Eugene Victor Wolfenstein On Marx & Alienation
In the 1884 manuscripts Marx proceeds from the workers’ alienation from the product of their labour to their alienation in the process of labouring. He then argues that, taken in combination, these two forms of alienation imply that workers are alienated from their “species being,” from their humanity. Alienation is dehumanization.
Marx took the idea of species being from Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology, and doubtless the term retains some of is moral/ethical connotations. But it is also, and (I believe) more importantly, an empirical concept. It is intended to provide an objective answer to the question, what is it that makes us human? What links us to nonhuman species, and what differentiates us from them?
Like other animals, the human being “lives on inorganic nature” and like them, s/he is a “suffering, conditioned and limited creature”. Human beings are finite, sensuous creature, parts of the natural order. That on the one hand. On the other, human beings are defined by the self-consciousness of their life-activity… It produces one-sidedly… It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need… Non-human species are merely natural. They satisfy their needs in instinctually determined fashion and through the use of specific, naturally predetermined objects (bees make honey from pollen and only pollen). They are neither free in how they produce nor universal in the scope of their production. But freedom from instinctual limitations and universality vis-à-vis the objects of productive activity are precisely the characteristics of human life-activity. This is because man “makes his life-activity the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity”. Or as Marx states the point later in Capital, Vol. 1:
“A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of his honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.”
We see, then, that Marx’s anthropology is of a piece with his political economic theory. When he says that we are dehumanised by the alienation of labour, it is because the freedom and universality of production is what makes us human:
“The object of labour is…the objectification of mans species self: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears away from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over other animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.
Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes man’s species life a means to his physical existence.” (Marx, 1844)
Extracted from: Eugene Victor Wolfensten’s Psychoanalytic-Marxism Groundwork - Pages 24-25
Marx took the idea of species being from Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology, and doubtless the term retains some of is moral/ethical connotations. But it is also, and (I believe) more importantly, an empirical concept. It is intended to provide an objective answer to the question, what is it that makes us human? What links us to nonhuman species, and what differentiates us from them?
Like other animals, the human being “lives on inorganic nature” and like them, s/he is a “suffering, conditioned and limited creature”. Human beings are finite, sensuous creature, parts of the natural order. That on the one hand. On the other, human beings are defined by the self-consciousness of their life-activity… It produces one-sidedly… It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need… Non-human species are merely natural. They satisfy their needs in instinctually determined fashion and through the use of specific, naturally predetermined objects (bees make honey from pollen and only pollen). They are neither free in how they produce nor universal in the scope of their production. But freedom from instinctual limitations and universality vis-à-vis the objects of productive activity are precisely the characteristics of human life-activity. This is because man “makes his life-activity the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity”. Or as Marx states the point later in Capital, Vol. 1:
“A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of his honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.”
We see, then, that Marx’s anthropology is of a piece with his political economic theory. When he says that we are dehumanised by the alienation of labour, it is because the freedom and universality of production is what makes us human:
“The object of labour is…the objectification of mans species self: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears away from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over other animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.
Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes man’s species life a means to his physical existence.” (Marx, 1844)
Extracted from: Eugene Victor Wolfensten’s Psychoanalytic-Marxism Groundwork - Pages 24-25