Ep. 355: Marx on Alienation (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 355 is something like how can we explain people's economic behavior? We read three 1844 essays by Karl Marx, Estranged Labor, Private Property and Communism and the Power of Money in Bourgeois Society. More information about the text in the podcast, please see partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, emanating from man for man in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is Seth Paskin, existing as a physical subject only in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan with more sense than sense. That's S E N S E vs C E N T S in London, England.

0:51 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, the most wretched of all commodities in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:55 Lawrence: This is Lawrence Dahlman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

0:58 Mark: Lawrence, welcome back. We have not had you on the show in a long time. You'd been one of our go to analytic gu. But you recommended this reading. Why this reading?

1:07 Lawrence: Yeah, thank you for having me back. I think it's been six years, which is wild. I've always worked on Marx. I am kind of analytically trained. I love the analytic tradition, but I work primarily on Marx. And I think each of Marx's major works has a kind of special quality of its own. But this one gives us the clearest picture of his understanding of what it is to be a human being. I think there's a lot to get out of it.

1:29 Mark: Yes, we haven't had you on for a long time, but we haven't talked about Marx for much longer than that. January 2017. 13. I see. It's our episode 70 on the German Ideology, which was a never published book written two years later than these essays. So yes, as we said for that discussion, he was more philosophic at this point. Maybe we'll still cover Das Kapital at some time. It's sort of been one of the things on our list. We did cover Adam Smith's wealth of nations, so it's probably at least as philosophical as that. But you picked ones from this 1844 essays book that you thought were particularly philosophical.

It's a bit of a patchwork. I mean, the power of money in bourgeois society is just sort of a little five page bonus. That's very poetic about sort of money being the root of all evil, his version of that. But the meat of what we had, this estranged labor and private property and communism. We don't get a full picture of his philosophy, certainly, but we get something about what human good is and how that relates to our daily activity.

2:25 Lawrence: Absolutely. Marx is, unfortunately not a very straightforward philosopher. No matter where you pick up Marx, you're going to have to do a bit of piecing things together to get a clear picture of the overarching view that he defends. Part of this is just his kind of polemical style of writing. He's always arguing against someone, criticizing their views. But here, especially, part of the project of reading Marx. Is trying to pick out clues about what the underlying kind of metaphysics that he's defending looks like from these claims that he's making about life under capitalism, things like that.

2:58 Wes: To me, the focus of the reading, I thought, was pretty clear. Just because it's alienation and what it would mean to overcome alienation.

3:04 Lawrence: Right.

3:05 Wes: And the primacy of alienation as an explanatory vehicle, I guess, for social and economic life. So we explain. Whereas other economists, like Adam Smith. And I think, to some extent some of the socialists that he's responding to. Take as a starting point certain economic principles that we might take for granted, like the existence of private property and wages and division of labor and things like that as arising kind of naturally. He wants to derive all of that from the concept of alienated labor. And then tell us in the second essay that we read what it might mean to transcend private property and therefore alienation.

3:48 Dylan: Yeah, I think that's right, Wes. But I guess I would add on to it that something that I did not ever understand about Marx. Even though I had read, oh, you know, he was part of the young Hegelians. And Marx was modifying or indebted to Hegel in certain ways. And criticizing Hegel in other ways. I guess I never understood it or had a feel for it until now, because we did all that Hegel. I hadn't read as much Hegel as we had until whatever it was a year and a half ago. And when I was reading through this, it just smelled up and down like Hegel. And in both his indebtedness to that notion of estranged labor.

That the estranged labor is also response in the criticism of private property. Is response to this notion of a unified human mind, a unified human existence with other human beings and what we're meant to be and how we're supposed to progress through histories as species beings. And I never had that sensitivity to how both comprehensive and then also alternately kind of insightful and crazy at the same time. My previous experiences with Marx, I felt like, okay, look, there's some really, astute criticisms of capitalism here. And some of them, when I read Adam Smith, are found in Adam Smith.

But the universalism that he has really struck me in a way that I hadn't. And that comes from just seeing how much Hegel's in it.

