted by another form that opposes it, i.e., a form of labor. The association between work and labor is inversely proportional. Political economy starts from labor which means it establishes a law of estrangement, a contradiction of estranged labor with itself.
2.2.2 Estrangement (3)-essential being.
Estrangement from the essential being: in 3) the estrangement from nature and his spiritual species-property.
This estrangement is deduced from the previous two estrangements. It follows that upon alienating the essential power, species-being is not adopted in practice and in theory—as should be like ‘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 sees himself in a world that he has created.’ Instead, the alternative to species-being is individual life in its abstract form. Marx treats abstract individuals as a life purpose (see JQ) as a form of estrangement/alienation. To that, the human essential conscious being transcended, which becomes means to mere existence.
2.2.3 Estrangement (4)-society
The consequence of estrangement 1,2,3 is that people separated from each other live independently and face each other discreetly. They lose bondage with social entities that belonging to them by social goods.
2.2.4 Private property.
Marx derived the concept of private property from alienated labor-(MANU34) since alien labor is an assertion of the loss of essential being-(2.2.2), power-(2.2.1), and the bondage with any social entity that has its own good-(2.2.3); therefore, human essentials are transcended, so, wealth as an external objective substance confronting “man” is superseded or done away with it by ‘private property being incorporated in man himself and with man himself being recognized as its essence.’ An analogy with religion Marx made ‘he negated the priests outside the layman because he transplanted the priest into laymen’s hearts’ -(MANU40)
2.2.5 Division of Labor, Exchange, and Commodity
Both divisions of labor and exchange are aspects of and rest on private property. But what does it mean that the division of labor rests on private property? Marx writes that ‘division of labor is nothing else but the estranged, alienated positing of human activity as a real activity.’ (MANU55) In other words, the division of labor is the allocation of the alienated. Alienated labor is the input to the division of labor process. Upon acquiring the antithetical essence of their nature, they are subject to division according to private property interests.
With the loss of bondage with the products and work relations, laborers are left with nothing except labor power for their living. The products, work relations, and labor power now appear in exchange outside humans as commodities in a market of free competition.
The exchange relation in the capitalist system enforces a production relation based on buying workers’ power as a commodity. ‘The worker’s existence is thus brought under the same condition as the existence of every other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and it is a bit of luck for him if he can find a buyer.’-(MANU3)
Workers as a commodity mean their essences are properties of a commodity, not of themselves as the producer or the maker. They are individual labor stripped from the social good, act of production, and the means to their productive relation. The relationship between buyers as capitalists and workers as laborers are established according to the legal contract of rights and wages that satisfy existential and survival needs.
2.3 Capital Volume I
2.3.1 Commodity, Division of Labor, and Exchange.
Division of labor is necessary for commodity production, not vice versa. It’s only when commodities are brought in by the product of mutually independent acts of labor performed discretely in isolation from each other, the product confronts the other as a commodity. (CAP132)
“Independent acts of labor…” is a reaffirmation that alienated individuals are separated from each other and their essential power. Products’ social character disappears, or the social nature of the production process is negated.
In the capitalist mode of production, the exchange realm prevails not as a movement amid the producers’ production realm but as an external power overriding the producer’s relation and objectification. It’s structured according to the connection between commodities of objectified abstract labor, the antithesis of species-being objectification.
Fetishism as a mystical consciousness emerges amid such an exchange relation. In contrast to fetishistic knowledge, Marx’s dialectic focuses on discovering the truth from the negativity in the realm of commodities that conceals reality and represents an untrue appearance to human beings. The truth about reality is found in contradictions, division, abstraction, and oppositions.
I will discuss Marx’s presentation method to demonstrate the contradictions and incoherence in the exchange realm and its relationship with alienation. Then the relationship between alienation and capital accumulation.
2.3.2 Marx’s presentation method
Marx writes about Hegel’s dialectic ‘…the real world is only the external appearance of the idea’ Marx differentiates his dialectic from Hegel’s ‘with me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.’ (CAP102)
Marx’s material dialectical argument is a process of 1) Affirming a state in case its concrete, essence, per se, intrinsic, necessary, 2) Negativity that affects what in 1) that brings about a division, opposite, contradiction, incoherence, asymmetry, abstraction, external essence, exclusion, contingent, 3) Movement to overcome the division or the opposition and contradictions between 1 & 2.
