Socialist Humanism; the Humanist Side of Marx and the Old/New Left

Hello again, been a minute. In this episode, following along with Weeks' argument in The Problem with Work, we take a look at Socialist Humanism, the ties to productivism Weeks (and I) have issues with, we get a bit into psychologist-philosopher Erich Fromm, the (old) New Left, and humanism in Marx' early works. Hope you're up for a long episode! 

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Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out:

Celikates, Robin and Jeffrey Flynn. “Critical Theory (Frankfurt School).” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2023.  citing “Fromm 1936 [2020, 39, 41]”

Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. P.85

Marshall, Alfred. Principles of Economics, 1890. 

Marx, Karl, Ernest Mandel, and Friedrich Engels. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. [London]: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. P.137

Marx, Karl. Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin in association with New Left Review, 1992. p.322

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Marxists.org.

#alienation #labor #work #Marx #Socialism #Humanism #politics #commodities #money #profit #wages #value #ethics

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 25: Socialist Humanism; the Humanist Side of Marx and the Old/New Left

Kathi Weeks’ The Problem with Work, part 5

Hello again, been a minute. Let’s just roll straight in, shall we? Because this… is a long episode. Back in episode 23 we started addressing what Weeks refers to as some failures of Socialist approaches to the problem with work: Socialist Modernization and Socialist Humanism. Today we’re continuing to unpack that by addressing Socialist Humanism. In keeping with Weeks, we’re going to be taking a look at what Socialist Humanism is, the era/movement referred to as the New Left, Socialist Humanist thinker Erich Fromm, and Marx’ work before Capital, which were informative to this Humanist take on 20th century Socialism. 

Quick recap, whereas Socialist Modernization focused on trying to update 19th century (industrial) labor, worker, goals to serve 20th century productivist goals, principally by addressing the exploitation of workers under capitalism; the Humanist pivot, which coincides with the emergence of the New Left, aims instead on recovering socialism (and Marxism) from Leninism, Stalinism, and other authoritarian regimes by focusing on the problem of alienation - long story short, the great philosophical problem from the dawn of the Enlightenment, what Nietzsche summed up as God is dead, we killed him, now what do we do?

In principle, Modernization leveraged Marxist theory as espoused in Capital and the Communist Manifesto (revolutionary Marxism (as Mythology), Leninism (the intensification of work in the hopes of producing superabundance in the hopes of getting to the utopian communist state, while mitigating the exploitation of that work by/for private profit via a (temporarily necessary) authoritarian state), etc.); the humanism branch looks instead to Marx’ early economic and philosophical works; the 1844 Manuscripts, the German Ideology, and the Grundrisse (an early outline for what became Capital, and works as a kind of theoretical bridge between the early texts and Capital). Plenty more on Marx in a bit as we start getting into alienation, estrangement, and concrete labor. 

Now, revolutionary Marxism wasn’t a call unique to those pushing for modernization, it certainly had its place among the New Left as well, though their political aims were more in line with social and economic justice. The New Left, in brief, was a political movement in the 60s and 70s tied to a broad range of social justice and civil rights activism in the US. It includes organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society (an anti-Vietnam War and anti-hierarchical movement whose primary aim was a full participatory democracy – not surprisingly, an ‘organization’ that collapsed under its own ideology, it’s pretty difficult to organize a large scale political movement when you’re fundamentally opposed to any kind of hierarchical structure, it disintegrated during its own convention), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (a group of mostly black college students organizing sit-ins and other nonviolent protests in the South during the civil rights movement), and the Black Panther Party (best known for their practice of openly carrying firearms to protect black neighborhoods from the police), and the Young Lords (a Hispanic, Latino, and Puerto Rican organization that focused on education, canvasing, and political engagement, which of course made them the targets of the FBI’s infamous COINTEL, counterintelligence, i.e., disinformation and propaganda, program). In addition to Marx, they leaned on the works of thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse (who rejected the conservative liberalism of the old Left, as well as the authoritarianism of Russian Sovietism, Leninist Socialism and Stalinism), Jean Paul Sartre, Jurgen Habermas, and other radical, anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian, anti-racist, and anti-war leftist thinkers. We’re just focusing on labor for now, but the aims of the New Left were far larger than simply organizing for better wages or meaningful work. 

As Weeks notes, “While the utopia of modernization is conceived as a response to the critique of bourgeois property relations and the problematic of exploitation, the humanist utopia grows out of the critique of alienated labor. Whereas the former focuses on notions of social progress, social justice, and social harmony, the latter privileges the individual as a crucial category and fundamental value. Indeed,” she continues, “according to Fromm,” whom we’ll get into in a just a sec, “Marx’ philosophy - quote - was aimed at the full realization of the individual.”

