Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

Medieval times provide an explicit contrast, however, with modern
times, times in which the state is abstracted from the world of ‘property,
commerce, society, man’. These categories are no longer ‘political’
in the sense they were. This abstraction of political relations, this
separation of the state as a realm distinct from the social and economic
arena is the outcome of the segmentation of modern social and political
life which is expressed at the level of the individual, whose life becomes
segmented into homologous roles that need not refer to each other.
There arise in modern times private, sealed-off spheres of activity - free
private commerce, trade unencumbered by medieval hindrances,
manufacture untrammelled by guild restrictions and sumptuary laws.
These spheres of activity are in no way functions or outgrowths of
communal life; on the contrary, what was a kind of community frag-
ments and shatters into them. They become separate, ‘abstract’ com-
ponents of life at the general, social level and of life at the particular
level - the life of the individual - alike. These roles can be discussed and
explained - and commonly are discussed and explained - severally,
apart from one another and apart from the social totality they never-
theless ultimately comprise.

At one level, the most pointed example of this fragmentation that is
attendant upon the dissolution of the medieval type of integral unity is
the separation of the state, of political activity as such, from society.
What men do politically no longer involves, or is no longer coterminous
with, what men do socially, and what men do productively, in the




everyday conduct of their lives. Political action becomes its own sphere
of activity. It seals itself off from social and economic activity. It is no
longer cognate or coterminous with social and economic activity ; the
liberal theory of the night-watchman state, which stands aside from
the self-interested economic pursuits of men in civil society, is an
ideological expression of the social fact that politics no longer refers
to, or has any real bearing upon, properly economic activity, which
is said to be capable of regulating itself. Social and economic life have
undergone depoliticization.

Marx constantly characterized the operation of the market mechan-
ism as being unrestrained, and even anarchic. Far from being character-
ized by an excess of state regulation - as many an anarchist imagined
that it was - society is left very much to its own devices, with disastrous
effects on the lives of the human constituents who make it up, and
whose activity sustains it. Depoliticization means that there is no real
control over the division of labour in society, or over its process of
production. Any adjustment among social needs and the imperatives
of the productive process, any regulation of the various branches of
production is consigned to, and effected by, the impersonal market
mechanism - a mechanism over which even the most favourably placed
capitalist occupying the most pivotal position has but a very limited
effect. What is lacking is any conscious control over the operation of
impersonal forces - the phenomenon of alienation in the labour process
writ large. Individuals, whether we take them separately, one by one, or
collectively, at the larger economic level, are powerless faced with the
outcome of their own actions. Smith’s ‘hidden hand’ deals out not
harmoniousness but dislocation - as Hegel, in his manner, had recognized
- and this dislocation is the real ‘unintended consequence’ of the nexus
of economic activity. There follows the bitter paradox that increasingly
socialized production increasingly eludes rational social control.

The dimensions of this outrageous and inhuman paradox, Marx
wants us to believe, are purely historical in character; but this does not
mean that its solution can be found in the past. Marx conspicuously
does not preach a medieval type of organic society, the ‘democracy of
unfreedom’. It may be that in such a society political life is not divorced
from but is identical with private life, life as it is lived; but it remains
true that neither contiguous realm, neither political nor private life,
gives any opportunity for self-determination. In the Middle Ages man is
the real essence of the state, as Marx puts it, but he is an unfree man,
just as the state itself awaits its freedom - the process of ‘political
emancipation’ of ‘On the Jewish Question’.

This political emancipation, as we have seen, assigns a two-fold set
of roles to the individual. On the one hand, he is a member of civil
society, an egoistical, independent, individual; on the other hand, he
becomes a citizen, a moral and social being. The division can be traced




back, through Hegel’s distinction of state and civil society, to Rousseau’s
distinction between the homme prive, the bourgeois, and the citoyen,
the man of public affairs; however, while with Rousseau the isolated,
autonomous, self-sufficient existence of man is perceived as ‘natural’
and primal, and as corresponding to the inherent spontaneous qualities
of human nature, in Marx this characteristic is historically specific. It
corresponds to, and is the product of, modern civil society. The isolation
of individual members of civil society one from another is required
by the particular, transitory historical period it alone characterizes.

Yet, to follow Rousseau one step further; we can see that the
political existence of man is the realm of his collective, social and moral
existence. Marx added to this perception that it was precisely this realm
that is alienated in relation to man’s concrete, immediate existence
once capitalism has taken root. Man under capitalism is not a generic
social being; his personal attributes, characteristics and powers are not
apprehended as social powers, and social power proceeds without
regard to personal qualities. (To see this we can go beyond the well-
known inversion of the proletarian, who becomes the object worked
upon by the production process, and the machine, which becomes
the subject; we can take the example of the capitalist. He possesses
capital - the controlling power over labour and its products - not by
virtue of any personal qualities he may exhibit but in his capacity as
owner of capital. His power is the purchasing power of his capital;
his mastery - rather like that of the master in Hegel’s master-slave
paradigm - is not illusory, but it is devoid of any real human content.
There are even very real limits on its effectiveness in what is, at base,
an impersonal system of production. Marx’s emphasis on the emptiness
and parasitism of the capitalist’s role is, among other things, a riposte
to Saint-Simon’s misleading, because misplaced, distinction between
les industriels and les oisifs.)