In dialectic terms used widely, the process can be described as (1) Affirmative state as a thesis, (2) Negation of or contradiction with (1) as antithesis, 3) Sublation as a negation of the negation (synthesis). Sublation is a translation of the German term aufheben. Three meanings are associated with sublation: lift something to rise to a higher level, preserve something due to its worth, terminate or cancel something as it ends or expires, or jettison it.
Marx affirms use-value as concrete, qualitative, internal essence, intrinsic, and per se of work/workers; it arises from the subjective nature of the worker. While value, on the other hand, is the antithesis that negates use-value, the essential power in workers is appropriated ‘the labor contained in these values does not count by virtue of its productive relation….., but only as being an expenditure of human labor-power,’-(CAP136) as mere expenditure of labor-power as equal human labor. Use-value and “essential power” are transformed into a quantitative value measure. The conditions that determine the expenditure of labor-power do not pertain per se to workers, but it’s extrinsic to them. Workers lose their ability to practice their power over what they produce because they don’t set the measure of value. It follows that the power that arises from value is not producers’ power.
Consequently, use-value is disregarded in the sense that different concrete forms of work disappear, i.e., it’s no longer linked with the producer, and then what remains in the product is the labor expenditure, i.e., time spent to produce the products.
Objectification is not to duplicate workers themselves in the sense of seeing themselves in the inorganic world/nature they created. Instead, their inorganic body is estranged from them and separated from them. Commodities substantiate this estrangement because what is in commodity is objectified abstract human labor measured as the average time to produce a commodity and counts as a quantitative measure.
2.3.2.1 Commensurability
According to Marx-, the first to analyze the value form is Aristotle, who argued that ‘there can be no exchange without equality, and no equality without commensurability.’(CAP150) Marx pointed out that Aristotle failed to discover equivalence relations because of historical limitations inherent in the society since Greek society was founded on the labor of slaves. Hence inequality had as its natural basis.
It’s not money that renders commodities commensurable; commodities are objectified human labor, therefore as values are commensurable. If we have two commodities x and y that are distinct from each other qualitatively, e.g., a mobile phone and a suit/cloth, if producing both take the same labor time, both have the same value because their qualitative properties do not count in the value.
2.3.2.2 Exchange Value
The contradictions between use-value and value measure must be resolved because commodity qualitative use-value must be exchanged in the market as a quantitative value as a measure of exchange. Exchange value is a sublation stage, where commodities are related to each other through exchange relations. Exchange-value assures that use-value is organized as commodity exchanges on the market.
An indifference curve is a representational tool structured according to the Pareto procedural principle that can represent exchange appearances as a trade-off between utilities-quantity (example of mobile phone v. cloth/suite referred to above). Individual preferences or choices ought to be determined practically and constrained by personal budgets. The ultimate production possibilities capacity in the society sets the limits in the economy, i.e., production possibilities frontier-PPF, where Pareto says people continue to exchange until they reach the PPF level they will stop. With this sort of exchange, the social character of use-value as a social wealth diminishes. What determines what will happen is not socio-productive imperatives but the exchange imperatives in terms of what & how much and may be produced for exchange. When people are ought to choose according to their income/budget, they are confronted with stipulative rules in the form of ideas owners of the commodities set to its terms. Buyers may choose freely from within the chain of ideas, which is a process of ideation of reality, turning reality into mere ideas pave the way for ideology. The commodities exchanges ‘as soon as these proportions have attained a certain customary stability, they appear to result from the nature of the products ..’ the magnitude of value varies continually, independently of the will, foreknowledge and actions of the exchangers.-(CAP167)
Knowledge about what people exchange is fetishized; its understanding is contingent as it doesn't reveal the fundamental nature of the products born in and with products during production processes.
2.3.2.3 Fetishism
What emerges from commodity exchange is that a social relation between things predominates while social link between producers is marginalized. As commodities appear in exchange value, they acquire new properties from the realm of exchange. But these properties are superstitions, for Marx, as ‘mysterious and metaphysical’ because they transcend the sensuous property of the product acquired from the qualitative formation by the work process. It stands on its relation to other commodities as a value that is determined quantitatively.
