Ep. 355: Marx on Alienation (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 355, part 2. We've been discussing some 1844 essays by Karl Marx, mostly the essay Estranged Labor. But we'll also get to private property and communism and the power of money on bourgeois society. I think you had left us, Dylan, with a question. Maybe this will get us to the beginning of the Estranged labor essay. Of what actually is the labor that he's talking about? Is this all the kind of activities that we do, or is it only a very specific kind of activity where we take the land, we take the natural resources, and we add our labor, and we convert it and we make it into a tangible product that can then be sold or stolen from the worker or any number of other things? I mean, any initial thoughts? Is this the only kind of work he's concerned with? Is this enough?

0:58 Lawrence: I can speak to this a bit. I think an important point here is that Marx thinks that productive work is essential to our nature, and it's the essential component of our nature. Now, the kind of productive work we do is different from the kind of productive work an animal does. It's informed by reason. It's informed by our specifically human mode of feeling. But nevertheless, it is life activity, which is the activity of meeting our needs and also expressing our capabilities through productive activity that is the most important, the most determinative feature of human nature.

And so he can't be saying all work is bad. Because it's through work that we fully realize our nature. And I do think that he, in a sense, counts kind of any expression of a human capability. That results in some objectification of that capability. So if you build something with your hands. You're objectifying your ability to build that thing. But there's also more abstract kinds of objectification. You know, services could involve an element of objectification. You're objectifying your capability to provide that service. The trouble comes in when that object can no longer function.

As an expression of your individual capability. As a kind of instance or token of the species. It is alienated from you. It's removed, both literally, in a kind of market economy. The objects or commodities produced by laborers. Are physically removed from their possession. Also, in terms of property relations, it's alienated from you while you're at work. The things you produce simply are not yours. They belong to your employer. And then also through competition. And other features of the private property system. Which is really just Marx's name at this stage.

For capitalism, there's ways in which production itself cannot function as a healthy expression of our capabilities. Because this fundamental feature of our nature. Has actually been harnessed by what he thinks. Thinks to be a kind of broken system of social coordination. To benefit certain groups. And actually harm the people who are doing the productive activity. For all these reasons combined, Marx thinks even though work that results in an object. Is a kind of healthy expression of human capabilities. Under the private property system. It becomes an unhealthy expression of human capabilities.

3:19 Wes: So let's use that to get into the actual essay. Because it begins by suggesting that we cannot explain estrangement and alienation in terms of private property and capitalism. Private property and capitalism are the results of the fundamental principle of alienation in work. So maybe I'm wrong about that, and I have to try to understand about. But, you know, he starts out with. He lists a bunch of things which I suppose he's. You know. He does a recap, which I think he's taken from Adam Smith. About premises of what he calls political economy.

Including division of labor, for instance. And says he's shown that the natural tendency towards that is the impoverishment of the worker. The worker sinks the level of a commodity, he says. And then he goes on to critique what he calls political economy. Which I take to be the current economic theory. But again, I don't think it's just Adam Smith. I think he thinks people like Proudhon take it for granted. And they explain the existence of private property in terms of just this natural human tendency towards being self interested. Right. Invisible Hand.

And Adam Smith is a kind of more optimistic way to tell that story. But in terms of people's natural greed, their aggression, I think war and avarice, he uses those two words and certain other accidental circumstances of history so that one might think if you're a crude communist, well, we just got to do better or we got to create a welfare safety net. Whereas Marx is going to say we start out with alienation as a fundamental principle, we get private property and then we get this necessary historical process that includes capitalism. Capitalism isn't just some accidental contingent thing that creates alienation.

And then we can fix it by becoming crude communists. He has a much different picture. So that's the impression I got. So it left me wondering, well, can I be right about that? Because how can labor itself be inherently alienating? Even if it's first moment, even if in some sort of Hegelian scheme you think that's going to be overcome. And as Lawrence said, right. Ultimately he thinks it's an important part of our nature to work in certain ways.

