Emile Burns Introduction to Marxism

A Scientific View of the World

Marxism is a general theory of the world in which we live, and of human society as a part of that world. It takes its name from Karl Marx (1818-1883), who, together with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), worked out the theory during the middle and latter part of last century.

They set out to discover why human society is what it is, why it changes, and what further changes are in store for mankind. Their studies led them to the conclusion that these changes - like the changes in external nature-are not accidental, but follow certain laws. This fact makes it possible to work out a scientific theory of society, based on the actual experience of men, as opposed to the vague notions about society which used to be (and still are) put forward - notions associated with religious beliefs, race and hero-worship, personal inclinations or Utopian dreams.

Marx applied this general idea to the society in which he lived - mainly capitalist Britain - and worked out the economic theory of capitalism by which he is most widely known. But he always insisted that his economic theories could not be separated from his historical and social theories. Profits and wages can be studied up to a certain point as purely economic problems; but the student who sets out to study real life and not abstractions soon realises that profits and wages can only be fully understood when employers and workers are brought into the picture; and these in turn lead on to a study of the historical stage in which they live.

The scientific approach to the development of society is based, like all science, on experience, on the facts of history and of the world round us. Therefore Marxism is not a completed, finished theory. As history unfolds, as man gathers more experience, Marxism is constantly being developed and applied to the new facts that have come to light.

The result of the scientific approach to the study of society is knowledge that can be used to change society, just as all scientific knowledge can be used to change the external world. But it also makes clear that the general laws which govern the movement of society are of the same pattern as the laws of the external world. These laws which hold good universally, both for men and things, make up what may be called the Marxist philosophy or view of the world.

The following chapters deal with Marxist theory in the fields which are of most immediate interest. It is essential, however, for the student to realise from the outset that Marxism claims recognition because it is drawn from a scientific study of the facts; because its theories correspond with the facts; in a word, because it is true. And because it is true, it can be and should be used to rid humanity for ever of the evils and misery which afflict so many in the world today, and to help men and women forward to full development in a higher form of society.

The Laws of Social Development

The history of mankind is often presented in the form of a record of wars between nations and the exploits of individual monarchs, generals or statesmen. Sometimes the motives of these individuals are described in a purely personal way - their ambitions led them to conquer territory, or their moral or immoral outlook caused them to adopt certain policies. Sometimes they are described as acting for the sake of the country's honour or prestige, or from some motive of religion.

Marxism is not satisfied with such an approach to history.

In the first place, it considers that the real science of history must deal with the peoples. It regards Cromwell, who led the English revolution of 1640, as important because he and his movement broke down the barriers of feudalism, and opened the way for the widespread development of capitalism in Britain. What matters is not the record of his battles and his religious outlook and intrigues. But the study of Cromwell's place in the development of British production and distribution, the understanding of why, at that period and in Britain, the struggle developed against the feudal monarchy; the study of the changes actually brought about in that period - these are important; they are the basis of a science of history. By using the knowledge derived from such a study (along with the study of other periods and of other peoples), it is possible to draw up general theories -laws of the development of society, which are just as real as the laws of chemistry or any other science. And once we know these laws we can make use of them, just as we can make use of any scientific law - we can not only foretell what is likely to happen, but can act in such a way as to make sure that it does happen.

So Marxism approaches the study of history in order to trace the natural laws which run through all human history, and for this purpose it looks not at individuals but at peoples. And when it looks at peoples (after the stage of primitive society) it finds that there are different sections of the people, some pulling one way and some another, not as individuals, but as classes.

What are these classes? In the simplest terms, they are sections of the people who get their living in the same way. In feudal society the monarch and the feudal lords got their living from some form of tribute (whether personal service or payments in kind)

taken from their "serfs," who actually produced things, mainly on the land. The feudal lords were a class, with interests as a class - they all wanted to get as much as possible out of the labour of their serfs; they all wanted to extend their land and the number of serfs working for them. On the other hand, the serfs were a class, with their own class interests. They wanted to keep more of what they produced for themselves and their families, instead of handing it over to their lords; they wanted freedom to work for themselves; they wanted to do away with the harsh treatment they received at the hands of their lords, who were also their law-makers and their judges.

Hence in every feudal country there was a constant struggle going on between the lords and the serfs, sometimes only on an individual basis, or a group of serfs against their particular lord; sometimes on a much wider basis, when large numbers of serfs acted together, in order to try to get their general conditions of life made easier. The revolt of 1381 in England, led by John Ball and Wat Tyler, is an instance of this. Similar risings of serfs or peasants occurred in Germany, Russia and many other countries, while the struggle was continually going on on a smaller scale.

In addition to the obligations to work their lord's land, there were many forms of tribute to be paid in kind - not only a share of the produce of their own holding, but products of the handicraft of the serfs and their families. There were some specialised producers - for example, makers of weapons and equipment. And there were merchants who bought surplus products, trading them for the products of other regions or countries. With the increase of trade, these merchants began to need more than the surplus produced by serfs and not required by their lords; they therefore began to develop organised production for the market, providing the serfs or peasants with raw materials and buying what they produced. Some of the freed serfs also managed to set themselves up in the towns as free craftsmen, producing cloth, metalware and other articles. So in a slow development, lasting hundreds of years, there grew up within feudal production for local consumption, also production for the market, carried on by independent artisans and employers of wage-labour. The independent artisans also gradually developed into employers of labour, with "journeymen" working for them for wages. So from the sixteenth century onwards there was coming into existence a new class, the industrial capitalist class, with its shadow", the industrial working class. In the countryside, too, the old feudal obligations had broken down - personal service was changed into money rent, the serfs were transformed in many cases into free peasants each on his holding, and the landowner began to pay wages for the labour-power he needed on his own farms; in this way, too, the capitalist farmer came into existence, along with the farm labourer earning wages.

But the growth of the capitalist class in town and country did not automatically put an end to the former ruling class of feudal lords. On the contrary, the monarchy, the old landed aristocracy and the Church did their utmost to use the new capitalism for their own benefit. The serfs who had been freed or escaped to the towns had also escaped from having to pay tribute (in personal service, in kind or in money) to the lords. But when the descendants of these serfs grew relatively rich, they began to find that they were not really free - the king and the feudal nobility made them pay taxes of all kinds, imposed restrictions on their trade, and prevented the free development of their manufacturing business.

The king and the old landed nobility were able to do this because they controlled the machinery of the State -armed forces, judges and prisons; while they also made the laws. Therefore the growth of the capitalist class also meant the growth of new forms of class struggle. The capitalists had to engage in a struggle against the monarchy and the feudal lords, a struggle which continued over several centuries. In some relatively backward countries it is still going on - but in Britain and France, for example, it has been completed.

How did this come about?

In Britain, where this stage was reached far earlier than in other countries, the struggle of the growing capitalist class against taxation and restrictions reached a high point in me middle of the seventeenth century. These restrictions were holding back the expansion of the capitalist form of production. The capitalists tried to get them removed by peaceful means - by petitions to the king, by refusing to pay taxes, and so on; but nothing far-reaching could be won against the machinery of the State. Therefore the capitalists had to meet force with force; they had to rouse the people against the king, against arbitrary taxation and trade restrictions, against the arrests and penalties imposed by the king's judges for all attempts to break through the feudal barriers. In other words, the capitalists had to organise an armed revolution, to lead the people to rise in arms against the king and the old forms of oppression - to defeat the former rulers by military means. Only after this had been done was it possible for the capitalist class to become the ruling class, to break down all barriers to the development of capitalism, and to make the laws needed for this.

It is perfectly true that this capitalist revolution in England is presented as a fight against Charles I because he was a despotic, scheming monarch of Roman Catholic leanings, while Cromwell is represented as a highly respectable anti-Catholic, with great ideals of British freedom. The struggle, in short, is presented as a moral, religious fight. Marxism goes deeper than the individuals, and deeper than the watchwords under which the fight was carried on. It sees the essence of the struggle of that period as the fight of the rising capitalist class to take power from the old feudal ruling class. And in fact it was a clear turning-point: after that revolution, and the second stage of it in 1688, the capitalist class won an increasing share in the control of the State.

In England, owing to the early stage at which the capitalist revolution came, the victory of the capitalists was not decisive and not complete. As a result of this, though the old feudal relations were largely destroyed, the landowning class (including rich recruits from the towns) to a great extent survived, merging with the moneyed interests over the next two centuries, and keeping a considerable share in the control of the State.

But in France, where the whole process came later, and the capitalist revolution did not take place until 1789, the immediate changes were more far-reaching. To the Marxist, however, this was not due to the fact that Rousseau and other writers had written works proclaiming the rights of man, nor to the fact that the popular watchwords of the revolution were "Liberty -Equality - Fraternity." Just as the essence of the Cromwell revolution is to be found in the class struggle and not in the religious watchwords, so the essence of the French revolution is to be found in the cjass relations and not in the abstract principles of justice inscribed on its banners.

Marx says of such periods: "Just as we cannot judge an individual on the basis of his own opinion of himself, so such a revolutionary period cannot be judged from its own consciousness." (Introduction to The Critique of Political Economy). What is important for the understanding of revolutionary periods is to see the classes struggling for power, the new class taking power from the old; even if, consciously or unconsciously, the leaders of the new class proclaim their fight to be for what are apparently abstract ideas or issues not directly connected with the questions of class interests and class power.

The Marxist approach to history sees the struggle between contending classes as the principal driving force in the development of human society. But the division of society into classes, and the rise of new classes, depends on the stage of development of the productive forces used by man to produce the things he needs for life. The discovery of power-driven machinery was an immense step forward in production; but it was not only this. It also brought with it the destruction of the producer owning his own spinning-wheel and weaving-frame, who could no longer compete against rival producers using power-driven machinery which enabled a worker to spin and weave in one day more than the artisan could produce in a week. Therefore the individual producer, who owned and used his own instruments of production, gave place to two groups of people - the capitalist class, who owned the new power-driven machinery but did not work it; and the industrial working class, which did not own any means of production, but worked (for wages) for the owner.

This change came about unconsciously, without being planned by anyone; it was the direct result of the new knowledge gained by a few people who applied it to production for their own advantage, but without in any way foreseeing or desiring the social consequences that followed from it. Marx held that this was true of all previous changes in human society: man was steadily increasing his knowledge, applying his new-found knowledge to production, and by this causing profound social changes. These social changes led to class conflicts, which took the form of conflicts over ideas or institutions - religion, parliament, justice and so on -because the ideas and institutions then current had grown up on the basis of the old mode of production and the old class relations.

