Species-being & Alienated Labour : Their Dialectical Inversions

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1. Introduction

For Marx, alienated labour is a human activity within which the species-character of human being reveals as an estranged form in a specific historical stage of human development, i.e. in capitalism. Marx calls this inversion from the species-character to alienated labour the first negation[TW1] . Further, Marx insists that this first negation is a necessary moment, through which subjective and objective conditions for the perfection of human being as a conscious species-being mature, and which necessitates communist revolution and the establishment of community society in which the perfection will be accomplished. Marx calls this second historical inversion the negation of the negation.

The above Marx’s concept seems to sound ironical because Marx is saying, although the character of species-being(Gattungswesen) and that of alienated labour are opposite, that alienated labour is one of the phenomenological revelations of species-character of human being, that both is the mere different expressions of the same whole one, and that the fact that human being is a species-being, if negated, is the cause of alienated labour[1]. For Marx, while species-being is one who has universality, i.e. who contains [TW2] the world in his consciousness and activities, alienated labour is a worker’s selfish activity in capitalism through which the worker takes advantage of the world as mere means to accomplish only his individual goal. How can the species character manifest itself as the opposite one, alienate labour? How can the species-character of human being be the cause of alienated labour? How can the species-character of man return into itself through the second negation?

The object of this essay is to examine how Marx explains the above dialectical inversion between species-being and alienated labour. This essay, first, will examine the distinctive feature of Marx’s ontological idea of human being as a conscious species-being. And, secondly, it will inquire into how the species character of human being had dialectically inverted into the opposite, alienated labour in human history. Finally, it will look into how Marx explains the possibility of the second negation.

2. Human being as a conscious species being

(1) The Organist Concept of Human Nature as “the Process of Come-into-being”

   Marx regards human emancipation by communist revolution as the process of the come-into-being of human essence.[2] Let us see his claim.

“But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through human labour, nothing but the coming-into-being of nature for man, he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his process of coming-to-be. (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 92)”

Marx’s view on the nature of human being inherits Aristotle’s. Aristotle writes in his Politics, “Nature is an end; for we say that each thing’s nature…is the character it has when its coming-into-being has been completed”(Politics, p.3, ch.2, Book1). Also we can find same view in Hegel. Hegel writes, “The "Nature" of an object is exactly synonymous with its "Idea"”(Philosophy of History, p. 40).[3] For him, the nature of an object(organicism) is its Idea, i.e. the full realization of its concept which, at the beginning, only existed as mere potentiality and as an initial plan. For Hegel, at the beginning, every organism has telos, i.e. a final cause like a germ, which guides its afterward development to an end. The realization of potentiality needs mediation, i.e. the realizing activity of an organism itself which relates itself with external objects and translates potentiality into reality.

(2) Human Being as A Conscious Species-being

Marx characterizes human being as a conscious species-being in the following sentence.

“Man is a species-being, not only because he practically and theoretically makes the species — both his own and those of other things — his object, but also — and this is simply another way of saying the same thing — because he looks upon himself as the present, living species, because he looks upon himself as a universal and therefore free being.[4]”

Marx regards an objective and universal conscious activity as the main ontological character of human being, a species-being. When Enzo Paci explains the above sentence, he writes, “each individual man, and all men, contain the world. (The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, p. 394)…Each man represents other men, i.e. each man as an individual contains [TW3] mankind in his human essence. (Ibid. p.379)” For Marx, every organicism has internal relations with other existence through its objective activity. However, Marx insists that while the objective activity of animal is essentially limited, that of human being as a conscious species-being has universality which reaches to the whole world: in his practical or theoretical objective activity, man produces not only his purpose and his enjoyment but also those of the whole world including his own species and other species[5]. Marx considers that this universality of man leads us to be a free-being[TW4] .

3. The Necessity of the First Negation

How had the species character of human being, for Marx, had dialectically inverted into the opposite, alienated labour in human history? 

