Marx and Alienation

...The end of man is logically predetermined: union with the Absolute or God...

...salvation is the process by which this self-alienation is overcome...

...His differences with them were over the means and conditions necessary to establish a rationally planned economy in which human beings could not exploit other human beings...

...Certainly in terms of Marx's own categories any economy in which free trade unions are lacking, the legal right to opposition non-existent, and the right to strike taboo, is an economy of forced labor, the very essence of human self-alienation...

...In the future, presumably, he will be limited in his foresight and power only by natural limitations...

...From this empirical point of view, without relying on the dubieties of existential metaphysics or psychoanalysis, it is obvious that the Communist countries of the world, in which there are no rights except for those who agree with the dictatorial rule of a minority political party, are much farther removed from the Marxian ideal of a society of unalienated men and women than the imperfectly democratic welfare economies of the West...

...The unalienated man is the creative man, any man engaged in significant or meaningful work voluntarily assumed as a means toward selfrealization...

...He would do this not only in protest against the semantic outrage but to draw the most emphatic line of differentiation between his own ideals of a socialist society, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, and current Communist practices in which the individual, especially the critical individual with a sense of the value of human dignity, is ruthlessly destroyed...

...No man can completely emancipate himself from the past, even when he revolts against it...

...When the first assumption is made, discussion of "self-alienation" cannot be intelligible until we reach agreement on what kind of Self it is desirable to aim at or educate for...

...This is particularly true of Marx's theory of human "alienation," about which an extraordinary amount of nonsense is being written these days...

...Were he alive today, confronted by the grotesque and terrible caricature of his social ideals in countries which call themselves "people's democracies" and "communist" societies, he undoubtedly would characterize himself differently...

...that they are compelled to labor for subsistence and not as means of self-fulfillment...

...But perhaps it is not too much to hope that at least in academic quarters of the Western world, in time he will not be dismissed as a simple economic monist or an egoistic hedonist...

...Sidney Hook's essay is based on the introduction to a forthcoming new edition of his From Hegel to Marx...

...Recently, some have attempted to erect a new shining image of Marx on the basis of his earliest unpublished writings, to find not only glints but a new golden vein of ethical thought in them...

...Here again, we must ask, how can man alienate himself from himself unless some standard of an unalienated self, of a desirable or to-be-preferred self were operating, in relation to which all his possible actions could be evaluated...

...Man's historical development is really a spiritual pilgrimage in quest of fulfillment: union with God or the Absolute...

...Perhaps the ultimate in absurdity is Fromm's contention that the thinking of Marx "is closely related to the thinking of Zen Buddhism...

...But there are obvious and weighty reasons—grounded primarily in fidelity to truth and secondarily in political considerations—why Marx and his legacy should not be surrendered to the enemies of human freedom...

...Even when specific Hegelian expressions are lacking, the overtones are there...

...Yet it is undeniable that even under the most highly developed welfare economies of the West, in which because of monopoly, administered prices, government regulation and the divorce between ownership and control of industry, capitalism has been profoundly modified, there are very few unalienated human beings...

...Human needs and wants and lacks, to be sure, will always be among the points of reference in determining our judgment that some forms of behavior show human nature to be self-alienated...

...Norman Vincent Peale...

...It is easy to show that the notion of human alienation—except for the sociological meaning it has in Capital—is actually foreign to Marx's conception of man...

...In Hegel, the term has several meanings...

...But which needs and wants will be taken as central...

...First of all, what does it mean to say that the nature of man is alienated from itself...

...Still, this does not gainsay the fact that neither the attempt to achieve the impossible, nor the new and powerful social system which resulted from this attempt, is explicable in traditional Marxian categories...

...And once we decide, even when we define them objectively, will they not vary from place to place and time to time...

...Second, if the essence of man's nature is considered to be a constellation of traits whose character changes with changes in the fundamental organization of society, then whatever man becomes in history—call it "alienated" or not—is just as much an expression of his essence as the state out of which he developed...

...Some of Marx's writings are drenched with references to the Hegelian philosophical traditions in which he was nurtured...

...To Marx, the empirical and historical sociologist, human alienation under capitalism signified that men are not free to create or redetermine their own natures...

...This is prefigured in his early writings but it is also accompanied by a number of Hegelian and Young Hegelian notions which Marx later ridiculed and explicitly abandoned...

...To speak of a particular expression of a man's nature as distorted or alienated or at odds with itself makes sense only when we already assume (1) either that there is an already agreed upon ideal or norm of what man's nature should be in contradistinction to the variety of possible manifestations of his nature, or (2) that there already exists some ideal or norm, determined statistically or on the basis of some classificatory system, which is identical with the natural essence of man and from which the forms of human behavior, dubbed alienated, are aberrant...