What is lacking, even at the level of the most favourably placed
individual (or even at the level of the capitalist class in toto), is con-
scious social control. As a faculty, this becomes a fantasy, being pro-
jected on the remote and ineffective level of the alien state. By virtue
of its own lack of content the state permits the dislocation of individual
and social life to proceed unrestrained. The dichotomy of political and
social life can be ended only by subjecting the latter to that degree of
control which will ipso facto end the abstraction of genuine social
regulation into the unreal realm of alien politics. ‘Freedom’, in the
words of The Critique of the Gotha Programme, ‘consists in converting
the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely
subordinate to it’;⁸⁸ this, indeed, is much of the message of Marx’s
writings on nineteenth-century France, including The Civil War in
France, which indicates how the conversion might be effected.

The duality that operates throughout these writings is that outlined




originally in ‘On the Jewish Question’- that of‘political’ as opposed to
‘human’ emancipation. A society characterized by political emancipation
splits human life in an unprecedented way into public and private roles;
restricts man’s social, collective life to the political realm, which is
sharply demarcated and restricted; and makes this realm ‘alien’ as well
as remote because it no longer corresponds to man’s real, empirical life
in civil society. This life, everyday life and action, is asocial and egoistic;
man sees others as he is constrained to see them, as means of furthering
his own ends, as obstacles to their attainment, as rivals and competitors.
Man, in short, is debased, and becomes ‘the plaything of alien powers’,
having no control over the powerful social forces engendered by his
own activity.

All of these characteristics of ‘political emancipation’ are reflected
in the modern state. The state becomes the abstracted, alienated general
form of civil society, which must be separated from civil society because
- and to the extent that - society does not form a moral and political
whole in and of itself. It is dislocated, fragmented, split and torn by
self-seeking individual and class interests. Since the orientation of the
individuals who constitute this society does not transcend their selfish
goals and egoistic ends, generality and sociality are projected upwards
and outwards and take the form of the alien state. An alien structure
is superimposed upon a realm of private, self-interested activity.

What is striking about the picture of ‘political emancipation’ first
outlined in ‘On the Jewish Question’ is its similarity to what Marx,
much later, had to say about the modern state in The Class Struggles
in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Civil War
in France, and The Critique of the Gotha Programme. The independence
of the state under Louis Bonaparte is very much the same conception
of the alienated state we encounter in ‘On the Jewish Question’. In
each case, the state purports to represent and institutionalize, to
embody and incorporate, all common interests. These common interests
are transformed into a higher general interest, divorced from civil
society and counterposed to it. This alien general interest is connected
to the empirical structure of civil society, but it does not simply reflect
this structure like a mirror. The myriad usages of the word ‘represent’
in The Eighteenth Brumaire indicate (among other complications) a
far greater degree of complexity than that provided by the image of a
static mirroring device. Distance, to be sure, is involved in the state’s
separation from civil society, but so is distortion.

One way of underscoring what this distortion entails is to note that
the state-society dichotomy reproduces itself in microcosm within the
life of the individual. The split between private and public, that is to
say, reappears in microcosmic and internalized parallel form within
each individual. The individual is the victim of a split personality in
the specific sense that he is restricted to partiality, to incompleteness,




to ‘abstraction’ in his occupational role, and that he acts ‘universally’
or communally only at the illusory level of citizenship in the alien
state. The very language of Marx’s designations of the modern bureau-
cratic state, apparently soaring high above society, signifies the separ-
ation between the citizenry and the means of their common action; it
signifies the usurpation of the means of common control, and a kind
of mystification into the bargain. The state becomes a fetishistic
personification of political potential, very much as the concept of
capital designates the separation between the conditions of labour and
the producer. Both are the members of society’s own, real force set up
against them, opposed to them, out of their control. The same process
of impersonal necessity which enriches society, multiplies productive
potential and impoverishes the individual worker - the alienation of
men’s most personal attributes - reinforces the alien state and robs
society of its substance. Once citizenship has become a purely formal
category, men submit to the imposition of an alien will invested with
authority. One theoretical conclusion suggested by this process is a
parallelism between the bureaucratization of the state and the emergence
of capitalism; another is the resonance of the concept of alienation
once we see that it has a pronounced political bearing and aspect to
it. There is, in this view, more than one set of ‘expropriators’ to be
‘expropriated’, more than one way of returning to society all the
prerogatives usurped and mystified - in a cognate and parallel way - by
the state and by capital. What the overcoming of the state means to
Marx (but not to the anarchists) is that socialized man, man as the
subject of his own existence instead of the object worked upon by
alien political and economic forces, man freely associated with his
fellows, could control the totality of his social existence, and become
master of his own environment and activity.

It is a point of some importance that Marx also indicated how this
could - and could not - be achieved. The adoption of a purely political
standpoint by the revolutionary workers’ movement would have been,
to Marx, fraught with danger. In an article he wrote in 1844 against
Arnold Ruge’s belief that social reform could result from a purely
political uprising, Marx argued that in a recent instance of uprising
on the part of workers in Lyons, ‘political insight deceived them about
the origin of their social misery, distorted their consciousness of their
real goal, and lied to their social instincts’. A real, social revolution, by
contrast, Marx went on,

takes place at the level of the totality, because even though it
might be limited to one factory district, it is a protest of man
against his dehumanized life, because its starting point is the
one, real individual, because the communal nature from which
the individual does not want to be severed is the true communal




nature of man. . . [on the other hand, the merely] political soul
of a revolution consists in the tendency of the politically power-
less classes to put an end to their isolation from the state and its
authority. Its level is that of the state, an abstract totality, whose
whole being is to be separated from real life, and which is unthink-
able without the organized antithesis between the universal idea
and the individual existence of man. Hence a revolution of the
political soul also organizes, in accordance with the narrow and
split nature of this soul, a ruling group at the expense of society.⁸⁹

