marxism and mythology

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Marxism and MythologyAuthor(s): John O'NeillSource: Ethics, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Oct., 1966), pp. 38-49Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2379394Accessed: 30/08/2008 16:00

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MARXISM AND MYTHOLOGY

JOHN O'NEILL

I

IT SEEMS incredible that anyone couldread Capital and overlook the mor-al vision which furnishes the driv-

ing energy for such a colossal documen-tation and analysis of the conditions ofunauthentic existence in industrial, cap-italist society. Yet it is argued that ifMarx was a social scientist, as mostMarxists claim for him, then he cannothave been a moral philosopher. Indeed,many Marxists themselves have thoughtthat a moral philosophy had no part inscientific socialism. But gradually acertain disenchantment with the politi-cal experience of socialism has pro-duced a number of attempts to rejuve-nate Marxist metapolitics with freshinterpretations of the original human-

ism of Marx.' The current revolutionof the philosophical framework ofMarxian thought, however, is seriouslyprejudiced by the view that Marxiansocial philosophy is speculative in theworst sense, a view compounded by amethod of pseudopsychological expla-nation. The latter approach has per-haps attracted most attention in Pro-fessor R. C. Tucker's treatment ofphilosophy and myth in Marx,2 whichremains lively enough to provide in-spiration for the comparison o.f Marx'sintellectual achievement with that ofthe drama of St. Paul's vision on theroad to Damascus.3

It would not be difficult to show thatMarx's sociological analysis of religionis not on the same level as the phenom-

enon it treats. Similarly, even if onewere to grant the similarity between thesubsequent fate of Marx's writings and

the tendency of original religious teach-ings to become dogmatized in the proc-ess of institutionalization, one couldeasily show the difference between re-ligious teachings, written or unwritten,and Marx's studies in the fields of eco-nomics, sociology, and political history.But in practice the characterization ofMarxism as a religious phenomenonrarely goes beyond the level of meta-

phors which are not adequate to thephenomenon of religion itself, let aloneMarxian social science. The seriousbasis of the attempt to denigrate thestatus of Marxian social science restsultimately upon an epistemological ar-gument, and it is at this level that itmust be engaged.

Tucker assumes that Marxism is not

a scientific theory. It is in part a phi-losophy and in greater part a myth. In-sofar as it is philosophical, theoreticalMarxism is concerned with the ethicalproblem of good and evil. But, accord-ing to Tucker, Marx cannot be classi-fied as a moral philosopher because hefits no obvious category in the historyof Western philosophy. Marx is at best

a moralist, one concerned with goodand evil, but never in terms of a sys-tematic inquiry into the nature of thesupreme good considered as problem-atic. Marx is, so we are to believe, amoralist opposed to moral philosophy.Accordingly, Marx can be understoodonly as a moralist of the religiouskind. Such is the nature of the philo-

sophical element in Marxian social the-ory. But this element is outweighed bythe mythical component in Marxism.

38


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MARXISM AND MYTHOLOGY 39

Tucker's theory of the nature ofmyth and, consequently of Marxian so-cial theory, is that something by na-ture interior is apprehended as exterior,

that a drama of the inner life of man isexperienced and depicted as takingplace in the outer world. By contrastwith myth, the attitude of philosophyis to represent external processes asdevelopments of an inner self. This isexemplified in Hegel's introjection ofthe world-spirit and Marx's criticalsubstitution of a human species-self inplace of the Absolute Spirit. But Marxproceeds to mythologize his philosophi-cal intuition by projecting onto theexternal world his image of the humanspecies-self and by going on to explainthe dynamics of self-alienation in termsof supposedly external social forces ofalienation.Whereas philosophy had once arisen against abackground of myth, here myth arose against a

background of philosophy-the Hegelian phi-losophy. A phenomenology of spirit, in whichthe world was consciously represented as a sub-jective process of realization of a world-self,became first a new phenomenology in whichMarx pictured the world as a process of realiza-tion of a human species-self. This was doneconsciously and without mystification, andoriginal Marxism remained fundamentally onthe ground of philosophical thought. At a deci-sive point in it, however, Marx made the transi-

tion to the mythic mode of thought. The sub-jective process of Entfremdungsgeschichte wasembodied in an image of society.4

It should be noticed that this argu-ment allows only two methods of in-terpreting reality. The philosophicalmethod, allegedly, is to explain outsideevents in terms of internal (mental)events. Internal events are presumablyunderstood through the method of in-trospective or philosophical psychol-ogy. The procedure of myth is to con-ceive internal (mental) events in termsof outside events. Tucker seems to con-

sider the status of the external worldas essentially mind dependent. How-ever, his use of the concept of mythindicates that the external world can-

not be taken as a dumping ground forany and all contents of the mind orpsyche. Yet, no criteria are offered fordistinguishing which mental events are,in his words, by nature interior and,consequently, not useful for interpret-ing external events. The view seems tobe that reality, more particularly socialreality, can be interpreted only in termsof the intentional concepts of individualpsychology. The attempt to explain so-cial and individual behavior in termsof sociological concepts is mistaken forthe reason that such concepts can beshown through a nominalist analysis tobe figments of the individual imagina-tion, unreal entities projected onto theexternal world and vainly employed toexplain individual behavior. In turn,

the explanation of this sort of concep-tual behavior is, quite simply, that itis pathological.