Also, a quick sidenote, Robert Putnam’s The Upswing points to some interesting data as regards underlying currents to these leftist movements in the 60s and 70s, as regards what he refers to as the “I-We-I” inverted U path of social progress in the United States from the 1910s through the 20-teens. Comparing Socialist Modernization and Humanism to Putnam’s political science research shows 20th century Modernization reflecting a larger trend toward communitarianism, and Humanism aligning temporally with the larger pendulum swing back to individualism – which has, for the past 50 years, coincided with a deterioration of the major economic gains for the middle and working classes made from the 1910s to the 1970s, and, what I can only hope is now peaking in the massive income inequality, precarity, poverty, and desperation, not seen in the US since the 1920s. I’d say here’s hoping we can avoid a repeat of the Great Depression, new tariffs not seen since the Great Depression now underway, and World Wars this time around, but I was just listening, at time of writing this, to news that morning of Tesla’s Board agreeing to a new deal with Elon Musk for some 29+ Billion in compensation. And this is, of course, Tesla alone, not his other projects and government contracts. Now, just to give you an idea of the absolute absurdity of this, if Elon were a salaried employee working 40 hours per week and never taking vacation or sick time, this comes out to over 13 million dollars PER HOUR. That’s almost 4 thousand dollars per second.  At a median salary of 61 thousand a year (I’m averaging the median male 66 grand, that the US reports and female 55 grand that gets left silent), you could employ over 475 thousand people at this rate. Tesla has a quarter of that. And yet the only legal issue they’re running into is whether or not this is fair to the stockholders. 

Okay, so, before continuing with Weeks, let’s take a look at Fromm. 

Erich Fromm, 1900-1980, was a German-American Jew that had fled the Nazi regime in Germany to the US. He was active in psychology, sociology, and philosophy, maintaining a research, and activist, emphasis on humanism, and he was a democratic socialist. One of the founding fathers of the William Allanson White Institute, WAWI, which I note because, while it is a psychoanalysis and psychotherapy training institute, it’s also unabashedly progressive both therapeutically and politically, and engages in political psychology and “psychoanalytic activism” (addressing and advocating regarding the role of culture in society, sociological problems that shape individual psychological problems, etc.). Philosophically, Fromm is a Frankfurt School critical theorist - among the likes of Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, etc., from the Institute for Social Research, the University of Frankfurt am Main, a predecessor of the New School for Social Research in New York (founded in 1919 as a progressive alternative to the conservative Columbia University), which took in many of Nazi Germany’s intellectual refugees, forming a University in Exile of Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Erich Fromm (Jürgen Habermas joined later, as well as Horkheimer and Adorno, who moved the Institute from New York to LA, and, after the war, returning the Institute to Germany). A group of thinkers who were largely formative to my own thinking. Given that Fromm had survived and fled the Nazi regime, it shouldn’t, I think, come as a surprise that he was stridently opposed to authoritarianism in any form. 

I’ll also note a couple of Fromm’s key texts which set up this move toward Socialist Humanism (or Humanist Socialism), namely, Escape from Freedom, 1941, a social and political critique with psychological roots and a seminal text in political psychology; an analysis of politics, politicians, and political motivations, ideologies, etc. from a psychological perspective. And Man for Himself: an Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, 1947, which presented philosophical and theoretical views Fromm revisits throughout his later works; Humanist Ethics (that the basis of ethics cannot be exogenous, derived externally, as rules handed down from a god, king, text, or other such external authority, it must emphasize human reason and autonomy, reject wholesale any dogmatic or blind obedience to some custom, tradition, or office, and align ethics/moral behaviors/norms with what further develops human potential), a focus on the orientation(s) of one’s character – Fromm upholds a critical belief in Productivism as the Ideal Orientation, even as regards productive love and thinking.

Now, granted, Fromm’s conception of productivity isn’t the same as productive in the sense of economic productivity, so much as labor as an active human engagement. In Man for Himself, Fromm notes, quote

Human existence is characterized by the fact that man is alone and separated from the world; not being able to stand the separation, he is impelled to seek for relatedness and oneness. There are many ways in which he can realize this need, but only one in which he, as a unique entity, remains intact; only one in which his own powers unfold in the very process of being related. It is the paradox of human existence that man must simultaneously seek for closeness and for independence; for oneness with others and at the same time for the preservation of his uniqueness and particularity. As we have shown, the answer to this paradox—and to the moral problem of man—is productiveness.

