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.