5:27 Mark: I was very confused by him starting off by saying political economy tells us this, much like it gives us laws, it gives us patterns. I Marx can use political economy to explain how workers are driven down, but it doesn't have the historical necessity. I think that he wants a good explanation, a full economic explanation to provide that. He wants to say that the very nature of humanity is that we work in the way that Lawrence was saying. And this at least has the capacity, the tendency, as we have more complex social relations, alienated labor is somehow inevitable.

He doesn't really tell us where that step comes from and that from that he thinks, you know, by the end of this essay, he set up the causal chain that it is, yes, the alienation relation between the individual worker and their labor creates the rest of it. It actually creates the capitalist, which was a very weird causal thing to say because it just seemed to no, actually you need the capitalist, you need the non worker there to invite the worker, hey, come work at my factory on machines that I own and I will keep the stuff. But no, he's saying alienation is first and it creates the relation between the alienated product and the capitalist, which just makes no sense to me.

Like it looks, it seemed to me like it all comes out in one system. He's shown that it requires the capitalist, requires this alienation, but that so does the alienation require the capitalist? It doesn't seem like it's a one

6:57 Wes: way it sounds very Hegelian and abstract. In the beginning his argument is going to be that there's this impoverishing process, right, that you know, the worker gets turned into a commodity. But again, it's not enough to say, oh, capitalism is doing this. Rather we start with this first principle of alienation and then we see how it unfolds and it unfolds historically. So it's almost as if alienation is just definitionally a part of the fact that when we work on something, we put part of ourselves into that thing, we eject part of ourselves, we make part of ourselves alien.

Now ideally, right, it becomes a vehicle to self knowledge and self acquaintance or however you want to put it to self consciousness. And it actually can become a vehicle of the very opposite of alienation. But the first moment, at least logically, is that any labor that produces a product produces this alien entity outside of us. And I think that's how basic he's trying to be here. This is what I think he thinks is his very clever idea about how we do historical determinism. And it's almost definitional, it's almost logical that work will historically produce moment of alienation and then that has to be sublated and surpassed eventually.

So again we explain capitalism in terms of that, not that in terms of capitalism.

8:22 Dylan: This doesn't require capitalism. In fact, this analysis has to be more robust than a self conscious notion of capitalism, existing industrial society and stuff like that. The notion of division of labor and exchanging of having goods or objects that have labor in them and those having value that contribute either to a group of people or you trade to get other things. I mean those kinds of things have been around since forever as human beings.

8:49 Wes: So this is the story he's objecting to, right? So this is Adam Smith story is, hey, we live in a village, I make my swords and my bows. You make your swords and your bows and they both suck. Why don't you concentrate on making a bow? I'll concentrating on making a sword and then we'll trade and our standard of living will go up. It's just a natural thing to happen. Trade is just a natural part of human experience. What he's calling exchange in this or I think at certain points transfer of property. And then oops, we created factories and there's the pin maker that Adam Smith describes and you get this kind of of degrading sort of work.

So what do we do about that? Well, we've got to find some way around that. So that's the story. He doesn't like it's not just some accident that we end up with capitalism and industrial degradation. And it's not just some accident that exchange comes about. And it's not to be explained by human psychology. It's not just greed and avarice and people wanting to increase their standard of living. It functions, it rides on top of this fundamental logical, transcendent principle of the alienating factor of work. The fact that our relationship to the world of self conscious beings, when it involves working on the world, it involves putting ourselves in the world in a way as an alien entity and then having to overcome that split, having to overcome that division that we've created.

Now animals don't have to worry about that, right, because they're non self conscious. In the moment of capitalism, of course it gets really exacerbated, it's horrific. But it's there as a principle from the beginning.

10:22 Dylan: Let me just try to clarify that. So the idea is that just historically, well, pre capitalist or whatever, and I've started manipulating the world to build a shelter for myself, my sense which comes from that, that that's mine and I defend it against other people trying to encroach on it or all the psychological things that come with it, that I like it or I value it, that kind of thing. That's what Marx is talking about in terms of the labor that I've invested in possessing something that I my notion of saying I put work into this or I did this, I manipulated the world and therefore that manipulation, it makes it mine. And I have an otherness with respect to it. And it's resolving that otherness that we're talking about. How I deal with that fundamental alienness because I'm not estranged necessarily until I get to some other state.

