In this note¢I shall first consider a passage in the Economic and Philosophicai Manuscripts of 1844 which has caused some people puzzlement. I shall draw from this a methodological moral, and finally apply this to Capital with special reference to Chapter 1, Section 4 - The Fetishism of Commodities.
In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx describes the condition of the workers by such concepts as alienated labour, self-estrangement and so one I shall not rehearse the details of the analysis here, I shall just remind readers of some of the most important points.
First, Marx describes the relation of the worker to his product as follows:
"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,
independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on
its own confronting him; it means that the life he has conferred on the
object confronts him as something hostile and alien."
Thus it is, says Marx, that the more the worker produces, the poorer, the more powerless he becomes.
Secondly, Marx describes the relation of the worker to his work as follows:
"What then constitutes the alienation of labour? First the fact that labour
is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being;
that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, :
does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and
mental powers but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker there-
fore, only feels himself outside his work, and his work feels outside hin-
self. He is at home when he is not vorking and when he is working he is
not at home, His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is
forced labour, It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is mer~
ely a means to satisfy needs external to it..... Lastly...» the worker's
activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is
the loss of his self."
Marx goes on to derive from these two estrangements the worker's estrangement from his species-being and from other men and so on, but I want to move straight en to considering the relation between alienated labour and private property
If one asks for the reason why the worker is in such a miserable situation, a situation in which his product, and even his very activity, belong to some one ela¢, in which he cannot find satisfaction inhis work and his product, but on the contrary experiences these as alien, as hostile; it might seem that it is the rule of private property, or more spsoifidakly Capital, that is to blame. This is the solution that is often given by some of the more unthinking students of Marx. (Indeed, I heard a visiting Russian Professor say straight out that the cause of alienated labour is private property.)
However there is one snag in defining the relation in terms of private property as cause and alienated labour as effect,-~ Marx said exaetly the
opposite.
It is worth quoting the whole passage:
‘The relationship of the worker to labour engenders the relationship to it
of the capitalist ... Private property is thus the product, the result,
the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation
of the worker to nature and to himself,
Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated
labour - i.e. of alienated men...
True it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have
obtained the conoept of alienated labour from political economy. But on
analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property
' appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labour, it is really its
' consequence, just as the Gods in the beginning are not the cause but the
effect of man's intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes
reciprocal." (p.80)
Why does Marx want to make private property the product of alienated labour? Yihy not, for example, taking up the point about recipocity, treat it as a chicken and egg "question, say that private property and alienated labour are mutually reinforcing conditions? That is, say that lack of private property forces workers to alienate their labour, but that private property in its turn, grows on the tribute it exacts from wage labour. .
Certainly the difficulty of imagining alienated labour, in isolation from private property makes it impossible that Marx could mean that the former was historically prior to the latter. Indeed in his analysis of the origins of capitalism he stresses the two necessary conditions - a mass of means of production accumilated and a mass of landless vagabonds with nothing to sell but: their labour power,
No, as in the first few chapters of Capital it is clear that Marx is giving a structural analysis of a given whole here, rather than considering the origins of the system. In this given whole Marx discerns two aspects = private property and alienated labour, but the secret of why he intends to make the latter fundamentel and the former a function of it, can be found a page or two later when he remarks;
"When one speaks of private property, one thinks of being concerned with . Bomething external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly
concerned with man himself,"
That is to gay, the question with Marx in all his work is how to penetrate beneath the abstract catagories of political economy and social life generally, to the huhen reality underlying them; and then in turn to exhibit the meaning of thesc apparently self-subsistent spheres and catagories in terms of human activity. a
To invert this relationship and derive forms of human activity from categories extcrnal to it, whether from God in religion, or from the Absolute in Hegel, or from private property as in s0 many political economists, is a procedure which itself is typical of an estranged form of consciousness. To — attribute powers to private property, to make it the subject which originates activity and to make man himself merely its object, is pure superstition. it is to reify an abstract category, that is to say, treat it as a thing
in itself. and attribute powers to it that properly belong to human beings.