Individuals are overwhelming exchangers who posit themselves outside their society of producer’s relation. They don’t come into social contact with each other ‘until they exchange the products of their labor,’ -(CAP165) their social personality appears in exchange. To that end, they seek the means to preserve and promote their position in exchange.
Marx draws attention to the role of money as commodity ‘….conceals the social character of private labor and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly.’-(CAP168)
2.3.3 Alienation and Capital Accumulation
2.3.3.1 Primitive accumulation
Primitive accumulation Marx alludes to as the pre-history of capital but necessary for understanding capital accumulation presuppositions. ‘The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labor.”-(CAP874) Workers are free in the double sense ‘that they neither form part of the means of production themselves, as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc., nor do they own the means of production, as would be the case with self-employed peasant proprietors.’-(CAP874)’
Two important takeaways are that workers ‘had been robbed of their own means of production’ and that ‘the history of their expropriation’--(CAP875) is violent. The second is that work is negated by canceling ‘Werktätigkeit’ as workers are separated from the means necessary for their work practices.
Marx exposed different scenarios of the same process, including the expropriation of agriculture, bloody legislation, and the modern theory of colonization, and dealt with the national debt as an alienation of the state, whether its despotic, constitutional, or republican.
The chief cause behind this process is the dissolution of the masses into free labor. Societies are annihilated to supersede fettered by that society and sufficiently decomposed. Free labor, for Marx, is an alien entity ‘capitalist private property, which rests on the exploitation of alien, but formally free labor’-(CAP928), so the necessary term for capital accumulation: ‘how money is transformed into capital; how surplus-value is made through capital, and how more capital is made from surplus-value.’-(CAP873), by having workers appropriated as free labor, as alien.
2.3.3.2 General Law of capitalist accumulation
Marx argues that ‘The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labor-power at its disposal. ……this is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.’-(CAP798) [Italics from the source].
The power of capital is pledged to control 1) the means of production and 2) the subjective essence of workers as mere labor power.
The former constitutes the objective conditions of society, while the latter is subjective aspects of workers. By separating workers from the ownership of the objective conditions, the owners are the capitalist class, who can influence the form of society. Workers lack social entities of their own making as an objective condition to realize their essence.
The cause that develops the expansive power of capital and the labor power at its disposal is alienation. The precedent of exploitation, the core process of capital accumulation, is alienated labor. Marx writes in chapter 23, ‘Before he enters the process, his own labor has already been alienated from him, appropriated by the capitalist, and incorporated with capital, it now, in the course of the process, constantly objectifies itself so that it becomes a product alien to him. …the worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power……’-(CAP716)
2.4 Conclusion
Does alienation follow definitionally like “all bachelors are unmarried,” so we can assert that “all capitalists are alienators?” The answer to this question is better addressed by looking into the bedrock of existence conditions expressed in Marx’s writings on the bourgeois civil society (Jewish question) and political economy (manuscripts), and a mode of production (Capital). This is not based on language analytics because civil society, political economy primordialism, and mode of production are human creations. Hence Marx’s mission is to demonstrate its inner processes to reveal its truth via dialectics.
Marx opposes Locke’s distinction between nominal and real essence, Marx affirms that by objectification and essential power, we can acquire the knowledge of natural things; their real essence is known to us, and it follows that their nominal essence is not distinguished from real. If a distinction is to be made, according to MARX, it’s due to fetishism because giving general names as thing’s nominal essence is a way in which we use words/language through ideation, which arises from alienating the real essence of workers that is the concrete form of the producer’s qualitative formation of things constituent sensuous properties by work relation-(see1.3).
How are the three selected works related in the context of alienation? In the three works, people are personifications of commodity exchange relations; Marx writes, ‘the characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations; it is as the bearers* of these economic relations that they come into contact with each other.’-(CAP179). Economic relations belong not to workers but to those who reverse productive work relations and appropriate laborers as aliens who can only receive freedom but cannot be free by their productive activities.