It is argued that Marx substitutedfor the Hegelian Absolute Spirit a col-lective, human species-self, alienatedman writ large. So long as Marx sawthe world through the jaundiced eyesof alienated man, he had the merit of

being a philosopher. He would, ofcourse, have benefited from a littlenominalist therapy. But, essentially,his subjective view of the world offeredthe chance of rehabilitation. Apparent-ly, however, Marx regressed at a cer-tain stage of his logical analysis. On thebasis of a personal decomposition,Marx proceeded to polarize his conceptof man into two antagonistic selves,

the infinitely greedy, despotic, exploit-ing, vicious, werewolf-self of capital(Kapitalseele) on the one hand, andthe exploited, enslaved, tormented, re-


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40 ETHICS

bellious productive self of labour onthe other. 5 Even at this stage, Marxmight have patched up his philosophywith the admission of a more variedpsychology of human motivation. ButMarx turned away from the possibili-ties of philosophical psychology intomyth-the projection onto the socialscene of his own image of a divided,self-alienated man.This is Marx's myth of the warfare of labourand capital. t is through nd through moralis-tic myth, a tale of good and evil, a story ofstruggle between

constructive and destructiveforces for possession of the world. Its under-lying moral theme is the theme of originalMarxism: man's division against himself anddehumanization nder the despotism of greed,and his final emancipation f himself and hisproductive ctivity from this despotism by theseizure of the alienated world of private prop-erty. The conflicting ubjective orces of crea-tivity and the will to infinite self-aggrandize-ment are seen and shown as class forces clash-ing across the battleground f society.6

II

Tucker argues that Capital is basedupon an entirely mythological psychol-ogy of the capitalist and his relation tolabor, documented by Marx in termsof a partial selection of economic factand detail. The question is whether themythical personality attributed to the

capitalist is a figment of Marx's mindor of Tucker's own mind. Marxian so-cial science starts from the premise thatthere is a legitimate level of sociologicalgeneralization and a non-fetishistic em-ployment of group theoretical con-structs. Max Weber, while remarkingon the danger of assigning causal effi-cacy to reified concepts, neverthelessconcedes the heuristic value of certainof the Marxian categories of sociologi-cal analysis.7 In his early writings,Marx criticized the errors of concep-tual reification in the Hegelian system.8

Yet it is argued that Marx's mature the-ory is entirely dominated by a fetish-istic or, as Tucker would have it, analienated conceptualism.

The starting point of Marx's investi-gation of social phenomena is that in-dividual behavior, quite apart from theperceptions and intentions of the indi-viduals concerned, is part of a struc-tured or systematic order. It is the taskof the social scientist to provide a the-oretical interpretation of the phenome-non of social order. From this point of

view, Quesnay's Tableau tconomiqueis the great landmark of the social sci-ences.9 As Marx acknowledged, thebasic analytic intuition of the circularflow of economic life-the demonstra-tion of how each economic period be-comes the basis of the next, not onlytechnologically but as a stage in a proc-ess of social reproduction solved by theexchanges between individual acts ofproduction and consumption-is thepermanent achievement of the physio-crats.Every child knows that if a country ceased towork, I will not say for a year, but for a fewweeks, it would die. Every child knows toothat the mass of products orresponding o thedifferent needs require different and quantita-tively determined masses of the total labor ofsociety. That this necessity of distributing o-cial labor n definite proportions annot be doneaway with by the particular form of social pro-duction, but can only change the form it as-sumes, is self-evident. No natural laws can bedone away with. What can change n changinghistorical circumstances, s the form in whichthese laws operate. And the form in which thisproportional division of labor operates, n astate of society where the interconnection fsocial- abor is manifested n the private ex-change of the individual products of labor, isprecisely the exchange value of these prod-ucts.'0

The Marxian labor theory of valueseeks to express both the quantitative


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and the qualitative features of the lawsdetermining the distribution of produc-tive effort in a commodity-producingsociety. In its quantitative aspect, thelabor theory of value is essentially ageneral equilibrium theory which sum-marizes the forces integrating (a) theexchange ratios between commodities,(b) the quantity of each produced, and(c) the allocation of the labor force tothe various branches of production.Qualitatively, the labor theory of valueexpresses the exchange relationships be-

tween commodities as a social relation-ship based upon the historical phe-nomena of the existence (i) of a de-veloped social division of labor, and (ii)private production.