11:19 Lawrence: It is important to distinguish here between Marx's notions of objectification and alienation. So when we produce something, we objectify it and we make our own nature external to ourselves. And that is that transforming of nature, that humanizing of nature. And in principle that can be non alienated, that can be a happy thing. But I think also to Wes's point, he does think that this phenomenon under capitalism, where the objectifications of our productive activity are then alienated, which bears down in a bad way on us, existed long before capitalism.

11:51 Dylan: Is this just fungibility? I'm trying to make the connection between I'm an early human and I'm like chucking flint off of a spear and I'm making a spear, right? I'm creating those things as part of my existence or tools that I'M creating. And there's a story of this that goes. Even till recently, I've invested my labor into it. And once the problem happened. This is what I'm trying to understand about what labor is and what estranged labor is.

12:16 Wes: I mean, I don't think we should harp too much on this because I'm just speculating. To me, he seems to say that we are not explaining alienation in terms of the existence of capitalism. We have to explain capitalism in terms of the fundamental way in which alienation is definitionally a consequence of a relation between a worker and a product, which I find confusing. And maybe I'm wrong about that and misinterpreting him because it sounds much more obvious, right? If we get to the point of capitalism. And then all his slogans apply, right? So the more wealth the worker produces, the poorer he becomes.

The more objects he produces, the fewer he possesses. That, you know, and you can go on and on, and that is clear under capitalism. But it doesn't seem to apply very well in this more basic moment that I'm speculating about. Except to the extent that the more I produce, the more depleted I become. In the sense of Lawrence, you're saying that objectification, it can be a happy thing, and I think that's right. But it sounds to me like it begins unhappy, just like Hegel's journey starts out unhappy for a long time before it gets solved.

13:22 Lawrence: I think we can tell a story that makes sense of this. So it's important that for Marx, what alienation fundamentally is, is our own alienation from our true nature. On 76, he writes, the whole character of a species, its species character is contained in the character of its life activity. So the way that it meets its needs for us, productive activity. Marx occasionally makes remarks saying, my analysis doesn't apply to prehistory, the first human beings. This may not work for them, but it works for every bit of history we have. We always already existed in a system of social coordination.

There's no Robinson Crusoe story to tell here, right? We were never alone. We were always together, doing things together. And within those systems of social coordination, there were always fundamental inequalities. There was always a division of labor that was unequal and unfair. And that unequal and unfair division of labor actually inhibits our capabilities as a species, is his claim. And insofar as we have limited capabilities, we are now only able to produce so much. We're not able to produce infinitely. We're only able to produce so much.

The claim here is that our Way of producing at this stage in history, and this is fundamental to our nature, is an alienated way of producing. And it is that alienated way of producing that gives rise to the visible system of private property.

Right?

It's because we have not yet developed enough as a species to do better. And so that's the sense in which private property springs from our alienation. And then in the Private Property and communism paper, he kind of hints at his account of where alienation begins historically. And he suggests, some feminist critics think this is a bit flat footed, but he suggests it begins in the biological division of labor between biological men and women. That already with childbearing we had the opportunity for inequality in human productive activity. Men were able to take advantage of the fact that women have to bear children to position themselves as the winning side of the division of labor. It may be accidental to our biological nature, but it's not historically accidental. It's been with us forever.

15:25 Mark: I think he leaves it kind of as an open question of can there be property that is not bad, that does not involve any sort of alienation? If he were open to these Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe, you know, mythical origin stories, then he could say, well, you know, the original people in nature, when they created stuff, they just kept it. It was their private property, but it was not alienated and there was no problem there. But the only way that we know private property now is within the system. System of unfairness and alienation. So I noticed in the third essay.

