Karl Marx

Of greater significance for Marx’s later thought is the way in which his famous Paris manuscripts of 1844 address to the ‘materialistic’ science of political economy a set of issues which Hegel and his followers had treated as questions of religious subjectivity. German idealism was concerned with problems of human selfhood, the nature of fulfilling human life, and people’s sense of meaning, self-worth, and relatedness fo their natural and social environment. They saw modern culture as both a scene of ‘alienation’ for human beings from themselves, their lives, and others, and also as holding out the promise of the conquest or over-reconciliation as a philosophical-religious one. It was Marx in the Paris manuscripts who first attempted to see it as fundamentally a matter of labouring activities they perform and the practical relationships in which they stand to one another. Mark’s concern for the plight of the working class was from the beginning a concern not merely with the satisfaction of ‘material needs’ in the usual sense, but fundamentally with the conditions under which human beings can develop their ‘essential human powers’ and attain ‘free self activity’

……………………..The social relationships depicted by political economy, however, are relationships in which the life-activity of the majority, the working class, is increasingly stunted, reduced to meaningless physical activity which, far from developing and exercising their humanity, reduces them to abstract organs of a lifeless mechanism. They do not experience the products of their labour as their expression, or indeed as theirs in any sense. For these products belong to the non-worker, the capitalist, to whom they must sell their activity for a wage which suffices only to keep them alive so that they may sustain the whole absurd cycle of their lives. Political economy, moreover, depicts human beings whose social life and relationships are at the mercy not of their collective choice but of an alien, inhuman mechanism, the marketplace, which purports to be a sphere of individual freedom, but is in fact a sphere of collective slavery to inhuman and destructive forces ~ page # 168 & 170

………………………What both Hegel and Feuerbach had in common is the perception of alienation as fundamentally a form of false consciousness consists in its negative attitude toward earthly life, the comforting assurance of religion, according to both philosophers, contain the truth, if only we know how to put the right philosophical interpretation of them. To Marx, however, alienation becomes intelligible as soon as we adopt just the reverse supposition: that the alienated consciousness tells the truth in its laments, not in its consolations. Religion, according to Marx, gives expression to a mode of life which is really empty, unfulfilled, degraded, devoid of dignity. Religious illusions have hold on us because they provide a false semblance of meaning and fulfillment for a mode of life which without this illusion would be misery is both an expression of actual misery and an attempt to flee from it into a world of imagination: it is the ‘opium of the people’. The way out of alienation is not, as Hegel and Feuerbach though, a new philosophical interpretation of life, but a new form of earthly existence, a new society in which the material conditions for fulfilling human life would no longer be lacking. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it” ~ page # 170

For Marx the ultimate tendency of history is the Promethean drive of the human species to develop its ‘essential human powers’, its powers of production. Under capitalism these powers, and complex network of human co-operation through which they are exercised, have for the first time grown far enough to put within the reach of human beings themselves the collective, rational control of the social form of their own production. This self-conscious self-determination is the true meaning of human freedom. But human beings under capitalism are alienated because capitalist social relations, by dispossessing the vast majority producers and subjecting the form of social production to the market mechanism, frustrate this collective self-determination. The historic mission of the proletariat is to actualize the capacities for human freedom which the capitalist mode of production has put within our reach, but abolishing class society. In this way, historical materialism gives the working class a full conscious understanding of its historic mission, so that unlike previous ruling classes it may fulfil this mission consciously, and thus truly enable the human species to master itself and its destiny . ~ page # 171

Excerpts: “The Philosophers” (Oxford University Press)