Allen Wood and “Alienated Labour”

Introduction

In his book, simply titled Karl Marx, Allen Wood discusses various aspects of Marx’ philosophy, including the so-called Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Among these is the document known as Alienated Labour. (1) This text deals with the early Marx’ view of alienation and labor, and how he perceived the relation between both and the social prerequisites for the existence of both, before he developed historical materialism together with Friedrich Engels. Because there is not yet any systematic historical embedding of the concepts Marx uses in this text, but the concepts are largely the same as he would use in his later works, the interpretation of this manuscript has led to much confusion. This goes in particular for the precise meaning of the word “alienation”. This plays a key role in the manuscript, but because the latter is unfinished and also because Marx still works from a Hegelian perspective which he assumes the reader is knowledgeable about, the meaning of this term remains unclear. Now Wood has an interesting view of this, in that he connects the word “alienation” as Marx uses it in this manuscript with his view of Marx’ concept of human essence. Shortly put, Wood states that for the young Marx, the essence of being human consists in humans positing themselves as ‘species-being’, and so that alienation is the result when, for whatever reason, humans are not capable of this.

This essay discusses to what extent this interpretation of alienation on the part of Wood can find support in the text, and what might be necessary changes to Wood’s view to get alienation right. For this purpose, I will first analyze more in-depth what Wood’s reasoning is, then I shall put the manuscript itself in context so Marx’ meaning may become clear. The conclusion assesses whether Wood’s conception is tenable or not.

Wood on human essence and alienation

Wood starts by noting that “alienation” seems to imply a separation, the disconnection of two things that should be connected. (2) With Marx, considering the subject of the text, this is mostly relevant in the context of modern industrialized (or industrializing) society and human labor in this society. Alienated labor is constantly mentioned, and the products of alienated labor are also considered alienated. Finally, the surroundings in which the laborer labors are to be considered such, as to create this alienation. What does all this mean? What has been separated that should be combined?

Wood answers that alienation in this sense fundamentally means loss of meaning. The economic system is not rigorously discussed in Marx’ text, but it is clear in his view that it sets man against man as individual laborer against the other individual laborers, and so causes a loss of natural connection with his fellow humans for each, resulting in society itself losing meaning for him. In the same manner, the fact that the laborer does not own the products of his labor causes these products to lose meaning for him: he doesn’t care what happens to them, as long as he gets his wage. In both cases alienation occurs. Marx concludes from this that there must be something to this kind of labor itself that is alienated. Labor qua labor is alienated.

What is alienated about this, and how is this possible? These are the questions Marx seeks to answer in his manuscript, and which Wood interprets. Wood effectively does this by considering what, for Marx, would count as non-alienated labor, and to compare this with the reality that Marx perceives. This leads to Wood’s own relevant contribution to the discussion: non-alienated labor is for Marx labor that is in accordance with the essence of man, which in fact allows this essence to be manifest in the products of his labor. The essence of man, Wood continues, is with Marx his concept of the “species-being”, i.e. man understood as part of the human species as such and who relates to the collective humanity as part of a whole. (3) What is of fundamental importance here is that when man labors, he must not only consider the effects of his labor on himself in his choices, but also the effects on all other people and on nature as a whole, because he is inevitably part of this whole. Only this kind of labor that is in accordance with nature and species is in accordance with the human essence, and only a conscience that realizes this is a non-alienated conscience. In this way Alienated Labour is understood by Wood as a form of labor that is not in accordance with Marx’ conception of the essence of man.

Alienated Labour and its context

Wood supports his claim with the famous Marxist thesis: “the calling, vocation and task of human beings is to develop themselves and all their capacities in a manifold way”. (4) He does not seem to take notice of the fact that this quote is derived from a work written a year later, and never intended for publication. But this need not be a problem, since historical materialism itself is only really developed by Marx after the publication of The German Ideology. The importance of this for our purposes is only that Marx replaces in his later works, such as Das Kapital, the concept of alienation as the primary description of capitalist man to his society with the concept of “commodity fetishism”, and “fetishism” in general. That is to say, the way in which people under capitalist relations are inclined to conceive the production of commodities as the real and natural form of society, instead of realizing that society itself is the result of social relations of production which, in the form of commodity production, escapes the grasp of the individual citizen’s control. (5) It can therefore not be claimed against Wood that he introduces terminology ex post facto into earlier works by Marx, but on the other hand it is difficult to maintain that a Marxist conception of human essence is a better basis for the interpretation of “alienation” with Marx than, say, a Hegelian one, if Marx himself apparently does not consider the human essence relevant for later discussions of this problem.