He mentions briefly on the second page of it, the meaning of private property liberated from its estrangement is the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of enjoyment and objects of activity. And I think when people object to, like communism, no private property, can you even imagine that they're thinking about, like your personal stuff? My photos, my guitar, my. The things that like I have this personal relationship to. And if I just had to share them with everybody all the time, my life wouldn't even make sense. There are extensions of our bodies.

If everybody could have their own iPhone, it works better. But I guess that's the question of what sort of things can be legitimately owned in his ideal system. I think that by saying estrangement is the root cause and it brings about the situation with current private property. Then he's in the second essay criticizing Proudhon, presumably, and these other early communists as saying, oh, we just get rid of private property or we just share, you know, everybody gets an equal wage. Something like that. Well, that leaves people still working in the factory Working in the fields, doing the alienated labor.

It's just that now they get to own more of it. And I've heard this is a criticism of communism, but here's Marx actually making this criticism that just fixing the ownership or paying you more for your slavery does not get rid of the fundamental slavery relation.

17:15 Dylan: Is the problem fungibility? Is that what it is? That our labor and the work that we do becomes fungible? And that's the fundamental notion of the alienation.

17:25 Mark: I mean, the third essay, power of money. Bourgeois society would suggest that this is certainly a related evil, that given that money can be turned into anything else, it becomes the God in society, which certainly alienates us from our own nature because it in fact makes everything turn upside down. People would naturally try to supplement, you know, build their own talents, for instance. But if you have money, you don't have to build your own talent. If you're ugly, you can just get a pretty person to do whatever, whatever the beauty would bring you. Since that's a separate essay, it's not entirely clear what the relationship between money and alienated product is, even though. So it seems pretty obvious, right? It's alienated because you sold your time for money, you sold the product for money, just to keep yourself alive.

18:09 Wes: I'm going to say one more thing about this more abstract version of alienation, that I think some version of it would have to be true. If we want to save his idea that private property is the result of alienation and not the other way around. We should think about the parallels with Kant and Fichte and Kant, the unity of experience is related to the ability to have faculties that construct these objects. But we're left with the alien thing in itself. By the time you get to ficta, we are positing this alien entity, which is the world itself, which poses a big problem for our freedom because it's this deterministic world and we need a unity and an absolute.

Apparently with young Hegelians, right, The absolute, if it contains God, and maybe even if it's just mind, is another alien object. But in this first essay, he'll say that what work does is it creates. The more you do, the more powerful an alien you're positing, right? With work that's like the practical version of fiction positing, you're producing the world, and the more you do that, the more of an alien thing outside of yourself you create that confronts you. It doesn't start out happy, right? There's a master slave paradox. Even by the time you get to the social part in Hegel, and that's the way it sounds like it starts out with worker and products of work.

So our inner world, he says, becomes impoverished by that activity. And he compares it to God. He says, the more you put into God, the less you retain in yourself. The more you put into the object of the labor, the less you retain in yourself. So I think it's something very fundamental. And then as it exists with private property and as it exists with capitalism is just a consequence of that more basic principle. And it explains why Marx would say that's inevitable. I don't know that we can explain why he thinks capitalism is necessary historically without appealing to those parallels.

Right. To people like Fichte. So labor and then object become this alien, hostile existence or power.

20:06 Lawrence: I think the reading that Wes is giving is one that establishes a kind of continuity between Fichte, Hegel and Marx in their method. And because of Marx's proximity to Hegel and the way that he writes it, admits of that interpretation. But unfortunately, because of the way Marx writes, there's a kind of number of interpretations one can give. One thing that we see later in Marx is that he starts to say explicitly, the account that I'm giving is not presuppositionless. I am presupposing things like biology, geology, all these contingent facts about nature.

And so if we look at this account with that in view, we can say, well, alienation doesn't need to function as a kind of first principle at the beginning. It's a contingent fact about human beings. We just are the kinds of creatures that start out alienated. You know, we're not fully capable of expressing our essential powers. And in the course of history, we will eventually become fully capable of expressing our essential powers. And the facts about society at any one stage are explained by the current limitations of our ability to express our essential powers.