5:14 Wes: Yeah, I looked back at Hegel, and it's phenomenology. And of course, the word alienation occurs over and over again. And the overcoming of alienation is the whole progress of the phenomenology. And when you. Section 89 the phenomenology, when he tells us that ultimately what's going to happen is the split between appearance and essence is going to vanish, Alienation begins as an epistemological problem, right? The thing in itself, our separation from that, the separation of subject and object, are the ultimate form of alienation. At this point, it's epistemological.

But then in Hegel, right, it gets into the social dimensions of that. So, for instance, at certain stages in religious history, God is this alien power, totally other than us. And Hegel doesn't like that idea. You know, he's going to preserve God in the end in a way that's kind of mysterious and seems to equate God with Geist, with ourselves and our collective social existence. But that's the sort of reconciliation that has to happen as well. And the same thing with morality, Kantian deontology. I do this thing that you ought to do, even though you don't want to do it, right?

The alienation between our desires and impulses and our behaviors. That's something that has to be overcome. And that's there in early theological Hegel. So all of that stuff gets taken up by Marx, first the young Hegelians and then Marx.

6:27 Mark: The thing I saw most clearly as a response to Hegel was actually directly in that master and slave self consciousness section that we, I think, was the first thing that we supposedly read in the phenomenology, which was he goes with the idea, you know, as Marx famously said, we're alienated as factory workers, as workers who are not working for ourselves, as workers working for bosses. So we don't own the thing we create. So we are alienated from the product of that labor. That's just Marx 101. But then the Hegelian connection, one of them that he makes is in saying that, well, this alienates us not just from the object, but from ourselves and therefore from other people, because our connection to ourselves is through other people.

So that's straight from Hegel's phenomenology. And also one of the parts of that story is that the master and the slave have faced off against each other, and the slave slinks off to go do the master's bidding. But the slave actually gets to go work with his hands. So the master is actually alienated from the wheat or the shoemaking materials, the shoes, because he's just off doing his own thing, not running into the resistance that the object that you work on. So Hegel is stressing how even though it would seem like the slave is in a bad position, having to do the master's bidding and grub down there in the dirt.

No, actually that helps grow his sense of self to fullness because he is not alienated from the product of his labor. Even if somebody else owns it, he's the one actually working on it. And Marx is just directly responding to that and saying, no, the modern worker is in a state of slavery. He doesn't own the product. And in fact, the more product he creates, the more efficient he is, the less demand there is for his. His services. So he's actually directly impoverishing himself by being productive. And so this does not lead to the growth of his self.

In fact, exactly the opposite.

8:15 Wes: We should remind ourselves that the way that master slave dialectic ends is with reciprocity. So something like mutual recognition, instead of there being an asymmetry, instead of there being this unbalanced power relation where one is superior in one way and inferior in another, you get some version of equality. So it's sort of the psychological version of communism. And alienation is very much about this social element. So alienation in society. Right. The forms of life in a society, as with the unhappy consciousness of a certain stage of Greek society, they no longer do what they're supposed to do.

It's the sort of thing Nietzsche called out. With the death of a God, those forms of life cancel and sustain communal bonds. People become alienated from each other. They get rid of their gods, for instance, and have nothing to replace them with. So the social part of Hegel's phenomenology, that inevitable historical progression, is towards a true community. And again, that's something that the young Hegelians and Marx are picking up on.

9:19 Dylan: A true community that simultaneously actualizes human essence and individuality. It's this thesis, antithesis, resolution thing. And as a comment, I think I want to talk about the alternate claim for the communal relationship that most cultivates human flourishing as an alternative of liberal democracy.

Right.

There are those lines in here that point to exactly what I just said, which is that the Aim of this analysis and the resolution of that would be to cultivate human flourishing in the best possible way. And liberal democracy also claims to do that, but with a very different analysis of what the forces at work and the relationship of the individual to the community is. Yeah, I'm just putting that out there as like a thing for us to not forget to engage. This isn't about. I mean, we're supposed to be talking about Marx, right? And I think we should understand Marx's analysis and how we get to that solution, acknowledging that the aim is at some level the same as the aim

10:22 Wes: of other claims of it's freedom, baby, freedom.

10:26 Dylan: It's freedom, right? Which isn't the same thing as like a monarchy or the best you could say about the notion of freedom there is that somehow it gets bestowed on you by the monarch. But communism, as Marx viewed it, and liberal democracy are intended to point to ways to cultivate human freedom. And they rely on an understanding of what the aims of humans are towards freedom and how those are related to the structure of society and the motivations of us individually and how the conflicts between what we want and our inclinations get resolved.