What brought such ideas and institutions into existence and what brought them to an end? Marx pointed out that always and everywhere the ideas and institutions only grew up out of the actual practice of men. The first thing was: the production of the means of life - of food and clothing and shelter. In every historical social group - the primitive tribe, slave society, feudal society, modern capitalist society - the relations between the members of the group depended on the form of production. Institutions were not thought out in advance, but grew up out of what was customary in each group; institutions, laws, moral precepts and other ideas merely crystallised, as it were, out of customs, and the customs were directly associated with the form of production.

It follows, therefore, that when the form of production changed - for example from feudalism to capitalism - the institutions and ideas also changed. What was moral at one stage could become immoral at another, and vice versa. And naturally at the time when the material change was taking place - the change in the form of production - there was always a conflict of ideas, a challenge to existing institutions.

With the actual growth of capitalist production and its conflict with feudalism there came up ^conflicting ideas: not divine right, but "no taxation without representation," the right to trade freely, and new religious conceptions expressing more individual right, less centralised control. But what seemed to be free men fighting to the death for abstract rights and religious forms was in fact the struggle between rising capitalism and dying feudalism; the conflict of ideas was secondary.

Marxists do not set up abstract "principles" for the organisation of society. Marxism considers that all such "principles" as have appeared in human thought merely reflect the actual organisation of society at a particular time and place, and do not and cannot hold good always and everywhere. Moreover, ideas that seem to be universal - such as the idea of human equality - in fact do not mean the same thing in different stages of society. In the Greek city States, the idea of the equal rights of men did not apply to slaves; the "liberty, equality and fraternity" of the great French Revolution meant the liberty of the rising capitalist class to trade freely, the equality of this class with the feudal lords, and the fraternity of this class with itself-the mutual aid against feudal oppressions and restrictions. None of these ideas applied to the slaves in the French colonies, or even to the poorer sections of the population in France itself.

Hence we can say that ideas connected with the organisation of society are, as a rule, class ideas, the ideas of the dominant class in society, which imposes them on the rest of society through its ownership of the machinery of propaganda, its control of education and its power to punish contrary ideas through the law courts, through dismissals and similar measures. This does not mean that the dominant class says to itself: Here is an idea which of course isn't true, but we will force other people to believe it, or at least not to deny it in public. On the contrary, the dominant class does not as a rule invent such ideas. The ideas come up out of actual life - the actual power of the feudal lord or of the rich industrialist who has been created a peer is the material basis for the idea that "noblemen" are superior to other people. But once the idea has come up and been established, it becomes important for the

dominant class to make sure that everyone accepts it - for if people do not accept it, this means that they will challenge the king's divine right (and perhaps even go to the length of cutting off his head). So the dominant class of any period and any country - not only the United States - does what it can to prevent "dangerous thoughts" from spreading.

But, it may be asked, if ideas are secondary, if the primary fact is always the material change in the form of production, how can any "dangerous thoughts" arise? How, in short, can people think of a new form of production before it actually arises?

The answer is that they cannot think of it before the conditions for its existence have appeared. But they are made to think of it when these conditions have appeared, by the very conflict between the old conditions and the new forces of production.

For example, with the actual growth of production by wage-labour, and the necessity to sell the products in order to realise the profit, the early capitalist was brought up sharply against the feudal restrictions on trade. Hence the idea of freedom from restrictions, of having a say in fixing taxes, and so on. It was not yet capitalist society, but the conditions for a capitalist society had arisen, and out of these came the capitalist ideas. But although ideas can only arise from material conditions, when they do arise they certainly exert an influence on men's actions and therefore on the course of things. Ideas based on the old system of production are conservative - they hold back men's actions, and that is why the dominant class in each period does everything it can to teach these ideas. But ideas based on the new conditions of production are progressive - they encourage action to carry through the change to the new system, and that is why the dominant class regards them as dangerous. Thus the idea that a social system is bad which destroys food to keep up prices, at a time when large numbers of people are in a state of semi-starvation, is clearly a "dangerous thought." It leads on to the idea of a system in which production is for use and not for profit; and this leads to the organisation of socialist and communist parties, which begin to work to bring about the change to the new system.

The Marxist conception of social development (known as "historical materialism") is therefore not a materialist "determinism" - the theory that man's actions are absolutely determined by the material world round him. On the contrary, man's actions, and the material changes which these actions bring about, are the product partly of the material world outside him, and partly of his own knowledge of how to control the material world. But he only gets this knowledge through experience of the material world, which, so to speak, comes first. He gets the experience of the material world not in an abstract, arm-chair way, but in the course of producing the things he needs for life. And as his knowledge increases, as he invents new methods of production and operates them, the old forms of social organisation become a barrier, preventing the full use of the new methods. The exploited class becomes aware of this from the actual practice of life; it fights first against particular evils, particular barriers created by the old form of social organisation. But inevitably it is drawn into a general fight against the ruling class in order to change the system.

Up to a certain point, the whole process by which new productive forces develop out of the old system is unconscious and unplanned, and so also is the struggle against the old forms of social organisation which preserve the old system. But always a stage is reached when the old class relations are seen to be the barrier preventing the new productive forces from being fully used; it is at this stage that the conscious action of "the class with the future in its hands" comes into play.

But the process of developing the productive forces need no longer be unconscious and unplanned. Man has accumulated sufficient experience, sufficient knowledge of the laws of social change, to pass on to the next stage in a conscious and planned way, and to set up a society in which production is conscious and planned. Engels says of that stage:

"The objective, external forces which have hitherto dominated history will then pass under the control of men themselves. It is only from this point that men, with full consciousness, will fashion their own history."

 

 

Capitalist Society

A great part of Marx's life was devoted to the study of capitalism — the method of production which had succeeded feudalism in Britain and was establishing itself all over the world in the course of last century. The aim of his study was to discover the "law of motion" of capitalist society. Capitalism had not always existed, but had grown up gradually; it was not the same in Marx's day as it had been at the time of the "industrial revolution" in Britain in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The problem was not merely to describe the capitalist method of production of his own time, but to make an analysis which would show why and in what direction it was changing. This approach to the question was new. Other writers on economic matters took capitalism as it was, and described it as if it was a fixed, eternal system; for Marx, this method of production, like all others in history, was changing. The result of his study was therefore not only a description, but a scientific forecast, because he was able to see the way in which capitalism was in fact developing.

The feudal form of production gradually gave way to production for profit, which is the essential mark of capitalism. Production for profit required two things: someone with enough resources to buy means of production (looms, spinning-machines and so on); and, secondly, people who had no means of production themselves, no resources by using which they could live. In other words, there had to be "capitalists," who owned means of production, and workers whose only chance of getting a livelihood was to work the machines owned by the capitalists.

The workers produced things, not directly for themselves or for the personal use of their new "lord," the capitalist, but for the capitalist to sell for money. Things made in this way are called "commodities" - that is, articles produced for sale on the market. The worker received wages, the employer received profit - something that was left after the customer had paid for the articles, and after the capitalist had paid wages, the cost of raw materials and other costs of production.

What was the source of this profit? Marx pointed out that it could not possibly come from the capitalists selling the products above their value - this would mean that all capitalists were all the time cheating each other, and where one made a "profit" of this kind the other necessarily made a loss, and the profits and losses would cancel each other, leaving no general profit. It therefore followed that the value of an article on the market must already contain the profit; the profit must arise in the course of production, and not in the sale of the product.

The enquiry must therefore lead to an examination of the process of production, to see whether there is some-factor in production which adds value greater than its cost (its own value). But first it is necessary to ask what is meant by "value." In ordinary language, value can have two quite distinct meanings. It may mean vaiue for use by someone - a thirsty man "values" a drink; a particular thing may have a "sentimental value" for someone. But there is also another meaning in ordinary use - the value of a thing when sold on the market, by any seller to any buyer, which is what is known as its "exchange value." Now it is true that, even in a capitalist system, particular things may be produced for particular buyers and a special price arranged; but what Marx was concerned with was normal capitalist production - the system under which millions of tons of products of all kinds are being produced for the market in general, for any buyer that can be found. What gives products their normal "exchange value" on the market? Why, for example, has a yard of cloth more exchange value than a pin?

Exchange value is measured in terms of money; an article is "worth" a certain amount of money. But what makes it possible for things to be compared with each other in value, whether through money or for direct exchange? Marx pointed out that things can only be compared in this way if there is something common to all of them, oi'which some have more and some less, so that a comparison is possible. This common factor is obviously not weight or colour or any other physical property; nor is it "use value" for human life (necessary foods have far less exchange value than motor cars) or any other abstraction. There is only one factor common to all products - they are produced by human labour. A thing has greater exchange value if more human labour has been put into its production; exchange value is determined by the "labour-time" spent on each article.

But, of course, not the individual labour-time. When things are bought and sold on a general market, their exchange value as individual products is averaged out, and the exchange value of any particular yard of cloth of a certain weight and quality is determined by the "average socially necessary labour-time" required for its production. If this is the general basis for the exchange value of things produced under capitalism, what determines the amount of wages paid to the actual producer, the worker? Marx put the question in precisely the same way: what is the common factor between things produced under capitalism and labour-power under capitalism, which we know also has an exchange value •on the market? There is no such factor other than the factor .which we have already seen determines the value of ordinary products - the labour-time spent in producing them. What is meant by the labour-time spent in producing labour-power? It is the time (the average "socially necessary" time) spent in producing the food, shelter, warmth and other things which keep the worker going from week to week. In normal capitalist society, the things necessary to maintain the family of the worker have also to be taken into account. The labour-time necessary for producing all these things determines the exchange value of the worker's labour-power, which he sells to the capitalist for wages.

But while, in modern capitalist society, the time spent in maintaining the worker's labour-power may be only four hours a day, his power to labour lasts eight, ten or more hours a day. For the first four hours each day, therefore, his actual labour is producing the equivalent of what is paid to him in wages; for the remaining hours of his working day he is producing "surplus value" which his employer appropriates. This is the source of capitalist profit — the value produced by the worker over and above the value of his own keep - that is, the wages he receives.

This brief statement of Marx's analysis of value and surplus value needs to be made more exact in many ways, and there is not space to cover every variation. But a few of the general points can be indicated.

The term "exchange value" has been used, because this is the basis of the whole analysis. But in actual life things hardly ever sell at precisely their exchange value. Whether material products or human labour power, they are bought and sold on the market at & price, which may be either above or below the correct exchange value. There may be a surplus of the particular product on the market, and the price that day may be far below the cdwj^E..exchange value; or, if there is a shortage, the price may rise above the value. These fluctuations in price are, in fact, influenced by "supply and demand," and this led^rijahy capitalist economists to think that supply and demand was the sole factor in price. But it is clear that supply and demand only cause fluctuations about a

definite level. What that level is, whether it is one| penny or a hundred pounds, is clearly not determined by supply and demand, but by the labour-time used in producing the article.