That story doesn't have that necessary quality of a Fichte or a Hegel. That might feel dissatisfying if you have a more Hegelian read on Marx. But there's ways of reading Marx as not being quite as worried about that.

21:19 Wes: Yeah, you know, when he gets to the point where he's talking about the sensuous external world, it provides the laborer with work materials, raw material to work with, to fashion into an object. It also supplies us with physical subsistence. And then we get him saying things like, well, the more we appropriate the external world, the more it ceases to be a raw material for us. So, for instance, you know, you could think about this in Terms of the environment. But if I were just sitting in a room by myself and I only had a certain number of supplies and I'm making things for myself to the more I make, the more objects I produce, the more I'm running out of raw materials, including raw materials that I need for my own physical subsistence.

So I think he thinks this dialectic is really built into the nature of labor and work. And then he'll go on this is on page 72 to talk about the worker becoming slave to the object. Again, I don't think that's just under capitalism. I may be wrong, but it's just, just puzzling how to make this work, how to make capitalism second and not first. When it comes to alienation.

22:22 Lawrence: I'm not having as hard a time, I guess, doing that. So there's a naive view of a kind of, you know, return all the people, they want to go back to hunter gatherer times or whatever. And this notion we see in a lot of the social contract theorists about the Earth is just this boundless bounty of resources for human beings to consume. And, and you have this idea of like the yeoman farmer or the individual who makes their own food and chops down trees to make their own house and tends their own pigs or whatever. And there's a naive view about the creation of surplus which then allows you to start the exchange process using the medium of money to blah blah, blah, right.

So if you buy Marx's notion that alienation is just part of labor, it's part of production, it's part of work, you can buy that and not necessarily buy his coherent account of the development of historical economic systems as some sort of world historical manifestation of the spirit of alienation. What you have to buy is it's there. Human beings are necessarily social, so it's going to America emerge. The challenges that it presents for human self actualization, for human interaction with nature, for human interaction with each other are going to arise regardless of what type of economic system or exchange system exists.

It so happens that we can trace whatever we have feudalism through blah blah, blah, blah blah. And we're in capitalism. And that has its own particularly pernicious or unique characteristic. But I don't think you have to make the strong connection between alienation and any particular economic system in order to be able to explain it. What I do think you have to do though is you have to make a very strong connection between alienation and self consciousness. Because the only beings on the planet that get alienated from their labor are us and the only thing that makes us different from every other being on the planet is our self consciousness.

24:30 Wes: Seth, don't drag us into another conversation about species being.

24:34 Lawrence: No, no, no, I'm not what I'm trying to say, but I think it

24:37 Wes: is a good segue to the. What he calls the fourth aspect of estrangement or alienation, which is of man, human being from human being. Yeah, which starts on page 79.

24:47 Lawrence: The point being, alienation is essential to our nature, not to work. It's essential. Or maybe it's contingent. Sorry, Lawrence. Maybe it's contingent. Maybe. But the point is, is that self consciousness gives birth to alienation, which is a very Hegelian thing to say.

25:01 Mark: Before we jump forward, I want to just point out something on page 74. What then constitutes the alienation of labor? First, the fact that the labor is external to the worker. It does not belong to his essential being. That in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself, but denies itself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not freely develop his physical mental energy, but mortifies his body, ruins his mind. The worker, therefore, only feels himself outside of his work and in his work, feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working.

And when he is working, he is not at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced. It is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need, but merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. So I wanted to see what you thought of this. I think a lot of people who are critical of communism, you know, if you just ask somebody is, they will deny that most workers are forced in any way. Like, well, you could quit that job and you could go to another job and you could point out what? Well, but all the other jobs are equally shitty as this job or, you know, whatever.

But you're not going to convince the capitalist, right, that the capitalist thinks that the foundations of their system is. It is voluntary. You are not literally slaves. Wage slave is sort of a hyperbolic, oh, poor me, I have to work for a living. It's merely nature that is controlling us. The curse of Adam is we all have to get up in the morning and do something to keep ourselves alive. And that's human nature. And isn't it good that we have all these employers that are willing to let us slot in and fulfill that need? And so it's definitely not coerced, certainly not just by another human being.