...His criticisms of Hess and Heinzen show clearly that he abandoned his early moralism, and in the Communist Manifesto he pokes fun at those socialists who make great play with the obscure term "alienation" to conceal their borrowing of the commonplaces of French socialist thought...

...The basic "existential predicament" of man is given by his Fall from Divine Grace in the Hebraic-Christian tradition, and from Ideal Perfection or the One in the Greek philosophical tradition...

...Like John Dewey, Karl Marx seemed to believe that human behavior required for its proper study the biological and social psychological approach, and that the field of individual psychology, considered in independence of biological and social coordinates, was a vestigial survival of medieval rational psychology which predicated the existence of man's soul...

...God and Self are regarded as implicitly one...

...For it failed to predict, or even to allow for, the very possibility of a form of industrial serfdom even further removed from socialist society than from capitalist society— the only alternatives Marx envisaged on the agenda of history...

...Therefore, despite itself and the dialectical method, he considered it to be shot through with dualism...

...Does the abolition of a market economy guarantee the abolition of human self-alienation...

...Thé spectacle of Communist countries in operation suggests that man, especially the working man, may be more alienated in a highly planned, socialized economy in which political democracy is absent than in a relatively unplanned, mixed economy in which political democracy is present...

...It may be argued with some appearance of plausibility that according to Marxian theories of historical causation, broadly interpreted, it is impossible to achieve socialism in a culturally backward and economically underdeveloped country in which democratic political traditions have taken no firm root...

...More important, investigation of Marx's relations with the Young Hegelians results in a conception of his social philosophy which confirms a view I propounded more than a quarter century ago: What Marx understood by Communism was profoundly different from the system of political despotism and terror, of gleichgeschaltete culture and economy, which prevails in the Soviet Union...

...But his nature within these limits will be a function of his choice, and of the changes his choice makes in the behavior of things and institutions...

...As democratic socialists of the free world behold the face of the Communist Leviathan, many of them in revulsion are prepared to abandon Marx to the Soviet Byzantinism which has made a religious cult of the founder of scientific socialism...

...So long as political freedom and democracy as a way of political life exists, the economy may be humanized and brought into consonance with reflective moral ideals...

...Most discussions of "alienation" confuse, when they do not ignore, this distinction...

...Marx, however, seems to go further than Dewey because, as a result of a hangover from early exposure to the romantic Hegelian Naturphilosophie, he held that man's biological drives could be transformed by culture...

...His words and actions breathe a commitment to a way of life and a critical independence completely at odds with the absolute rule of the one-party dictatorship of the Soviet Union...

...Aside from the specific sociological doctrine of "the fetishism of commodities"—which explores with brilliant suggestiveness the ramifications of the fact that men as social creatures are ruled not by intelligence or reason but by forces generated by their own handiwork in a commodity-producing society—the central notion of "self-alienation" is foreign to the historical, naturalistic humanism of Marx...

...Marx was a democratic socialist, a secular humanist and a fighter for human freedom...

...During his lifetime, Marx at various times called himself a Communist in order to distinguish his position from other contemporary socialists...

...If the foregoing analysis is valid, then in the very interests of the socialist society which Karl Marx anticipated, and, more important, in the interests of the truth, we must conclude that at thè present juncture of world history, it is not the mode of economic production but the mode of political decision which is of decisive importance today...

...It may seem anti-climactic to read ontology into Marx's social philosophy after he has been hailed as a Zen Buddhist, but it is just as much a piece of obscurantist legerdemain...

...A study of this development will show that it is the criticisms Marx made of his predecessors and contemporaries, rather than his temporary agreements with them, which are more significant for an adequate understanding of his thought...

...The human soul is alienated from God...

...Because of the emotive associations his name evokes, which are exacerbated by his deification in the Communist empires of the world, this is rather unlikely...

...An adequate study of Marx's intellectual development should do justice to both...

...To seek what was distinctive and characteristic about Marx in a period when he was still in Hegelian swaddling clothes, or when he was still more or less of a Feuerbachian, before he had fought his way clear of all varieties of seductive idealism and reductive materialism, is to violate every accepted and tested canon of historical scholarship...

...In class societies in which economic production is in private hands, man can initiate social and historical actions but cannot control their consequences...

...To the extent that Marx's genuine contributions to our understanding of history and society have entered into the scientific tradition, nothing is lost by such reorientation...

...that where the market is king and Mammon is God, human beings are degraded, reduced to passive subjects, progressively deprived of the powers of uncoerced choice...

...They should also safeguard Marx, the thinker, from being taxed with holding theoretical positions he had abandoned in the course of his development...

...There is, of course, some continuity between Marx's early and later thought, but there is considerably more discontinuity...

...For it is a concept which is originally and primarily religious in nature and, derivatively, metaphysical...

...The Marx of the mature years is being made over to fit a model of a man and thinker approved by some fashionable schools of psychotherapy...