Marx insists that it is not possibleto express the workings of the law ofvalue apart from the specification of aset of sociological middle principles.

The procedure n Capital is to constructa model of simple commodity produc-tion, that is, an economy of independentproducers each owning his own meansof production. The labor theory ofvalue expresses the general equilibriumconditions for this special case.'2 Marxthen varies the institutional features ofhis model of simple commodity pro-duction. The ownership of the meansof production is concentrated into thehands of a class of capitalists, and laboritself becomes a commodity subject tothe laws of exchange value. Marx's con-clusion that exchange ratios in the caseof capitalist production are ultimatelydetermined according to the labor the-ory of value is, as is well known, themost controversial feature of Capital.13

But Tucker's account of Capital entire-ly ignores its nature as a piece of eco-nomic analysis. However, the economiccontent of Capital cannot be passed

over or simply attributed to Marx'scasual empiricism.

Tucker deprives himself of an under-standing of the analytic achievement ofCapital because the construct of an eco-nomic process or order is, by the stand-ards of methodological individualism,an illusion. Marx's method is to showthe operation of the laws of classicaleconomic theory to be dependent upona particular historical constellation de-finable in terms of a set of sociologicaland psychological middle principles.'4

It is in the transition from a simple-commodity-producing ociety to a cap-italist mode of production that the psy-chology of the capitalist is engendered.

Let us consider Marx's generalschema of the development of capitaland capitalist psychology.The simple circulation of commodities-sellingin order to buy-is a means of carrying out apurpose unconnected with circulation, namely,the appropriation of use-values, the satisfac-tion of wants. The circulation of money as capi-tal is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for theexpansion of value takes place only within thisconstantly renewed movement. The circulationof capital has therefore no limits. Thus theconscious representative of this movement, thepossessor of money becomes a capitalist. Hisperson, or rather his pocket, is the point fromwhich the money starts and to which it returns.The expansion of value, which is the objectivebasis or main-spring of the circulation M-C-M,becomes his subjective aim, and it is only inso far as the appropriation of ever more andmore wealth in the abstract becomes the solemotive of his operations, that he functions asa capitalist, that is, as capital personified andendowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be looked upon asthe real aim of the capitalist; neither mustthe profit on any single transaction. The rest-less never-ending process of profit-making alone

is what he aims at. This boundless greed afterriches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and themiser; but while the miser is merely a capitalistgone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The


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42 ETHICS

never-ending augmentation of exchange-value,which the miser strives after, by seeking to savehis money from circulation, is attained by themore acute capitalist, by constantly throwingit afresh into circulation.15

Under the sociological conditions ofindividual ownership of the means ofproduction economic activity is moti-vated by the desire to satisfy wants.However, where the means of produc-tion are the property of a class of capi-talists, economic activity is divided in-to the need of a laboring class to sellitself as a commodity in order to sub-sist and the imperious drive of the cap-italist class to accumulate.

An economic system of some sort is afunctional prerequisite of any society.The capitalist system is simply onehistorical variant of the economic or-der. According to Marx, capitalism isdefined by specific property relationswith respect to the ownership of the

means of production. It is the socio-economic system described by the term

capitalism which provides a struc-tural focus for behavior oriented to-ward acquisition, accumulation, andprofit-making. The so-called profit mo-tive is not primarily a psychologicaldisposition. It is a socially acquiredgoal which is given within the frame-

workof

asociological situation, namely,

commercial and industrial capitalism.We have to grasp the essential con-

nection between private property, ava-rice, and the separation of labor, capi-tal and landed property; between ex-change and competition, value and thedevaluation of men, monopoly andcompetition, etc.; the connection be-tween this whole estrangement and the

money system. 'Marx's definition of the sociological

situation (capitalism) which providesthe matrix for the orientation toward

profit concentrates attention upon theproperty relations or class positionswith respect to the means of produc-tion. It may be that Marx's definitionof capitalism is more relevant to his-torical rather than analytic features ofa capitalist system.' Weber's analysisof the prerequisites of the capitalistsystem stresses the importance of therationalization of accounting, technol-ogy, law, and the permanent enterprise.But neither Marx nor Weber consid-ered the spirit of capitalism to be a

basic feature of human nature.'8 TheProtestant ethic, an unconsciously re-fined organization for the productionof capitalistic individuals (Weber)provided the economic ethos at a par-ticular juncture of the political and so-cial history of industrial capitalism.The later stage of monopoly capitalismwhich has given rise to the phenome-non of the affluent society appears tohave abandoned the Protestant ethic infavor of a consummatory ethic.'9

In Capital Marx provided a docu-mented critique of the psychology andethics of capitalism. Marx's method isto demonstrate that the psychologicalelement which appears to be the drivingforce of capitalism, and is consequent-ly rationalized in terms of the Judaeo-

