the 19th century (Hegel,
Feuerbach).
In umtlng
these two powerful
currents,
Marx summed up in
himself a whole century of thought,
at the same
time that he represented the dawn of a new philo-
sophic epoch.
It is man, then, who is at the foundation of
Marx's considerations;
and to be more precise: man
"alienated from himself." This "alienation"
(the
term is acquired from Hegel and Feuerbach)
is,
according to Marx, one of the pillars of actual bour-
geois society, the center, consequently,
from which
all his reflections will radiate. The man who works
is a stranger to his labor; he performs it only with
disgust; likewise, he is a stranger to the product
of his toil, since this product belongs to another.
And to this other also, to the owner, this product
represents an indifferent thing, a commodity, that is,
something which has value only because it can be
. exchanged for money. But the worker who feels his
labor and the product of his labor to be something
foreign to him, becomes also a stranger to himself.
For work, that is to say, the productive transforma-
tion of the world, is part of the very essence of man.
It man is prevented from working in a natur.al way,
that is, from living naturally,
he "alienates himself
from himself," which means that he is no longer a
man in the full sense of the word. His existence
becomes to a certain extent animal, for he works
only in obedience to constraint,
to misery.
In affirming this alienation,
in laying bare its ter-
rible consequences,
Marx arrived naturally at a sec-
ond point: What is the relation of man to his work
under natural .conditions,
non-capitalist
conditions?
It is extremely interesting to observe the attitude
assumed by Marx towards the problem of work
which has confronted the ethic of peoples for thou-
.. sands of years. Work is for Marx "vital activity,
productive life itself." This is true, of course, only
of free and conscious labor, not of the forced and
alienated labor of capitalist society.
This free labor
is for Marx the true form of human existence.
The
human factor of work consists in the fact that
through work man transforms nature, transforms it
for himself, that is, makes the world into his own
world. In the beginning, the world is composed only
of dead and indifferent things: man makes of it,
thrQugh his labor, his world, his reality. Thus nature
is found to be integrated in human life. Being the
object upon which man accomplishes his work, it be-
comes part of his being. "Nature is the inorganic
body of man," as Marx boldly put it. From dead
stone, Michelangelo fashions with his chisel an ex-
pression of his being. In the same way, by means of
all labor, nature becomes part of man, as man be-
comes part of nature.
Each product of free labor
incarnates the personality of man. And therefore,
this work is a joy, since it is the expression of life.
We all recognize it in the exceptional case of the
artist, that is, the creative transformation of nature
PARTISAN
REVIEW
is, according to Marx, the attribute of every man
who works, providing he has broken loose from the
fetters of "alienation."
Further:
since I do not produce for myself alone,
but also for others (who need my product as I need
theirs), work is also the true form of
social
activity;
it is the intermediary between one man and another.
It is through work that man comes to the realization
that he is not isolated, that he is a social being. In
each product he receives from another,
he receives
also part of the personality of the other. This idea
is expressed in a very happy terminology in the
"Remarks on James Mill": "Our productions are so
many mirrors in which our being is reflected." This
is, then, the lVlarxist conception of work: a tremend-
ous enlarging of the human personality.
The con-
cepts "to work" and "to be a man" recover their
meaning .
It is only when one has allowed himself to become
impregnated with these images of free labor and the
"natural man" that one can measure exactly to what
a level the wage-slave of bourgeois society has been
dragged down, and what a perverse reversal
of
natural
values the world of "alienated labor"
proffers us. It is, in the true sense of the word, an
inhuman
existence that the worker leads under cap-
italism.
Under what concrete form does this alienation
manifest itself in bourgeois society? Marx responds:
"Under the form of private property" : thus precise-
ly designating at the first stroke the practical arena
of the class struggle.
Private property:
here is the
form of production and consumption which deter-
mines everything.
Private property is the negation
of the human personality.
It is the cause of the
alienation.
The task which will, consequently,
be
imposed upon Marx is to undertake a rigorous
analysis of private property.
This analysis must
reveal the laws which regulate it, and must deduce
from them the destructive forces which develop
within its own being and are prepared to negate the
negation,
that is, to destroy the capitalist system.
It is known that Marx attacked this problem in a
special work,
Capital,
which has become his major
work by its content and the time he devoted to it.
But the meaning of
Capital
within the context of
Marx's work will not be understood unless one is
aware of the road which led him to pose the problem,
the road which I have briefly sketched above.
Evidently,
Marx did not wait until the writing of
Capital
in order to discover and indicate the road
of liberation.
Already in the
Holy Family,
almost
contemporary with the
Manuscripts,
he expresses it
clearly: "It is the proletariat
who will execute the
death-sentence which private property has suspend-
ed over itself in creating the proletariat."
The only road is, then, the
proletarian revolution.
Restored to its J?lace within the context of Marxist
thought, this concept acquires a larger meaning that
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