...From this point of view, to speak literally of human alienation requires that one assert in Aristotelian fashion that the fulfillment of one's natural set of potentialities represents the only authentic mode of life...

...For these and many other reasons, the contention that socialism spells the abolition of human selfalienation is either a risky prophecy, when it is taken as an empirical prediction that a new relation will be established between the worker and the object of his labors...

...Marx's scientific naturalism or materialism banishes these beautifully colored soap bubbles to the realm of poetic fantasy and literary psychology...

...Nonetheless, an objective analysis must recognize that as removed as Communist cultures are from Marx's own conception of socialist society, their very existence poses a very fundamental challenge to the validity of his theory of historical materialism...

...Where political freedom and democracy are lost, the economy becomes another means of ushering in the "dark night of the soul...

...In the final analysis the view that man makes himself or creates his own nature even in part renders untenable most notions of human self-alienation...

...The nature of man is for Marx historically conditioned, so much so that he suggested that even man's biological nature is affected significantly by historical and cultural determinants...

...Erich Fromm, if not of Dr...

...The abiding sense in which Marx believed that human beings were "selfalientated" is expressed in the section on "the fetishism of commodities" in the first volume of Capital...

...Even under capitalism this account was exaggerated if taken as a literal account of the life of labor in all historical periods rather than as a description of an ideal type...

...The process of "self-alienation" is a process of self-development in which the limits of one's self are progressively overcome, in which what is implicit becomes explicit...

...Some of the most common misconceptions of Marxism, particularly the interpretation of historical materialism as a form of egoistic hedonism, and the notion that Marx was a Judaic-Christian heretic whose social ideal was love— to be expressed in the art of loving!—can hardly survive a study of his criticisms of Stirner and Feuerbach, of Hess, Karl Grun and Karl Heinzen...

...He wrote with more passion than precision, almost always in the context of criticism or polemic, and often in an idiom foreign to the thoughtways of the empirically oriented cultures of England and America...

...Otherwise there is no explanation of the process of development and we should have to conclude that Marx was born a Marxist...

...Third, to the extent that man, as Marx insists, changes his own nature by acting upon the world of nature and history, he can and must, when he is free to make his history rationally, choose among different values, different paths of development...

...They seek, instead, to develop their social philosophy on the basis of contemporary ethical values and available scientific knowledge...

...When the second assumption is made, it expresses precisely that conception of human nature as a constant or fixed character in history—departures from which are perpetually lamented as forms of self-alienation—which history, and above all the spirit of Marx's philosophy of history and society, rejects...

...This would transform Marx into a believer in the metaphysical doctrine of natural law, which entails the acceptance of a natural law morality...

...very few for whom, in John Dewey's phrase, "earning one's living" is at the same time "living one's life...

...Yet, while Marx's relation to Hegel has been the subject of considerable publication, there has been comparatively little inquiry into his even more interesting relations with the Young Hegelians...

...but it cannot be logically deduced from the latter...

...one of them is applied in a primitive, exaggerated way to the process of work...

...Man finds himself not in the sense that he recovers something he once had and lost, but in the sense that he acquires a self-justifying awareness of his unity with the Totality of things...

...In Plotimis, the concept derives from the myth of the soul descending into the world of matter because of a Narcissus-like infatuation with its own image, and then making the flight back again to the ineffable totality...

...The ethical question must be decided, to be sure, on the basis of psychological and biological knowledge...

...The nature of anything, including man, is not found in a fixed essence which is separate from, or even distinguished from, its manifestations...

...But the root notion is still religious...

...There have not been wanting claims that Marx was a forerunner of Dr...

...These misunderstandings are to be deplored...

...There is no more reason for calling oneself a Marxist in pursuing the social sciences than in calling oneself a Newtonian or Einsteinian in pursuing the physical sciences...

...Leon Trotsky on occasions offered this explanation for the failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to develop the promise of socialism, even as conceived by the early Communist leaders...

...A period of intellectual maturation, surveyed and evaluated from the perspective at which a thinker has subsequently arrived, is significant more for the doctrines and attitudes which have been abandoned than for those which have been retained...

...and, also, that the attempt to introduce it was bound to fail...

...They cannot be corrected by giving Marx the benefit of the dubious insights of his latter-day existentialist admirers...

...or a metaphysical extravaganza when it is taken, as one interpreter takes it, as "the return of man as a real human being"—as if man had an original nature to which he is returning under socialism...

...In the interstices of the capitalist economy there existed unalienated men...

...In coming to critical maturity, however, he wrestled not only with Hegel but also with the Young Hegehans: David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess, Max Stirner, Ludwig Feuerbach—to mention only the most notable...

...Marx regarded the entire Hegelian philosophy as a transliteration into obscure prose of the underlying ideas of Western Christianity...