One can be productively related to the world by acting and by comprehending. Man produces things, and in the process of creation he exercises his powers over matter. Man comprehends the world, mentally and emotionally, through love and through reason. His power of reason enables him to penetrate through the surface and to grasp the essence of his object by getting into active relation with it. His power of love enables him to break through the wall which separates him from another person and to comprehend him. Although love and reason are only two different forms of comprehending the world and although neither is possible without the other, they are expressions of different powers, that of emotion and that of thinking, and hence must be discussed separately.

Now, I haven’t done a deep dive on Fromm, but from this passage I think it’s fair to say that this sense of productivism is pretty far afield from the productivity being chased in Socialist Modernization, though akin to what Hannah Arendt was advocating for, as well as why capitalist control of the means of production is fundamentally dehumanizing. The right to work, in the capitalist, libertarian sense, is no such right at all, without a right to not work. 

I also want to defer to this passage by, and I hope I pronounce this right, Robin Celikates and Jeffrey Flynn, from the plato.stanford.edu entry on Critical Theory regarding Fromm’s early work; they note, quote

The first substantial foray [into studying what they dubbed irrational elements in modern society] was Studies in Authority and the Family (Horkheimer 1936b), the product of five years of research carried out by members of the Institute as part of the research agenda outlined by Horkheimer when he became director in 1930. In an essay articulating the study’s theoretical framework, Erich Fromm argued that the “drives underlying the authoritarian character” are “the pleasure of obedience, submission, and the surrender of one’s personality” along with “aggression against the defenseless and sympathy with the powerful.” A main concern of the Studies was that the nuclear family had lost the power it once had to counter other socializing forces, which could now more directly influence the individual, and that individuals who view the world as governed by irrational forces submit to powerful leaders who ease their feelings of powerlessness.

In addition, Humanist Ethics aims at reimaging self-interest. Fromm’s view here is essentially in direct opposition to the Libertarian version of ‘enlightened self-interest’ exemplified by Ayn Rand’s ‘rational selfishness,’ that, here, self-interest is not necessarily selfishness, and must instead be conceived as aligning, in a somewhat Kantian move, with universal human interests – think Kant’s categorical imperative: for example, if everyone lied all the time there would be no way we could ever trust one another and society would collapse; therefore, lying is bad. Now, we could go on, but this episode isn’t about Humanist Ethics, and I want to get back to wrapping up this outline of Erich Fromm so we can get back to Weeks’ argument. Suffice to say, personally, I find a lot of value in Humanist Ethics, I certainly concur with Fromm in his description of the ‘humanistic conscience’ (in contrast to the authoritarian conscience, based on exogenous rules), but I do take issue with some specifics in Fromm’s argument, namely his productivist emphasis, which we may get to somewhere down the line. 

It's also worth noting Fromm’s arguments are deeply informed by his Judaism, specifically, his understanding of the Talmud and the spiritualism of Hasidic Judaism. A key point here being Fromm’s interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden. Fromm takes the position that knowledge of Good and Evil is, in itself, Good, that their, traditionally understood, disobedience to God was also, itself, good, because the Tree of Knowledge enabled humanity to make decisions based on reason, using reason to determine moral values, rather than simply adhering to an authoritarian system of rules to be followed blindly. He takes this a step further though and notes that prior to eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve were not human yet. To be human is to have self-consciousness, to be aware that one is both in and part of the world, and also separate from it (alienated); and to have anxiety about separatedness comes from being a self, an individual. 

In this sense, it might be more accurate to interpret Eden as more prison than paradise, and Earth as their reward to themselves. A line of thought, I think, not far afield from Camus’ insistence that ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ 

I think that’s enough background on Fromm, and we have a lot of Marx to get to, to distinguish this humanist move from the modernization move, and see how this humanist move is still, unfortunately, productivist.  

Now, I mentioned Weeks points out that a humanist utopian reading of Marx, through Fromm, emphasizes ‘full realization of the individual,’ (I’ll note it’s also a distinctly Western (i.e. western European and American) reading of Marx, likely drawn in response, and opposition, to the authoritarian communitarianism of the Soviet Union), she also notes Fromm’s is a romanticized Marxism as well. She continues, noting, quote

…Fromm’s description of Marx’ philosophy as “a movement against the dehumanization of Western Industrialism” and a “spiritual humanistic” alternative to the “mechanistic-materialistic spirit of successful industrialism.”  Together, the utopia of modernization and the humanist utopia present a Marxist gloss on the two faces of modernity: an ideal of social and economic progress grounded in the continuing development of science and industry and the romantic revolt against the forces of rationalization accompanying that ideal. 