There exists alienating and alienated politics. Marx considers indebted nations alienated. If we take the largest economy in the world today, the United States of America, its public debt is equivalent to 126% of its total gross product-GDP . This means that the national wealth that enters the possession of modern nations is a national debt, i.e., borrowed money from private sectors; chief among those are the financial institutions, who will use ‘Money as a measure of value ….. which is immanent in commodities, namely labor-time.’--(CAP188) ‘As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labor-time.’-(CAP129), it follows that alienation politics arises amid national debt because borrowed money as a measure of value, to become capital through its expansive power, must then appropriates workers’ essentials as labor-time. Society must then be measured through private sector lenses as an independent act of labor, as alien free labor as a precedent to exploitation.
Production in the capitalist mode of production is constrained by the PPF, which imposes conditions that become the antithesis of the infinite progression of species-being that presupposes a production that is not predetermined but rather where the production opens new possibilities and potentials as a free activity, i.e., production for freedom.
Part III: Hegel and Nozick
3. Hegel’s alienation, estrangement, objectification
In the phenomenology of spirit, Hegel walks us through the dialectic of phenomenology: progress is achieved via the movement of thoughts through the process of thesis-affirmative, antithesis-negation, and sublation as a negation of the negation. What is negated is separated or divested from the thesis and becomes an object of awareness; the spirit becomes conscious of it.
Estrangement is the negation state of tension due to opposition; this means it’s something external not yet settled in self-consciousness. Estrangement is sublated to resolve the tension in a higher level of understanding towards fine-grained determination of concepts. A new elevated consciousness appears in synthesis as a unification of oppositions, which enters the inner realm of human thought as consciousness, for instance in [147]: Hegel characterizes how the thesis sensuous negated by the antithesis perception then sublated by ‘the supersensible is the sensuous and the perceived posited as they are in truth. the supersensible…. It is rather that world posited as sublated, or posited in truth as the inner.’
Another aspect of Hegel’s dialectic is about the spirit in history. Hegel argues that spirit will for sure return to itself ‘[36]: spirit becomes the object, for it is this movement of becoming an other to itself, which is to say, of becoming an object to its own self and of sublating this otherness. And experience is the name of this very movement in which the immediate, the non-experienced, i.e., the abstract (whether the abstract is that of sensuous being or of “a simple” which has only been thought about) alienates itself and then comes round to itself from out of this alienation.’
Looking at the previous two quotes, Hegel did not distinguish between estrangement, alienation, and objectification at the conscious and historical levels. The Cambridge translation draws attention to that. Marx writes about Hegel, ‘all estrangement of the human is …nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness.’ against that, Marx describes the method as an abstraction ‘…they are thought entities, and therefore merely an estrangement of pure, i.e. abstract, philosophical thinking’-(MANU65).
Hegel always refers to an unsettled state of externalization as that will be sublated as a “thought entity” as in consciousness “posited as sublated” or spirit “sublating this otherness.” Hence, Hegel didn’t link his dialectic to social or political dependency like Marx’s in the production realm associated with the social formation associated with a set of apparatuses and the result from alienation/estrangement that will appear in exchange, distribution, and the effect on freedom.
In the Philosophy of Rights, Hegel writes, ‘…the wrong which I and the other party have done to my concept and reason in treating the infinite existence of the self-consciousness as something external, ….’ Which is saying that what is external is divested and is wrong. Then, the way forward is removing the external determinations “when their externality is superseded,” I am in a position to “return on my part into myself, whereby I make myself existent as Idea, as a person with rights and morality, supersedes the previous..’
In arguing about property, Hegel said that if a thing is external in nature, it’s possible to alienate it. He regarded ‘alienation a true mode of taking possession,’ in three moments: 1) possession, 2) use, and 3) the unity of the first two, namely taking possession to go something by alienating it, i.e., that I become ownerless as I relinquish it to make over to the will of someone else.
Accordingly, estrangement as alienation as externalization and objectification resolves itself metaphysically through the sublation due to opposition in the externals. Contrary to Hegel, Marx’s revolutionary dialectic mobilizes political and social forces to fulfill the goals and objectives of returning humans to themselves to their essential character.
4. On Robert Nozick (1938-2002)
The liberal camps overlook alienation; they view Marxism mostly from egalitarian arguments for judging liberty. Second, liberals philosophers like Nozick adopt Kantianism in that we must transcend our nature to be free. Thirdly, extreme denial of society as a social entity and that only individuals constitute society.
