MARTIN JAY
unfortunalely quile unulopian idea lhal guides Marx's lheories-lhe
dislinclion belween labor and work would have complelely disap–
peared; all work would have become labor because alllhings would
be underslood, nOl in lheir wordly, objeclive qualilY, bUl as results of
living labor power and funclions of the life process.
357
There is, of course, something to be said for the contention that
Marx glorified labor in a way that reduced other human activities to
aspects of the labor process. But what must be understood is that for
Marx labor was far more than the reproduction of the conditions
necessary for biological survival. It entailed precisely what Miss Arendt
designated as work: the creation of a world of objects through man's
interaction with nature. It is thus incorrect to state that Marx's goal
was the reduction of work to labor when what he wanted was the
overcoming of the reified quality of objectification under capitalism,
not objectification
per se.
As her treatment of reification as a necessary
component in all fabrication indicates, she failed
to
perceive the crucial
distinction Marx makes between objectification and reification. In fact,
she mistranslated
Vergegenstandlichung
(objectification) as rei fica–
tion, whereas that word is more correctly the translation of
Verdingli–
chung.
Rather than championing
animal laborans,
Marx was a
believer in the power of man as
homo faber,
as Avineri has shown in
the chapter he devotes to that concept.
However, Hannah Arendt might have conceded this point and still
argued that Marx's work was pernicious because of its reduction of
politics to the socioeconomic realm. In several places in her writing,
she contended that Marx wanted the public realm
to
"wither away"
with the triumph of socialism. This familiar argument is unfortunate
for two reasons. First, the phrase "withering away" was used by Engels
in his
Anti-Duhring ("der Staat wird nicht 'abgeschafft,' er stirbt ab")
and not by Marx, wbo consistently used the term
Aufhebung
instead.
As is well known,
Aufhebung
implies preservation as well as cancella–
tion and transcendence. Secondly, even if one accepts Engels's formula
as representing his friend's thought, the phrase "withering away"
refers to the state, not politics as a whole. That the two need not be
equated is clear in Hannah Arendt's own call for the replacement of the
sovereign nation-state by a federated system of councils, which of
course would foster political life. What Marx wanted was the transcen–
dence of the Hegelian distinction between civil society and the state,
bourgeois "man" and the citizen, not the reduction of the state to
society or the political citizen
to
natural man. Although one may share
Hannah Arendt's skepticism about reconciling these oppositions