10:58 Lawrence: I think maybe a way to kind of group together these two threads. I mean, I think it's very right, like the first two manuscripts we read in particular about alienation and it's overcoming. And that overcoming for Marx takes shape in, you know, a true human community, which he calls communism. And definitely that theme of alienation comes from Hegel. It's directly out of Hegel. But Marx is writing at a time when there's a lot of feverish debate about what's Hegel right about what's Hegel wrong about. And by the time that Marx gets his hands on this idea of alienation, it's already undergone some kind of criticism and it's been revised in various ways.

And so at least as Marx is reading Hegel for Hegel, alienation has to do with. There's some kind of inappropriate split in our thinking. We think that two things are separate, but actually they're one. There's a kind of underlying harmony or unity. And so the way to solve that is to in a way think better to overcome whatever that split in our thinking is. With one of Marx's major influences, Ludwig Feuerbach, we get a kind of new notion of alienation that has more to do with feeling than thinking. So the kind of splits that we're trying to overcome, to overcome alienation have to do with splits in our feelings.

Here Marx is presenting a Kind of alienation that is, in a way, not first and foremost about thinking. It's also not first and foremost about feeling. It's first and foremost about action. That alienation takes shape in action. That human beings are alienated insofar as they are acting in the wrong way in the world. And in particular, he thinks the kind of action that is relevant is production. That the way that we produce for ourselves, the way that we meet our needs is alienated. There's some kind of split in it that needs to be diagnosed. And it's through that development in the concept of alienation that Marx kind of arrives at this focus on production which leads him to give this specific communist vision of what a non alienated society would be.

It would be a society in which the way that we produce has been reformed to kind of excise that element of alienation. So I think these themes are actually very closely tethered.

13:02 Mark: Well, I'm anxious to hear how that's supposed to happen because I wasn't able to divine it from what we read. And I think it's clear that Marx has an emancipatory agenda, obviously. And it is clear that he's cognizant of the fact it's not transcendental. Right. We have to start from where we are. He's not hypothesizing any kind of apophantic or transcendental experience that's going to shift. You know, we have to acknowledge where we are, understand the systems of alienation. And it's also not intended to be emancipation from the perspective of the individual.

There is a certain amount of self awareness and self consciousness you can imagine. But this is not a go sit on a mat up in the cabin and try to gain some kind of consciousness. I find that really interesting and I think it suggests some other modalities of interaction, other modalities of production, if you will, that. You know, I've kind of been banging a drum for. For some time. So I just wanted to put this out there, you know, until we get into the text. But you said action, right, Lawrence, you said it's not a philosophy, it's a treatise.

The question is, what are the concrete actions we can take to overcome that alienation? And I'm very interested to talk in more detail about that.

Well, it's a philosophy about action, so to say, like you're saying that there are concrete actions. He has to give reasons and he does. One of the things I found a little confusing about the first essay is just the order in which things Are presented. So I sort of feel like going straight to around page 76. It starts on page 69. So we're quite a bit into the essay where he kind of gives, like. Why do we call this normal state of workers toward their products alienated? Well, because normally we live on the products of nature. We are one with nature.

We are nature. And when we work, you know, he kind of carries a Locke's labor theory of value, right? We take nature and we work it. We make it into a human creation. We objectify it. And that's all fine and good. If it is sort of coming out of this natural relation. It's only then when we don't get to then enjoy the fruits of our labor, See it as authentically our creation. You know, we create ourselves. This is, you know, as Hegel was saying in that picture about the master and slave. That the slave, if he weren't a slave, if he were Rousseau's natural man, Then he would create this thing that would in turn create him.

And all would be hunky dory. And it's only now, because then we have. There's a system that the worker is fitting in where he is selling his body. He's essentially becoming the property of another person. He's alienating himself and his own activity. And the thing he creates, none of those are his anymore. And that's what creates alienation.

15:50 Wes: Well, this section then, he brings up this concept of man's species being. Which really is a variation on the Hegelian concept of self knowledge, self consciousness. Our particular human self consciousness, as distinguished from animals. Involves this awareness of our essence. I guess is the way I would translate this idea of species being and our essence as conscious beings of a certain sort. Who are capable of science and having an aesthetic relationship to nature. This is what he calls the third aspect of alienation. It involves turning species being into something alien.