David Harvey quoting Margret Thatcher, the ex-prime minister of Great Britain, ‘famously declared, `no such thing as society, only individual men and women'-and, she subsequently added, their families. All forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favor of individualism, private property, personal responsibility, and family values.’ He added that she said, ‘Economics are the method, but the object is to change the soul.’
I take it that ‘change the soul’ is about creating hegemonic culture as wider enforcement of ideological principles. Gramsci argued that hegemony is ‘an active and voluntary (free) consent, i.e., a liberal, democratic regime.’
Nozick, a precursor to denying society and considering it a roadblock to freedom, argued, ‘[T]here is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people... Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more.’ A Kantian tone and notion of preserving the end of everybody by treating each individual as an end in themselves.
Nozick’s “liberty upset pattern” is used as the antithesis to state intervention in wealth redistribution, if happens will be based on the coercive measure because it’s against deep pluralism in the society that people will choose freely what to do.
Nozick’s famous example to prove his point is a champion basketball player where the player requests an extra Dollar from those who come to watch the game. If all the players and spectators had an initial egalitarian state, the champion player would have higher utility after some time. Nozick then argues that if the government wants to keep the equality in utility, the government will have to take coercive measures to redistribute the wealth from the basketball player to the poor, which will grant preference to a specific group that others disagree with or the government must abolish private property or private ownership to prevent inequality in utility.
But Nozick overlooks alienation as his argument arises from exchange relations that presuppose commodities, not an exchange of qualitative products based on work relations (see 1.3) amid the production realm. It’s, therefore, a transcendent argument of production. Contrary to Nozick’s Kantian perspective, Marx’s departure point is the free development of humanity from within production, where alienation terminates such possibility.
The ghost of Kantianism in Nozick’s argumentations rendered the actual world out of the scope of understanding, which is, in Kantianism, the noumenal world as things in themselves, such that we cannot go beyond the phenomenal world. In His book Philosophical Explanations, on page 174 in the footnote, Nozick argued ‘..utility theory which represents preferences but does not explain them.’ the argument says that we don’t know what is beyond the representation of the utility function; we have to take it at its face value as a non-trivial fact, he elucidates his view in the footnote ‘Still, it is not a trivial fact that preferences are so structured that a real-valued function can represent them, …even though the representation (by itself) does not explain these preferences.’
Nozick follows Kant in that our freedom is metaphysical as we don’t know its superposition, as in the noumenal world in that we are barred from accessing or knowing the substance of things in themselves or any of their determination terms.
5. Conclusion
Contrary to Kant, Hegel argued that we could be free without transcending our nature and presupposing superposition in a noumenal world; we can be free without accessing some inexplicable and unknowable transcendental source – noumenal freedom. Marx asserts Hegel’s perspective but objects to his dialectic to discern truth because it’s “abstract philosophical thinking” of progressive consciousness and spirits returning to itself, while for Marx, it is a material movement of historical, social formation, and humans return to themselves in a communist society where alienation is removed by positive reconciliation with the external world. Marx writes, ‘Communism is the positive mode as the negation of the negation…’-(MANU49). Human productive activities are not negativized by external aliens’ power.
Marx jettisoned the distinction in power as Kant did, between the power of physical bodies to act upon each other and the other causal power of freedom belonging to humans as they are in themselves. Power for Marx is immanent transcendental in humans’ nature.
6. Bibliography
Gramsci, Antonio (1929-35). Selections From The Prison Notebooks.
David Harvey (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism (p. 23).
Fuchs, Christian (2016). Reading Marx in the Information Age: 1 (p. 27). Taylor and Francis.
Fuchs, Christian (2015). Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (p. 24). Taylor and Francis.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrich (2012). Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrich (2018). Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)
Hobbes, Thomas (1656). Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics (Illustrated) . www.WealthOfNation.com
Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan [with Biographical Introduction] . Neeland Media LLC.
Marx, Karl (1844). On The Jewish Question by Karl Marx (marxists.org).
Marx, Karl (1844). Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts. Translated: by Martin Milligan.
Marx, Karl. (1867). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Trans. by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin.
Marx, Karl Friedrich Engels (1845-6). The German Ideology, including Theses on Feuerbach. Published 1998 by Prometheus Books
Tully, James. An Approach to Political Philosophy (Ideas in Context) Cambridge University Press.
Nozick Robert (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974
Nozick, Robert (1994). Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-66479-5 .
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