The actual price of labour-power - the actual wages paid - is also influenced by supply and demand; but it is influenced by other factors as well - the strength of trade union organisation in particular. Nevertheless, the price of labour-power in ordinary capitalist society always fluctuates around a definite level - the equivalent of the worker's keep, taking into account that the various grades and groups of workers have varying needs, which are themselves largely the result of previous trade union struggles establishing a standard above the lowest minimum standard for existence.

The labour-power of different grades of workers is not, of course, identical in value; an hour's work of a skilled engineer produces more value than an hour's work of an unskilled labourer. Marx showed that such differences were in fact accounted lor when articles were sold on the market, which, as he put it, recorded a definite relation between what the more skilled worker made in an hour and what the labourer made in an hour.

How does this difference in value come about? Marx answers: not on any "principle" that skill is ethically better than lack of skill or any other abstract notion. The fact that a skilled worker's labour-power has more exchange value than the labourer's is due to exactly the same factor that makes a steamship more valuable than a rowing boat - more human labour has gone to the making of it. The whole process of training the skilled worker, besides the higher standard of living which is essential for the maintenance of his skill, involves more labour-time.

Another point to note is that if the intensity of labour is increased beyond what was the previous average, this is equivalent to a longer labour-time; eight hours of intensified labour may produce values equivalent to ten or twelve hours of what was previously normal labour.

What is the importance of the analysis made by Marx to show the source of profit? It is that it explains the class struggle of the capitalist period. In each factory or other enterprise the wages paid to the workers are not the equivalent of the full value they produce, but only equal to about half this value, or even less. The rest of the value produced by the worker during his working day (i.e. after he has produced the equivalent of his wages) is taken outright by his employer. The employer is therefore constantly trying to increase the amount taken from the worker. He can do this in several ways: for example, by reducing the worker's wages; this means that the worker works a lesser proportion of the day for himself, and a greater proportion for the employer. The same result is achieved by "speeding up" or intensifying the labour -th^*ariccr produces his keep in a smaller proportion of thework'mg day, and works a larger proportion for his employer. The same result, again, is achieved by lengthening the working day, which increases the proportion of the working day spent in working for the employer. On the other hand, the worker fights to improve his own position by demanding higher wages and shorter hours and by resisting "speeding up."

Hence the continuous struggle between the capitalists. and the workers, which can never end so long as the • capitalist system of production lasts. This struggle, starting on the basis of the individual worker or group of workers fighting an individual employer, gradually '.> widens out. Trade union organisation on the one hand, , and employers' organisation on the other, bring great '. sections of each class into action against each other. Finally, political organisations of the workers are built-up, which as they extend can bring all industrial groups and other sections of the people into action against the capitalist class. In its highest form, this struggle becomes revolution — the overthrow of the capitalist class and the0 establishment of a new system of production in which the workers do not work part of the day for the benefit of another class. This point is worked out more fully in later chapters; the essential thing to note is that the class struggle under capitalism is due to the character of capitalist production itself— the antagonistic interests of the two classes, which continually clash in the process of production.

Having analysed wages and profits, we now pass to the study of capital. First it must be noted that the "surplus value" created by the worker in the course of production is not all kept by his employer. Il is, so to speak, a fund from which different capitalist groups take their pickings - the landowner takes rent, the banker takes interest, the middleman takes his "merchant's profit," and the actual industrial employer only gets what is left as his own profit. This in no way affects the preceding analysis; it only means that all these capitalist sections are, as it were, carrying on a certain subsidiary struggle among themselves for the division of the spoils. But they are all united in wanting to get the utmost possible out of the working class.

What is capital?

It has many physical forms: machinery, buildings, raw materials, fuel and other things required for production; it is also money used to pay wages for production.

Yet not all machinery, buildings and so on, and not even all sums of money are capital. For example, a peasant on the west coast of Ireland may have some sort of building to live in, with a few yards of ground round it; he may have some livestock, and a boat of some sort; he may even have some little sum of money. But if he is his own master and nobody else's master, none of his property is capital.

Property (whatever the physical form) only becomes capital in the economic sense when it is used to produce value; that is, when it is used to employ workers, who in the course of producing things also produce surplus value,

What is the origin of such capital?

Looking back through history, the early accumulation of capital was very largely open robbery. Vast quantities of capital in the form of gold and other costly things were looted by adventurers, from America, India and Africa. But this was not the only way in which capital came into being through robbery. In Britain itself, the whole series of "Enclosure Acts" stole the common lands for the benefit of the capitalist farmers. And in doing so, they deprived the peasantry of their means ofliving, and thus turned them into proletarians - workers with no possibility of living except by working the land taken from them for the benefit of the new owner, or by finding some other capitalist employer. Marx shows that this is the real origin of capital ("primitive accumulation"), and he ridicules the legend that capitalists were originally abstemious men who "saved "from their meagre living:

"This primitive accumulation plays in Political tiomy about the same part as original sin in theology ... In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one the diligent, intelligent and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living ... Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority, that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have ceased to work." (Capital Vol 1 Chpter XXVI)

But capital does not remain at the level of primitive accumulation; it has increased at an enormous rate. Even if the original capital was the product of direct robbery, what is the source of the additional capital piled up since that period?

Indirect robbery, Marx answers. Making the worker work more hours than is necessary for his keep, and appropriating the value of what he makes in those extra hours of work - the "surplus value." The capitalist uses a part of this surplus value for his own maintenance; the balance is used as new capital — that is to say, he adds to it his previous capital, and is thus able to employ more workers and take more surplus value in the next turnover of production, which in turn means more capital - and so on ad infinitum.

Or, rather, it would go on to infinity but for the fact that other economic and social laws come into play. In the long run, the most important obstacle is the class struggle, which from time to time hinders the whole process and eventually ends it altogether by ending capitalist production. But there are many other obstacles to the smooth course of capitalist development, which also arise out of the nature of capitalism.

Economic crises occur which check the expansion of capital, and even lead to the destruction of part of the capital accumulated in previous years. "In these crises," Marx says (Communist Manifesto, 1848), "there broke out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production." In feudal society, a bumper wheat harvest would have meant more food for everyone; in capitalist society, it may mean starvation for workers thrown out of employment because the wheat cannot be sold, and therefore less wheat is sown next year.

The features of capitalist crises were only too familiar in the years between the two wars: there is over-production, therefore new production declines and workers are unemployed; their unemployment means a further decline in the market demand, so more factories slow down production; new factories are not put up, and some are even destroyed (shipyards on the north-east coast or cotton spindles and looms in Lancashire); wheat and other products are destroyed, though the unemployed and their families suffer hunger and illness. It is a madman's world; but at last the stocks are used up or destroyed, production begins to increase, trade develops, there is more employment — and there is steady recovery for a year or two, leading to an apparently boundless expansion of production; until suddenly once more there is over-production and crisis, and the whole process begins again.

What is the cause of these crises? Marx answers: it is a law of capitalist production that each block of capital strives to expand - to make more profit, and therefore to produce and sell more products. The more capital, the more production. But at the same time, the more capital, the less labour-power employed: machinery takes the place of men (what we know now as "rationalisation" of industry). In other words, the more capital, the more production and the less wages, therefore the less demand for the products made. (It should perhaps be made clear that it need not be an absolute fall in total wages; usually the crisis comes from a relative fall, that is, total wages may actually increase in a boom, but they increase less than total production, so that demand falls behind output).

This disproportion between the expansion of capital and the relative stagnation of the workers' demand is the ultimate cause of crises. But, of course, the moment at which the crisis becomes apparent, and the particular way it develops, may depend on quite other factors - to take an example from the USA in 1950 onwards, a big armaments production (i.e. a Government "demand" which is right outside the normal capitalist process) may partially conceal for a time the fact that crisis conditions are developing. So may other factors such as the Government buying up of surplus farm products, or a great expansion of consumer credit - instalment buying But none of these factors alter the growing gap between production and consumption; they merely postpone the crisis.

Then there is another most important factor in the development of capitalism - competition. Like all othe factors in capitalist production, it has two contradictory results. On the one hand, because of competition to win larger sales of products, each capitalist enterprise is constantly trying to reduce production costs, especially by saving wages - through direct wage reductions or

by speeding-up labour-saving devices, the latest form of which is known as automation. On the other hand, those enterprises which succeed in getting enough capital to improve their technique and produce with less labour are thereby contributing to the reduction of demand owing to the total wages paid out being reduced.

Nevertheless, the enterprise which improves its technique makes a higher rate of profit for a time - until its competitors follow suit and also produce with less labour. But not all its competitors can follow suit. As the average concern gets larger and larger, greater amounts of capital are needed to modernise a plant, and the number of companies that can keep up the pace grows smaller. The other concerns go to the wall - they become bankrupt and are either taken over by their bigger competitors or are closed down altogether. "One capitalist kills many." Thus in each branch of industry the number of separate concerns is steadily reduced: big trusts appear, which more or less dominate a particular field of industry. Thus out of capitalist competition comes its opposite — capitalist monopoly. This brings out new features, which are described in the next chapter.

 

 

The Imperialist Stage of Capitalism

In popular usage, imperialism is a policy of expansion, the conquest of less developed countries to form an Empire. In so far as the policy is seen to be more than an abstract desire to see the country's flag floating over as much territory as possible, it is recognised that there is some economic reason for the policy of expansion. It is sometimes said, for example, that the reason is the need for markets, or for raw materials and food, or for land where an overcrowded home population could find an outlet.

But foreign countries can be perfectly good markets. Raw materials and food supplies can always be obtained from foreign countries. And as for land for settlement, it is only the conditions created by capitalism that drive people out of their own country and force them to seek a living in someone else's country. What then are the causes of imperialist expansion?

The first Marxist analysis of modern imperialism was made by Lenin. He pointed out that one of its special features was the export of capital, as distinct from the export of ordinary commodities; and he showed that this was the result of certain changes that had taken place within capitalism itself. He therefore described imperialism as a special stage of capitalism - the stage in which monopolies on a larger scale had developed in the chief capitalist countries.

