Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 165 页

4.1.3 Alienation

The alienation [Entäußerung] and estrangement [Entfremdung]⁹⁵ of human life is of course a defining feature of Marx’s entire oeuvre. In Marx’s earlier writings, it is the 1844 Manuscripts, not The German Ideology, that makes up the primary locus of Marx’s analysis of the alienation of human labour and thus the explicit locus of Marx’s appropriation of the philosophical status of alienation in Hegel. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx transforms the self-externalisation and objectification of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit into an existential and moral critique of the law of political economy, the law of ‘national economy’ [Nationalökonomie], a law that dictates – above all – that the means of production, and thus the means of life, are private property. This is the context of Marx’s renowned, fourfold specification of alienation as: (1) the alienation of the worker from the product of his labour (‘the object which labour produces – its product – stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer’⁹⁶); (2) the alienation of the labour-process itself, which is to say the ‘self-activity of the worker’ (‘production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation’⁹⁷); (3) after Feuerbach, the alienation of the worker as a human being and thus as a genus-being [Gattungswesen] (‘estranged labour…turns humanity’s genus-being…into a being alien to it, into a means of individual existence’⁹⁸); and (4) the alienation of one worker from another, one individual human being from another (‘an immediate consequence of men and women’s estrangement from the product of their labour, their life activity, their genericbeing, is the estrangement of men and women from other men and women’⁹⁹).

Alienation does not feature in the first chapter of this thesis, and for a very basic reason: unlike the concepts of labour, need and productive force, and a certain conception of class and the division of labour, alienation is not something that Marx presents in transhistorical terms. In short, alienation and estrangement exist for Marx because they are capitalist alienation and capitalist estrangement. This is apparent in the 1844 Manuscripts (which is essentially Marx’s ‘Hegelianisation’ of Engels’s 1843 Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy), wherein the analysis of alienation is explicitly presented from the standpoint of capitalist private property, which is to say the standpoint of the ‘economic fact of the present.’¹⁰⁰ For our purposes, we must consider the alienation generated by the production-process of capital, or more precisely the alienation created by the subsumption of the labour-process under the valorisation-process. This alienation is vital, because like the automation with which it is intertwined, it constitutes an essential standpoint of the intelligibility of history. In other words, the notion, as previously proposed, that the form of appearance of the production of relative surplus-value (automation) makes possible the idea that ‘history’ is something which, in itself and as such, is in motion, moves on and expands, must be supplemented by the idea that alienation, as the manifestation of the fact that surplus-value is produced by and with private property, constitutes an additional standpoint without which ‘history’ cannot be thought. This is the notion that ‘history’ not only stands outside of and opposed to human beings – that it is indifferent to them – but also, and as a consequence, that history is a force that independently determines and governs them. To express this notion through Marx’s words, consider this description of the valorisation-process in the Grundrisse:

⁹⁵ Marx’s use of the terms Entäußerung and Entfremdung reflects Hegel’s complex philosophical response to the English word ‘alienation’. Strictly speaking, Entäußerung means ‘externalisation’, and hence does not capture the entire scope of ‘alienation’ in English [from the Latin alius (other, another) and alienus (alien, foreign, and belonging to someone else)]. Hence despite the fact that Entäußerung is commonly translated as ‘alienation’, one should keep in mind that this translation relies on the ‘alien’ [fremd] within Entfremdung for its intelligibility.

⁹⁶ Marx, OPM, 511 (EPM, 108).

⁹⁷ Marx, EPM, 110.

⁹⁸ Marx, OPM, 517 (EPM, 114).

⁹⁹ Marx, EPM, 114.

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