Sidenote – this is another idea I want to revisit; Horkheimer and Adorno have a fascinating text that, in part, addresses this dichotomy, their Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947 (English translation 1972), which holds that the positivism that arose from the Enlightenment became its own mythology in its obsession with scopophilia, data, and technological progress, paved the way to Fascism, Stalinism, what Adorno calls the ‘culture industry,’ etc.– to which futurism seems to be the modern heir – It’s because of the failure of Enlightenment thinking, the replacement of reason with positivism, that, what we now call pseudo-sciences like eugenics, physiognomy, social Darwinism, etc. were not only possible, but leveraged by Western democracies to form governmental policy. Oh, and before you think this was a European problem,  here’s your friendly reminder that Hitler sent his best and brightest to the US to borrow from American Jim Crow laws legal mechanisms he could use to get around the German constitution, which following the Weimar Republic, was more robust than the American constitution in providing for civil rights, and thus implement state discriminatory policies. Okay, back to Weeks on Fromm. She continues, quote 

The two visions of the future – socialist modernization and socialist humanism – are in some ways opposed to one another, but they are based on a similar commitment to labor as a fundamental human value. In the first, labor is conceived as social production and lauded as the primary mechanism of social cohesion and achievement. In the second, labor is understood as an individual creative capacity, a human essence, from which we are now estranged and to which we should be restored. 

End-quote. 

In the first case, we preserve the core of the Protestant Work Ethic; without work, society collapses. Work is the ethic in itself. In the latter though, we have a strange marriage of Aristotle (labor is the basis of Poiesis (now, granted, Weeks never uses the term, she uses craftsmanship and craft production, like Arendt, but I’m going to use poiesis, as shorthand here, in keeping with earlier episodes) and Plato (labor is the essence of man, that which is essentially human). In the first case, keeping society from collapsing is good, therefore we should want to work; in the second case, 1. it’s only through work that I can create the world, and 2. A worker is essentially what I am. Therefore, we should enjoy work. The problem isn’t work, at all, the problem is capitalism, because it, in the first case, exploits our labor, and in the second case, alienates us from our labor. We cannot achieve self-realization, we cannot be human, unless we recover labor from the capitalist political economy. To do so, we must either modernize or humanize socialism, or both. Of course, the problem here is that this entire argument takes place from a productivist PoV, and fails to call productivism itself to account. 

Before getting any further, I think it bears taking a moment to clarify what we’re talking about here as far as the exploitation and/or alienation of labor, and that means addressing Marx regarding concrete and abstract labor, and capitalist wealth creation and surplus value. Following Marx, what we mean by exploitation regards the surplus value that lies at the heart of capital profit and the incumbent wage theft that lies at the heart of capitalist wealth creation. 

The seeming economic miracle of capitalism to 19th century economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, was the appearance of the creation of wealth, quickly becoming vast sums of wealth, beyond what could have been traditionally accounted for by simple accumulation, exemplified by late 19th, early 20th century industrial capitalists (such as Carnegie and Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, John Jacob Astor, Jay Gould, and others). Smith and Ricardo, John Locke, even Alfred Marshall’s 1890 Principles of Economics (which addresses questions like ‘what to do about poverty, how much poverty is acceptable, what are the limits of taxation and redistribution, and other such high-minded moral, classical liberal, questions about social life (as well as some pretty questionable takes on lower classes, “backward races,” slavery, and primitive societies), they address questions about wealth, what to do with wealth, the creation of value, but fail to address the question of the creation of wealth above and beyond both value and accumulation. Marx’ analysis in Capital sought to explain where this ‘new’ wealth came from, and it wasn’t economic magic or divine reward. Marx’ determination is what he called the conversion of Money to Money Prime, which goes something like, based on the existing economic theory, ‘Widget A costs $1 in resources + facilities + machinery + distribution + ‘something else’ = $5 price at sale, set at a morally and economically acceptable price (charge too much and either your customers won’t buy it or your competition will sell it cheaper, and if you have no competition, your price will either create some, or your customers will perceive you as immoral (referring to Protestant conceptions of luxury and exploitation – at this point exploitation was something you did to your customers by charging them more than something was worth, thus the importance of the labor theory of value to explain the equation of value to price)). The $4 profit isn’t magic or value, it is the ‘something else,’ the labor that used facilities and machinery, and transformed the raw materials, to create Widget A. 