Marx’s position here was no early, immature sentimentalizing that
he was later, as a ‘mature’ thinker, to slough off and abandon. On the
contrary, Marx’s reasons for applauding the lost cause of the Paris
Commune and for castigating the German Workers’ Party in The
Critique of the Gotha Programme are very much the same as his reasons
for criticizing the Lyons workers in 1844. His further insistence that
‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state
machinery and wield it for its own purposes’⁹⁰ in The Civil War in
France follows directly from his position in 1844. Thus while it is true
that the markedly Hegelian vocabulary of the 1844 essay - with its
reference to ‘abstract totality’, ‘political soul’, ‘universal idea’, and so
forth - was not carried over into Marx’s later writings, the central
distinction Marx outlined in this and other writings between the ‘merely
political’ and the ‘properly social’ resounds through Marx’s later writings
at a far deeper level than that of vocabulary. Picking up and extending
a point of Arnold Ruge’s, Marx in 1844 went on to clarify the distinc-
tion in question.

Do not all uprisings without exception. . . break out in disastrous
isolation of men from the community? Does not every uprising
necessarily presuppose this isolation? Would the [French]

Revolution of 1789 have occurred without the disastrous
isolation of the French citizens from the community? Its aim,
after all, was to end this isolation. But the community from
which the worker is isolated is a community of a very different
order and extent than the political community. This community
from which his own labour separates him is life itself, physical
and spiritual life, human morality, human activity, human
enjoyment, human existence. Human existence is the real
community of man. As the disastrous isolation from this
existence is more final, intolerable, terrible and contradictory
than isolation from the political community, so is the ending
of this isolation. And even as a partial reaction, a revolt against
it means all the more, as man is more than citizen, and human
life more than political life. Hence, however partial the industrial




revolt may be, it conceals within itself a universal soul; no
matter how universal a political revolt may be, it conceals a
narrow-minded spirit under the most colossal form.⁹¹

Marx, as we shall see, was later in his career as a revolutionist to insist
(against Bakunin, among others) on the necessity for political action on
the part of the proletariat. There is, however, no real inconsistency
between what Marx said in the 1840s and his insistence (in the 1860s
and 1870s) that class action is political action, because what is involved
in both sets of claims is a common refusal. The proletarian movement,
Marx continues to believe, should not be misled by purely political
demands and imperatives, that is, by demands and imperatives that are
restricted within the political realm, and which bear no relation to -
and have no effect upon - the social and economic system. A purely
political movement, like a coup d’etat on the part of a conspiratorial
elite, would be in Marx’s view counter-productive from the social point
of view, since conspiratorial Putsche operate on the assumption that
a change in control at the helm would in and of itself be sufficiently
momentous to effect any necessary changes in the underlying social
and economic system. From Marx’s point of view, such an assumption
cannot lead into substantial, fundamental revolutionary change because
any thoroughgoing revolutionary change has different priorities, just
as serious, worthwhile revolutionary doctrine proceeds (in Marx’s eyes,
at any rate) from society to the state, and not vice versa.

This does not mean that the political realm can be ignored, or left
to its own devices, by the conscientious revolutionary. On the contrary,
Marx was to remain adamant about the necessity to transform the
political realm by means of political action and struggle, although he
endeavoured to make it clear that such political action and focus was
not a substitute for social and economic transformation. Nor was it to
be undertaken at the expense of action in the social and economic
realm. It was to be part o/such action -and a crucially important part
of such action into the bargain. Marx, in a letter of 1871, expressed
the kind of reasoning that was wont to send shivers down an anarchist’s
spine. ‘The political movement of the working class’, said Marx,

has, of course, as its final object the conquest of political power
for this class, and this requires, of course, a previous organization
of the working class developed up to a certain point, which itself
arises from its economic struggles. But on the other hand, every
movement in which the working class comes out as a class against
the ruling class and tries to coerce them by pressure from without
is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular
factory, or even in a particular trade, to force a shorter working
day out of the individual capitalists by strikes etc. is a purely


economic movement. The movement to force through an eight-
hour law, etc., however, is a political movement. And in this
way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers
there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say
a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests
in a general form, in a form possessing generally, socially coercive
force. Though these movements presuppose a certain degree of
previous organization, they are in turn equally a means of
developing this organization.⁹²

To see this may not solve all the problems of a Marxist politics, but
it does cast light on these problems. Revolutionary action entails
collective self-assertion on the part of a conscious proletariat; it means
the recapturing of alienated powers through a process of social (not
political) self-emancipation. That this self-emancipation is central to
Marxism can be seen from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbuch. Marx recognizes
that revolutionary social transformation must entail the transformation
of men themselves, their attitudes, abilities and habits, and that without
this more fundamental change, any institutional change at the political
level - such as that of the French Revolution - will not be thoroughgoing.
It will proceed merely at the level of the ‘political emancipation’ of ‘On
the Jewish Question’, which would mean, inter alia, that the tension
between human actuality and human potentiality (which had made
transformation necessary in the first place) would remain in existence.
Its form might change, its content would not. The need to bridge
actuality and potentiality would remain strong. Everything hinges
on how the process of reconciliation is to be conceived.

Attempts at reconciliation, that is to say, had been made; and all of
them fell down at one particular kind of stumbling block. To take one
rather well-known example, let us look briefly at Rousseau, a thinker
for whom the difference between what men were and what they could
be was palpable, and the task of their reconciliation an urgent one. Yet
Rousseau’s almost ruthless honesty testifies to his perception of the
central difficulty.