So that what should be in self consciousness Acquaintance with ourselves. A self acquaintance. What, we look in the mirror and see something alien. And why is that thing in the mirror alien? Because we turned it merely into a means of subsisting of continuing our physical existence. Which is another way of saying, hey, we take these great minds that we've been bequeathed with by nature, and what do we do with it? We shackle it to the most degrading forms of labor. And prevent people from fully actualizing and being themselves qua human.

17:06 Dylan: I have to confess, I had a much more negative reaction to this whole analysis. Than I have ever had in the half dozen times I've Read Marx when we say man is a species being because he treats himself as a universal and therefore free being. So what that means to me is that we are free by treating ourselves as universals. This then translates into our relationship with nature. Nature becomes an extension of us. Nature is man's inorganic body. So that we have dominion over nature. And that's a manifestation of our freedom. And this is part of the reason for why our work products belong to us.

And they are part of the manifestation of our freedom in a material way. So what we work on and what we build and construct is our activity with respect to nature, as nature is our extended body. And therefore our freedom is actualized by that action. I don't know that I buy that nature is our inorganic body. That sounds very much like a kind of twisted version of Bacon's claim that our. Our dominion as the birth of science as being. That insofar as we control nature, we effectively actualize ourselves. And that doesn't seem quite right either.

The level of universality and sort of dominion over the world now I'm reading, it's like, okay, we are to be gods of the world and actualizing our freedom in that way. And then it becomes just kind of crazy to me.

18:41 Wes: So the way I would explain this distinction is it's kind of like live to eat versus eat to live. Do you work in order to activate the higher part of your humanity, of your human self consciousness? Or do you just put all that cleverness in the service of subsistence, of survival, of animal survival? So it's really about the relationship between this animal and more human part of us. And he'll say estranged labor basically reverses that relationship. Making the essential being, which has something to do with our human self consciousness, a mere means to existence.

And that is what undermines our freedom. It seems to me there is a special kind of freedom in self consciousness and. Right. And being able to not devote all my activity and energy and thought simply to finding food, you know, if I were an animal out hunting, but to be able to fuel myself with food in order to sit around reading a book, for instance. And so those are two very different modes of existence. And that's the distinction I think he's trying to make.

19:43 Dylan: I agree with you, but that's exactly the same distinction that I was pointing to with liberal democracy as a solution to it. Right. And I might be wrong about this. It's just me reading it again in a different context is the underlying analysis of man as species being as what leads you. So I think that that conclusion feels not wrong, but it doesn't feel as extreme as what the conclusion is implied by Marx. What I have to buy into if I agree with Marx on that conclusion in terms of the characteristic relationship of me to nature, human beings to nature, human beings to each other.

If we say, well, you know, you don't have to buy species being and all that other stuff, that's fine. All Marx is asking to do is agree that we have higher faculties that are part of actualizing us as human beings is distinct from. Is about eating to live rather than living to eat. Sure. It just doesn't seem to me like it's that it's that benign.

20:38 Wes: Well, maybe we should explain species being a little more just because it's something he's picked up from Feuerbach. Right. And we have a nice footnote on page 78. So what is the difference between man and the brute? Consciousness, but consciousness in the strict sense, which is reading a little bit farther down. Consciousness in the strict sense is present only in a being to whom their species is essential. Nature is an object of thought. Either he or Marx will go on to say, I think it's Marx who will say, we can think about our own essence. We can think about our own essential nature.

And another way of saying that is we can approach ourselves scientifically, human beings. And then as a consequence of that, we can also do that more broadly. Right. We can be biologists. We can think about the essence of organic life or what it is to be this or that particular animal. So that concept of species being I don't have an objection to. And I guess I'm just bringing this up because I don't fully understand, Dylan, what your worry is about species being. If it just boils down to that thing that Feuerbach said.

21:39 Dylan: I mean, maybe I'm just wrong about it, but when I read things like nature is man's inorganic body and the kind of universalism implied or not implied, but explicit in the way Marx is understanding the realization of human freedom. It feels so expansive and self indulgent about our relationship with the world. It makes human beings just so important. And it just feels just like it's like a Christianification. It's like Christianity all over again. You know, Marx is against religion, but it's just a Christianity all over again, the way Hegel is in terms of the centrality of us and us being the center of the universe.