It is of course possible that Marx changed his mind on this during his intellectual career, but there is no obvious evidence for this, and Wood offers none. Sir Karl Popper, for example, in fact accused Marx of basing a “psychological” view of society too much on Hegel, and considered the concept of “species-being” in this context as a totalitarian one. (6)

Nevertheless, the theory of “commodity fetishism” does fit the general idea of human essence that Wood points out, in the sense that the real nature of capitalism as a social relation rests on the idea that all modes of production are social relations. This already more or less implies that for Marx labor is always a collective undertaking, an activity of the human species, and that the capitalist conception of individuality as ‘every man for himself’ is necessarily an illusion.

These considerations lead to the conclusion that Wood is correct in his analysis of the Marxist concept of human essence, man as homo faber. This leaves the issue of “alienation” itself and its relation to this humanity remaining. For solving this riddle, we will need to consider the manuscript in more detail. We will then note that Marx’ first use of the word “alienation” in the context of the laborer and his product. (7) Subsequently, he describes this labor itself as alienating objectification, the way in which political economy hides this nature, and so on. But the essential phrase is in fact one that directly precedes the first mentioning of “alienation”, one that one might easily overlook: “Labour does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity (…)”. (8) Later, he repeats the point of this remark: “All these consequences [that is, of alienated labor] follow from the fact that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object.” (9)

This is crucial for understanding the concept of “alienation” in this Marxist manuscript, not only because he provides here the fons et origo of “alienation”, but he also directly connects it with that great subject he would later explore in such an extensive manner, capitalism. How does all of this relate to the Woodian concept of human essence, which we have just approved? Marx himself gives the answer in paragraph XXIV: “We have now to infer a third characteristic of alienated labour from the two we have considered [i.e. first the alienation of the laborer from his product, secondly the laborer’s alienation from himself that results from this]. Man is a species-being not only in the sense that he makes the community (…) his object both theoretically and practically, but also (…) in the sense that he treats himself as the present, living species. [This is indeed what Wood said.] (…) Since alienated labour (…) alienates nature from man and alienates man from himself (…) so it alienates him from the species. It makes species-life into a means of individual life.” (10)

This means, in simple terms, that the origin of all mentioned aspects of alienation, even insofar as this is conceived as a non-fulfilment of human essence, is the commodification of the social relations of production: the way in which labor is constituted as individual production of commodities for others. Only under these circumstances appear the phenomena of man laboring separated from others, loses the result of his labor when it is done, and does not have any control over later uses of that product, which then appears to gain a life of its own as an embodiment of his alienated labor. In other words, the core of alienation in Alienated Labour is here already capitalism, the name of the social relations described above.

We can therefore conclude that Allen Wood’s mistake is to conceive of all forms of alienation as the non-fulfilment of human essence; as reasoned above, this non-fulfilment is but one of the many aspects of alienation, and alienation as such is the product of the dominant social relations, capitalism.

Conclusion

We can recapitulate our argument about Wood’s interpretation and our own on the basis of the above reasoning. Wood has correctly described what the concept of human essence means to the early Marx, and what is necessary for man to be freed of alienation entirely in this aspect. (11) But he erred in considering this non-fulfilment of human essence as the entire nature of alienation. Even in this early text, the non-fulfilment is but one of multiple aspects of alienation considered by Marx, and all of these aspects can be traced back to capitalist relations of production. It is this specific ‘background’ which alienates laboring man in manifold ways, and the non-fulfilment of his human essence as “species-being” is just one dialectical moment in this, put in the Hegelian sense. Wood does not err in assuming the contents of later texts as known by Marx here, but in considering the later texts to much as complementary to the earlier ones in the philosophical terminology. He does see, but not realize sufficiently, that the leitmotif in Marx’ work here and elsewhere is the effects and analysis of capitalism, and this in turn in the context of society’s effect on man. Wood can therefore be said to make the error, common to philosophers, of considering Marx’ philosophy as analytically prior to his political-economic thought (to put it simply), which appears untenable. Marx’ later replacing of alienation as the core “psychological” description of capitalist man’s experience in life with “commodity fetishism” is no more than this: not a serious change of Marx’ view of human essence, as it should be in the Woodian interpretation of Marx, but just a more accurate and concrete term of these “psychological” effects.