It’s not because the capitalist accumulated everything needed to make a widget that it’s worth $5, it’s because the worker labored to make a widget that the widget even exists. Without labor, at best, the capitalist could gather the materials and sell a widget kit for $5, and good luck selling them to anyone that doesn’t know how to make a widget. This is of course where automation comes in, as from day one the dream of the capitalist has been to eliminate labor and simply be able to accumulate what’s needed to produce a widget, produce the widget without paid labor, and sell it for the highest possible profit. For the owner of the means of production, which must purchase the labor power of others, automation has never been a means of providing humanity more leisure time, it’s the dream of a socially palatable replacement for slavery, and it translates just as well today as regards robots and AI as it did with the dawn of the cotton gin. 

Bringing this back to Marx, what he found across the board, at the time, was that industrial laborers were dramatically underpaid for their labor in creating surplus value (not to mention the horrific conditions most were forced to labor in) – the difference between the real cost of a product and the final price – simple supply and demand theory is insufficient to explain the wealth created by surplus value under capitalism.

As it is the worker that created the surplus value, it belongs to them, or, it ought to. When the capitalist accumulates wealth (via profit) they do so by exploiting the worker. Their ownership of the means of production prevents the worker from exercising in free labor, denies the worker their self-realization, and in a society in which the basic needs of subsistence must be purchased, the worker is forced to sell their labor for wages – wages the capitalist has no interest in increasing, as their aim is the accumulation of wealth, and every interest in mitigating, to keep the working class in a state of dependence, wage slavery, so they always have at hand an army of surplus labor – until of course such time as the government has need of raising a real army for war, but that’s a different story, check out George Battaile if you want to read more on that. The modernization argument focuses on private property as that which makes the ownership of the means of production even possible, and thus the main problem. 

Okay, before we take a look at the Grundrisse, which, recall, serves as something of a bridge between Marx’ early works and Capital, let’s unpack estrangement and alienation a bit further, because alienation is the main problem for humanism in post-Enlightenment thought; whether we’re talking about early Enlightenment thought and humanity’s estrangement from God; or Hegel, or Levinas, and estrangement from the self as self from others, or Heideggerian angst, or Nietzschean eternal return, or Existentialist condemnation to freedom, and on and on. If we are no longer, if we ever even were, subjects to the object “God,” and we must now be our own subject and object, and want to achieve self-realization, we have to reconcile our alienation. 

Marx’ turn on alienation, which is often materialist, regards the estrangement of the worker from the product of their labor, though he also attacks the way in which modern industrial work alienates workers from each other. Because a full sense of self-realization requires the elimination of this alienation, in both senses, this is, likewise, the critical move for Fromm and the New Left. 

So, Marx’ essay, “Estranged Labour,” from the 1844 Manuscripts, establishes that ‘political economy’ is the wrong way to attempt to explain concepts such as “private property; the separation of labour, capital and land… division of labour, competition,” etc. as “political economy proceeds from the fact of private property.”  By doing so, the political economist – the fashionable term of the time, think Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, etc. – fails before he starts by proceeding from the establishment of private property as fact rather than explaining it. Further, political economy, as an analytical method, is part of the problem in forming an accurate analysis of labor because it “conceals the estrangement in the nature of labour by ignoring the direct relationship between the worker… and production.”  Rather than political economy, Marx would have us focus on the estrangement (the separation) of the worker and the product of his work and the ripple effects this has on the shrinking wealth of the workers and the increasing wealth of the owners of the resources, machinery, and commodities produced. If we make this switch, we can recognize that private property, rather than being that which the economy stems from, is instead the product of the alienation of labor in relation to the worker and non-worker (the owner, i.e., the Capitalist). 

By focusing on the material processes of private property, this is Marx being a Hegelian historical materialist, political economy fails to explain how or why the abstract premises on which private property is established are taken as concrete fact (like John Locke’s formulation that I make my property that which I combine my labor with); nor can it explain the many facets of labor and production as regards workers. Taking instead the worker and their relationship to their labor as the center-point of the analysis shows that the critical differences are no longer merely temporal or geographical, as between industrial and agricultural modes, nor as between owners of capital and owners of land, but rather that all of these systems can be collapsed to the relationship between those that own property but do not work, and those who work but do not own property. 

Marx argues that there are two principal faults in the current modes of production; the first is alienation, which produces the estrangement of the worker from his labor and the product of his work. The second is that this estrangement results in an ever-deepening divide between the worker and the owners of property; as for each widget the worker produces (as being owned, sold, and owned again by persons other than the worker) contributes to the ever-diminishing amount of property the workers themselves own. This is exacerbated by the fact that, in being paid wages, which are disproportionate to the value of the commodity produced by the worker and sold by the non-worker, the worker in many cases must now seek to purchase the commodity of his own production at a value considerably higher than the individual cost per unit of his own labor-time. 