In the early days of industrial capitalism the factories, mines and other enterprises were very small. As a rule they were owned by a family group or a small group of partners, who were able to provide the relatively small amount of capital that was required to start up a factory or a mine. Each new technical development, however, made more capital necessary; while, on the other hand, the market for industrial products was constantly expanding - at the expense of handicraft production, first in Britain and then in other countries. The size of industrial enterprises, therefore grew rapidly. With the invention of railways and steamships the iron, and later the steel, industry developed, involving enterprises of much greater size. Whatever the industry, the larger enterprise was more economical to run, and tended to make more profits and expand more rapidly. Many of the smaller enterprises could not compete, and closed down or were absorbed by their more powerful rivals.

Thus a double process was constantly at work: production tended to be more and more concentrated in larger enterprises and the proportion of production controlled by a small number of very rich people was constantly increasing. Marx was well aware of the process that was taking place even in his day, and called attention to the increasing technical concentration, i.e. the concentration of production in large units, secondly, to the concentration of capital in the ownership or control of a smaller and smaller group of individuals. He saw that the inevitable result would be the replacement of free competition by monopoly, and that this would bring out all the difficulties inherent in capitalism in a more intense form.

By the beginning of this century economic writers (especially J.A. Hobson in Britain) were noting the great degree of monopoly that had already been reached in many industries. In 1916, during the First World War, Lenin (in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism) brought together the various facts already known about the growth of monopolies, and turned his attention to the political and social as well as the purely economic features of monopoly. On the basis of the developments since Marx's death, he was able to develop and extend the conclusions reached by Marx. Lenin snowed that in the imperialist stage of capitalism, which he regarded as having developed by about 1900, there were five economic features to be noted:

(1) The concentration of production and of capital had developed to such an extent that it had created monopolies which played an important part in economic life.

This had taken place in every advanced capitalist country, but particularly in Germany and the United States. The process has, of course, continued at an increasing rate; in Britain such concerns as Imperial Chemical Industries, with net assets of £458 million in 1955, and Unilever, with net assets of £415 million in 1955, are outstanding examples. In every industry a very large proportion

of the total trade is done by a few big concerns, which are usually linked together by agreements for price-fixing, quotas and so on, thus in effect exerting ajoint monopoly.

(2) Bank capital had merged with industrial capital, creating a "finance-capital" oligarchy which virtually ruled each country.

This point requires some explanation. In the early days the industrial capitalists were distinct from the bankers, who had little or no direct interests in industrial concerns, although, of course, they lent money to them and took a share of the profits in the form of interest. But with the growth of industry and the wide establishment of the "share company," the men who owned the banks also began to take shares in industrial companies, while the richer industrialists took shares in the banks. Thus the very richest capitalists, whether they started as bankers or industrialists, became banker-industrialists.

This combination of capitalist functions in one and the same group enormously increased their power. (In Britain particularly, the big landowners also merged with this group.) The bank, working with an industrial concern with which it was linked in this way, could help that concern by lending it money, by making loans to other companies on condition that orders were placed with the concern in which the bank was interested, and so on. Thus the finance-capital group was able rapidly to increase its wealth and its monopoly control of one section of industry after another; and, needless to say, its voice received greater attention from the State.

The best illustration of the merging of the banks with industry is the increasing number of directorships in other concerns held by the directors of banks. Of course this does not mean that the banks own the other concerns; the point is that the powerful figures in the banking world are also the powerful figures in industry and trade - they form the same group of very rich men whose capital runs through the whole of British capitalism. In 1870 the directors of the banks which later became the "Big Five" and the Bank of England held 157 other directorships; in 1913 they held 329; in 1939 they held 1,150. The full force of these figures is all the greater when it is realised that the 1939 figure includes such concerns as Unilever and I.C.I., which themselves have swallowed large numbers of smaller enterprises.

(3) The export of capital, as distinguished from the export of commodities, grew in importance.

In the earlier period of capitalism, Britain exported textile and other manufactures to other countries, and with the proceeds bought local products, thus in effect exchanging her manufactures for the raw materials and \ food required for British industry. But in the second half! of last century, and particularly at its end, finance capital j grew more and more concerned in exporting capital, j with a view not to a trade exchange but to drawing interest on this capital from year to year. Such exports of capital - lending to foreign states or companies, or financing railways and harbour works or mines in other countries - were usually made on the condition that orders for materials, etc., were placed with the British industrial concerns with which the banks were connected. Thus the two wings of finance capital worked together, each getting very substantial profits and shutting out rivals.

(4) International monopoly combines of capitalists were formed and divided up the world between them.

This took place in steel, oil and many other industries; it was agreed between the monopoly groups in different countries what share each should have in total foreign trade; often particular markets were allocated to each and fixed prices were agreed. The limits of such agreements are explained later.

(5) The territorial division of the world by the greatest Powers was virtually completed. (The percentage of Africa belonging to European Powers was 11 in 1876, and 90 in 1900.)

The importance of this was that the easy annexation of more or less defenceless countries could no longer continue. The finance-capital groups in the wealthiest States could no longer expand the territories they controlled except at each other's expense - that is to say, only by large-scale wars to redivide the world in favour of the victorious state.

One of the special points made by Lenin in this connection is of particular interest. The drive of each imperialist country for expansion had generally been treated as only aimed at colonial countries. Lenin pointed out that this was by no means essential; the drive was general, and in suitable circumstances would be directed against other industrially developed states. The drive of German finance-capital in the Nazi period was a clear example of this.

On the basis of this whole analysis, Lenin drew the conclusion that the imperialist stage of capitalism inevitably brought with it greater economic crises, wars on a world scale and, on the other hand, working-class revolutions and the revolt of oppressed peoples in the colonies and semi-colonial areas against their exploitation by imperialists.

The concentration of capital in the hands of small groups also meant that these groups got more and more power over the State machine, so that the policy of the various countries became more closely associated with the interests of these narrow groups. It is this factor which made it possible for the finance-capital group in each country to fight their foreign rivals by tariffs, quotas and other State measures, and in the last resort by war. Why is this conflict between rival groups inevitable? Why can they not agree to parcel out the world between themselves?

It was noted above that the monopoly groups in different countries make agreements to divide the markets of the world between them. In the abstract, this might seem to lead to the complete elimination of competition, and to a kind of international merging of interests of a permanent character. But Lenin brought forward facts to show that such international agreements were never lasting. An agreement made in 1905 would be on the basis of allocating the markets in relation to the producing powers at that time of the different groups, say British, French, German and American. Unequal development, however, is a law of the growth of capital. Within a few years of such an agreement being made, the productive power of the German group, or of the American or another group, would have increased, and this group would no longer be content with its former allocation. It would denounce the agreement, and if the other groups did not immediately submit, a new and more bitter struggle for markets would begin. In fact, this is the fate of all such agreements; and as the law of unequal development applies not only to particular industrial groups, but to the capital of different countries as a whole, economic agreements are only, so to speak, armistices in a continuous trade war between the finance-capital groups of different countries.

The economic war in itself can bring no solution. Therefore the finance-capital groups, through the State machinery of their respective countries, set up tariff barriers against their rivals, fix quotas on imports, try to arrange preferential trading agreements with other countries, strive to extend the territory within which they exercise their monopoly - and arm for the war in which victory will bring them at least a temporary superiority over their rivals.

Two world wars have in fact been the outcome of the concentration of wealth in the hands of finance-capital groups in each country. What is apparently a purely economic process - the concentration of production and of capital —leads to the terrible social calamity of war. The Marxist approach to war is not pacifist. It condemns imperialist wars to hold down peoples fighting for their liberation, since these hold back the advance of humanity. Such wars it regards as unjust. But wars fought by peoples against imperialist conquest or for liberation from imperialist rule Marxism regards as just, as also civil wars waged by the people to end exploitation. It is only through the victory of the peoples against the exploiters that the conditions which produce war can be ended and thus war abolished for ever.

When the government of an imperialist country is waging an unjust war, the working class in that country must oppose the war by every possible means, and if it is strong enough bring down the government and take power, to end the war and begin the advance to socialism. This was the policy followed by the Russian workers in 1917.

The competitive struggle between rival imperialist groups results in general worsening of conditions. Technical rationalisation - labour-saving machinery -brings with it intense speeding up and unemployment. Wages are forced down to reduce costs and win or keep markets. The big monopoly concerns reduce the prices they pay for agricultural products. Social services are cut down, in order to save money for arms and other war preparations. Economic crises are deeper and more prolonged. Such was the experience in the period between the two world wars.

For all these reasons the class struggle and the struggle of the colonial peoples against the imperialists grow more acute. The imperialist stage of capitalism is an epoch not only of wars but also of revolutions.

But there is another feature of the imperialist stage of capitalism which Lenin brought out in his analysis. The monopolist groups in the imperialist countries are able to draw profits above the average from the exploitation of backward peoples. This is partly because of the low standard of living of these peoples; partly because of the terrible conditions forced on them by completely callous rulers and capitalists; and partly because of the fact that the products of machine industry can be exchanged with handicraft products at a very specially high rate of exchange. This does not refer to money, but to the actual goods. It will be remembered that the exchange value of any product is determined by the average socially necessary labour involved in its production. The socially necessary labour time, say in Britain, to produce one yard of cloth with machinery might be only one-tenth or one-twentieth of the time taken to produce one yard of cloth on a hand loom. But when the machine made cloth entered India, it exchanged against the value of one yard of Indian cloth, in other words, it exchanged in India at very much above its value in Britain. By the time raw materials or other Indian products equal to this higher value are brought back to Britain and sold, there is a much higher profit than if the yard of cloth had been sold in Britain. Even where the type of machinery is the same, different levels of skill produce their effect, and result in an extra profit. This extra profit, of course, applies to all transactions ol this kind, not only to cloth, with the result that enormous fortunes are made by the finance-capital groups.

This extra profit arising from the exploitation of the colonial peoples has a special importance in relation to the labour movement. Marx had already pointed out that the British capitalist class, having been first in the field in selling machine-made products throughout the world, had been able to respond to the pressure of the British working class for better conditions, so far as the upper sections of skilled workers were concerned. Thus some sections of skilled engineers and cotton workers of Britain had secured far higher standards of living than workers in other countries; and along with this they tended to identify their interests with the capitalist exploitation of the colonies. Lenin showed that this occurred in each advanced industrial country when it reached the imperialist stage, and that sections of workers in a relatively privileged position, especially the leaders of these sections, tended to become "opportunists," that is, to come to terms with the capitalists on behalf of their own sections, without considering the conditions of the great mass of the workers in the country. This tendency became stronger as the imperialist stage developed, with the result that the leading sections of the labour and socialist movement became closely identified with the imperialist policy of the finance-capital group in their own country. During the First World War this was made clear by the association of the official labour movement everywhere (except in Russia, where the Bolsheviks remained Marxists) with "their own" imperialists in the war, instead of using the opportunity presented by the war to take power from the capitalist class.