(1) Allen Wood, Karl Marx (New York, NY 2004), passim.
(2) Ibid., p. 3.
(3) Ibid., p. 18.
(4) Karl Marx, The German Ideology (Moscow 1932)
(5) See for example Eugene Kamenka, The Portable Karl Marx (New York, NY 1983), p. 444-447.
(6) Sir Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. II (London 1945), p. 98-99. Popper seems to consider Marx’ use of these terms as methodologically individualist, though, in contrast with Hegel.
(7) Tom Bottomore (ed.), “Alienated Labour” in: Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York, NY 1963), p. 122.
(8) Ibid., p. 121.
(9) Ibid., p. 122.
(10) Ibid., p. 126-127.
(11) Walicki has given a good description (in an otherwise silly book) that Marx’ conception of freedom consists of ‘unleashing’ these creative powers under man’s own domination and for man’s own goals, and that for this reason Marx can be said to be more interested in freedom than in equality or justice, in contrast to the popular view.
See: Andrzej Walicki, Marx and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom (Stanford, CA 1995), p. 20-90.

The Dialectics of Consumption

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.”
– Karl Marx, Das Kapital

Introduction

The Dialektik der Aufklärung by Adorno & Horkheimer is, for the greater part, a powerful critique of bourgeois culture. It is written in a language of aesthetic indignation, an lashing-out against spoilers and manipulators, a reaction of the kind one might expect if one were to throw paintbombs into a professor’s library. And Adorno & Horkheimer’s criticism of modern society is indeed one that mainly laments the loss of hochbürgerlich culture and the ideals of Bildung. For what happened? A society of the culture industry has come into being, a society in which cultural goods have become mass-produced, standardized commodities, sold at competitive prices to any and all buyers. With the development of modern, Enlightened society knowledge has at the same time become more than ever a means to control and engineer rather than the possibility of liberation; and this knowledge has put itself at the service of consumer society, in the shape of technology. Eventually, so reasons the chapter on the culture industry of the Dialektik, a system emerges of competitive individualism and loss of meaning, a system in which Enlightenment’s destruction of the yoke of religion and tradition has robbed man of his true individual character, by controlling and pacifying where it should create the opportunity for real human advancement.(1)

This view of modern society, whose reproduction as such is directly dependent on the production and sale of commodities at an immense scale and for which every human being is equal as individual but nonexistent as part of a community, finds an immediate parallel in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their critique of the capitalist mode of production as the treason of human ingenuity in the field of technology and of production of all goods imaginable against that very humanity, which is sacrificed to it, is better known than that of Adorno & Horkheimer. But it is also older and aimed against a society that, on the surface, is much less like ours than the society Adorno & Horkheimer agitate against. For this reason, it is worthwhile to see to what degree the Marxist critique of capitalist production can be a complement to the aesthetic-philosophical critique of the Dialektik. Where necessary, we will contrast the Marxist critique with that of Adorno & Horkheimer and consider which pair has understood the nature of modern society better.

The subjective experience of modern consumer society

What is consumer society? For Adorno & Horkheimer, consumer society is the face of Enlightenment. Their concept of Enlightenment is, in the chapters on the culture industry, very interchangeable with that of capitalism, although they prefer the use of the former; probably because their criticism is mostly an attack on liberal ideology and its manifestations in modern society rather than the political-economic fundaments of that society. (2) Precisely because Marx and Engels focused mostly on the latter, an analysis of the Marxist view by way of comparison to Adorno & Horkheimer can be fruitful.

In the chapter on the culture industry, Adorno & Horkheimer begin by posing the culture industry as an industry that makes all men identical. (3) This forms the theme of the entire chapter, from the dissection of Hollywood movies to the stricture against jazz and genre novels: consumer society is a society in which the culture industry has canalized the diversity of man into a monotone equality, which serves to render possible the uninterrupted sale of consumer goods. Technology is the rationality of this control, but this is explicitly not because of anything inherent in technology as such, but because of the role technology plays in the larger constellation of social relations. (4) Adorno & Horkheimer give many examples of their subjective experiences of these effects of the culture industry and the role of technological instrumental rationality in it. Application of increasingly advanced technology in movies leads to the experience of the real world as an extension of the world of the Hollywood movie; the beatings Donald Duck receives in cartoons serve to reconcile citizens with the beatings they receive themselves; the quantitative density technology grants to the ‘false’ experiences of consumption leads to forgetting the possibility of a different world, etc.