Now, I find this part of the essay particularly prescient as it can continue to be seen across the modern international economy (political, capitalist, whether you’re talking American mixed-market capitalism or Chinese State Capitalism, or anything in-between); from the value/wage discrepancies of the laborers at companies like Foxconn, to the interest companies like Wal-Mart and Dollar Tree have shown in maintaining both low prices and, more importantly, low wages (which they continually lobby Congress to maintain, subsidizing their wage costs, through government assistance programs like Medicaid and SNAP, without which, their employees couldn’t afford to continue working there); a situation which has, ironically, of late created some tension between these same companies that have historically supported conservatives and the Trump administration over his tariff regime, which threatens their access to cheap goods and his defunding of public assistance programs that support their underpaid employees. He’s hitting them where it hurts on both sides of the model that makes their businesses (artificially) sustainable. Time will tell if they abandon ship or not, but I’ll be paying attention, or at least trying to, to where the money is coming from for conservative, institutionalist Democrats’ campaigns and Super PACs. 

Another aspect of Marx’ analysis of estranged labour is that this estrangement worms into man’s very being in the world. Marx states that the essential characteristic of humanity, as a species, is our productive life (this is where we start getting into Weeks’ problem with socialist humanism). By this conception, we navigate the world by making things. The modern means of production under terms of capital and commodity inverts this nature, making of man a species that consumes rather than produces. That which the worker produces is no longer their own, they exchange their labour for wages which are used to procure other commodities. It generates a constant cycle of expenditure (of time and energy) and consumption that are distinct, alienated, from one’s productive life – I cannot be productive with my life, creating things, whether it’s a chair or a novel or a painting or a child or anything else through which my productivity enables me to realize myself, if I’m forced to spend my labor-power working for others. Estranged labour reduces man’s productive life to a means of subsistence, rather than it being the essential characteristic of his social life, or, as Marx put it, his species life. So yeah, we’ve just replaced hunting and gathering with clocking in and out – maybe also check out James Suzman’s Work: a Deep History, the modern and historical data suggests hunter/gatherer societies actually had a lot more leisure and a lot less scarcity than we do in our late-capitalist, post-industrial societies. So, yes, Marx does have a productivist leaning, but he elaborates on this that we are not only productive beings. 

The Grundrisse. 7 notebooks, 1857 - 58, unfinished, full title Grundrisse der Kritik der Politschen Okonomie (Foundations of a critique of political economy), 1st published 1939 (56 years after Marx’ death)), including Das Kaptial, which was the only one fully fleshed out and published in its own right - more or less, there’s multiple volumes to Capital and Marx never actually finished them. It’s, as mentioned, sometimes called the rough draft of Capital, also, sometimes considered Marx talking to himself. Which, I get. If you grabbed, really, any of my notebooks, or happened to walk in on me ‘in process,’ and compared that content to any of my finished papers, you could pretty easily read them as me talking to myself. Hell, I often do pace around, talking aloud, to myself (I guess) as I try to flesh out an argument. I suspect this is pretty familiar to anyone familiar with rhetoric and writing. 

The big move from the early manuscripts through the Grundrisse to Capital is Marx’ move from philosophy to economics; the end product, Capital, being a text both on and critiquing the field of political economy, in contrast to the earlier philosophical work on historical materialism, which, given its nature and aims, seems a natural evolution. The Grundrisse is the conceptual link between the early and later Marx. And before you worry that economics ought somehow be different, separated, liberated etc. from politics; economics is inherently political anywhere and everywhere it offers any form of recommendation to action. Ironically, if anything, it would be political science that is the most detached from politics by studying politics, arguably, objectively. But, again, here we run into the issue of positivism.  

How a society organizes its resources and production is inherently political. Marx realized this and his chief complaint about philosophy, which Socrates also realized, yet feels lost in Plato, is that philosophers have mistakenly focused on understanding the world when the point ought to be to change it. Economics that seeks some abstract understanding without acknowledging what economics does is disingenuous at best; or, it’s not economics, it’s just wealth math.

Okay, let’s dig into this in some detail. Take the following passage – fair warning, it’s a long one – regarding the circulation of commodities and exchange for money, and how this relates to alienation, from the Grundrisse, quote

To have circulation, what is essential is that exchange appear as a process, a fluid whole of purchases and sales. Its first presupposition is the circulation of commodities themselves, as a natural, many-sided circulation of those commodities. The precondition of commodity circulation is that they be produced as exchange values, not as immediate use values, but as mediated through exchange value.

