Examine in detail Marx’s prescription for ending alienation and reaching the stage of de-alienation. (2009)
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Karl Marx diagnosed alienated labour: the worker is estranged from his product, his activity, his species-being and other people. Because the cause is social rather than mental, the cure cannot be better thinking, as for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, or reclaiming projected attributes, as for Ludwig Feuerbach, but a practical transformation of production. The prescription is coherent in logic, thin in design and troubled in history.
The Premise: Objectification Is Not Alienation
- Labour as such is not the evil: alienation is a historically specific relation in which the product belongs to another and dominates its maker.
- Private property is “the product, the result, the necessary consequence” of alienated labour, and thereafter its means. The cure must therefore change the relation, not abolish work or technology.
The Prescription
- Positive, not crude, communism. The 1844 Manuscripts define communism as the “positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement”, the “complete return of man to himself as a social being”. Crude communism, levelling by envy, merely generalises private property. Its abolition frees the human senses from mere having, which has made us “so stupid and one-sided”.
- Revolutionary praxis by the proletariat. The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (1845) demands changing the world, not interpreting it. For Marx “the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation”. The class must become a class for itself.
- Ending the fixed division of labour. In The German Ideology (1845–46, with Friedrich Engels) nobody has an exclusive sphere: one may hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and criticise after dinner. Communism is “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”, not an ideal imposed on it.
- Free association of producers. Capital, Vol. I (1867), pictures “a community of free individuals” working with means of production in common; commodity fetishism dissolves under conscious, common planning. Vol. III keeps a realm of necessity and places the realm of freedom beyond it, its “basic prerequisite” a shorter working day.
- Stages. The Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) passes through the dictatorship of the proletariat and a first phase still marked by bourgeois right to a higher phase where labour becomes “life’s prime want”: from each according to ability, to each according to needs. The state, alienated social power, is reabsorbed by society, as Marx saw foreshadowed in the Paris Commune.
Critical Examination
- Underspecified. Marx declined to write recipes for the cook-shops of the future (Afterword to Capital, 1873): how planning avoids new domination, and what ends the scarcity that distribution by need presupposes, are left open.
- The Soviet test. Abolishing private property yielded bureaucratic control; Milovan Djilas (The New Class, 1957) found a new owning stratum. Erich Fromm (Marx’s Concept of Man, 1961) and East European humanists turned alienation against such regimes. Max Weber‘s point stands: rational bureaucracy alienates whoever owns.
- Labour or action? Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958) finds Marx calling labour man’s essence yet promising release from it; freedom, she argues, lies in political action.
- Indian alternatives. Mohandas K. Gandhi, from Hind Swaraj (1909) onward, sought de-alienation through bread labour, decentralised village production and trusteeship, without class war. Producer cooperatives such as Amul show common ownership working within a market.
Conclusion
Marx’s logic is sound: if alienation lies in the relations of production, only changing them can end it. His error is institutional silence. De-alienation is better pursued through workplace democracy, cooperatives and shorter hours, reforms that keep the liberties Soviet practice sacrificed.