(1) Hegel’s view on Alienation

First of all, we need to examine Hegel’s view. Hegel endorses Spinoza’s doctrine that all determination is negation, even though he rejects Spinoza’s view that reality is at bottom a wholly indeterminate substance. For Hegel, substance itself involves negativity with which it fills itself with contents and develops itself into the new stage. He insists that, different from the development of other organicism, the process in human history involves alienation of human essence, because human essence is reason, or universality. The reason or universality of man already contains the negativity, the particular passion or the particularity, which brings about the alienation.

In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel describes how will develops through the process of education(Bildung) to the stage of absolute freedom, reason or concrete universality. At the starting point, the will is immediate and indeterminate, and it exists only as abstractly universal form. Thus, the will is free only in itself; i.e. the freedom of will is merely potential. Through its self-mediating activity, the will must dialectically invert itself into particularity in order to inwardly and outwardly fill itself with contents such as right, property, morality, family, state, and so forth, and, finally, return into itself as concrete universality at the stage of the state. Through this whole process, the will is [TW5] for itself what it is in itself; i.e. the freedom of will is actualized.

Also in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes that the whole universe is seen as the product or externalization(Entaeusserung) of subject, Geist, and history is understood as the process by which Spirit is overcoming the estrangement(Entfremdung) of the external world. At the beginning of the phenomenological odyssey of spirit, external objects independently stand against spirit and appear as an obstacle to its free movement. “The process of critical reflection upon the adequacy of knowledge to its object become a progress in the history of Geist. Spirits learns what it truly is (and its relationship to the world of objectivity) at the same time, and in exact proportion, as its becomes what it truly is through manifesting itself in objective form (in morality, in bourgeois life, in the state, in religion), and in so dong it eventually ends its estrangement from its world through identifying itself in it.[6]” Therefore, The phenomenological odyssey of spirit is not merely its struggle to negate an alien objectivity, but also the story of its gaining an objective existence and its return into itself through a recollection(Erinnerung).

(2) The First Negation: Alien Character of Objectivity

Marx inherits and develops Hegel’s notions of ‘externalization(Entaeusserung)”, of the relation between subjectivity and objectivity, and of ‘the negation of negation’ in his historical materialism[7]. Marx claims that “it is in his fashioning [TW6] of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being” and that “the product of labour is, therefore, the objectification of the universality of man”. These claims reveal that there is a possibility that the objectified universality of human species-power, if it were not completely developed, could be detached from man himself and stands opposite him as a abstract objective form, and could degrade man to be a mere particular being. Marx’s historical materialism shows that this negative transformation is mere than a possibility in human history.

Marx writes in his Grundrisse,

“Human beings become individuals only through the process of history. He appears originally as a species-being [Gattungswesen], clan being, herd animal – although in no way whatever as ζοώυ πολιχόυ[8] in the political sense. Exchange itself is a chief means of this individuation [Vereinzelung]. It makes the herd-like existence superfluous and dissolves it. Soon the matter [has] turned such a way that as an individual he relates himself only to himself, while the means with which he posits himself as individual have become the making of his generality and commonness…In bourgeois society, the worker e.g. stands there purely without objectivity, subjectively; but the thing which stands opposite him has now become the true community [Gemeinwesen], which he tries to make a meal of, and which makes a meal of him.” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse, p.496)

How can objectivity be stands against the producer of them and degrade him to be a mere particular being? We need to examine Marx’s explanation of historical relationships of labour, exchange, private property and so on.

