social arrangements reflect human nature. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the framework of his theory of alienation and his theory of commodities, the point of continuity between what has been mistakenly described as the early Marx and later Marx.
Why is this so? It is because Marx outlined, within the first two chapters of his essay titled “Alienated Labour,” that, as a philosopher who would attempt to discover and catalogue the mind of 19th-century capitalist man, he needed to understand the capitalist system. This was because within the language of economics there resided the framework not only for understanding the human condition but ultimately its relation to human nature.
Marx in fact began the essay by noting:
We have begun from the presupposition of political economy. We have accepted its terminology and its laws … From political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and to a most miserable commodity.15
Yet, having accepted its terminology, Marx discovered the discipline of political economy – while properly descriptive of the human condition – was not enough:
Political economy begins with the fact of private property; it does not explain it. It conceives the material process of private property, as it occurs in reality, in general and abstract formulas which then serve as laws. It does not comprehend these laws; that is, it does not show how they arise out of the nature of private property.16
Political economy provides the material content and material form of ‘human activity,’ if you will, but it cannot give a metaphysical form and ultimately meaning to this activity. In other words, it alone cannot answer the ultimate questions of human nature.
It was Marx’s challenge, therefore, to “grasp the real connection between this whole system of alienation – private property, acquisitiveness, the separation of labour, capital and land, exchange and competition – and the system of money.”17 Marx would meet that challenge by beginning with a contemporary economic fact, around which he constructed a philosophical system: “Labour does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods.”18 Marx had, in short order, created a unified field theory, a totally contained universe within which men and goods are intimately related in a zero-sum game. And he revealed how, in his very first arguments, a dialectical framework underpinned his theory.
Marx argued, for example, that because labor produces itself and the workers as a commodity, and in the same proportion as goods, a subject-object dichotomy was necessarily implied: the laborer (him- or herself who is a “subject”) produces a ‘product” (itself an “object”) which not only “exists” outside him- or herself but now stands opposed to him/her as an alien being, as a power existing on its own as a thing, a “subject,” independent of its producer. “The product of labour which has been embodied in an object and turned into a physical thing; this product is an objectification of labour.”19 In the very act of “working” to produce something, “work” is transformed into “labor;” and it is through this transformation – when the thing itself no longer exists in relation to its creator – that a distortion of natural relations occurs that becomes harmful to man.
Mind you, Marx was not positing work itself is harmful, in fact it might well be natural; but
rather, he was arguing “labor” was/is harmful because it was/is unnatural. Why? Because as Marx claimed in the very next sentence, while the performance of work is its objectification, “the performance of work appears in the sphere of political economy as a vitiation of the worker,
objectification as a loss and as a servitude to the object, and appropriation as alienation.”20
14