For a new-born people to relish wise maxims of policy and to
pursue the fundamental rules of statecraft, it would be necessary
that the effect should become the cause; that the social mind, which
should be the product of such institution, should prevail even at
the institution of society; and that men should be, before the
formation of laws, what those laws alone can make them.⁹³

Rousseau was no revolutionary - although his iconoclasm inspired
others who were revolutionaries - but the dilemma he specifies in this
passage from The Social Contract is a particularly acute dilemma for




revolutionaries; the more so since revolutionaries tend, broadly, to be
materialists. Let us look at the dilemma more closely. Men, according
to Enlightenment epistemology,are the products of their circumstances;
they are unfit to found society anew so long as they are stamped and
corrupted by imperfect institutions. They can recognize the need for,
and acquire the ability to sustain, social change, only if they have
already benefited from the influences of such change. They are caught
in a vicious circle, which is broken, in Rousseau’s case, by the Legislator,
That this figure casts his shadow over subsequent revolutionary theoriz-
ing is clear from the writings of Buonarroti and Weitling. Buonarroti
puts the matter starkly:

The experience of the French Revolution... sufficiently
demonstrates that a people whose opinions have been formed
by a regime of inequality and despotism is hardly suitable, at
the beginning of a regenerative revolution, to elect those who
will direct it and carry it out to completion. This difficult task
can only be borne by wise and courageous citizens who, consumed
by love of country and love for humanity, have long pondered
on the causes of public evils, have rid themselves of common
prejudice and vice, have advanced the enlightenment of their
contemporaries, and, despising gold and worldy grandeur, have
sought their happiness. . . in assuring the triumph of equality.

Weitling is no less aware of the predicament. ‘To want to wait’, he
wrote,

as it is usually suggested one should, until all are suitably
enlightened, would mean to abandon the thing altogether:
because never does an entire people achieve the same level of
enlightenment, at least not so long as inequality and the struggle
of private interests within society continue to exist.⁹⁴

Weitling - who used this point in his dispute with Marx - went on to
compare the dictator who organizes his workers with a duke who
commands his army.

There is no need to labour the point that revolutionaries-often for
the reasons just outlined - often tend to elitism. But it is germane to
this particular discussion to indicate that Marx attempted to cut through
this dilemma. In 1879 Marx and Engels wrote a ‘circular letter’ that
contained the following recollection:

When the International was formed, we expressly formulated the
battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be the
work of the working class itself. We cannot, therefore, co-operate




with people who openly state that the workers are too
uneducated to emancipate themselves and must first be freed
from above by philanthropic bourgeois and petty bourgeois.^9S

This sentiment was observed in the breach - as we shall see - at times
during Marx’s disputes with Bakunin: yet the theoretical development
that underlies it is central to Marx’s notion of proletarian politics and
praxis. ‘The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circum-
stances and upbringing’, wrote Marx in 1845, ‘forgets that circumstances
are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator
himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts,
one of which is superior. . .’ The rider to the ‘Third Thesis on Feuer-
bach’ is no less significant: ‘The coincidence of the changing of circum-
stances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and
rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.’⁹⁶

What Marx was attempting to do in 1845 was to shortcircuit the
predicament of the materialist revolutionary. His objections to the
various attempts to graft revolutionary action on to a resolutely materi-
alist, determinist epistemology are readily enough listed. There is an
ethical objection to the notion of pursuing libertarian or emancipatory
ends by authoritarian means - a paradox we are to encounter again.
There are epistemological objections to the notion that the conditions
for a critical perspective on reality are denied most people, but that,
nevertheless, a few are (somehow) permitted a path to the truth.
Indeed, Enlightenment materialism proceeds to a bizarre combination
of the most mechanistic determinism (men are merely the effects of
their circumstances) with the most idealistic voluntarism (a few escape
this all-powerful conditioning to transform human circumstances at a
stroke). There are political objections to the idea that social reality is
inert, a closed system possessed of the power to shape its human objects
into acceptance or submission, and that nevertheless, against this
immense power, the force of a Rousseauian legislator, or Weitling’s
‘dictator’, or of Buonarroti’s ‘wise and courageous citizens’ can effec-
tively prevail. But on top of all these objections is another - that who-
ever separates (even conceptually) ‘circumstances’ from ‘men’, counter-
posing and polarizing one to the other, acts in accordance with the
precepts and mechanism of bourgeois economy. The point, after all, is
that ‘men’ should control their ‘circumstances’ instead of vice versa.

Marx’s argument - which has more specificity than is often credited
- can be distinguished, and at this juncture should be distinguished,
from the arguments of many later Marxists. It is very different from
Lenin’s short-lived but polemical (and influential) insistence in What
is to be Done? that the spontaneous movement of the working class
creates nothing more than the trade unionism which is ‘precisely
working-class bourgeois politics’;⁹⁷ it is very different from Althusser’s




insistence that men, who are no more than the supports and effects of
their social, political and ideological relations, can transform these
relations only by means of knowledge (‘theoretical practice’) brought
to them from without;⁹⁸ and it is very different from Marcuse’s insist-
ence upon a working class that is integrated, indoctrinated, manipulated
and that is unable to see where its interests lie

Marx’s argument about the cognitive basis of revolution was ad-
vanced, largely, in The German Ideology. Attacking Max Stirner’s
notion that ‘a society cannot be made new as long as those of whom
it consists and who constitute it, remain as of old’, Marx points out
that Stirner

believes that the communist proletarians who revolutionize
society and put the relations of production and the form of
intercourse on a new basis -i.e. on themselves as new people,
on their new mode of life - that these proletarians remain ‘as of
old’. The tireless propaganda carried out by these proletarians,
their daily discussions among themselves, sufficiently prove how
little they want to remain ‘as of old’, and how little they want
people to remain ‘as of old’ ... In revolutionary activity the
changing of self coincides with the changing of circumstances.¹⁰⁰