So, Marx isn’t talking about a simple barter system here, I have 2 goats and I need 3 bales of thatch to repair my roof before winter, and the thatcher has plenty of thatch but needs a goat for food, I trade him the male because I can also trade milk from the female with the cheesemaker, etc., etc. This is a more complicated economy where I’m now farming goats for surplus meat and milk (surplus beyond my subsistence needs) for the purpose of exchanging that surplus on a market. I have to farm a surplus and I have to unload that surplus to acquire the other things I need, so that surplus takes on a value of its own, it’s no longer simply surplus. Marx continues, 

Appropriation through and by means of divestiture [Entäusserung] and alienation [Veräusserung] is the fundamental condition. Circulation as the realization of exchange values implies: (1) that my product is a product only in so far as it is for others; hence suspended singularity, generality; (2) that it is a product for me only in so far as it has been alienated, become for others; (3) that it is for the other only in so far as he himself alienates his product; which already implies (4) that production is not an end in itself for me, but a means. Circulation is the movement in which the general alienation appears as general appropriation and general appropriation as general alienation.

Marx goes on to explain that this movement of commodities, circulation through exchange, “appears as a social process,” via individual exchanges, individual wills and consciousnesses – and, I’ll note, this is a key failure in Hayek’s and Friedman’s centering of ‘free contracts’ in the libertarian sense of individuals interacting in the market and thus individual freedom being derived from free markets – these exchanges have the appearance of “an objective interrelation… spontaneously [arising] from nature… but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them.”

Circulation, because a totality of the social process, is also the first form in which the social relation appears as something independent of the individuals, but not only as, say, in a coin or in exchange value, but extending to the whole of the social movement itself. The social relation of individuals to one another as a power over the individuals which has become autonomous…”

This is a critical point to keep in mind as far as the Marxist autonomists. What Marx is pointing to here is this sense in which the economy has itself become the autonomous force, and the aim of the autonomist movement was recovery of humanity’s autonomy from the economy, okay, back to Marx

whether conceived as a natural force, as chance or in whatever other form, is a necessary result of the fact that the point of departure is not the free social individual. Circulation as the first totality among the economic categories is well suited to bring this to light.

At first sight, circulation appears as a simply infinite process. The commodity is exchanged for money, money is exchanged for the commodity, and this is repeated endlessly. … In this way, commodity is exchanged for commodity, except that this exchange is a mediated one. The purchaser becomes a seller again and the seller becomes purchaser again. In this way, each is posited in the double and the antithetical aspect, [read notes of Hegel here] and hence in the living unity of both aspects. It is entirely wrong, therefore, to do as the economists do, namely, as soon as the contradictions in the monetary system emerge into view, to focus only on the end results without the process which mediates them; only on the unity without the distinction, the affirmation without the negation.

So, you have a system, the circulation of commodity exchange, which is not a thing in itself, but a symptom, it’s how a condition appears, becomes visible, and we need to identify what the actual thing is that exchange is making visible. In the process of doing so, we need to identify what is distinct, the thesis, what negates it, the antithesis, and its affirmation, the synthesis. A good old fashioned Hegelian dialectic – which is what the political economists are guilty of failing to reconcile. 

Okay, I know that was a lot, but, I’d like to compare this to what Marx has to say about money, commodities, and alienation in the manuscripts and Capital. 

In the above passage, Marx gets really deep in the weeds as far as exchange and circulation, and value, and how these tie to the human experience on the one hand and the basic functioning of the economy on the other. 

Now, compare that, in both aim and tone to what Marx has to say about money in “Excerpts from James’ Mill’s Elements of Political Economy,” 1844, 13 years earlier, notes Marx, quote

In the credit system, of which banking is the most complete expression, the illusion is created that the might of the alien material power has been broken, the state of self-estrangement abolished and man reinstated in his human relationship to man. Led astray by this illusion [they] regarded the development of money, bills of exchange, paper money, paper representatives of money, credit, banking, as a progressive abolition of the separation of man from things, of capital from labor, of private property from money and money from man, of the separation of man from man. Their ideal was, therefore, the organized banking system. But this abolition of estrangement [xxvi], this return of man to himself and thus to other men, is only an illusion. It is a self-estrangement, dehumanization, all the more infamous and extreme because its element is no longer a commodity, metal or paper, but the moral existence, the social existence, the very heart of man, and because under the appearance of mutual trust between men it is really the greatest distrust and a total estrangement.