Protestant ethic, is in fact dependentupon a definite historical and sociologi-cal constellation defined by the classdivision of property relations.But in the course of historical evolution, andprecisely hrough he inevitable act that with-in the division of labour social relationshipstake on an independent existence, there ap-pears a division within he life of each individ-ual, in so far as it is personal and in so far as

it is determined y some branch of labour andthe conditions pertaining o it. (We do notmean it to be understood rom this that, forexample, the rentier, the capitalist, etc., ceaseto be persons; but their personality is condi-


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tioned and determined by quite definite classrelationships, and the division appears only intheir opposition to another class and, for them-selves, only when they go bankrupt.)20

Individual psychology is the depend-ent variable in the definition of a so-ciological situation, such as the nine-teenth-century family, or capitalism.The functional design of these lattersociological systems acts selectively up-on the motivation of the individualmembers so that their behavior, what-ever its individual significance, though

there will be considerable endemiccon-

vergence, contributes to the mainte-nance of these institutional systems assuch. Thus Marx demonstrated, forexample, that in a commodity-produc-ing society, despite independent andunco-ordinated decisions about produc-tion and sales, there results not a chaosbut an order which is expressed in theoperation of the law of value.Since these [individual capitalists] meet oneanother only as owners of commodities, andevery one seeks to sell his commodity as dearlyas possible (being apparently guided in theregulation of his production by his own arbi-trary will), the internal law enforces itselfmerely by means of their competition, by theirmutual pressure upon each other, by means ofwhich the various deviations are balanced. Onlyas an internal law, and from the point of viewof the individual agents as a blind law, doesthe law of value exert its influence here andmaintain the social equilibrium of productionin the turmoil of its accidental fluctuations.21

In any society there is an economicorder. But under capitalism, the socialequilibrium of production s maintainedthrough the working of a blind law.However, with certain changes in therelations of production and ownershipof the means of production (the socio-economic aspect of socialism) the

blind operation of the law of valuewould be replaced by the principles of

rational economic planning.22 The lat-ter is a principal ingredient in theethical formula of socialism. Thus,Marx is not saying that the functional

autonomy of social institutions is anethical imperative. Quite the contrary,the social framework of individual ac-tion should in fact be subject to theconscious control of its members. Thedifficulty for Marx was to express theethical requirement that social institu-tions not obstruct the goal of achiev-ing an authentic individual existence

without falling into the errors of naiverationalism and the contractual formu-la of psychologistic individualism.23 npractice, Marx often preferred to givegreater stress to the institutional deter-minants of individual behavior ratherthan express himself in the psycholo-gistic style of liberalism. He did so be-cause his intuition of the ethical prob-lem is deeper than that of bourgeois in-dividualists.The division between the personal and the classindividual, the accidental nature of the condi-tions of life for the individual, appears onlywith the emergence of class, which is itself aproduct of the bourgeoisie. This accidentalcharacter is only engendered and developed bycompetition and the struggle of individualsamong themselves. Thus, in imagination in-dividuals seem freer under the dominance ofthe bourgeoisie than before, they are less free,because they are more subjected to the violenceof things.24

Tucker prefers to read Capital as anallegorical tale of good and evil inwhich all the metaphors are drawn fromeconomic theory and twisted into aninsane theology.This [capital] is an economic concept in nameonly. The word comes from Adam Smith and

the political economists; the idea, from Hegeland the world of German philosophy. Marx'sCapital is just as much a citizen of this worldas, for example, Schopenhauer's Wille or Nietz-sche's Wille zur Macht, with which it has ob-


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44 ETHICS

vious affinities. But the immediate affiliationof the idea is Hegelian. The absolute Berei-cherungstrieb s a translation in economic termsof the drive to infinite self-enrichment thatHegel ascribes to spirit, which is insatiablygreedy to appropriate all things cognitively as

property of the ego and thus to assert itspower over them. The Hegelian dialectic ofaggrandizement, whereby spirit is driven to in-finitize itself in terms of knowledge, reappearsin Marx's mature thought as dialectic of theself-expansion of capital-a movement of self-infinitizing in terms of money.25

When one considers Tucker's inter-pretation of German idealist philos-

ophy since Kant, one can only feel thathe has fallen victim to his own mixtureof myth and metaphor.26 His summaryof German dealism as a self-infinitizingmovement is meant to describe the phy-logenesis of Marx's own neurotic con-ception that man is motivated by adrive for infinite self-aggrandizementin terms of wealth. German philosophy

between Kant and Hegelis read in

terms of the Faust theme. Now Marxconsidered that the romantic projec-tions of the irreducible self concept ofthe Kantian epistemology are part of aneurotic literature not, as Tucker ar-gues, because they conflict with theconceptions of biblical literature butbecause they lack an adequate sociolog-ical content.27 Tucker seems to be will-ing to recognize that there is a certainmoral advance in Feuerbach's view thatman's business is not to deify himselfbut simply to reappropriate the fullpotential of his human nature, once theproblem of God has become a deadissue. Tucker argues, further, that thisis the position of original Marxism,with the difference that Marx consid-ered Feuerbach's critical cognitive actan inadequate solution to the problemof alienation. But in the Theses onFeuerbachl, Marx states his own argu-

ment that the problem of alienation isa sociological problem which requirespractical political intervention for itstreatment.