22:14 Mark: I just think this is undermined by his stress on man as naturally part of nature. And so the alienation, the pulling out that we do. You could read this in some ways as a Rousseau call back to more natural ways of dealing with things. I don't think that's his ultimate position because I think he thinks dialectically we have to proceed right. In our second essay that we'll eventually get to. It's after the overcoming of private property, we find our true destiny that I think feel like the ancients could not actually have had this natural relation.

So it's not going to be a. Let's return to some time in the past. In fact, I recall at some point in the second essay, he's criticizing Proudhon or somebody, as if they were pointing at their utopia, their communism, as something. Something in the past that we have to return to. And Marx is saying, because it's the past, you know, that that's not the destination. He's all about the historical determinism and how we have to get to this point. And so, yeah, in his explicit comparisons of human with animal nature, we are more flexible. A beaver builds its dam, but a human can build a dam or a nest or anything.

Anybody else, you know, so that's the way in which we are different. I don't see his conception of man. It's all that different in some ways than Aristotle's. Right. That we are primarily social. Like this is something that gets completely undermined by modern work situations. And, you know, that we relate to each other as workers or, you know, as worker to boss. We don't even have solidarity naturally, with other workers. We're pushed into this isolated. I'm doing what I have to do for my personal survival and that the hell with all of you, you know, I'm.

I'm in competition with the rest of you workers.

23:55 Wes: I think what Dylan is kind of cottoning onto is the elevation of the social to a kind of quasi religious level, which is not surprising. Right. So we're looking at Peter Singer's very short introduction to Marx and the way he describes this transition from the young Hegelians to Marx. It involves, for Feuerbach, at least, right, Getting the God out of Geist. It's a theological critique, and I think we might read that next time. But for Hegel, God, properly understood, I think, is a solution. But the young Hegelians are atheists, and God is just another form of alienation.

And then Feuerbach also, I think, is an impetus for Marx's focus on the concrete and material conditions. So we get this, you know, and the focus on money and estranged labor as the alien thing. But what I'm trying to say is once you get the God out of Geist, you're left with this social ideal. This elevation of relationship of one human being to another. That sounds quite utopian. Although I know Marx would probably object to that characterization as belonging to crude communism, as he puts it. But if I'm getting Dylan right here, that's kind of.

It's kind of an emotional tone or fervor involved in elevation of social relationships.

25:12 Mark: Can I try to connect a few dots here in my mind? I remember us having a conversation about something in the last couple years where we were talking about the importance of spontaneity, free action, spontaneous action. That this notion that we can act and that way is important for a variety of reasons, not just simply ethical, but that it's part of what distinguishes man from the animals and other sorts of things. So I think this. The steps here, very crudely, are something like. It's our species, character or essence to interact with the world, objects and people in this spontaneous, free manner.

Property, private property and labor alienates us from that spontaneity. And also those things by virtue of removing the freedom, it removes the spontaneity. And labor becomes forced. And it's essentially that what you do becomes merely. He says this in the text, merely a means to existence. Okay, now, later on, when he's talking about what communism would provide. And these are sorts of things. He talks about an engagement with the world that is not an engagement of forced labor. And he uses the example of love and beauty, experiencing beauty.

And if we think about it in those terms, really what he's saying is that to engage with the world in this non labor, object, alienated way, you have to have the ability to do this free and spontaneous engagement. As exemplified by things like loving another person or experiencing a beautiful sunset. None of which are engagements where you are laboring. It doesn't even make sense to say that you're laboring. It's not that those things disappear for the alienated worker, you know, it's not like they can't do it. It's just that because they are spending all of their energy on producing things that they don't own for other people to get rich.

