Marx's Theory of Alienation - Philosophic Significance

Philosophic Significance

Influences — Hegel and Feuerbach

For Hegel, the unhappy consciousness is divided against itself, separated from its “essence”, which it has placed in a “beyond”. Marx used essentially the same notion to portray the situation of modern individuals — especially modern wage labourers — who are deprived of a fulfilling mode of life because their life-activity, as socially productive agents, is devoid of any sense of communal action or satisfaction, and gives them no ownership over their own lives or their products. In modern society, individuals are alienated, in so far as their common human essence, the actual co-operative activity which naturally unites them, is power-less in their lives, which are subject to an inhuman power — created by them, but separating and dominating them instead of being subject to their united will. This is the power of the market, which is “free” only in the sense that it is beyond the control of its human creators, enslaving them by separating them from one another, from their activity, and from its products. The German verbs entäussern and entfremden are reflexive, and, in both Hegel and Marx, alienation is always fundamentally self-alienation. Fundamentally, to be alienated is to be separated from one’s own essence, or nature; it is to be forced to lead a life in which that nature has no opportunity to be fulfilled or actualized. In this way, the experience of ‘alienation’ involves a sense of a lack of self-worth, and an absence of meaning in one’s life.

— Alienation: Faute de Mieux, Entäusserung, Entfremdung, Entäussern, Entfremden, Self, the Idea of a Critical Theory

Entfremdung (alienation) is a foundational proposition in Marxist theory about Man’s progress towards self-actualisation. Earlier in the history of philosophy, in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), G.F.W. Hegel described a succession of historic stages in the human Geist (Spirit), by which the human spirit progresses from ignorance towards perfect self-understanding. In the response of Karl Marx to Hegel, those poles of idealism (spiritual ignorance and self-understanding) are replaced with categories of materialism, wherein, for Man, spiritual ignorance becomes “alienation” and self-understanding becomes the “realisation of his species-being”; thus, the transcendent end of history results in the human triumph over alienation, and the establishment of an objectively better society.

Nonetheless, such a teleological (goal-oriented) reading of Karl Marx, supported by Alexandre Kojève before the Second World War (1939–45), was criticized by Louis Althusser in his discussion of “random materialism” (matérialisme aléatoire), in which he said that such a teleological reading rendered the proletariat as the subject of history; therefore, such an interpretation was tainted with Hegelian idealism, with the “philosophy of the subject”, that had been in force for five centuries, which he criticized as the “bourgeois ideology of philosophy”. (cf. History and Class Consciousness, by Georg Lukács)

Entfremdung and the Theory of History

In Part I: “Feuerbach — Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook” of The German Ideology (1846), Karl Marx said: “things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but also, merely to safeguard their very existence”. Hence, although people psychologically require the activities that lead to their self-actualisation as persons, it remains a consideration of secondary historical relevance, because the capitalist mode of production eventually will exploit and impoverish the proletariat until compelling them to social revolution for survival. Yet social alienation remains a concern, especially among the philosophers of Marxist Humanism; in the book The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism (1992), Raya Dunayevskaya discussed the existence of the desire for self-activity and self-actualisation among wage-labour workers struggling to achieve the elementary goals of life in a capitalist economy. (See: Marx’s Theory of History and Dialectical materialism)

Social class

In Chapter 4 of The Holy Family (1845), Karl Marx said that capitalists and proletarians are equally alienated, but that each social class experiences alienation in a different form:

The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power, and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and in the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement, the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. Within this antithesis, the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, and the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it.