Most people will have known moments of such subjective experience of the products of technological applications as blunting and numbing (such as commercials). At the same time capitalism cannot do without the sale of commodities to consumers, and this leads to the liberal illusion of the market as a basically reactive social relation: the market only follows demand. The implication of this phrasing is of course that any criticism of the functioning of this market can only be possible in the manner of altering an individual’s demand within it: if you do not like it, do not buy it, or the phenomenon of a boycott. Marx and Engels have, however, opened the door for a fundamental critique of the market as such with their examination of this political economy, and also destroyed the notion of the market being a spontaneous order deriving from the interaction of individuals. In so doing, they pave the way for an objective evaluation of the causes of subjective these negative experiences (which are different for everyone; some would consider jazz and modern music a liberation from ‘bourgeois’ classical music!). For how does the market work from the standpoint of consumption?

Consumer society objectively assessed

Das Kapital gives a technical but clear analysis of the foundations of consumer society. The capitalist mode of production is characterized by free labor, that is to say that each worker does not possess anything but his labor power to sell, and that the market for this labor power is free and competitive, with little or no restriction on the mobility of labor (in contrast, for example, to feudal societies where serfs are enjoined from leaving the lands of their lord and so on). The capitalist possesses capital in the form of money, and with it buys labor power and means of production, and with these produces commodities. During this process of production, the value of labor power is remunerated to the laborer in the form of wages, but the difference between the value of the products and the value of the labor power goes to the capitalist in the form of surplus value. However, the capital invested plus surplus value only exists yet in the form of commodities. Only if these are sold, that is that capital again takes the form of money, (hopefully) enhanced with the surplus value which then (in a complex manner which I cannot fully go into here) takes the form of profit, can capital accumulate. The essential point here is valorization, i.e. the transformation from commodity capital to money capital, but obviously more money capital than in the initial phase. Without the valorization, the invested capital is lost. Because of this, everything in capitalist society is aimed at making the sale of goods as easy and frequent as possible. Standardization, commercials, warehouses, all of the surface appearances of modern capitalism are immediate consequences of this necessity. This is consumption seen from the standpoint of capital. (5)

But to fully understand the latent potential of Adorno & Horkheimer’s culture critiques it is necessary to view consumption from the standpoint of the consumer. Adorno & Horkheimer strongly stress, as we have seen, certain subjective negative experiences of consumers, and on the falsehood of the positive experiences of the same. Although, as cited, they also see the connection to the concrete production process of these consumer goods, this is not systematically elaborated, giving their critique an excessively aesthetic nature. Because the subjective experiences of consumer society are different for everyone, even allowing for cultural determination of taste and preferences, the critical character of Adorno & Horkheimer’s work loses much of its power and impact.

Consumption, Culture and Capitalism

Because of this, we must first look at what consumption is as such for the consumer. It is important to separate analytically two aspects of the procedure of sale and consumption. The one is the concept of exchange value, i.e. the relative value of a product expressed in other products. This takes the form of price, and is perhaps the most studied aspect of the capitalist economy. The other is the experience of the buyer of his own product, in all aspects of utility, pleasure, etc. This is use value. In this much less generally studied fact lies the key to a strong foundation of a culture critique. I think we can identify two important facets of use value which play an important role in the work of Adorno & Horkheimer: the cultural meaning of a commodity, and the physical and technical properties of a commodity. Both are obviously an inseparable part of the understanding of the commodity as such.

Adorno & Horkheimer seem to consider the first aspect as having analytical priority. The analysis of the culture industry is often phrased in terms like: “the more strongly the culture industry entrenches itself, the more it can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers” (6), “it is (…) the standardized mode of production of the culture industry which makes the individual illusory in its products” (7) and “the landscape becomes a mere background for signboards and symbols“. (8) This is probably a direct result of the essentially idealist philosophical method which underlies the chapter on the culture industry. Enlightenment, not capitalism as such but her ideology, is presented as navigating dialectically between the liberation from old myths and the evil genius of modern myths. Within the culture critique, they conceive in the same way of dominating power in modern society as taking the form of the ideological pretension of instrumental reason which gives a justification to consumer society, and not primarily as residing in the process of production of consumer goods as such. This is also why they are both forced into an aesthetic hochbürgerlich attack on massiveness and cheapness, which could as well be interpreted in a reactionary manner (although I do not think it intended in that way) as it can be seen as a progressive critique. (9)