This "opportunist" outlook (identification of their own interests with those nf the ruling class) of the leaders of working class parties in many countries made necessary the formation, after the 1914-18 war, of Communist Parties, adhering to the outlook of Marxism and striving to win the working-class movement for Marxism.

In the imperialist stage the colonial struggle for liberation also becomes more determined and widespread. The conquest and capitalist penetration of a colonial country break up the old form of production, and destroy the basis on which large numbers of the people lived. Competition from Lancashire mills destroyed the livelihood of the Indian hand-loom workers, driving them back to agriculture and increasing the pressure on the land. In the imperialist stage the pressure on the whole people is increased by taxation to meet the interest on loans and to maintain the apparatus of imperial rule, both civil and military. As a result of this double pressure on the land and the forcing down of prices ot colonial products by the big monopolies, poverty and literal starvation provide the basis for constant peasant struggles. In the towns industrial production is carried on under appalling conditions; working-class organisation is hampered and where possible suppressed. The middle classes, especially the intelligentsia, feel the restrictive bonds of imperial rule. The rising capitalists see their development restricted, Thus a wide movement for independence grows. The same process goes on, though in different conditions, in every colonial country. Since the Second World War the colonial liberation movement has made immense progress.

Marxists see these struggles as the inevitable result of capitalist exploitation, and that they will only end with the overthrow of the imperialist groups. They therefore make common cause with the colonial peoples against Itheir common enemy, the finance-capital group in the imperialist country.

The First World War, itself the result of the struggle between the finance-capital groups of the Great Powers, marked the beginning of what is known as the general crisis of capitalism. In 1917 the working class of Russia, led by the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Stalin, overthrew the rule of the capitalists and landowners, and began to build the first socialist State in history. From that time, the world was divided into a socialist sector growing in strength and influence, and a capitalist sector in which all the contradictions of capitalism in its imperialist stage were more and more undermining the political and economic foundations of capitalist society.

Issue 79 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM, quarterly journal of the Socialist Workers Party (Britain) Published July 1998 Copyright © International Socialism

Summer 1998

AN INTRODUCTION TO MARX'S THEORY OF ALIENATION

Judy Cox

We live in a world where technological achievements unimaginable in previous societies are within our grasp: this is the age of space travel, of the internet, of genetic engineering. Yet never before have we felt so helpless in the face of the forces we ourselves have created. Never before have the fruits of our labour threatened our very existence: this is also the age of nuclear disasters, global warming, and the arms race. For the first time in history we can produce enough to satisfy the needs of everyone on the planet. Yet millions of lives are stunted by poverty and destroyed by disease. Despite our power to control the natural world, our society is dominated by insecurity, as economic recession and military conflict devastate lives with the apparently irresistible power of natural disasters. The more densely populated our cities become, the more our lives are characterised by feelings of isolation and loneliness. To Karl Marx these contradictions were apparent when the system was still young. He noted that:

On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors of the Roman Empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by loss of character.1

Marx developed his theory of alienation to reveal the human activity that lies behind the seemingly impersonal forces dominating society. He showed how, although aspects of the society we live in appear natural and independent of us, they are the results of past human actions. For Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukбcs Marx's theory 'dissolves the rigid, unhistorical, natural appearance of social institutions; it reveals their historical origins and shows therefore that they are subject to history in every respect including historical decline'.2 Marx showed not only that human action in the past created the modern world, but also that human action could shape a future world free from the contradictions of capitalism. Marx developed a materialist theory of how human beings were shaped by the society they lived in, but also how they could act to change that society, how people are both 'world determined' and 'world producing'. For Marx, alienation was not rooted in the mind or in religion, as it was for his predessesors Hegel and Feuerbach. Instead Marx understood alienation as something rooted in the material world. Alienation meant loss of

control, specifically the loss of control over labour. To understand why labour played such a central role in Marx's theory of alienation, we have to look first at Marx's ideas about human nature.3

What is human nature?

Marx opposed the common sense idea that humans have a fixed nature which exists independently of the society they live in. He demonstrated that many of the features attributed to unchanging human nature in fact vary enormously in different societies. However, Marx did not reject the idea of human nature itself. He argued that the need to labour on nature to satisfy human needs was the only consistent feature of all human societies, the 'ever lasting nature-imposed condition of human existence'.4 Human beings, like all other animals, must work on nature to survive. The labour of humans, however, was distinguished from that of animals because human beings developed consciousness. Marx gave a famous description of this at the beginning of Capital:

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.5

In a useful introduction to Marx's ideas, How to Read Karl Marx, Ernst Fischer also described what is unique about human labour. He explained how, because we act on nature consciously, we build on our successes and develop new ways of producing the things we need. This means that we have a history, whereas animals do not: 'The species-nature of animal is an eternal repetition, that of man is transformation, development and change'.6

Working on nature alters not only the natural world, but also the labourer himself. Marx frequently reinforced this idea, as in the following quote from Capital: 'By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway.' Thus labour is a dynamic process through which the labourer shapes and moulds the world he lives in and stimulates himself to create and innovate. Marx called our capacity for conscious labour our 'species being'.

Our species being is also a social being, as Marx explained in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844): 'The individual is the social being.' People have to enter into relationships with each other regardless of their personal preferences because they need to work together to get what they need to live. In the Grundrisse, Marx emphasised the point: 'Society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves.' Humanity relates to the physical world through labour; through labour humanity itself develops and labour is the source of human beings' relationships with each other. What happens to the process of work, therefore, has a decisive influence on the whole of society.

Our ability to work, to improve how we work and build on our successes, has tended to result in the cumulative development of the productive forces. One such development gave rise to class society. When society became capable of producing a surplus, it also became possible for a class to emerge which was liberated from the need to directly produce and could live from its control over the labour of others. This process was necessary in order to develop and direct the productive forces, but it also meant that the majority of society, the producers, lost control of their labour. Thus, the alienation of labour arose with class society, and Ernst Fischer has given a brilliant description of how it reversed the limitless potential of labour:

The first tool contains within it all the potential future ones. The first recognition of the fact that the world can be changed by conscious activity contains all future, as yet unknown, but inevitable change. A living being which has once begun to make nature his own through the work of his hands, his intellect, and his imagination, will never stop. Every achievement opens the door to unconquered territory... But when labour is destructive, not creative, when it is undertaken under coercion and not as the free play of forces, when it means the withering, not the flowering, of man's physical and intellectual potential, then labour is a denial of its own principle and therefore of the principle of man.7

The emergence of class divisions in which one class had control over the means of producing what society needed, led to a further division between individuals and the society to which they belonged. Certain forms of social life 'drive a wedge between the two dimensions of the self, the individual and the communal',8 producing a separation between individuals' interests and those of society as a whole. However, alienation is not an unalterable human condition which exists unchanged in every class society.

Alienation and capitalism: all in a day's work

In feudal society humans had not yet developed the means to control the natural world, or to produce enough to be free from famine, or to cure diseases. All social relationships were 'conditioned by a low stage of development of the productive powers of labour and correspondingly limited relations between men within the process of creating and reproducing their material life, hence also limited relations between man and nature'.9 Land was the source of production, and it so dominated the feudal-manorial system that men saw themselves not as individuals but in relation to the land. Marx described this in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

In feudal landownership we already find the domination of the earth as of an alien power over men. The serf is an appurtenance of the land. Similarly the heir through primogeniture, the first born son, belongs to the land. It inherits him. The rule of private property begins with property in land which is its basis.10

Ownership of land was dependent on inheritance and blood lines: your 'birth' determined your destiny. In an early work Marx described how 'the aristocracy's pride in their blood, their descent, in short the genealogy of the body...has its appropriate science in heraldry. The secret of the aristocracy is zoology'.11 It was this zoology which determined your life and your relationships with others. On the one hand, the low level of the productive forces meant constant labour for the peasants, while on the other, the feudal lords and the church officials took what they wanted from the peasants by force.

Thus alienation arose from the low level of the productive forces, from human subordination to the land and from the domination of the feudal ruling class. However, there were limits to these forms of alienation. The peasants worked their own land and produced most of the things they needed in their own independent family units. 'If a person was tied to the land, then the land was also tied to the people... The peasant, and even the serf of the middle ages, remained in possession of at least 50 percent, sometimes 60 and 70 percent, of the output of their labour'.12 The social relationships in feudal society were relationships of domination and subordination, but they were obviously social relationships between individuals. In Capital Marx described how 'the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour'.13

However, the constraints of feudalism were very different from the dynamic of capitalism. The bourgeoisie wanted a society in which everything could be bought and sold for money: 'Selling is the practice of alienation'.14 The creation of such a society depended on the brutal enclosures of the common land. This meant that, for the first time, the majority in society were denied direct access to the means of production and subsistence, thus creating a class of landless labourers who had to submit to a new form of exploitation, wage labour, in order to survive. Capitalism involved 'a fundamental change in the relations between men, instruments of production and the materials of production'.15 These fundamental changes meant that every aspect of life was transformed. Even the concept of time was radically altered so that watches, which were toys in the 17th century, became a measure of labour time or a means of quantifying idleness, because of the 'importance of an abstract measure of minutes and hours to the work ethic and to the habit of punctuality required by industrial discipline'.16

Men no longer enjoyed the right to dispose of what they produced how they chose: they became separated from the product of their labour. Peter Linebaugh in his history of 18th century London, The London Hanged, explained that workers considered themselves masters of what they produced. It took great repression, a 'judicial onslaught', in the late 18th century to convince them that what they produced belonged exclusively to the capitalists who owned the factories. During the 18th century most workers were not paid exclusively in money. 'This was true of Russian serf labour, American slave labour, Irish agricultural labour and the metropolitan labour in London trades'.17 By the 19th century, however, wage labour had replaced all other forms of payment. This meant labour was now a commodity, sold on the market. Capitalists and workers were formally independent of each other, but in reality inextricably connected. Production no longer took place in the home, but in factories where new systems of discipline operated. The mechanisation of labour in the factories transformed people's relationship with machines, 'those remarkable products of human ingenuity, became a source of tyranny against the worker'.18 In Capital Marx compared the work of craftsmen and artisans to that of the factory worker:

In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machines that he must follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes a mere living appendage.19

One of the most important, and devastating, features of factory production was the division of labour. Prior to capitalism there had been a social division of labour, with different people involved in different branches of production or crafts. With capitalism there arose the detailed division of labour within each branch of production. This division of labour meant that workers had to specialise in particular tasks, a series of atomised activities, which realised only one or two aspects of their human powers at the expense of all the others. Harry Braverman pointed out the consequences of this division: 'While the social division of labour subdivides society, the detailed division of labour subdivides humans, and while the subdivision of society may enhance the individual and the species, the subdivision of the individual, when carried on without regard to human capabilities and needs, is a crime against the person and humanity'.20 John Ruskin, the 19th century critic of industrialisation, made a similar point when he wrote that the division of labour is a false term because it is the men who are divided.

