The Encounter with Feuerbach: Anthropology and Alienation

When Marx turned in the 1844 Manuscripts from political philosophy to his first critique of economic life, the influence of Feuerbach was readily appar­ent. Feuerbach’s account of man’s self-objectification in the fantasy of God provided new insight for an anthropological critique of the relation between the worker and his product in the form of capital. Hegel had said that self­fulfilment begins through objectification and simultaneous appropriation: ‘In his property a person exists for the first time as reason'd⁶⁰ Marx replied that the activity of production in bourgeois society was the living practice of human alienation. The propertyless worker objectified his labour, but the other - the capitalist - did the appropriating: ‘... if the product of labour is alienation, pro­duction itself must be active alienation - the alienation of activity and the activity of alienation’.161 The propertyless worker does not appropriate nature for himself. Instead, he creates capital as an alien object. Hegel’s account of alienation as self-determination was therefore a mockery of the worker’s dehu­manisation.

. the more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself.

Hegel had said that community is founded upon property. Marx responded that labour’s creation of capital, as an alien object, necessarily means the estrangement of man from man. The master-slave relationship was therefore inherent in the process of capitalist production, with no prospect of mutual recognition:

... the relation of man to himself is first realized, objectified, through his relation to other men. If therefore he is related to the product of his labor, his objectified labor, as to an alien, hostile, powerful and independent object, he is related in such a way that another alien, hostile, powerful and independent man is the lord of this object. If he is related to his own activity as to unfree activity, then he is related to it as activity in the service, and under the domination, coercion and yoke, of another man.^{[248] [249] [250] [251] [252] [253]}

In Hegel's account of the master and slave, consciousness risks biological life to establish its own superiority. But in the real activity of production, the worker is even less than the master's slave. He is effectively an animal, labour­ing not to develop his body and mind but merely to survive and satisfy the most elementary biological needs of ‘eating, drinking and procreating'.

Alienated from the object of his labour, from other human beings, from his essential human capacity for ‘free, conscious activity'/*’⁵ and from nature itself, which has been carved into private properties, the worker must negate his own negation. Hegel said: ‘A slave can have no duties; only a free man has them';i*6 ‘It is in the nature of the case that a slave has an absolute right to free himself...'.^κ,7 ‘Communism', Marx concluded in the Manuscripts, ‘is the phase of negation of the negation and is, consequently, for the next stage of historical development, a real and necessary factor in the emancipation and rehabilitation of man'.i*⁸ Borrowing Kant's terminology, Marx wrote that communism must fulfil the ‘categorical imperative' to replace all relations ‘in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being'.^{[254] [255] [256] [257]}

Communism as a fully developed naturalism is humanism and as a fUlly- developed humanism is naturalism. It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution?⁷⁰

The problem at this point was that Marx had no clear idea of exactly what com­munism must entail.

The immediate, natural and necessary relation of human being to human being is. the relation of man to woman. In this natural species rela­tionship man's relation to nature is directly his relation to man, and his relation to man is directly his relation to nature, to his own natural func­tion. Thus, in this relation is sensuously revealed, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which human nature has become nature for man and to which nature has become human nature for him. From this relation­ship man's whole level of development can be assessed. It also shows how far man's needs have become human needs, and consequently how far the other person, as a person, has become one of his needs, and to what extent he is in his individual existence at the same time a social being.^[258]

The man-woman relation provided a model for mutual recognition in the bonds of shared consciousness, but what of the activity of production? How would the anthropological concept of universality relate to appropriation of the products of labour? At this point Marx provided no clear answer beyond the common socialist aim of collective control of the social means of production.

In the Manuscripts he warned against replacing the abstract ideal of the Hegelian state with the even more repugnant one-sidedness of a ‘crude' and ‘unreflective' communism that would regard immediate physical possession as ‘the unique goal of life and existence'. Utopian communism, detached from the ideals of philosophy, would be the ultimate dystopia: it would ‘destroy everything which is incapable of being possessed by everyone as private prop­erty', eliminate differences of talent and achievement by force, and embrace ‘envy and levelling' as its constitutive principle. Crude communism would reduce everyone to a means in service of the community as universal capitalist. Marx summarised this way:

How little this abolition of private property represents a genuine appro­priation is shown by the abstract negation of the whole world of culture and civilization, and the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless [i.e. uncultured] individual who has not only not surpassed private property but has not yet even attained to it. The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the com­munal capital, by the community as universal capitalist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed universality; labor as a condition in which everyone is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.

Unreflective communism was the illusion of the unenlightened. What Marx expected from communism was the opposite: universal enlightenment in eco­nomic circumstances that would make the ideals of philosophy real. The stand­point of Marx's humanism, as he remarked in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), was ‘human society, or socialised humanity',^{[259] [260] [261] [262] [263] [264] not the mere socialisation of things. A community that regarded itself exclusively in economic terms would merely universalise the tyranny of things at the expense of Hegel's ideal of sub­jective and objective freedom.}