And we talked many times about how the exhaustion of the worker, you know, means you can't enjoy your life. And you get all these psychological problems and all that kind of stuff. If we're not alienated, then we can truly become who we are. Which is to do these things that, you know, in my parlance would be aesthetic or creative, artistically creative. But to get back to my earlier point, it also means that because they're always there, they're just kind of suppressed by this alienation or effaced or whatever term you want to use. That's the basis for the ability to have a revolutionary action from where we stand, as opposed to having to kind of step outside ourselves and have the view from nowhere or what have you,

27:45 Lawrence: to continue pulling threads together. So he writes at the bottom of 76. In creating an objective world by his practical activity in working up inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being. That is, as a being that treats the species as its own essential being. So to tie these threads together further, it's important that Marx thinks the sense in which we are species beings is not just that we're capable of cognizing our common species. It's something about the way that we intervene in the world makes us species beings to kind of quickly paint a picture.

The sense in which human beings are infinite, the sense in which we're special, is that through acting on nature, we also do things like create tools that make us capable of acting on nature in yet more ways and modify our capabilities. And so through our acting on nature, we are constantly changing what further actions we can take. And giving ourselves more capabilities, making new things possible for ourselves. And not just for ourselves, but also for others. And in particular, other human beings. So through our interventions in nature, we make more things possible for other human beings as well as for ourselves.

And later in the theses on Feuerbach, Marx will kind of explicitly comment on the fact that this means, in a way, we are constantly reconstituting our own nature as a species. That's what makes us infinite. That we're not just one kind of creature with a finite set of capabilities. And therefore limited in our activity on nature.

29:14 Mark: Right?

29:15 Lawrence: We're constantly transforming nature to make it possible for us to do even more things. Importantly, one of the things that human beings are in principle capable of doing because we do possess the capacity for reason, is reflecting on the goodness of an object, which amounts to appreciating its beauty. However, certain social arrangements, certain ways of organizing production, inhibit us from actually exercising that capability. So the sense in which appreciating beauty or being able to experience love is kind of essential to the true community that Marx is aiming at is that that is one of our capabilities.

And a true community would be a community in which we have so fundamentally transformed the environment around us through practical interventions, through production, that we've unlocked all of our capabilities. Including the ability to appreciate beauty fully, the ability to experience love fully, so on and so forth. Marx calls these capabilities essential powers. These are the essential powers of the human being. They're constantly modifying as we intervene in nature. But the goal for Marx is to unlock all of these essential powers, including love, including beauty.

30:21 Wes: We get a lot of that in the second essay. Right. With the talk of the senses.

30:26 Mark: Yep. Species being is the most peculiar thing here. And this was new. I'd never seen anything like this in Marx or anything I knew about Marx here. So I feel like we should dwell on this because two clues. We read Kierkegaard more recently than we read Hegel, but Kierkegaard, talking about Hegel, talking about what the ethical is from the Hegelian point of view, would talk about the telos of mankind is to rise to a common level, right? So that's what our form, you know, of course every animal, when it grows to its maturity, is going to have something in common with the species.

But we're actually aware of this and we use it as the norm that we try to follow. So being ethical according to sort of, you know, the ethical point of view, from that Kierkegaard talks about in the or part of his either or means that you are aware of. So being species being means tapping into the zeitgeist of what goodness is and getting to that level, what maturity is. Lawrence, does that seem a foreign influence here, that this other take on Hegel trying to jam that in here?

31:29 Lawrence: I mean, there's a very similar idea operative here. In a way it goes back to Kant. Kant has a notion of natural purposes, naturalized notion of teleology where species aim to reproduce themselves in time and different species have different ways of doing that. As you say, the human beings are capable of treating that as a norm. Marx is not so interested in normative talk in general. Like Kierkegaard is deeply invested in ethical questions. Marx is just not in the same way if he has an ethics. My take is that it's a kind of Aristotelian ethics where we have a notion of what is the kind of function of the human being and what we want to be is well functioning human beings and an alienated human being is not a well functioning human being.

But the way Marx is going to talk about that is less in terms of evaluating people for being non well functioning and more in terms of how do we enhance our functioning so that we can all become well functioning human beings. So it becomes more of a practical question. But yeah, I think there's a similar notion of species in the background here.

32:31 Mark: And the other Hegelian bit that I was using to understand this was just from Hegel's phenomenology itself, where at the end of the master slave thing, by obtaining this sort of independence, by obtaining self consciousness, this is what actually enables us to have a shared geist. You might think that, oh, we start out as herd animals. That would be the species being. Like if you're species being, you're merely the they, you're merely the herd and it's the individual that rises out of that. But I think Hegel's picture is much more complicated than that.