Where Marx begins here with a humanism at the center of his argument, the Grundrisse, though it maintains an aim of humanism, shifts part of the argument to the abstraction of the economy, and in Capital, abstracts even human labor. It’s also a much more impassioned argument; Marx is using a ton of italics in this essay. Perhaps ironically, the passage from the Grundrisse has a more Hegelian lean than this Manuscripts passage. Marx, and Engles, had joined the Young Hegelians in the 1830s (where Marx became influenced by Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feurbach, and later parted dramatically with Feuerbach over the latter’s dissolution of practical, material humanism into religious spiritualism), and they had parted ways by the 1840s. 

Now, last thing we need to reference here is use and exchange value, and their pairing, concrete and abstract labor in Capital, as these all connect, in various ways, to alienation 

In short, labor is twofold, abstract (the human capacity to labor) and concrete (the creation of commodities), both are required and transformed, in the production of a commodity, into a thing which has both a use value and an exchange value. 

Marx notes, in Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1, Section 2, “The Dual Character of the Labor Embodied in Commodities,” quote

On the one hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power [hyphenated] in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces use values.

The Exchange value is where things get both particularly messy and interesting, including what Marx refers to as commodity fetishism, which adds a subjective, social, and irrational amount of value above and beyond the commodity’s use value, while simultaneously erasing the labor-power that went into the object’s creation. But, in short, exchange value is determined socially, notes Marx, quote

Objects of utility become commodities only because they are the products of the labour of private individuals who work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the specific social characteristics of their private labours appear only within this exchange. … To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things. 

Okay, before you say this ignores assembly line production and people working together, that’s not what Marx is referring to here. He uses the examples of a coat and the linen used to make the coat. The tailor can’t make the coat without the weaver making the linen, but the tailor and the weaver work independently of each other. Both are necessary to produce a coat, but neither interact except in the exchange of commodities; bolt of linen and coat. 

It is only in the act of exchange that the products of labor are transformed into values – Marx defines this as “acquiring a socially uniform objectivity as values.” A widget becomes $5, a coat becomes $50, and we thus exchange $5 to purchase a widget or $50 to purchase a coat. 

Okay, let’s get back to Weeks, and Socialist Humanism, we’ve got plenty of time to deal with Marx later. 

Notes Weeks, “Fromm’s cure for capitalism is not more work, as Lenin once prescribed, but better work. ‘The central theme of Marx,’ Fromm insists, ‘is the transformation of alienated, meaningless labor into productive, free labor.’ Now, granted, Fromm leverages a great deal of Capital Volume 3, which I have not read, but based on Marx’ analysis in Volume 1, this feels off just on its face. Marx certainly does want the liberation of labor from conditions of capitalism, but he also notes that the products of labor only acquire an exchange value because of the social nature of exchange. Liberating labor alone and for the individual, when clearly one of Marx’ key problems is the alienation of individual workers from each other as workers in a work society, is insufficient for this aim of self-realization. A key component of self-realization necessarily includes being with others. Part of the problem in making a coat is the independence of the tailor and the weaver, their social relationship is denied by the capitalist middleman, and such that the capitalist that purchases the production of a coat in order to sell the coat is also actually doing some harm to society beyond the harm done to the individual by exploiting and alienating their labor. And this is a problem that gets glossed over both by productivism and individualism.  

Alright, a final word on this from Weeks and Marx, and then we’ll wrap so we can get to Autonomist Marxism and the Refusal of Work next time around. Weeks returns to the following passage in the Grundrisse to hammer home the point that, essentially, the only way out is through, there’s no going back. We can’t simply get back to the traditionalist work ethic (of working to live instead of living to work), nor is the libertarian aim of free contracts, nor Lincoln’s ‘free labor,’ viable to either freedom or self-realization, they rely on a myth of the autonomous individual. Citing Marx, notes Weeks, quote

In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end. 

This development,” this is Weeks still, “points not back to an older mode of organization centered on independent individuals, but rather forward to new ways of organizing work and production and new models of subjectivity.

Alright folks, that’s all I’ve got, not that it was brief. I’d like to say I know when the next episode will hit, but I’ve got a lot of pans on the fire at the moment and we’ve got Dragoncon coming right around the corner! If you’ll be there, hit me up, let me know what you think about the Voiceover spots I did for Dragoncon TV! You can message me through the Philosophy vs Work Patreon or on the Discord chat. Links to both are on the website, philosophy V S work.buzzsprout.com 

Well, ‘til next time…

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