26:34 Wes: When I see phrases like mortifies his body and ruins his mind, I think, well, he's talking about conditions under capitalism. And the factory. But then I'm like, wait, isn't he supposed to be right now telling us how alienation comes first? And I wonder if it should be reading it more broadly, in which case, Mark, it would fit more with that second theory that you gave, which is that we're just focused on survival and it doesn't have to be in a capitalist society. It just could be as cavemen, early human beings, then, yeah, in a sense it is forced labor.

It's always a means to an ends. If you're focused on survival at the point where it becomes something that we do for the sake of itself, it's art. Or it's other sort of sublimating, satisfying forms of work which don't. Well, they exist a little bit for cavemen apparently, because they did put the hand they did to depict cave paintings. So they had a of lot little time for that. But you know what I mean. So again, I.

27:26 Mark: The cavemen, they only had to work two hours a day and then they were lying around.

27:31 Wes: Yeah, I keep harping on the point, even though I say I'm going to stop, but I wonder if this paragraph shouldn't be read more broadly because we don't want to explain alienation in terms of capitalism. We don't want to say, oh, it's because they're in a factory. They're in a factory because of alienation.

27:45 Lawrence: I take it this is an analysis of alienation under capitalism. That doesn't mean that there wasn't alienation under previous modes of production. Like you can remain committed to the idea that the human species has been alienated for effectively its entire history and then still give a concrete analysis of what form that alienation takes under this mode of production.

28:05 Wes: Right, yeah.

28:05 Mark: You wouldn't necessarily get the. The more you create, the more impoverished you are, unless you're under a market economy where, oh, I've been more productive. That just means there's less need for the stuff that you create.

28:17 Wes: Unless you've cut down all the trees nearby.

28:20 Dylan: Right, sure.

28:21 Wes: Let's do the relation of man to man.

28:24 Dylan: Yeah.

Alienation just means that I am not actualizing my freedom. Is that all that? Is that what alienation means? Such that I can analyze alienation to be true of human beings from the get go.

28:35 Mark: The part that I just read, I was reading as severance, like, you know, the TV show that your work life is no longer like in a natural state, then like just getting along in the world. That would involve doing stuff to keep yourself alive. And that would be sort of Part of the organic whole of your life. That would not be enslaving you in itself. The fact you have material needs. It's only under capitalism that your work life has been sliced off so that you are no longer at home at work. And you're no longer at work at home.

29:05 Wes: I felt this way in many jobs. Like, I don't want my mind to be hijacked by this particular activity that I want. Would never be doing in my life if I didn't need it to survive. You've never felt that way?

29:18 Dylan: No, I'm not saying that I haven't felt that way. What I'm saying is, I mean, isn't living even in a community where I'm working with a group of people just to live? I mean, most of human history involves us dying unless we work together. Right. And that working together is absolutely required unless we want to die. We're not enslaved to nature. I mean, look, is that different than this? It doesn't seem like it's different to me. It just seems like we can blame a different set of environmental circumstances and social circumstances for things that we have to do.

I have to work for a living. Yeah. Okay. And, you know, and there's aspects of that that, you know, ways in which I'm having to subject my existence to that. And I completely agree with that. But if I have to plant my food or go hunt for everything or I have to build my house or. And I'm going to freeze to death unless I build my house, how am I not a slave to all of that? All that necessity?

30:14 Lawrence: This will also come in private property and communism. But Marx grants that we also begin in a condition of alienation from nature.

30:20 Dylan: Yeah. Okay.

30:21 Lawrence: So our ability to act on nature and to meet our needs with the help of nature begins in a very limited state. And then through our practical interventions, we make ourselves more capable and more capable and in that way transform nature and make our relationship to nature less and less alien. And so he has a way to account for that kind of intuition. His claim is that we begin also in this state of severe social alienation. In the way that we organize our interventions in nature gives rise to all kinds of ugly class divisions, you know, inequalities. And that those inequalities have ramifying negative consequences for all of our capabilities, like intellectual, emotional, our ability to see clearly. And that's why he focuses on that. But in the course of human progress, we're going to remedy both, he thinks, social alienation and alienation from nature.