That, you know, we start as these herd animals, but then we have these interactions through mutual recognition, through dealing with work in the world, these kind of things that gives us, builds us up, this sense of self. And this is what actually enables us to be fully social. So we are social in a way that animals cannot be, even though they run around in herds as well. That helped me to understand what he could possibly be talking about here because it seems like species being would be. But if you want to say no, no, actually this is the height of recognizing our essential nature is seeing how he can't be just against independence.

He can't be saying liberal independence, that rugged talk that that's all to be ground down. We have to have more of a communal. Well, I mean, he's a communist, but I think his communist involves a necessary form of individualism. Right? You have to have self reflection and real feeling, real love. All this stuff requires depth in a way that I think people that don't like communism would think that, oh no, Communists are all trying to grind us down to a pre individualistic level.

34:06 Lawrence: He'll go on to criticize that kind of grinding down process as well in yeah, primitive communists. But I think there's also just a kind of Marxian argument to be made here that the rugged individual is actually misunderstanding him or herself. All of us are wearing clothes right now that we probably did not produce for ourselves. Every rugged individual, in fact depends deeply on the productivity of other people and on decisions they made in the production process and on impersonal facts about how that process was organized. And if you are so alienated from your own nature as a human being that you fail to recognize that this is a collective activity, you're actually going to be, without knowing it, even more dependent, so to speak, on the herd because you're going to mistake the decisions of others for your own decisions by recognizing the shape of the Kind of collective, productive life of the human species.

We know where to locate ourselves in it, how to navigate it, things like that. And not mistake a kind of false individuality for a true individuality.

35:07 Dylan: That all sounds right and good. What I'm finding myself trying to understand is what Marx's version of locating yourself correctly is. Because my experience so far reading it is what you just described is sort of my usual way of understanding Marx. You know, we're just getting reminded that we belong to a collective. We don't actually exist by ourselves. Which isn't so different than the kinds of things that Aristotle would say or others. But when I'm reading this now, it just feels much more philosophically utopian and a kind of aimed at a great nirvana of me understanding my goals as an individual individual as completely commiserate with the goals of the community.

And that those things all exist in harmony with one another. And therefore I can achieve enlightenment. That's what it feels like right now when I read through it. That, you know, even without telling me how I get there, my estrangement from my labor is a condition, it's a symptom. I'll get it resolved with this kind of universality. One thing that I wanted to understand better was labor itself. So we're heavily estranged. Labor and who's doing the laboring. What work counts as labor and what work doesn't count as labor. Because there's a way in which everything that an animal does for their existence would be in a category that for human beings would be work.

But then we have this notion that there's, you know, all this kind of labor that gets done that's maybe in work, maybe not work that we get alienated from. And so we constantly refer to, to the paradigmatic example is a serf, like factory worker who's working 14 hours a day and is directly in contact with the metal that they're shaping. But 99% of the value of that work out on the capitalist market is actually going to the owners of the production who own them and all that stuff. But labor seems broader than that. Do I say that all the people who are.

Aren't working with their hands, aren't doing labor? Or do I say, well, okay, now all the people who are in our modern economy, most of the capital value is not actually working with your hands. It's working with your mind or with your computer. And people are just as alienated from that. What is labor? And is my artwork labor or is it not labor? Is that just work? I got confused about what labor was such that it would all be estranged.

37:36 Wes: Right.

37:36 Mark: I referred earlier to Locke's labor theory of value that I think Marx is known for just taking up and running with the idea. So there's lots of work that we do. I mean, we taking care of kids. But the prototype that he seems to be talking about is one that produces a product that could therefore be taken away from you, that uses the natural world as its raw materials and adds human labor and produces a thing. And so I guess if you. You do that spontaneously and you get to keep the thing and use the thing, then it's not alienated. Whereas if you do it because somebody hires you and takes the thing away immediately, then it's alienated.

But yes, I think that's a great point. We could start with in part two. What about all the other kinds of work? And does he have a place for that in his theory? Thanks for checking us out here. We will continue next week. If you want to get part two right now, you could support us at partial examination. Support. There are several options for doing that. Thanks, Lawrence. Thanks, everybody.

38:33 Dylan: Thanks.

38:34 Mark: Thanks. Thanks.

38:35 Wes: Thanks.