Most modern Marxist analysis of the use value side of consumption places analytical priority in the sphere of production, parallel to how it also gives priority to concrete production as causal over its ideological formulations, such as Enlightenment. Haug for example calls the latter in an effective phrase “the aesthetic illusion”. The capitalist must, to be able to sell his product, make his good appear desirable. (10) But at once the way in which they do this is limited by the physical properties of the product itself: one cannot use a razor for a vacation and one cannot drive in a radio. The sphere of production is also characterized by competition, which enforces upon it certain concrete necessities which affect the aesthetic illusion: think of the need to make production cheaper to be able to lower prices, and so stay competitive. According to Haug this leads to a need to change the aesthetic illusion surrounding the product, because cheaper production lowers the quality. Suddenly simplicity and frugality become a virtue, so fast food trumps delicatessen as the most important aesthetic of modern capitalism. (11) Ben Fine, who gives an excellent modern Marxist analysis of consumption in his The World of Consumption, has also emphasized the importance of what is called “planned obsolescence”, which is the need for capitalists to make their products wear out faster, to force the consumer to keep re-buying the product. (12) Here also we find concrete economic causes for numbing, wasting and deterioration. The complaint that “things just aren’t made as they used to be any more” has by now become a comical cliché. The connection between this statement and the subjective experience of indistinguishability and sameness within the culture industry is nothing but the possibility capitalists perceive to posit a ‘universal good’ which all their products, whatever their concrete properties, possess. This good must be something that appeals directly to instincts present in all people: sexuality, wanderlust, need for novelty and the desire for relaxation and excitement. All of these real experienced emotions, which until the advent of the culture industry had a power for escape and change, and which were liberated from religious repression by the Enlightenment, are so taken from humanity as authentic feelings and sold back to them in the shape of consumer goods. (13) That is the intuition which gave Adorno & Horkheimer the motive for their critique, but it cannot be grasped without an understanding of capitalist production.

Conclusion

l’Art pour l’art, which is still praised by Adorno & Horkheimer, is in this way not resurrected as an aesthetic critique of bourgeois functionalism, but as an endless production of different commodities with the same cultural meanings. Adorno & Horkheimer recognize this in advertising (14), but in fact there are many different channels through which these cultural meanings are reproduced, such as media, the state and the family. (15) The conclusion is in any case that the subjective experience of the culture industry as something which makes life more hollow, flat and false can and must be founded on the imperatives of capitalist production. If one then aims at destroying the real cause of the negative subjective experiences, capitalism itself, it becomes possible to avoid the trap of romantic reactionary critique of culture in the manner of High Church seeking for authenticity and rejection of modernity. And then the way is clear for a critique of culture which is radical and yet based on the daily experience of modern man.

(1) “Pseudoindividuality is a precondition for apprehending and detoxifying tragedy: only because individuals are none but the mere intersections of universal tendencies is it possible to reabsorb them smoothly into the universal. Mass culture thereby reveals the fictitious quality which has characterized the individual throughout the bourgeois era(…)” Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA 2002), p. 125.
(2) Similarly, what they call the ‘culture industry’ is now better known as ‘consumer society’. I will use both terms, but address the problematic of equating them later.
(3) “Culture industry today is infecting everything with sameness.” Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (op. cit.), p. 94.
(4) “Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination. It is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself. (…) These adverse effects, however, should not be attributed to the internal laws of technology itself but to its function within the economy today.” Ibid., p. 95.
(5) See Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Hamburg 1867), Vols. I and III, cont.
(6) Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (op. cit.), p. 115.
(7) Ibid., p. 125.
(8) Ibid., p. 132.
(9) The communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, for example, presents the culture industry as a positive affair overall; because of it, the worker can for the first time in history afford to take vacations, decorate his home to his wishes, own many different media, etc. Nevertheless, any Marxist will acknowledge the way in which this does not yet lead to truly free expression of human capacities. See for instance Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 1983).
(10) See Wolfgang Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (Minneapolis, MN 1986).
(11) Ibid., p. 24.
(12) Ben Fine, The World of Consumption (2nd ed.) (London 2002), p. 91-92.
(13) There is here an interesting resemblance to the theories of the late Marcuse. Marcuse also describes Enlightenment rationality as a liberation of sublimated urges, but sees this liberation as something which removes the capacity of those urges to lead to human malcontent. This fits his concept of ‘repressive tolerance’. I cannot go into this in an expansive manner here, but it is enough to remark that it is unfoundedly pessimistic and ahistorical besides to pretend that there are now fewer possibilities for being unhappy than there used to be. On the contrary, people are more critical about their way of life now, and take it less for granted, than in any preceding period. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA 1964).
(14) Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (op. cit.), p. 132.
(15) Fine, The World of Consumption (op. cit.), p. 90.