In this system workers become increasingly dependent on the capitalists who own the means of production. Just as the worker 'is depressed, therefore, both intellectually and physically, to the level of a machine, and from being a man becomes an abstract activity and a stomach, so he also becomes more and dependent on every fluctuation in the market price, in the investment of capital and on the whims of the wealthy'.21 It became impossible for workers to live independently of capitalism: to work meant to be reduced to a human machine; to be deprived of work meant living death. Without work, if capital ceases to exist for him, Marx argued the worker might as well bury himself alive: 'The existence of capital is his existence, his life, for it determines the content of his life in a manner indifferent to him'.22 There is no choice involved - work is a matter of survival. Therefore labour became forced labour; you could not choose not to work, you could not choose what you made, and you could not choose how you made it. Marx noted:

The fact that labour is external to the worker, does not belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His labour is therefore not voluntary but forced, it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need, but a mere means to satisfy need outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists it is shunned like the plague.23

There was another side to the fragmentation of labour in the factory system. The creation of the 'detail labourer who performed fractional work in the workshop meant that the value-producing class became collective, since no worker produced a whole commodity'.24 This collectivity expressed itself in constant struggle against capitalist forms of production and frequent attempts by workers to assert their right to control machines rather than be controlled by them, most famously in the Luddite Rebellion of the early 19th century, a revolt so widespread that more troops were deployed to crush it than were sent to fight with Wellington at Waterloo.

Four aspects of alienation

The development of capitalism proved irresistible and it brought alienation on a scale previously unimaginable. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (also known as the 1844, or Paris Manuscripts) Marx identified four specific ways in which alienation pervades capitalist society.

The product of labour: The worker is alienated from the object he produces because it is owned and disposed of by another, the capitalist. In all societies people use their creative abilities to produce objects which they use, exchange or sell. Under capitalism, however, this becomes an alienated activity because 'the worker cannot use the things he produces to keep alive or to engage in further productive activity... The worker's needs, no matter how desperate, do not give him a licence to lay hands on what these same hands have produced, for all his products are the property of another'.25 Thus workers produce cash crops for the market when they are malnourished, build houses in which they will never live, make cars they can never buy, produce shoes they cannot afford to wear, and so on.

Marx argued that the alienation of the worker from what he produces is intensified because the products of labour actually begin to dominate the labourer. In his brilliant Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, I I Rubin outlines a quantitative and a qualitative aspect to the production of commodities. Firstly, the worker is paid less than the value he creates. A proportion of what he produces is appropriated by his boss; the worker is, therefore, exploited. Qualitatively, he also puts creative labour into the object he produces, but he cannot be given creative labour to replace it. As Rubin explains, 'In exchange for his creative power the worker receives a wage or a salary, namely a sum of money, and in exchange for this money he can purchase products of labour, but he cannot purchase creative power. In exchange for his creative power, the worker gets things'.26 This creativity is lost to the worker forever, which is why under capitalism work does not stimulate or invigorate us and 'open the door to unconquered territory', but rather burns up our energies and leaves us feeling exhausted.

This domination of dead labour over living labour lies behind Marx's assertion in the Manuscripts that 'the alienation of the worker means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien'.27 For Marx this state of affairs was unique to capitalism. In previous societies those who work harder could usually be expected to have more to consume. Under capitalism, those who work harder increase the power of a hostile system over them. They themselves, and their inner worlds, become poorer. 'The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more goods he creates. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things'.28

The labour process: The second element of alienation Marx identified is a lack of control over the process of production. We have no say over the conditions in which we work and how our work is organised, and how it affects us physically and mentally. This lack of control over the work process transforms our capacity to work creatively into its opposite, so the worker experiences 'activity as passivity, power as impotence, procreation as emasculation, the worker's own physical and mental energy, his personal life - for what is life but activity? - as an activity directed against himself, which is independent of him and does not belong to him'.29 The process of work is not only beyond the control of the workers, it is in the control of forces hostile to them because capitalists and their managers are driven to make us work harder, faster and for longer stints. In addition, as Harry Braverman points out, 'in a society based upon the purchase and sale of labour power, dividing the craft cheapens its individual parts',30 so the bosses also have an interest in breaking down the labour process into smaller and smaller parts. The resulting rigidly repetitive process buries the individual talents or skills of the worker, as Marx described:

Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity... The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together, with that mechanism, constitute the power of the master.31

Modern methods of production have increased the fragmentation of the labour process since Marx's day. The organisation of modern production is still based on the methods of the assembly line. Scientific research is used to break the production process down into its component parts. This has led, firstly, to the deskilling of white collar jobs and to a situation where managers have a monopoly of control over the production process: 'The unity of thought and action, conception and execution, hand and mind, which capitalism threatened from it beginnings, is now attacked by a systematic dissolution employing all the resources of science and the various engineering disciplines based upon it'.32 Conditions of work, from the length of the working day to the space we occupy, are predetermined: 'The entire work operation, down to it smallest motion, is conceptualised by the management and engineering staff, laid out, measured, fitted with training and performance standards - all entirely in advance'.33 Workers are treated as machines, with the aim of transforming the subjective element of labour into objective, measurable, controlled processes. In some brilliant passages in History and Class Consciousness, Lukбcs describes how the increasingly rationalised and mechanised process of work affects our consciousness. As the following extract shows, his analysis was prophetic and gives a strikingly accurate picture of today's white collar work:

In consequence of the rationalisation of the work-process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions. Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of this process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not.34

Our fellow human beings: Thirdly, we are alienated from our fellow human beings. This alienation arises in part because of the antagonisms which inevitably arise from the class structure of society. We are alienated from those who exploit our labour and control the things we produce. As Marx put it:

If his activity is a torment for him, it must provide pleasure and enjoyment for someone else... If therefore he regards the product of his labour, his objectified labour, as an alien, hostile and powerful object which is independent of him, then his relationship to that object is such that another man - alien, hostile, powerful and independent of him - is its master. If he relates to his own activity an unfree activity, then he relates to it as activity in the service, under the rule, coercion and yoke of another man.35

In addition, we are connected to others through the buying and selling of the commodities we produce. Our lives are touched by thousands of people every day, people whose labour has made our clothes, food, home, etc. But we only know them through the objects we buy and consume. Ernst Fischer pointed out that because of this we do not see each other 'as fellow-men having equal rights, but as superiors or subordinates, as holders of a rank, as a small or large unit of power'.36 We are related to each other not as individuals but as representatives of different relations of production, the personification of capital, or land or labour. As Bertell Ollman wrote, 'We do not know each other as individuals, but as extensions of capitalism: "In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality".'37 The commodities of each individual producer appear in depersonalised form, regardless of who produced them, where, or in what specific conditions. Commodity production means that everyone 'appropriates the produce of others, by alienating that of their own labour'.38

Marx described how mass commodity production continually seeks to create new needs, not to develop our human powers but to exploit them for profit:

Each attempts to establish over the other an alien power, in the hope of thereby achieving satisfaction of his own selfish needs...becomes the inventive and ever calculating slave of inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites. He places himself at the disposal of his neighbour's most depraved fancies, panders to his needs, excites unhealthy appetites in him, and pounces on every weakness, so that he can then demand the money for his labour of love.39

We see other people through the lens of profit and loss. Our abilities and needs are converted into means of making money and so we consider other human beings as competitors, as inferiors or superiors.40

Our human nature: The fourth element is our alienation from what Marx called our species being. What makes us human is our ability to consciously shape the world around us. However, under capitalism our labour is coerced, forced labour. Work bears no relationship to our personal inclinations or our collective interests. The capitalist division of labour massively increased our ability to produce, but those who create the wealth are deprived of its benefits. Marx's descriptions of this process in the Manuscripts are extremely powerful indictments of the system:

It is true that labour produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It procures beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labour by machines, but it casts some of the workers back into barbarous forms of labour and turns others into machines. It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker.41

Human beings are social beings. We have the ability to act collectively to further our interests. However, under capitalism that ability is submerged under private ownership and the class divisions it produces. We have the ability to consciously plan our production, to match what we produce with the developing needs of society. But under capitalism that ability is reversed by the anarchic drive for profits. Thus, rather than consciously shaping nature, we cannot control, or even foresee, the consequences of

our actions. For example, new, cheaper techniques of production may, when repeated across industry, produce acid rain or gases which destroy the ozone layer.

Similarly, when one capitalist improves production in his factory, he is unwittingly contributing to the slowing up of the rate of profits for his class as a whole by lowering the rate of profit.42 One firm can produce to fulfil a particularly sharp demand, only to find when the goods hit the market that other firms got there first. Instead of simply meeting demand, there is a glut in the market. This means that we produce more but what we produce is unwanted. All previous societies suffered from shortages, famines and the failure of crops. Under capitalism recessions mean that workers 'consume less because they produce too much. And they consume less, not because their labour is inadequately productive, but because their labour is too productive'.43 There is nothing natural about the economic crises we face: it is our social organisation which prevents us enjoying the potential of our ability to produce.

What is commodity fetishism?

The domination of commodities in our society is so pervasive that it seems to be an inevitable, natural state of affairs. All our achievements, everything we produce, appear as commodities, as Marx noted: 'The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities'.44 Capitalism is the first system of generalised commodity production, in which the commodity has become 'a universal category of society as a whole'.45 The dominance of commodity production has implications for how we experience the world we have created.