Marx is referring, in the first instance, to the fact of association
among workers and the practical orientation this involves. Workers
by associating create new social bonds - a different kind of social
bond - and they emerge from the atomization, homogenization and
isolation that would otherwise be imposed upon them by capitalist
society. A new kind of organization is emerging, according to Marx; in
and of itself, its emergence is a revolutionary act, changing both the
individuals concerned and the external reality that they make and
re-make. It is in this sense that an association (or an uprising) is ‘univer-
sal’, ‘even though it might be limited to the factory district’. This
association, in Avineri’s words, ‘creates other-directedness and mutuality,
it enables the worker to become again a Gemeinwesen [communal
being]. The act and process of association, by changing the worker
and his world, offer a glimpse into future society’,¹⁰¹ because the
activity involved creates the conditions for the realization of its own
aims. In this sense the closed circle of alienation - and the social,
political and epistemological dilemmas its involves - can be broken,
as Marx makes clear in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts'.

When communist artisans form associations, teaching and
propaganda are their first aims. But their association itself
creates a new need - the need for society - and what appeared
to be a means has become an end. The most striking results




of this practical development are to be seen when French
socialist workers meet together. Smoking, eating and drinking
are no longer simply means of bringing people together.

Society, association, entertainment which also has society
as its aim, is sufficient for man; the brotherhood of man is
no empty phrase but a reality. . ,¹⁰²

Yet the fact of association among workers is not in itself an ultima
ratio. Its significance, according to Marx, consists in its futurity, in
the way in which it points forward, in its character as a presentiment
of future communist society. In this sense workers’ associations are
politically programmatic; they are instances of the re appropriation by
men of control over the conditions of their existence, and as such
cannot but point forward. Indeed, it is for this very reason that organ-
izational questions were never treated by Marx as purely tactical, or
as being concerned purely with means towards some undefined revol-
utionary end; the organization of the revolutionary working class to
Marx - as his anarchist enemies in the International were to recognize
-is the revolutionary end in statu nascendi. Future society, as we shall
see in dealing with the International, is contained in embryo within
the kind of association that the working class was adopting. Future
society, after all, had nothing else from which it could grow. Marx
constantly stressed working-class organization as having a generative
character:

Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist
consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the
alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration
which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution:
this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the
ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also
because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed
in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found
society anew.¹'⁰³

Marx’s position, as we shall see, is that political action on the part of
the proletariat is aimed at the state but cannot succeed at a purely
institutional level; general problems require general solutions, and not
partial solutions, or those that take the part for the whole. What is
crucially important to an understanding of Marx’s conception of
politics - revolutionary and other - is that his theory of alienation and
his theory of the state cannot really be dealt with separately. If we
consider alienation, not as something restricted to the assembly-line
in the modern factory, but as a deeply rooted social (and political)
phenomenon, and as a social and political problem demanding a social




and political solution, we are closer to what Marx intended than are
those who have emphasized the importance of the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts at the expense of examining Marx’s other
writings of the same period. The Manuscripts are important, but we
should not allow ourselves to become fixated on, or distracted by
them if this means something it has meant in the past: that we can
afford to ignore those writings where Marx made clear the specifically
political dimension his concept of alienation embodies.

That ‘man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him
which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him’ is not a percep-
tion Marx intended to limit to factory production (as an uncritical
reading of the Manuscripts - and of nothing else - might suggest). Marx
is not only pointing to but portraying alienation as a political problem
that is specific to modern times, and that cries out for a political
solution. What lies at the root of all forms of alienation is the unintended
consequence of social action. Under capitalist conditions, Marx insisted,
such unintended consequence is all-pervasive; it is practically systematic.
Men are living in a world they cannot control, a world that eludes
rational social control, a dynamic and progressive economic system that
operates independently of the will of its human constituents and which
appears to have its own momentum in riding roughshod over these
constituents, who are more objects of a process of production than its
subjects. The point here is not simply that in this topsy-turvy world
objects are subjects and subjects objects, or that ‘things’ (to quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson) ‘are in the saddle and ride mankind’, it is also
that these very ‘things’ are human products. Under capitalism in particu-
lar, the material world is made by men, and external nature is human-
ized - however alien its form may be. As Marx puts it in a passage from
Theories of Surplus Value defending Ricardo against Sismondi, even

production for its own sake means nothing but the development
of human productive forces, in other words the production of
the richness of human nature as an end in itself. . . although, at
first, the development of the capacities of the human species
takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and
even classes, at the end it breaks through this contradiction and
coincides with the development of the individual; the higher
development of individuality is thus only achieved by an
historical process.¹⁰⁴

Marx, as is well known, believed that the human mode of existence
is inconceivable apart from the transformation of nature by productive
activity; and that this transformation - the technology of labour - was
the fundamental ontological determinant of human existence. Yet,
what is often forgotten is that the realization of this teleology entails




the transformation of reality into something that is (literally) realized,
so that man can recognize himself in a world that he has himself created.