Tucker's view is that Marx andFeuerbach were on the right track, solong as they considered the phenome-non of alienation as a self problem. Itwas Marx who mythologized the psy-chological results when he projectedthe internal conflicts of his own alien-ated self onto the social scene. Whatconstitutes the shift from originalMarxism to mature Marxism is thesociological projection of an originalintuition of psychological conflict.Moreover, Marx himself suspected thatthe phenomenon of alienation might bedue more to man's own infamy thanto the complex of class and propertyrelationships in the production process.Apparently, Marx later struggled tosuppress the psychological interpre-tation of capitalism by introducingas a principle of interpretation themaxim that the individual psychicstructure is patterned upon the struc-ture of external social relations. In thelater writings, the so-called profit mo-tive or acquisitive instinct is to be con-sidered an element in the definition ofa specific socioeconomic situation,

namely, competitive capitalist accumu-lation. But Tucker argues that Marxin fact contradicted himself on thisvery point. In the Economic and Philo-sophic Manuscripts 1844 Marx had ar-gued that the driving force, the ethic,of bourgeois political economy is greedand the war between the greedy, name-ly, competition. In his later writings,Marx's position changed to the viewthat competition, as a market phenom-enon, cannot be explained in terms ofpsychological motives. On the contrary,the existence of acquisitive behavior,


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which may be explained teleologicallyby a variety of ad hoc purposes, isstructurally dependent upon its func-tion in maintaining the market situa-

tion. The fact of the matter here is thatMarx was well aware28 f the capitalistethos which Weber later described inhis Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalism. Moreover, while they mayhave disagreed as to the short run,Marx and Weber agree that, in thelong run, the Protestant ethic is thedependent variable in the relationshipwith capitalism. But Tucker's view

isthat Marx must have been uncomfort-ably aware that the entire structure ofCapital was dependent upon the pos-tulate of infinite greed as the drivingforce of capitalist production. Tuckerthen comments upon what is in fact hisown brain-child as follows: To sug-gest that this [the postulate of infinitegreed] could be derived from the com-petitive mechanism itself was a wayof minimizing the total dependence ofthe system upon a highly questionablepostulate, and at the same time of re-inforcing the postulate. 29 But thisrather doubtful psychological postulateof Marxism was deduced, it should beremembered, from Tucker's analysisof German idealism.

III

We now consider the argument thatthe genuine philosophical element inMarxism is the moral concern with thephenomenon of self-alienation. Marx,we are to believe, located the source ofself-alienation in a self-infinitizingmovement, which he named Kapitalbut which in the Judaeo-Christian tra-dition is ordinarily called the sin ofpride. Marx's mistake was to believethat man's disease of the infinite is afact either of religion or economics.

The disintegration of the self as a re-sult of taking either God or Henry Fordas one's ego ideal is certainly in indi-vidual cases a matter for the psychia-

trist. Tucker argues that even whereconsiderable numbers of people breakdown under similar illusions this neverbecomes more than a statistical phe-nomenon of individual psychology.30The evil lies within ourselves. It isnever a social problem. To imagineotherwise, as Marx did, is to create apolitical myth.

It is frequently asserted thathistori-

cal materialism lacks an adequate psy-chological theory.3' It is argued, forexample, that in order to escape psy-chologism Marx regressed to concep-tual fetishism, using economic theoryrather than philosophy or theology tofoist a new alienated ideology upon theworld.32 Marx, however, was aware forcritical purposes of the nominalist posi-tion that it is individuals who act andnot institutions, social trends, or lawsthat act upon individuals. Indeed,this was the principle Marx employedto attack the conceptual realism whichcharacterized idealist historiography.

It is not 'history' which uses men as ameans of achieving-as if it were anindividual person-its own ends. His-

tory is nothing but the activity of menin pursuit of their ends. 33 At the sametime, Marx did not advance a psycho-logistic explanation of social phenom-ena in terms of a contractual or ration-alistic means / end model.