The mysterious commodity: In every society human beings have laboured to created objects which help them fulfil their needs. So Marx began his analysis of commodities under capitalism by asserting that 'a commodity is an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind', regardless of whether that need comes from stomach or the imagination.46 Commodities must have a use value, but they also have an exchange value. In capitalist society our many different human needs can only be met through the purchase of commodities: to eat we have to buy food in a shop, to travel we have to buy a car or a bus ticket, to have access to knowledge we have to buy books, TVs or computers. Yet the usefulness of all these commodities is overwhelmed by their exchange value and the satisfaction of human needs becomes inseparable from the workings of the market.47

The circulation of commodities on the market is even more cloaked in mystery than the process of their production, where workers have some direct relationship with the commodity they produce. This relationship is lost when commodities are sent to market and exchanged for money, which, in turn, is exchanged for other commodities. As Marx wrote, 'The actual process of production, as a unity of the direct production process and the circulation process, gives rise to new formations, in which the vein of internal connections is increasingly lost, the production relations are rendered independent of one another, and the component values become ossified into forms independent of one another'.48 Marx explained how the circulation of commodities transforms relationships between individual producers into relationships between the commodities they produce. They are divided from each other, yet utterly dependent on each other's commodities:

The owners of commodities find out that the division of labour which turns them into independent private producers also makes the social process of production and the relations of the individual producers to each other within that process independent of the producers themselves; they also find out that the independence of the individuals from each other has its counterpart and supplement a system of all-round material dependence.49

In the capitalist system individuals have to possess certain things - labour power, or materials of production, for example - in order to enter into productive relationships with each other. As a consequence, 'it seems as if the thing itself possesses the ability, the virtue, to establish production relations', rather than the individuals themselves.50 Commodities acquire social characteristics because individuals enter the productive process only as the owners of commodities. Marx described this process: 'To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours...do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things'.51 Thus it appears as if the market itself causes the rise and fall of prices, and pushes workers into one branch of production or out of another, independent of human agency. 'The impact of society on the individual is carried out through the social form of things'.52 This adds another dimension to alienated relationships because, as Marx argued, 'the characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations; it is as the bearers of these economic relations that they come into contact with each other'.53

Marx described the whole process of the reification of human relationships, the attribution of human powers to inanimate objects, and the way in which social organisation appears as independent of human will as commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism has increased with the growth of capitalism, in which 'the capitalist mode of production takes over the totality of individual, family, and social needs and, in subordinating them to the market, also reshapes them to serve the needs of capital'.54 Today there is a market for everything, for sex and art, for labour itself, as well as for TVs and cars. As Ernst Fischer wrote, 'We have become so accustomed to living in a world of commodities, where nature is perhaps only a poster for a holiday resort and man only an advertisement for a new product, we exist in such a turmoil of alienated objects offered cheaply for sale, that we hardly ask ourselves any longer what it is that magically transforms objects of necessity (or fashion) into commodities, and what is the true nature of the witches' Sabbath, ablaze with neon moons and synthetic constellations, that has become our day to day reality'.55

Money: the 'universal pimp': The creation of exchange values and the circulation of commodities requires a commodity which can represent all other commodities, through which all other commodities can be compared. Marx described how the development of capitalism brought with it the problem of how to evaluate different commodities and simultaneously created the solution in the form of money, the universal commodity. Physical objects, gold or silver become the 'direct incarnation of all human labour'. With the development of money people's relationship to their production assumes a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious action: 'This situation is manifested first by the fact that the products of men's labour universally take on the form of commodities. The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes'.56

Marx called money the 'universal pimp', mediating between men and their desires. The value of money, the metals in which it was originally embodied, have long since been discarded in favour of intrinsically worthless alloy metal coins or paper money. And yet money can buy everything - it is the most powerful commodity in existence: 'Money is all other commodities divested of their shape, the product of their universal alienation'.57 The role of money in the circulation of commodities shapes the consciousness of human beings involved in that process. Money takes on the value of the objects it represents, it appears to be the force which can create value itself. As Meszaros explains:

Money is taken to possess these colossal powers as natural attributes. People's attitude toward money is, undoubtedly, the outstanding instance of capitalist fetishism, reaching its height in interest bearing capital. Here, people think they see money creating more money, self-expanding value... workers, machines, raw materials - all the factors of production - are downgraded to mere aids, and money itself is made the producer of wealth.58

Thus money acquires great abilities, but on the other side of the coin, all our human desires and abilities contract into what Marx called a sense of having: 'Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc, in short, when we use it'.59 Marx also described how this desire for possession is both stimulated and denied: 'The worker is only permitted to have enough for him to live, and he is only permitted to live in order to have'.60 In a particularly perceptive passage from the Manuscripts, Marx explains how money submerges our personalities. It is a brilliant rejoinder to those who argue that capitalism allows our individuality to flourish:

That which exists for me through the medium of money, that which I can pay for, ie which money can buy, that am I, the possessor of the money. The stronger the power of my money, the stronger I am. The properties of money are my, the possessors', properties and essential powers. Therefore what I am and what I can do is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful women. Which means to say that I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its repelling power, is destroyed by money. As an individual I am lame, but money procures me 24 legs. Consequently, I am not lame. I am a wicked, dishonest, unscrupulous individual, but money is respected, and so also is its owner...through money I can have anything the human heart desires. Do I not therefore possess all human abilities? Does not money therefore transform all my incapacities into their opposite?61

Commodity fetishism and class: Alienation and commodity fetishism shape all relationships in society. Those who possess wealth also inhabit a world beyond their control, in which relationships are reified. Their individuality is submerged by the dictates of capitalism - as Marx wrote, the instinct to enrich himself, which 'in a miser is a mere idiosyncrasy, is, in the capitalist, the effect of the social mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels'.62 The huge productive forces owned by the ruling class may bring them riches beyond our imaginings, but they cannot control the vast economic forces of the system or even plan any section of it accurately. The capitalists are caught in a contradiction, that 'capital is a social force, but it is privately, rather than collectively, owned so its movements are determined by individual owners necessarily indifferent to all the social implications of their activities'.63 The capitalist has constantly to compete in order to keep up with his competitors and while his actions may be perfectly sensible for the individual firm, when generalised across society they cause the economic recessions which can destroy many firms. Economic crises are irrefutable proof that the system is more powerful than any individual capitalist. This explains why crises are such a massive blow to the confidence and ideology of the ruling class. The capitalist may like to believe that his daring, entrepreneurial spirit creates his wealth, but in reality he 'rides a wave another has created'.64 The class struggle, which he cannot prevent, brings home forcibly how dependent he is on the labour of his employees, and, like economic crises, is a wounding blow to the outlook of the ruling class.

In The Holy Family Marx gives a brilliant description of the situation of the ruling class:

The possessing class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-alienation. But the former class feels at home in this self-alienation, it finds confirmation of itself and recognises in alienation its own power; it has in it a semblance of human existence, while the class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its self-alienation; it sees therein its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence.65

Thus, no matter how deeply alienation affects them, the ruling class will always be driven to defend the system that creates their alienation with all the power and brutality at their disposal because of their material position within it. In addition to this, Lukбcs argued that the ruling class can never rise above the commodity fetishism of capitalism. The bourgeoisie can never recognise the real nature of capitalism without confronting their own role as exploiters and upholders of the system. Therefore the capitalists do

not want to recognise the real social relationships which underlie the institutions of capitalist society. They prefer to continue believing that the relations of production are natural and inevitable. In contrast, Lukбcs argued that workers, though also shaped by commodity fetishism, were not permanently blinded to the reality of capitalism. Rather he argued that the working class is in a unique position to be able to tear the veil of reification from capitalism because its struggle against capitalism reveals its real own role in producing the wealth of society. Class struggle means that workers no longer see themselves as isolated individuals. It means that they can become conscious of the social character of labour. Lukбcs suggests that when workers glimpse the reality behind commodity fetishism it can help them to realise the need for a revolutionary transformation of society: 'This enables us to understand why it is only in the proletariat that the process by which a man's achievement is split off from his total personality and becomes a commodity leads to a revolutionary consciousness'.66

The uses and abuses of Marx's theory

The concept of alienation is a central but controversial aspect of Marxism. When Marx's key work on alienation, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, was eventually published in 1932, it had a dramatic impact on the tradition known as 'Western Marxism', which included writers like Herbert Marcuse and John Paul Sartre.67 However, in the hands of the Western Marxists, the theory of alienation became intermingled with idealist theories, which explained alienation in terms of psychology rather than the organisation of society. The New Left which emerged in the late 1950s reacted against the theory and practice of Stalinism, but some of the writers associated with the New Left threw the Marxist baby out with the Stalinist bathwater. They abandoned some central aspects of Marxism, such as the central role of the economic structure in shaping the rest of society and the objective class antagonisms at the heart of capitalism. As Perry Anderson wrote, 'The most striking single trait of Western Marxism as a common tradition is thus perhaps the constant presence and influence on it of successive types of European idealism'.68 Alienation was seized upon to explain the miseries of modern life, and the 'lonely crowd', 'those aggregations of atomised city dwellers who feel crushed and benumbed by the weight of a social system in which they have neither significant purpose nor decision-making power'.69 Alienation came to refer predominately to a state of mind, rather than an understanding of how social organisation affected human beings.

Typical of the confused ideas about alienation fashionable in some quarters at this time is a book edited by Eric and Mary Josephson, Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society, first published in 1962 and reprinted eight times before 1968. For the Josephsons, alienation describes 'the untold lives of quiet desperation that mark our age', and the long list of those suffering from alienation includes such diverse group as women, immigrants, sexual deviants, drug addicts, young people and artists.70 But the editors understand alienation exclusively as a psychological state, 'referring to an extraordinary variety of psycho-social disorders, including loss of field, anxiety states, anomie, despair, depersonalisation, rootlessness, apathy, social disorganisation, loneliness, atomisation, powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, pessimism, and the loss of beliefs and values'.71 If alienation is only a specific psychological problem, then it follows that the solution to alienation must be sought exclusively in the individual consciousness. If alienation is predominantly a state of mind, there is an implication that it can be cured without fundamentally changing the organisation of society. As Eric Fromm suggested, forms of alienation were 'chains of illusion' which can be broken within the context of capitalist society, because they arise from 'stereotyped alternatives of thinking'.72

However, Marx's writings on alienation, from the Manuscripts to the Grundrisse and Capital, demonstrate that for him alienation was not merely a state of mind. The roots of the individual psyche were to be located in how society as a whole is organised. As one Marxist described it, 'The life activity of the alienated individual is qualitatively of a kind. His actions in religion, family affairs, politics and so on, are as distorted and brutalised as his productive activity... There is no sphere of human activity that lies outside these prison walls'.73 Marx's theory offers us an indispensable method of understanding how the production process shapes the whole of society. There are two areas of activity which are particularly controversial in relation to alienation. This first is the place of intellectual, or mental labour, and creativity in alienated production.