The goal recalls the German Romantics as well as Hegel; the aim is
not to create men of a certain type but to enable men to create them-
selves. However, too much should not be made of these similarities;
Marx adds specificity to his prescription by basing it on a careful
analysis - one that is at once speculative and empirical - of the various
manifestations of alienation (the denial of the ‘free conscious activity’
that is man’s ‘species-being’) in capitalist society. The attainment of
‘species-being’ - the overcoming of alienation - is to Marx politically
programmatic. The question, then, whether a stress on alien politics
as an integral part of the overall pattern of alienation helps us specify
what is involved in this overcoming of alienation, is quick to impose
itself; and the question is particularly important in view of the fact
that an apparent lack of specificity in Marx’s notion of future com-
munist society has bedevilled discussion in the past.

It is impossible to clear up all - or even many - of the ambiguities
of Marx’s position on future society, which he had good theoretical
reasons not to wish to describe in detail. Given a choice between
Hegel’s insistence that philosophy is no crystal ball, that philosophical
enquiry, properly so-called, consists in knowledge of the present in
the light of retrospective knowledge of the past, and what Marx dis-
paragingly called ‘Comtist recipes for the cook-shops of the future’,¹⁰⁵
it is clear enough that Marx opted for the former. Utopian socialists
were, in general, anything but reluctant to specify, often in the minutest
detail, what future society was about to look like; Marx, who ridiculed
such pretensions, by contrast said very little about the shape of things
to come. His reluctance was neither unprincipled nor indefensible,
based as it was on an uncommon (at the time) recognition, one of
Hegelian lineage, of the continuity of present and future. The present
is, in this view, brought to bear on the future; the contours of future
society, in so far as they are discernible at all, must be discerned within
present-day society, for they have nowhere else from whence to emerge.
Yet, even if this point is granted - and Marx’s rather reserved, scholarly
caution is compared favourably with the mania for prediction that
characterized so many of his contemporaries - nagging doubts have
persisted among sensitive readers of Marx. It has seemed paradoxical
- or inadequate - to these readers that Marxism, an enterprise character-
ized by futurity above all else, a theory geared to a vision of the future,
had so little to say about what this future would bring.

A stress on alienation - in the expansive sense outlined in this chapter,
and as specifically including alien politics - does something to remedy
these shortcomings. The advent of future society consists in the over-
coming of alienation; and the overcoming of alienation implies the
overcoming of all its mediations. The abolition of private property,


as Marx never tired of insisting, is the sine qua non of communism, as
is well known; but what is less well known - if equally important - is
that the abolition of private property, while it is necessary, is certainly
not sufficient as a condition for the survival of communism. Taken as
an end in itself, the abolition of private property (as Marx indicated in
the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts) can lead only to ‘the
re-establishment of society as an abstraction against the individual’,
to the erection of society as a ‘universal capitalist’ or as a ‘community
of work and wages’.¹⁰⁶ While this austere ideal commended itself to
many other socialist thinkers during Marx’s lifetime - among them
Proudhon - it did not appeal to Marx.

It is a point of some importance to Marx’s disputes with the anarch-
ists that his vision of future society, unlike theirs, was neither ‘reaction-
ary’ nor ‘utopian’, at least in his own eyes. But is there any content to
Marx’s claim to have gone beyond the ‘reactionary’ and ‘utopian’
character of rival socialist, communist and anarchist creeds? It is
certainly true that Marx constantly lampooned those, on the left and
on the right, who fought capitalism on behalf of the traditional values
it was corroding. Marx, indeed, seems never to have accepted the
Romantic attitude that capitalism had disrupted a pre-industrial idyll;
and this alone makes him unusual, if not unique, among his revol-
utionary contemporaries. Marx was aware that artisanship denoted
the engulfment and absorption of the artisan within the confines of
a narrow trade, that the artisan’s mental horizon is restricted within
the confines of his occupation. The proletarian, in Marx’s view, is
very different; his ‘alienation’ takes a more radical form, to be sure,
but the independence, detachment, disengagement and indifference
displayed by the modern worker - which can be taken as indices of
his alienation - are nevertheless not unmitigated curses.

The proletarian’s conceptual rejection of his occupation and its
standards, in Marx’s view, is progressive; it is so at least in the sense
that the worker of pre-capitalist modes of production could not even
conceive of the possibility of rejecting the conditions of his life. He
understood himself as part of them, not them as part of himself. To
put the same point another way: wage-workers, modern proletarians,
stand in an alienated, ‘abstract’, detached relation to their conditions
of life; but it is a relation. Formerly, there was none. It is for this
reason that ‘the subjection of the [modern] producer to one branch
exclusively ... is a necessary step in the development’ of the human
productive faculty; ‘the new modern science of technology’ resolves
each aspect of production ‘into its constituent movements, without
any regard to their possible execution by the hand of man’.¹⁰⁷ That
this development is oppressive is obvious enough: what Marx added to
this point was another, that this very oppression liberates. The sacrifice
of his ‘organic’ unity with the process of production entails a potential
growth in the autonomy of the worker.




But even if this point - which Marx was wont to make in even
stronger terms in the case of the peasantry - is admitted, what does it
tell us about the character of future communist society? In the course
of his lectures on Wages, Price and Profit Marx goes some way towards
providing an answer. The early development of capitalism, says Marx,
takes the form of

a series of historical processes, resulting in a decomposition of the
original union existing between labouring man and his instruments
of labour. . . The separation between the man of labour and the
instruments of labour once established, such a state of things will
maintain itself and reproduce itself on a constantly increasing
scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in the mode of
production should again overturn it, and restore the original union
in a new historical form.¹⁰⁸

The succession Marx is referring to, here and elsewhere, is nothing if
not a Hegelian one; the process starts with a simple, undifferentiated
unity of producer with instrument of production, develops into a
relationship involving differentiation without unity, and eventuates
as a differentiated unity corresponding to the development of manifold
human talents and attributes. Undifferentiated unity refers to feudal
society and artisan production; differentiation without unity to the
division of labour under capitalism; and differentiated unity to future
communist society. Each stage denotes an advance in freedom; and
what is striking about the dialectical sequence itself is that it corre-
sponds to that which we encounter in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,
where undifferentiated unity characterizes the family, differentiation
without unity characterizes civil society, and differentiated unity
characterizes the state.