If we look at the original quote again, notice that Marx illuminates this way of thinking by comparing it with religion - "...the Gods in the beginning are not the cause but the effect of mans’ intellectual confusion."
This recalts Feurbach's materialist critique of religion where he argues . that men have created God in their own idealised image and then fallen down before it and treated their own creation as their lord and master.
In the same way Marx argues, private property must be understood as a cre= ation of human activity, a form of social life, not an eternal self~subsistent entity. If it appears, and not just in theoretical speculation, but also in the experience of millions, as dominating man himself then it must be due to a very peculiar form of alienating activity which results in the products of human activity appearing as alien hostile beings. Marx generalises this conclusion as follows:
"Just as we have found the concept of private property from the concept of
estranged labour by analysis, in the same way every catagory of political
economy can be evolved with the help of these two factors; and we shail
find again in each catagory, e.g. trade, competition, capital, money, only
& definite and developed expression of the first foundations,"
It is my thesis that Capital must be understood in the light of this dictum, aan namely that all the categories of Capital, commodity, capital, etc. must be taken ultimately .as forms of expression of human activity, in particular of estranged labour,
if this is true one might argue therefore that the importance of the labour theory of value for Marx was, primarily, precisely as a bridge between the human subject and the abstract categories of exchange value, interest etc. (Of course, in Capital, as compared with 1844, there is an advance in that more precise concepts are used, so that the analysis is susceptible of quantitative treatment).
Particularly in the Chapter on commodities it seems to me that the same themes I have drawn from the 1844 Manuscripts reappear again, especially in section 4. Warx is concerned in this section to make clear the mystifications of exchange by showing thatunderlying the relations between the products (Quarter of corr. = 20%. of gold and so on} are the relations between men. However the relations between men are mediated by, and also disguised as, relations between products. "it is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things." (p.72)
Just as in the Manuscripts Marx stresses that, although a product of human activity the commodity system has somehow become independent and enslaved its ereators. "The character of having value, when once imposed upon products - obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and reacting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually independently of the will, foresight, and action of the producers. To them their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by then."
Marx calls this section 'The Fetishism of Commodities.’ Once again we no~ tice the religous metaphor appearing. Just as the savage fashions a fetish with his own hands and then stands in superstitious awe of it/does modern man worship the commodities he has himself constructed, attributing to them powers to relate to one another in a god given way, treating their movement as an eternal law of nature which man himself could not possibly defy.
But clearly, all economic phenomena are predicated, in the last anlysis on human activity and on the form it takes, and therefore can by no means be treated as something external to man.
Thus: .
"These formulag,which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulae appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self evident necessity imposed by nature as productive labour itself."
It was Marx's achievement therefore to have seen that the categories of pole itioal economy were founded on a particular form of activity, historically specific, and consequently that a redirection of this activity, a remaking of the social relations between man was possible, and indeed necessary as the next stage in the development of man's mastery of his world and his own activity. ~_—— ee Se eee se ee Se eee Ee eee ee ee ee
OTHER PUBLICATIONS AVATLABLE
The Making of Revolutionaries - Cadre or Sect
by Ken Tarbuck
(reprint from BMS No, 1) 104 post free
From Revolt Against the Bourgeois University -
To Revolt Against Capitalist Society.
by Ernest Mandel
74 post free
Workers' Control ~ What Next?
By Ken Tarbuok & Chris Arthur
8d post free
Bulletin of Marxist Studies No. 2
The Donevan Commission on Trade Unions - Tony Topham
Marxism and Parliamentary Democracy - Chris Arthur
Trotsky's Marxism ~ A Reply to Nicolas Krasso - Ken Tarbuok
Trotsky reprint - The Timetable of Revolution.
1/104 post free
All obtainable from the Business Manager, B.M.S, 4, Norwood House,
Peakes Road, Etchinghill, Rugeley, Staffs.