It would be naive, of course, to un-derestimate the difficulty raised for thesocial sciences, Marxian or not, by thequestion of the nature of the mecha-nism of interaction between the socio-logical and psychological aspects ofbehavior.34 Nevertheless, there are twonotable attempts to account for indi-


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46 ETHICS

vidual psychology in Marxian terms.35In his early writings, Erich Fromm at-tempted to explain the mechanism bywhich the individual introjects the so-

ciological determinants of behavior.The individual libidinal structure isshaped by influences in the familywhich is in turn located in the socialclass structure which shapes its eco-nomic life chances.30 In a complemen-tary way, Herbert Marcuse has em-phasized the nature of work as themedium through which the individualintrojects the performance principle,that is, the dominant reality principle.37Any form of society requires a modi-fication of the instinctual expression ofindividuals in view of the basic neces-sity of work and the social division oflabor involved in any working society.However, according to Marcuse, thespecific social institutions, laws, andproperty rights that embody the basic

reality principle introduce additionalcontrols which result in surplus re-pression in order to preserve the in-terests of a class with a property right,so to speak, in the social structure.Marxian psychology stresses the impor-tance of the individual's psychologicalhistory and the changing institutionalcontexts within which the individualdevelops. It is especially concerned withthe defense of the argument that thereare socially induced neuroses, largelydescribed by the concept of alienation.

Now, if there are individual maladieswhose source lies in the nature of theprevailing social institutions, for ex-ample, the nature of the work process,it follows that treatment of the condi-tion will involve not only individual

therapy but institutional reform. Whilethere is no logical connection betweena given methodological strategy andcertain moral and political orientations,in practice the two do influence each

other.38 Tucker, for example, rejectsthe view that there are sociologicalcauses of neurosis on the ground thatto posit sociological entities is sim-

ply to indulge in the projection of thecomponents of an alienated psyche. Thealienated individual suffers from amyth-making neurosis which induceshim to believe that there are entitiesoutside his self-system which influencehis behavior. As a result, there arisesthe completely illusory view that thecondition of alienation can be treated

bymeans of a

politicalrevolution. The

truth is, as Tucker will have it, thatalienation is a personal problem andits solution lies in an ethical conquestof the self.It is essentially a work of self-clarification andself-changing. Its tools are the power of under-standing, the urge to be free, and the willing-ness to be merely human. Its dialectic is aSocratic dialectic of Know thyself. The

revolution or real change of self that emergesin and through this movement of emancipationis, likewise, a moral revolution. The change of

circumstances with which it coincides is achange of the self's character, meaning thehabitual circumstances within the self that havebeen shaped by alienated living and stand inthe way of its freedom, the inner autocracy orcoercive system. Such a revolution within theself cannot occur or start in a violent cata-strophic episode. It is the outcome of a gradualprocess, and is this process taken as a whole.Alternatively, it is the merely theoretical pointof culmination of the whole slow growth of in-ward freedom and repossession of the produc-tive powers of the self which takes place inthe movement and by the labour of self-libera-tion.39

The passage just quoted is remark-able for the way in which Tucker in-trojects the external world by identi-

fying circumstances -why betweenquotes?-with habitual circumstanceswithin the self. On this basis, Tuck-er then advances the view that by rev-olution we may no longer mean a vio-


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lent change40-presumably, he disap-proves of shock therapy-but only a

theoretical point of culmination of thewhole slow growth of inward freedom.

Tucker's argument is that Marx'scontribution to the social sciences is tobe understood in the light of the dy-namics of his neurosis. Marx's relative-ly valuable philosophical achievementderives from his early moral intui-tion of authentic individual existence.Marx's later investigations in the socialsciences are simply a function of amyth-making neurosis engendered byhis own circumstance of self-alienation.The manner in which Tucker's thesisfails to deal with the structure41 ofMarx's philosophical and sociologicalthought is illustrated in the paradoxicalresult it produces even when expandedsomewhat. A. J. Gregor, for example,accepts Tucker's distinction betweenoriginal and mature Marxism but at-

tempts to salvage its over-all humanismby emphasizing its dependence uponFeuerbach's critique of idealism.42 Atthe same time, Gregor argues that theyear in which Marx wrote The GermanIdeology, 1845, is precisely the yearin which Marx settled with his philo-sophical conscience in an entirely em-pirical manner. 43 According to Gregor,Marx, prior to The German Ideology,at first argued that the phenomenon ofalienation is an ontological datum, alogical and causal condition of econom-ic and political alienation. But Marxfinally saw that this was simply an ar-gument in the idealist mode. Thus hereversed it and got the empirical for-mula that it is the division of laborand private property which are the

cause of alienation. But this argumentcarries us to the embarrassing conclu-sion that once private property and thesocial division of labor are abolishedthe phenomenon of alienation will dis-

appear. Gregor sees that this almostromantic normative ideal is a problemin the study of the mature Marx.