While this is not the place to investigate in detail what this marked
parallelism between Hegel and Marx may ultimately comport, it is
germane to an understanding of Marx’s conception of alienation and
de-alienation to indicate that the sequence of categories involved implies
futurity as well as historicity. Capitalism, as Marx often repeated,
socializes the production process, collectivizes labour, and develops the
capacities of the human species even if these capacities make only an
alienated appearance under capitalist conditions. The process by which
they come to present themselves to (or against) men in this way is, of
course, akin - and indeed directly parallel - to the process of ‘political
emancipation’ at the level of the state’s relation to civil society. Political
emancipation’s immediate impact is oppressive: yet without it ‘human
emancipation’ would be inconceivable. Differentiation without unity -
which is just another way of describing the defining feature of capitalist
production, the separation of the producer from ownership of or




disposition over the means of production - has a similar immediate
impact, one that is directly oppressive; yet it too, in Marx’s view, is an
oppression that liberates, or can liberate. Here, it is important to get
the sense of Marx’s perception.

The fact that the particular type of labour employed is immaterial
is appropriate to a form of society in which individuals pass easily
from one job to another, the particular type of labour being
accidental to them and therefore irrelevant. Labour, not only
as a category but also in reality, has become a means to create
wealth, and has ceased to be tied as an attribute to a particular
individual.¹⁰⁹

He who performs this labour is not dominated or even stamped by the
form it takes; and because the division of labour in capitalist society
entails a diminution of specialization for the workers (several of whom
do the same thing) - if not for society at large - man as proletarian
becomes labour in general, labour sans phrase. This is an oppression
that can liberate because it raises the possibility of developing abilities
in general.

In the case of artisan labour, only a few artisanal abilities are created;
and because of this inherent limitation, there is no possibility of the
transcendence of the conditions of life. ‘Rural life’ and its ‘idiocy’,
under feudalism, similarly defines and limits its participants in such a
way that, for example, the growth of successful class consciousness
(at least according to Marx’s celebrated depiction of the French peas-
antry in The Eighteenth Brumaire)¹¹⁰ is precluded and blocked off in
advance. Capitalism signifies an advance over this: the ‘automatic
workshop’, as The Poverty of Philosophy tersely puts it, ‘wipes out
specialists and craft idiocy’;¹¹¹ the mobility of labour, as it becomes
called, presupposes a release from the various bonds that had restricted
the artisan, and his horizons, under feudal conditions; and even capitalist
manipulativeness has a positive side to it.

. . . capital first creates bourgeois society and the universal
appropriation of nature and of social relationships themselves
by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence
of capital: its production of a stage of society compared with
which all earlier stages appear to be merely local progress and
idolatry of nature. Nature becomes for the first time simply an
object for mankind, purely a matter of utility; it ceases to be
recognized as a power in its own right; and the theoretical
knowledge of its independent laws appears only as a strategem
designed to subdue it to human requirements. . . Capital has
pushed beyond national boundaries and prejudices, beyond




the deification of nature and the inherited, self-sufficient
satisfaction of existing needs confined within well-defined
bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional way of life.

It is destructive of all this, and permanently revolutionary,
tearing down all obstacles that impede the development of
productive forces, the expansion of needs, the diversity of
production and the exploitation and exchange of natural and
intellectual forces.¹¹²

This passage, from the Grundrisse, parallels others that are rather
better known; the point of Marx’s paeans to capitalism and its mission
civilisatrice is that even ‘the extreme form of alienation. . .in which the
worker ... is opposed to his own conditions and his own product is a
necessary transitional stage’. Any organic bonds between the worker
and ‘his own conditions and his own product’ are broken, rent asunder;
Marx had no illusions about what this meant, economically and humanly.
‘[The] complete elaboration of what lies within man appears as his
total alienation, and the destruction of all fixed, one-sided purposes as
the sacrifice of the end in itself to a wholly external compulsion.’¹¹³
Yet the implications of this development point forwards, not back-
wards: Marx was the last person in the world to wish to put the clock
back. At ‘early stages of development’, as Marx put it, again in the
Grundrisse,

the single individual appears to be more complete, since he has
not yet elaborated the abundance of his relationships and has not
yet established them as powers that are opposed to himself. It is
as ridiculous to wish to return to that primitive abundance as it is
to believe in the continuing necessity of its complete depletion.