Marx writes in his Grundrisse, in pre-capitalist societies,

”Each individual conducts himself only as a link, as a member of this community as proprietor or possessor. The real appropriation through the labour process happens under these presuppositions, which are not themselves the product of labour, but appear as its natural or divine presuppositions. (Grundrisse, p. 472)” ”The commune…is the presupposition of property in land and soil. (Ibid. p. 475)”

As for man of pre-capitalist societies who stared as a species-being, the possession of property[9] was the given-right of an individual as a communal member, i.e. as a citizen.[10] So to speak, in pre-capitalist societies, community mediated the property relation. However, as exchange and productive power had developed, labor had become to mediate the property relation. When property right appeared the result of labour, the communal property relation transformed into the private property relation. The first form of the private property is the worker’s ownership of his means of production. According to Marx, just before the appearance of capitalism in England, this first form of the private property had become dominant over the previous forms of property.[11] In this first form of private property, the objectivity of the worker as a nature-given inorganic body was not separated from himself, and, therefore, the private property became the basis of the development of his free individuality.[12] However, this form of private property had a destiny to be dialectically inverted into capitalist private property resting on the exploitation of the labour of others. A class, the bourgeoisie class, who had started as a free private proprietor but had accumulated wealth through the development of exchange, started expelling a mass of people into the slums of cities and had completed it by grasp political power. Through this process, the objective condition of the worker had been separated from himself, and exchange had incorporated workers as a commodities. Consequently, the first form of private property had dialectically inverted into the second and the most estranged form of private property, the capitalist private property. Marx writes,

“Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated means of production, the transformation, therefore, of the dwarf-like property of the many into the giant property of the few, and the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence and from the instruments of labour, this terrible and arduously accomplished expropriation of the mass of the people forms the pre-history of capital.(Capital Vol.1, p. 928)”

Also Marx’s writing, “Private property is therefore the product, result, and necessary consequence of alienated labor[13]” shows the relation of labour as a commodity to the private property. In this sentence, since ‘alienated (entäußerten)’ means ‘transferred’ or ‘sold’, ‘alienated labour’ signifies commodity labour, i.e. wage labour. Only to throw the worker into a mere subjectivity without presupposed objectivity, a wage laborer or a worker as a commodity brings about the second form of private property relation. In the second form of private property relation, the communal character within man himself is replaced by a “relation mediated the object which is external and accidental to the individual(Grundrisse, p. 487)” and man himself become degraded a mere abstract being as a commodity who only pursue his particular interest.. The universality of man dialectically inverted to abstract universality as the form of money which developed into capital in capitalism. Marx cynically describes as the true community capital relation which replaces the communal character of the community members. Marx calls it the first negation.

4. The Necessity of the Second Negation

This first negation is necessary for a species-being to develop his concrete universality and fill himself with objective contents as a universalized and individualized human being. The concreteness or individuality of man can be accomplished by the first negation. In Capital, Marx concentrates on analyzing the movement of the objective form of wage labor such as commodity, money, capital, private property, automatic machines, the division of labour and so on. For him, these objective forms of ‘estranged free human activity(wage labor or inverted freedom)’ have two contradictory meanings: one is that these has deepen human estrangement; another is that these brings up the subject[TW7] , i.e. proletariat and the means i.e. new social productive force for the second negation.

Let me examine Marx’s idea of communism before analyzing, for Marx, what conditions capitalism brings about.

(1) Communism & Universally Developed Individual

The idea of communism by Marx aims a historical stage in which the separation of particular interests and common interest becomes unified[TW8]  and in which the free development of individuality of each member becomes the basic source of that of community. Let us examine what principles or what premises Marx suggests to accomplish the harmonious development of community and individuality in communism.

    First, the development of social productive forces is the basic economic premise for communism. It has more meanings than just to overcome basic economic want.[14] It means the development of objective conditions for the universal intercourse between every man, such as

“the growth of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil, the transformation of the means of labour into forms in which they can only be used in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime.(Capital Vol. 1, p929)”

    Secondly, based on the development of social productive forces, the universal intercourse between men should replace the exchange system which, in capitalism, has become independent as a real community, and has controlled individual activities.