Elsewhere,44 we have argued for the

distinction between the phenomena ofexternalization and estrangement, oralienation, which are originally cov-ered by the single term alienation.Marx did not lament the necessity ofcreating socioeconomic institutions orobjectifying human behavior (externali-zation). Here Gregor's reading of theEconomic and Philosophical Manu-scripts seems to be at fault, and evento contradict his better understandingwhen discussing the relation of Marxto Feuerbach. What Marx said in rela-tion to Hegel is that estrangement isnot an epistemological problem, nor,as Feuerbach thought, a theologicalproduct. Estrangement, but not, ofcourse, externalization, is a socioeco-nomic phenomenon. Now Marx's strat-

agem of identifying the (undifferen-tiated) phenomenon of alienation witheconomic exploitation and the classstructure of capitalism has suggested adefinitional resolution of the problemwhich the political history of socialismhas yet to provide. The significance ofthe contemporary discussion of the phil-osophical structure of Marx's thoughtlies in the attempt to recover its foun-dations in the phenomenology of theWestern mind. This is not an abstractendeavor, of course, any more than theHegelian legacy upon which Marx drewin the first place. It is an essay in theclarification of the cultural presuppo-sitions of the institutions and mentalityof Western man. Certainly, there ismyth and drama in the Marxian herit-

age-not, however, the guilt of Oedi-pus, as the Freudians would have it,but the compassionate rebellion ofPrometheus.YORK UNIVERSITY


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48 ETHICS

NOTES

1. D. Bell, The Rediscovery of Alienation,Journal of Philosophy, LVI, No. 24 (November,1959), 933-52.

2. R. C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl

Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press,1961).3. Louis J. Halle, Marx's Religious Drama,

Encounter, XXV, No. 4 (October, 1965), 29-37.4. Ibid., p. 219.5. Ibid., pp. 220-21.6. Ibid., p. 222.7. M. Weber, The Methodology of the Social

Sciences (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1949), p. 103.8. P. Kahn, SociRt6 et Rtat dans les ceuvres de

jeunesse de Marx, Cahiers internationaux de so-ciologie, V (1949), 165-75; M. Rubel, Notes onMarx's Conception of Democracy, New Politics,I, No. 2 (Winter, 1962), 78-90.

9. J. Schumpeter, Economic Doctrine and Meth-od (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954), chap.ii; Marx to Engels, London, July 6, 1863, SelectedCorrespondence 1846-1895 (New York: Interna-tional Publishers, 1934).

10. Marx to Kugelmann, London, July 11, 1868,Selected Correspondence.

11. P. M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist De-velopment (New York: Monthly Review Press,1956), chaps. ii and iii; K. Marx, Capital (Chi-cago: C. H. Kerr, 1906), Vol. III, chap. li.

12. 0. Lange, Marxian Economics and ModernEconomic Theory, Review of Economic Studies,II (1934-35), 189-201.

13. R. L. Meek, Studies in the Labour Theoryof Value (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956).

14. A. Lowe, Economics and Sociology (Lon-don: Allen & Unwin, 1935), pp. 138-39; Marx,Capital, Vol. III, 947-49, 966-68.

15. Marx, Capital, I, 169-71.16. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manu-

scripts of 1844 (Moscow: Foreign LanguagesPress, 1959), p. 68.

17. R. Dahrendorf, A Sociological Critique ofMarx, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial So-ciety (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,1959), chap. iv.

18. M. Weber, General Economic History, trans.F. H. Knight (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), pp.355-56.

19. The Puritan ethos was not abandoned. Itwas merely overwhelmed by the massive power ofmodern merchandising (J. K. Galbraith, TheAffluent Society [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958],p. 200).

20. K. Marx, The German Ideology (New York:

International Publishers, 1947), Parts I and III, p.76.

21. Marx, Capital, III, 1026.22. Ibid., I, 90-91.

23. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family orCritique of Critical Critique (Moscow: ForeignLanguages Publishing House, 1956), pp. 162-63.

24. Marx, The German Ideology, p. 77.

25. Tucker, op. cit., pp. 213-14.26. On the relation of German idealist philos-ophy to Protestant theology, see P. Asveld, LaPensee religieuse du jeune Hegel: Libertg etalienation (Louvain: Publications Universitaires deLouvain, 1953); G. M. M. Cottier, L'Athefisme dujeune Marx: ses origines Higgliennes (Paris:J. Vrin, 1959).

27. Marx, The German Ideology, pp. 32, 50-51.28. Marx's version of the Protestant ethic has

largely passed unnoticed, and so we may be justi-fied in reproducing it here. Thus, from the view-point of this enlightened political economy whichhas discovered the subjective essence of wealthwithin the framework of private property, thepartisans of the monetary system and the mer-cantilist system, who consider private property asa purely objective being for man, and fetishistsand Catholics. Engels is right, therefore, in call-ing Adam Smith the Luther of political economy.Just as Luther recognized religion and faith as theessence of the real world, and for that reason tookup a position against Catholic paganism; just ashe annulled external religiosity while makingreligiosity the inner essence of man; just as he