The bourgeois view has never got beyond opposition to this
romantic outlook and thus will be accompanied by it, as a
legitimate antithesis, right up to its blessed end.¹¹⁴

What, then, is involved in going beyond opposition to the ‘romantic
outlook’? If Marx never envisaged reversion to a pre-industrial idyll
as a viable historical alternative to the depredations of capitalism,
where does his dismissal of the ‘reactionary utopia’ (advocated by
Proudhon and others) lead? The answer to these questions - and one
can be given, within limits, without doing an injustice to the textual
evidence - is cognate with, and parallel to, the answer to another: in
what way is ‘human’ an advance on ‘political’ emancipation? Or: in
what ways is ‘political emancipation’ a foretaste of real, ‘human eman-
cipation’? For what is implied throughout is reappropriation of con-
trol over the conditions of existence - the real meaning of the over-
coming of alienation in all its manifestations. This solution, it should be




emphasized, is no more categorical than the predicament that prompts
it; what it involves for men is, above all else, an opportunity. The
well-known injunction ‘from each according to his ability, to each
according to his need’ is less complacent than sometimes has been
assumed. What it presupposes is that both ‘ability’ and ‘need’ can be
fully developed. Their development is a human task, that men are
prevented from undertaking under capitalism (or, of course, any
earlier mode of production) except in an alienated manner. Capitalist
society restricts the exercise and the scope of human abilities, and it
disfigures the very nature of human needs - indeed, of human senses
themselves. Only with the appropriation of what men produce by the
men who produce it will enable these men either to contribute according
to their abilities or to consume according to their needs. It is clear from
the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts that both abilities and
needs will change and develop once they are free to do so. The ‘pro-
ductive forces’, as The Critique of the Gotha Programme puts it,
increase ‘with the all-round development of the individual’, and not in
opposition to this development.

The scenario - dimly sketched as it admittedly (and, Marx would
presumably add, necessarily) is - amounts to something very ambitious
indeed. The Manuscripts, in all seriousness, envisage the liberation of
the senses. Socialized man is one whose senses have been fully developed.
‘The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a
social, human object, derived from and for man... The senses of social
man differ from those of the unsocial.’¹¹⁵ This may seem surprising,
coming from a theorist who prides himself on not being utopian, but
it is not historically senseless. Much of what Marx means has been well
put by Avineri:

What the artist creates for himself is being created at the same
time by others as well; what one person gains in creative
experience is not at the expense of another person, in other
words, there exists no zero-sum relationship between the
artist’s enjoyment of his creativity and that of his public.¹¹⁶

The scenario is not one that can be satisfied even by its sine qua non
- the abolition of private property. By this category, Marx meant the
abolition of private property relations (the existence of social classes
defined by the amount and kind of property held) as well as private
property as a brute social fact. Its abolition, or overcoming, is required;
yet Marx believed that what was also needed was the simultaneous
abolition of other mediations - of exchange (and of social relations
based on exchange); of the division of labour (in its restrictive and
monstrous Smithian form); of money (the alien mediation between
labour and property) as well as wage-labour; and of the state. Looking




at all these, it is of the utmost importance to see them as constituting
an interlocking, articulated system, or structure. To single out any one
of its components for destruction would be futile. >4// must go. Total
problems require total solutions. All these mediations, all these com-
ponents of alienation, are not symbols but manifestations, and they
reciprocally imply, and depend upon, one another. To absolutize any
one of them, to single out any particular instance at the expense of
dealing with the reciprocal system they all comprise, is to make of the
task of revolution a search for a panacea, to deflect one’s revolutionary
energies into one particular category.

Bearing this in mind, if we proceed to ask not what the overcoming
of alienation .entails, but what does not constitute ‘de-alienation’, we
find, once again, a set of interlocking categories. To begin with, a
change in ‘control’ at the helm is insufficient; to tinker about with the
personnel manning the state apparatus, or to believe (with Marx’s
contemporary Louis-Auguste Blanqui) in the efficacy of a conspira-
torially organized coup d’etat, is to fall far short of what Marx meant
by the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, and to remain within the
confines of a purely political approach to revolution. It is to remain
spellbound by ‘political emancipation’ and by its consummation, the
French Revolution. But we can go further. Even the abolition of the
state per se - the Leitmotiv of the anarchists - would be insufficient,
since it might eventuate in the ‘re-establishment of society as an ab-
straction against the individual’. Again, mere reformism with wage-
rates might institute ‘society as a universal capitalist’, and, as Marx
indicated in the course of his polemics against Proudhon, any ‘com-
munity’ predicated upon even the equality of wages would be no more
than a community of labour -of wage-labour counterposed to a universal
capitalist called society. Alienation here, too, would survive in a differ-
ent form. Even nationalization of the instruments of production in
itself would prove insufficient or misleading, since relations as well
as forces of production are involved in alienation. The collective appro-
priation of capital, that is to say, is a means to the overcoming of
alienation, to be sure, but it cannot be taken as an end in itself. This
point, too, can be put even more strongly. What Marx’s warning against
re-establishing society as an abstraction against the individual means is
that wherever the public sphere is set against the private sphere,
alienation still exists. Where the collectivity is counterposed to the
individual and his pursuits, community in the sense of Gesamtpersbn-
lichkeit or intersubjectivity - which is the only real sense in which we
can identify community - is denied. This, indeed, is the main point
of Marx’s attack on Max Stirner in The German Ideology, as we shall
see. The opposition of public and private roles or spheres of activity,
of community and individual, is the measure of alien politics, which
will flourish if even a changed ‘society’ is elevated to a fantastic plane.




It seems that this latter point, in particular, has proven to be rather
too close to the bone for the so-called ‘people’s democracies’.¹¹⁷ If
under capitalist conditions individuals reproduce themselves as isolated
individuals, as Marx insisted, then under the bureaucratic communism
of our times - an ‘abstract collectivity’ in Marx’s terms if ever there
was one - they cannot reproduce themselves as individuals at all. It is
no accident, perhaps, that in the ‘people’s democracies’ the early Marx
(in so far as he is really studied there) is written off as an immature
moralist with ‘ideological’ (non-scientific) concepts, or as a ‘youthful
idealist’. The extent to which his writings are not only incompatible
with the practice of politics in the ‘people’s democracies’, but also
provide an immanent critique of them, has been recognized all too
rarely.