The division of labour described in this article leads to a sharp division between work and creativity. Work is regimented, broken down into separate tasks. The creative elements in each process are dispersed into a million fragments. Labour itself is a commodity and its value is determined by the labour time which went into its creation, for example, the amount spent on training or educating a worker. A highly skilled technician or engineer will therefore be paid more than an unskilled labourer. As Braverman wrote, 'In this way, a structure is given to all labour process that at its extremes polarises those whose time is infinitely valuable and those whose time is worth almost nothing'.74 However, this does not mean that the intellectual whose time is valuable escapes from the general pattern of alienation. On the contrary, one of the features of modern capitalism is the commercialisation of knowledge.75 The design of a microchip or computer software is just as much the property of the capitalist as a tin of beans or a car. Capitalists enrich themselves through the appropriation of mental labour in the same way as they do through material labour.

The social division of labour undermines the potential of intellectuals to discover new truths about society. As Franz Jakubowski wrote,

The social division of labour creates a series of sub-spheres, not only in the economy but in the whole of social life and thought. These develop their own autonomous sets of laws. As a result of specialisation, each individual sphere develops according to the logic of its own specific object.76

Intellectual activity takes place within these limitations, in isolation from society as a whole. In the end, the individual sciences 'cannot understand either the method of the principle of even their own concrete substratum of reality'.77 All the potential we have to develop new techniques and methods is subordinated to competition. The very structure of capitalist society condemns our intellectual developments to the chase of facts in blind isolation from the real movements of society. This does not mean that nothing useful can be developed, rather that research takes place within a framework which constrains and limits its development.

The same processes are at work in the production and consumption of art in capitalist society. As Eugene Lunn explained in his excellent book Marxism and Modernism, bourgeois society offers artistic freedom on one hand and snatches it back with the other: 'Bourgeois society - with all its progressive advance over "feudal" constrictions - is also inimical to many forms of art, for example because of division of labour, the mechanisation of many forms of human activity, and the predominance of quantitative over qualitative concerns'.78 Marx argued that artists, like scientists and intellectuals, could not escape from the general conversion of all human creativity into commodities. Firstly this is because artists, like all other workers, are dependent on their ability to make money: 'The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyers, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers'.79 Secondly, Lunn points out how commodity production shapes art. The fact that works of art are sold on the market shapes every level of their conception and production. Marx gave one example of this in his critique of the novels of Eugene Sue, in which he 'stresses the influence upon the author of the ethical and political assumptions of its intended bourgeois public'.80 Neither can art escape commodity fetishism: 'If one form of spiritualising mystification has been eroded by expansion of commerce - the romantic apotheosis of the arts as soaring above material reality - a new fetishism has replaced it: the fetishism of commodities'.81 This also points to how new, challenging cultural developments are rapidly incorporated into the system as mere commodities.

This does not mean that works of art can be reduced to exactly the same status as a tin of beans. Art stimulates our imagination and emotions. It enriches our understanding of society and can reveal something of the contradictions behind reified appearances: 'It can pierce through the ideological clouds which enshroud social realities.' Some artists devote their energies to attempting to reach beyond capitalism, while others choose to celebrate the system as it exists, but even then the art they produce can penetrate the reified appearance of capitalism. As Lunn wrote:

We cannot reduce art to exchange rates reflecting the pervasive alienation. Even with its halo removed, art was capable of diagnosing, and pointing beyond alienating social and economic conditions... All art has the capacity to create a need for aesthetic enjoyment and education which capitalism cannot satisfy. Although coming increasingly under the influence of the marketplace, art is produced and consumed in relative autonomy and is not identical to factory work or to a pure commodity.82

The second controversial application of Marx's theory of alienation is in the formulation of an analysis of other activities outside the sphere of work, which we undertake through choice rather than necessity. The more the world of work confronts us as hostile, exhausting and miserable, the more people pour their energies into their lives outside work. As the system develops new markets are constantly being carved out of our needs and wishes. For example, consider the multimillion pound industries which have developed around commodities which are said to make us look thin or young, our desire to play games, to experience nature or enjoy art. The very fact that we have the 'leisure industry' and the 'entertainment industry' points to the fact that the separation of work from leisure has left a void in our free hours: 'Thus filling time away from the job also becomes dependent upon the market, which develops to an enormous degree those passive amusements, entertainments, and spectacles that suit the restricted circumstances of the city and are offered as substitutes for life itself'.83

The retreat into the privatised world of the individual and the family is a pronounced feature of life in the 1990s. Adopting particular lifestyles seems to offer the only real chance of personal fulfilment. Hence the increasing fascination for TV programmes and magazines about fashion, cooking, holidays and gardening and the boom in the Do-It-Yourself market. The family and the home have become leisure activities in and of themselves; they have also become subject to the priorities of the market. All the commodities which could increase our free time simply reinforce the family as a unit of consumption not an emotional haven: 'As the advances of modern household and service industries lighten the family labour, they increase the futility of family life; as they remove the burden of personal relations, they strip away its affections; as they create an intricate social life, they rob it of every vestige of community and leave in its place the cash nexus'.84

In addition, Meszaros describes how the retreat into private life simply increases the power of capitalism over us: 'The cult of privacy and of individual autonomy thus fulfils the dual function of objectively protecting the established order against challenge by the rabble, and subjectively providing a spurious fulfilment in an escapist withdrawal to the isolated and powerless individual who is mystified by the mechanisms of capitalist society which manipulate him'.85 Meszaros also makes the point that alienation has deprived us of our ability to have genuinely human relationships. We are forced to seek compensation for the loss of our humanity in the limited area of our privatised personal lives, yet this merely reinforces our alienation from each other: 'To seek the remedy in autonomy is to be on the wrong track. Our troubles are not due to a lack of autonomy but, on the contrary, to a social structure - a mode of production - that forces on men a cult of it, isolating them from each other'.86

Our attempts to express the creativity of which capitalism has deprived us cannot negate the totality of alienation. The eradication of alienation depends on the transformation of society as a whole. However we organise our personal lives and leisure time, we cannot individually fulfil our collective ability to shape the natural world we live in. Lifestyles and leisure activities cannot liberate us from alienation, or even create little islands of freedom in an ocean of alienation. As alienation is rooted in capitalist society, only the collective struggle against that society carries the potential to eradicate alienation, to bring our vast, developing

powers under our conscious control and reinstitute work as the central aspect of life. As Marx wrote in Capital, 'The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life process, ie the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men and stands under their conscious and planned control'.87

Notes

1 K Marx, 'Speech at the Anniversary of the Peoples' Paper' quoted in E Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (University of California Press, 1984), p31.

2 G Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Merlin, 1971), p47.

3 Marx was not the first to develop an analysis of human alienation. Marx's philosophical predecessor, Hegel, saw alienation as part of the development of the human mind. Ludwig Feuerbach put forward a materialist analysis of alienation, pointing out how men transfer the power to change the world to imaginary gods, but he believed that religious alienation could be eradicated through rational argument alone. Marx broke from both Hegel's idealist concept of alienation and the ahistorical materialism of Feuerbach. For an introduction to Marx's theorectical background, see A Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (Bookmarks, 1996), ch 3.

4 Quoted in E Fischer, How to Read Karl Marx (Monthly Review Press, 1996), p53.

5 Ibid, p52.

6 Ibid, p51.

7 Ibid, p54.

8 T Eagleton, Marx (Phoenix, 1997), p27.

9 K Marx, Capital, vol 1 (Penguin, 1976), p173.

10 K Marx, Early Writings (Penguin, 1975), p318.

11 Quoted in P Walton and A Gamble, From Alienation to Surplus Value (Sheed and Ward, 1972), p20.

12 E Mandel and G Novak, The Marxist Theory of Alienation (Pathfinder, 1970), p20.

13 Capital, op cit, p170.

14 K Marx quoted in I Meszaros, Marx's Theory of Alienation (Merlin Press, 1986), p35.

15 P Linebaugh, The London Hanged (Penguin, 1993), p396.

16 Ibid, p225.

17 Ibid, p374.

18 Ibid, p24.

19 Capital, op cit, p460

20 H Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 1974), p73.

21 K Marx, Early Writings, op cit, p285.

22 Ibid, p335.

23 Ibid, p326.

24 P Linebaugh, op cit, p225.

25 B Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p143.

26 I I Rubin, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (Black Rose Books, 1975), pxxv.

27 K Marx, Early Writings, p324.

28 E Fischer, op cit, p67.

29 Ibid, p327.

30 H Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 1974), p80.

31 E Fischer, op cit, pp58-9.

32 H Braverman, op cit, p171.

33 Ibid, p180.

34 G Lukбcs, op cit, p89.

35 K Marx, Early Writings, op cit, p331.

36 E Fischer, op cit, p63.

37 B Ollman, op cit, p144.

38 Rubin, op cit, p15.

39 K Marx, Early Writings, op cit, p359.

40 There is a brilliant description of one facet of this experience in C Caudwell, The Concept of Freedom (Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), p49.

41 K Marx, Early Writings, op cit, p325.

42 See C Harman, Economics of the Madhouse (Bookmarks, 1995).

43 E Mandel, op cit, p22.

44 K Marx, Capital, op cit, p125.

45 Ibid, p125.

46 Ibid, p1.

47 See ibid, p165.

48 Quoted in B Ollman, op cit, p187.

49 K Marx, Capital, op cit, pp202-203.

50 Ibid, p21.

51 Ibid, pp165-165.

52 Ibid, p24.

53 Ibid, p179.

54 H Braverman, op cit, p271.

55 E Fischer, op cit, p68.

56 Ibid, p187.

57 Ibid, p205.

58 I Meszaros, op cit, p197.

59 K Marx, Early Writings, op cit, p351.

60 Ibid, p361.

61 Ibid, p377.

62 K Marx, quoted in G Lukбcs, op cit, p133.

63 Ibid, p63.

64 B Ollman, op cit, p154.

65 K Marx, The Holy Family, quoted in F Jakubowski, Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism (Pluto, 1990), p87.

66 G Lukбcs, op cit, p171.

67 P Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (New Left Books, 1976), pp50-51.

68 Ibid, p56.

69 E Mandel, op cit, p6.

70 E and M Josephson, Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society (Dell Publishing Co, 1968), p12.

71 Ibid, p13.

72 Ibid, ch 1.

73 B Ollman, op cit, p202.

74 H Braverman, op cit, p83.

75 See, for instance, G Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy (Verso, 1991), p18.

76 F Jakubowski, op cit, p96.

77 Ibid, p96.

78 E Lunn, op cit, p15.

79 Ibid, p16.

80 Ibid, p12.

81 Ibid, p16.

82 Ibid, pp15-16.

83 H Braverman, op cit, p278,

84 Ibid, p282.

85 I Meszaros, op cit, p26.

86 Ibid, p267.

87 K Marx, Capital, op cit, p173.