negated the distinction between priest and laymanbecause he transferred the priest into the heart of thelayman; so wealth external to man and independ-ent of him (and thus only to be acquired and con-served from outside) is annulled. That is to say, itsexternal and mindless objectivity is annulledby the fact that private property is incorporatedin man himself, and man himself is recognized asits essence. But as a result, man himself is broughtinto the sphere of private property . . . just as,with Luther, he is brought into the sphere of reli-gion. Under the guise of recognizing man, politicaleconomy, whose principle is labour, carries to itslogical conclusion the denial of man. Man himselfis no longer in a condition of external tension withthe external substance of private property; he hashimself become the tension-ridden being of privateproperty. What was previously a phenomenon ofbeing external to oneself, a real external manifesta-tion of man, has now become the act of objectifica-tion, of alienation. This political economy seemsat first, therefore, to recognize man with his inde-pendence, his personal activity, etc. It incorporatesprivate property in the very essence of man, andit is no longer, therefore, conditioned by the local

or national characteristics of private property re-garded as existing outside itself. It manifests acosmopolitan, universal activity which is destruc-tive of every limit and every bond, and substitutes


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itself as the only policy, the only universality, theonly limit and the only bond. But in its further de-velopment it is obliged to discard this hypocrisyand to show itself in all its cynicism (Economicand Philosophical Manuscripts, in Karl Marx,

Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore[London: Watts & Co., 1963], pp. 147-48).

29. Tucker, op. cit., p. 217 n.30. Ibid., pp. 239-40.31. The Marxist theory of motivation devel-

oped within this framework [historical material-ism] has two components. The first emphasizes therole of purely external pressures on individuals:force, fraud and compulsion. The second beginswith a concept of class interests (N. Birnbaum,

Conflicting Interpretations of the Rise of Capi-talism: Marx and Weber, British Journal of So-ciology, IV [June, 19531, 130). Birnbaum's argu-ment that Weber supplies the psychological anal-ysis of the rationalization of economic life whichMarx simply attributed to the immanent laws ofcapitalist development overlooks that Marx infact derived the Protestant or bourgeois ethic fromthe literature of the classical economists, as wehave pointed out above.

32. L. D. Easton, Alienation and History inEarly Marx, Philosophy and PhenomenologicalResearch, XXII, No. 2 (December, 1961), 193-205. Marx's critique of psychologism is recognizedby one of his most hostile critics as Marx's major

contribution to social science (see K. R. Popper,The Autonomy of Sociology, The Open Society

and Its Enemies [New York: Harper & Row, 1963],Vol. II, chap. xiv).

33. K. Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology andPhilosophy, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore andM. Rubel (London: Watts & Co., 1956), p. 63.

34. So far no Marxist theoretician has yet de-tailed the crucial psychological and institutionalnexuses which show how the 'personifications' ormasks of class role are donned by the individualas self-identity (D. Bell, The End of Ideology[New York: Collier Books, 1961], p. 426). For anattempt to treat these transmission belts, seeP. A. Baran, Marxism and Psychoanalysis( Monthly Review Pamphlet Series, No. 14

[New York: Monthly Review Press, 1960), pp. 50-52.

35. More justly, one should include Sartre's at-tempts to add to Marxian anthropology the meth-od of existential psychoanalysis (Jean-Paul Sartre,

Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes [NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1963]).

36. M. Birnbach, Neo-Freudian Social Philos-ophy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,1961), pp. 77-82.

37. H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (NewYork: Random House, 1962), p. 34.

38. It has been suggested that Fromm's nomi-nalist usage (The Sane Society [New York: Holt,Rinehart & Winston, 1955], pp. 72, 78, 273) pro-vides support for his theory of radical change(J. H. Schaar, Escape from Authority [NewYork: Basic Books, 1961], pp. 166-68).

39. Tucker, op. cit., pp. 240-41.40. On Marx's use of the term revolution see

L. S. Feuer, John Stuart Mill and Marxian So-cialism, Journal of the History of Ideas, X, No.2 (April, 1949), 297-303.

41. For a statement emphasizing the unity ofMarx's thought in terms of the Hegelian frame ofreference, see R. Dunayevskaya, Marxism andFreedom (New York: Bookman Associates, 1957),Part III, and J. Hyppolite, Etudes sur Marx etHegel (Paris: Riviere, 1955), pp. 95-100.

42. A. J. Gregor, Philosophy and the YoungKarl Marx, Studies on the Left, II, No. 3 (1962),95-102; cf. L. Feuer, What Is Alienation? TheCareer of a Concept, New Politics, I, No. 3(Spring, 1962), 116-34.

43. A. J. Gregor, Erich Fromm and the YoungKarl Marx, Studies on the Left, III, No. 1 (1962),85-92. The theory of the two Marxes is sharedalso by L. Kreiger, Marx and Engels as His-torians, Journal of the History of Ideas, XIV,No. 3 (June, 1953), 381-403; G. Gurvitch, LaSociologie du jeune Marx, La Vocation actuellede la sociologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1950) pp. 568-602.44. J. O'Neill, The Concept of Estrangement inthe Early and Later Writings of Karl Marx,Journal of Philosophy and Phenomenological Re-search, XXV, No. 1 (September, 1964), 64-84.

marxism and mythology

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