Take note of Marx and Engels’s deliberate use of a fetishised conception of nature in the latter passage; this conception is essential to the idea that Marx’s analysis of the production-process of capital allows the basic relationship between alienation and history to come to light. If, after The German Ideology, the human is a natural-historical being and nature is a human-historical means of life, what Marx’s analysis of the valorisation-process and real subsumption reveals is not that the capitalist division of labour and private property (The German Ideology depicts these as ‘identical expressions’<sup>103</sup>) render nature and history as ‘unnatural’ and ‘unhistorical’, such that alienation has ‘taken away’ the previously rich totality of human powers and needs, that alienation has fractured what in human beings was previously whole. Rather, the situation is more complex than this. On the one hand, the division of labour and private property which constitute, and are constituted by, real subsumption register the sense in which human powers and needs are separated off from human beings, inasmuch as these powers and needs are not possessed and actualised by individuals. In this regard:
The division of labour is the economic expression of the social character of labour within…estrangement. Or, since labour is only an expression of human activity within alienation, of the living of life as the estrangement of life, the division of labour…is therefore nothing else but the estranged, alienated positioning of human activity as a real activity of the genus or as the activity of men and women as genus-beings. 104
This passage should be retroactively read from the standpoint of Marx’s examination of real subsumption from the early 1860s onwards, since this is the only way in which the specifically capitalist division of labour can be understood as constitutive of a conception of ‘history’ (and ‘nature’) as a productive force in its own right – independent and divorced from individuals – wherein, as previously cited, ‘knowledge appears as alien, external’ to workers. Thus ‘history’ exists because the expansion of human needs is predominantly not actualised within, and thus not possessed by, the majority of human beings. However, and on the other hand, this grasp of alienation needs to be reconciled with the sense in which, albeit through alienated property relations, human powers and needs are actively developed by capital within human beings, in that these powers and needs are possessed and actualised by individuals:
<sup>103</sup> Marx and Engels, GI, 53. They state: ‘in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.’ Ibid. <sup>104</sup> Marx, OPM, 557 (EPM, 159).
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