Summary
Marx’s works in the Jewish Question, Estranged Labor, and Das Kapital is best read as an analysis of how the problems in contemporary society all create alienation. Alienation is absolutely pivotal because for Marx to obtain his highest good, human emancipation, he believes we must be non-alienated from the species being (human faculties), abstract citizen (civil community), and social powers (relationships).
Liberalism and rights alienates us from our civil community, because it creates these atomistic individuals. It exacerbates all the problems of materialism, and encourages egoism because basic rights reinforce the idea that we are lone individuals and everyone else is out to get us.
Capitalistic forms of production alienate us from our own labor, from others, and our species being of freely producing.
Marx also diagnosis alienation from the intermediaries of money, state, commodities, and God.
Money alienates us from the good and value in this world. It seems to be self-sufficient and is the arbiter of all value. It alienates us because we are forced to see the world and affirm the good as well as ourselves (anything that is valuable) through this intermediary.
God is alienating because we are affirmed only through him as an intermediary, we project onto him our best qualities (separating us from them), and pay attention to God instead of the real world.
The state is alienating because we are forced to act through the state. Our will is no longer expressed by us but through an intermediary.
Commodities are alienating because they are the only representations of social relationships within production. We are forced to see all forms of social relations through the exchange of commodities.
QUESTION: there is a profound structural similarity between these four intermediaries. Their value is always relative, usually on us, yet we attribute their powers to something intrinsic within them. They tyrannize us in some way. They also create distance from some very important aspect in our lives. I wonder if any intermediary would cause alienation. I wonder if Marx thinks communicating say over messenger or FaceTime would cause profound alienation. And I wonder if that alienation is unavoidable given our increasing level of abstraction in society?
ANSWER: Societies are complex, complexity creates abstraction, abstraction necessitates intermediaries, intermediaries cause alienation. Thus modernity is alienating. It might be inescapable.
Fuerbach on Christianity
Ludwig Fuerbach, a student of Hegel’s and a great influencer of Marx’s, presented an anthropological explanation and critique of Christianity. To understand Marx’s disdain towards religion we must understand Fuerbach’s position on religion.
He believed that we create God by projecting all the best parts of our species-being (human nature) on to him and none of our deficiencies e.g. all loving, all knowing.
He thinks this is alienating for three reasons:
We necessarily must distance ourselves from our best qualities since that is now in the realm of God. We say something like: “complete non reciprocation, that can only be done by Jesus…” And in this we are alienated from the best parts of our nature.
If we venerate God we must necessarily spend less attention with other humans and even ourselves, and in the process we become alienated from our species beings and companions.
Christianity gives "a person a peculiar sense of his own dignity and importance”. This commonly leads to egoism and narcissism but that is not the main critique. The main critique is that believers do not possess dignity in themselves but only acquire it mediated through a deity just as a servant sometimes identifies himself with the social class of the employer. In that way we are alienated from our own dignity and authority.
Hegel’s definition of an unhappy consciousness is one that is separated within itself, disposing part of its essence into a beyond. This helps us understand Marx’s disdain of christianity.
A Critique on Political Emancipation and Liberalism
The question to be addressed is whether jews should be given special rights and privileges in Prussia, e.g. work off on the Sabbath.
Brauer another Hegelian, responds that instead of presenting the Jew with extra rights, the state should just not be religious. He argues for political emancipation by getting rid of the Christian state. In other words, Brauer is a liberal who believes that everyone should be granted rights to practice and not be discriminated upon their religion. Political emancipation ensures that people won't be discriminated by the state on certain matters.
But Marx points to America where religion is as burgeoning as ever despite a non-religious state. Marx concludes that political emancipation must not be enough to truly free man.
Political emancipation is problematic for a few reasons:
1. The state is just as oppressive and as alienating as religion. It is an intermediary through which the citizen acts, and in this way it creates the exact same issues of alienation and oppression that Fuerbach sees in Christianity:
By emancipating himself politically, man emancipates himself in a devious way, through an intermediary, however necessary this intermediary may be. Finally, even when he proclaims himself an atheist through the intermediary of the state, that is, when he declares the state to be an atheist, he is still engrossed in religion, because he only recognizes himself as an atheist in a roundabout way, through an intermediary. Religion is simply the recognition of man in a roundabout fashion; that is, through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and human liberty. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man attributes all his own divinity and all his religious bonds, so the state is the intermediary to which man confides all his non divinity and all his human freedom.
2. Emancipation on the political level is not enough to bring true human emancipation:
To be politically emancipated from religion is not to be finally and completely emancipated from religion, because political emancipation is not the final and absolute form of human emancipation. The limits of political emancipation appear at once in the fact that the state can liberate itself from a constraint without man himself being really liberated; that a state may be a free state with out man himself being a free man.
3. Political emancipation requires the erection of individual rights. These individual rights, far from dispelling what is dangerous from society, recognizes them through their political disavowal. It institutionalizes materialism and egoism.
Marx recognizes the contribution of political emancipation. It brought down an oppressive society where everything was political (in that the lord dictated the production, life, and relationships of the serf) in nature. The conception of rights brought down Fuedalism. But these exact same political bonds which were oppressive also restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society.