Thirdly, based on the development of social productive forces, the natural and technical fixation of labour i.e. the division of labour should be removed for the development of the diverse abilities of each individual. Marx and Engels write in his The German Ideology,

He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 160)

   Fourthly, based on the development of social productive forces, especially, of the centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour, capitalist private property should be replaced by social property. Like pre-capitalist societies, community should mediate property relation, in other words, individual property should become a given right of individual as a community member. Marx writes in his Capital, “This is the negation of the negation. It does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself. (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 929)”

Fifthly, Marx’s ideal equality or his concept of right in communism is ‘unequal equality’, i.e. ‘proportional’ equality[15], based on ‘concrete need’ of each individual. In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx writes,

“Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal” (Marx, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 530-531).  

For Marx, the consideration of the concrete diversities of each individual by proportional equality gives man genuine freedom. Marx claims every society has its own just concept of right based on proportional equality, because “right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby. (Ibid. p. 531)” However, in a higher phase of communist society, right should be based on “need’ rather than on “ability” in a lower phase of communist society.[16]

The sixth premise is the universally developed individual, which would synthesize the all above premises. The universally developed individual is one who “as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and his particular situation[17]”, and who “has recognized and organized his ‘own powers’ as social powers”[18]. Only the appearance of universal individual leads us to be free from the independent objective and political power[TW9] .

(2) The Possibility of the Second Negation

Marx claims,

“Communism is for us not a stage of affairs which is to be established, and ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence (Marx-Engels Reader, p.162)”

If his claim is right, capitalism should bring about the development of the subjective and objective conditions for communism revolution. According to Marx, the large-scale industry based on the capitalist passion for money leads to the development of objective conditions such as the development of the social productive forces, the removal of technical basis of the division of labour, the centralization of the means of production, the entanglement of all people in the net of the world market, and so on. However, for Marx, the improvement of these objective conditions has contradictory influences on the development of subject: in some cases he emphasizes that it increases the working class in number, and, trains and organizes the working class; in other cases he emphasizes that it deepens the practical and conscious alienation from the species-character, all of which hinder the unification of the working class.

How can Marx solve the contradiction? Marx suggests,

As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished… The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy.

His theoretical solution is the unification of philosophy [TW10] and proletariat. And in practice it appears as his lifelong effort to unify the leadership of communist party and proletariat. Philosophy and communist party representing the common interests or the universality of the entire proletariat should be unified with proletariat. Marx writes in his Communist Manifesto,

(Communist party has) “no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole…The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. (2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole. (Marx-Engels Reader, p.483-484, emphasis is mine.)

In the sense that the universality of philosophy and communist party represent the movement of the entire proletariat, the universality has its origin inside proletariat; however, in the sense that the universality of philosophy and communist party cannot come from the alienated character of proletariat, it has its origin outside proletariat.

5. Conclusion

Like Hegel, for Marx, only the real happening [TW11] of things proves its truthfulness. Therefore, for him, the truth of the idea of communism can be proved only by realizing communism by man’s own efforts. Before the realization, Marx’s idea of communism can be proved only as the inherent aim of man[TW12] . Marx’s analysis that capitalism brings up the development of objective and subjective conditions for communism can prove that the idea of communism can be the aim of man.

However, there are some contradictory tensions in his claim that capitalism brings up the maturity of consciousness of subject. These contradictory tensions could be understood if we examines Marx’s ontological concept of man. For Marx, labour is purposeful activity. Also Karel Kosik insists that labour leads man to uncover the a future as a dimension of its being[19]. For Marx, man is one who cannot do anything without aim. If the essential character of man’s activity were not purposeful, there would be no the above contradictory tensions in capitalism like other mechanical laws. Only the real purposeful activities of men can solve these contradictory tensions that are imposed on them[TW13] .[TW14] 

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_____, the Philosophy of Right (PR), translated by T.M. Knox, Oxford University Press, 1952

Karl Marx, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, V.3

________, Capital I, translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin Books, 1976

________, Grundrisse, Translated by Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Books, 1973

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