But the consummation of the idealism of the state was at the same time the consummation of the materialism of civil society. The bonds which had restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society were removed along with the political yoke
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Feudal society was dissolved into its basic element, man; but into egoistic Man who was its real foundation.
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Thus man was not liberated from religion; he received religious liberty. He was not liberated from property; he received the liberty to own property. He was not liberated from the egoism of business; he received the liberty to engage in business.
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Far from abolishing these effective differences, it only exists so far as they are presupposed.
That is to say, Feudal man might have been discriminated by the amount of his property but he wasn't egotistic because he was not licensed to acquire more. However, democratic man isn't discriminated upon his properties but the state licenses him to gain property in an egotistic manner.
These very rights which brought down feudalism forced people to think in egotistic and individualistic ways. The key tenets of these rights are focused on liberty, property, and security, all of these concepts reinforce the idea of a lone man against a hoard of people trying to get him. This in turn, alienates them from their community:
None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice. Man is far from being considered, in the rights of man, as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself society appears as a system which is external to the individual and as a limitation of his original independence. The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the presentation of their property and their egoistic persons.
These very rights create separation and overlooks the fact that genuine human emancipation is to be found, at least to an extent, in our relationships with other people. It is to be found in our species being, not in isolation. This system of rights undermines the very possibility of real freedom.
Human Emancipation
Marx never gives. A full definition of human emancipation but it will necessarily entail non-alienation. Non-alienation from the species being: that is to exercise his full humanhood and capacities; non-alienation from his social being, that is he no longer exercises his social power through the intermediary of the state.
QUESTION: what does the first criteria mean, that individual man is absorbed into the abstract citizen?
ANSWER: We are not going to relate to one another exclusively as an abstract citizen with rights and contracts, but most of our relationships with others will be forms of familial relations much broader than a nuclear family.
Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from him self as political power.
Marx, in another place, expressed the unlikely idea that as you figure out the economic relations within a society, the political will resolve itself.
Historical Materialism
A great example of Marx historical materialism is how he views religion as a function of secular societal problems:
Religion no longer appears as the basis, but as the manifestation of secular narrowness. That is why we explain the religious constraints upon the free citizens by the secular constraints upon them. We do not claim that they must transcend their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular limitations. We claim that they will transcend their religious narrowness once they have overcome their secular limitations. We do not turn secular questions into theological questions; we turn theological questions into secular ones. History has for long enough been resolved into superstition; but we now resolve superstition into his tory. The question of the relation between political emancipation and religion becomes for us a question of the relation between· political emancipation and human emancipation. · We criticize the religious failings of the political state by criticizing the political state in its secular form, disregarding its religious failings.
Deification of Money
A reason why Marx thinks political emancipation is not enough for anyone but especially the Jew is because he sees Judaism, at least it's pragmatic manifestations as greedy.
What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self interest. 'What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money … In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
He believes that, enabled by liberalism, this greed has spread across society and thus, the state needs to do more than just political emancipation if it wants to liberate individuals.
This is not an isolated instance. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only by acquiring the power of money, but also because money has become, through him and also apart from him, a world power, while the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have become Jews.
Parsing through the shameless anti-Semitism, Marx presents a critique of money that is insightful:
Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it
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Every creature should be transformed into property-the fishes in the water, the birds of the air, the plants of the earth
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Objectification is the practice of alienation. Just as man, so long as he is engrossed in religion, can only objectify his essence by an alien and fantastic being; so under the sway of egoistic need, he can only affirm himself and produce objects in practice by subordinating his products and his own activity to the domination of an alien entity, and by attributing to them the significance of an alien entity, namely money.
His critique of money is that it seems to be self-sufficient. That is to say, it contains a universal judge of value and it doesn't need anything else to impart its value. Of course this is an illusion, just like commodity fetishization we impart money with its value as a social convention. (Buddhism again provides a solution to this Western problem by seeing the conventional nature of reality; if the problem really is that we are reifying commodities and money and that is, in some part alienating, then seeing them through the lens of dependent origination would help us realize we ultimately impart it, and money is not self-sufficient.)
Because we believe money to be self sufficient. It becomes the judge and arbiter of all value. We start seeing everything through the lens of money, it becomes the intermediary through which we see things like God and the state. What we mean by objectification is the evaluation of an object or person based on one metric, in this sense money. This objectification alienates because our first order interaction si no longer with the object but its monetary value.
Miscellaneous
Marx does not give us a picture of what communism looks like. He is not in the business of providing “recipes for the cook shops of the future.” Marx instead proposes values, in this case human emancipation and hope that society can converge onto an ideal together. This is not a new idea, Hegel, Smith, Burke, all echoed a similar anti-utopianism which is always an anti-platonism. One of the reason that Marx gives is an epistemic limit. We might not even be able to imagine what life is like outside capitalism, we have ben entrenched in egoism, rights, capitalism that we may not even be able to gauge what human nature could be like under capitalism.
Marx believed that capitalism created tools of separation, liberal rights being one of them, gender identities being another. These tools prevented workers from uniting and see the true oppression coming from the capitalists.
I find it fascinating that we usually associate Liberalism with freedom and Communism with totalitarianism. Yet, Marx prime value here seems to be, inherited from Hegel, freedom. His definition is just more strict and thus the state needs to do more things to achieve that.