31:12 Dylan: Yes.

31:13 Mark: So I brought up nature in this just to get us to the part that Wes wants to get us to, which is that he specifically says on page 89, nature is not our subjugator. It's not just that the circumstances of the world are such that we have to. To work somewhere or other. No, it is. It is other people. When you're in a state, when you as a worker are having the product of your labor stripped from you, somebody is doing that to you.

31:35 Lawrence: Is it the case that it can only be another human being? Because, and this is maybe gets us back to the question of what constitutes labor. But to just refer to what Dylan just said, Nature doesn't force us to act and then take the product of our action. Now, nature can put us in a situation, like you said, where I have to build shelter or I'll freeze to death. But that's precisely a kind of production that I think is just animal. And it's quite different than what Marx is talking about. Marx literally means we can think of that in terms of like the great 19th century, like man against nature, man against God, man against man, whatever.

But alienation in some way, it involves a dehumanization in some way, shape or form, and it involves that through a kind of theft. And it's also, like we said earlier, a suppression of essential parts of your nature. If you're out in the wilderness and there's a snowstorm coming and you have to build shelter, that's an existential situation for you. And in a kind of perverted sense, you are fully experiencing your human. Like when you are faced with an existential threat, you fully experience what it's like like to be a human because you're fully experiencing the possibility of the end of your mortality and so forth.

And you don't have money, at least theoretically, in this example, you don't have money to hire somebody to do the things that maybe you're going to struggle with to build the house. So it's just like you're left to your own devices in a sense. Like maybe part of the Marxian project, right, is we, through money and through our participation in the system, have become so disconnected with the. Those basic skills. All the survivalist people and, you know, whatever, like, they're like, we have to build up our skills because you never know when you're going to get forced back into nature and back on your animal self or whatever.

And you're. You never know when you're going to be fully, authentically human, be faced with an existential threat that'll make you fully authentically human. So here's a six day course for $15,000 where an instructor will take you through. No, but this is what I'm saying is there probably is an example we can find that's more convoluted than that one. I get your point. But I also understand how only another human being could be the one that would theoretically be capable of making you estranged.

One of Seth's points there. Marx does claim that even suffering is a kind of enjoyment when done humanly. This is one of our capabilities. We can express our capability to take in the world and take in circumstances and take in exigencies. That can be a kind of satisfaction when it's done in a properly human way, as opposed to an alienation way. But for Marx that would be possible only under communism.

34:12 Wes: Part of what he gets at in this section is the way in which he'll say, and this sounds very Hegelian, a man's relation to himself only becomes objective and real for him through his relation to the other man. So this is Hegelian recognition stuff. But that potentially reciprocal relationship is screwed up if there's a master slave dynamic going on because one person owns the labor. It sounds like he's talking about capitalism. Right, because he'll say the workers. One worker's torment is another's delight. That's a very extreme situation.

34:46 Mark: I thought it's the capitalist delight. Right, because you're producing the product out of your sweat and blood.

34:51 Wes: Right, Another human. He doesn't say capitalist, but another human being's delight. Okay, but. Right, you can imagine how at any stage in trade, if I'm producing swords merely as commodities, so I can give them to you do to get bows and arrows and other stuff and wheat, whatever, then I would imagine the product confronts, you know, Marx might say, well, that product now confronts me as alien. It doesn't really belong to me anymore. It's not something I've made for myself. It's not something I've made purely for aesthetic reasons. But it is now just something I've made purely as an object of trade, purely as a means to some other end.

So I think there's alienation and estrangement in that, that you can't find yourself so much in your work object and your act of sublimation if it is simply for the sake of trade. Even before you get to the point where you're a factory worker being exploited by the capitalist. And that's why, you know, when he ends the section, he ends it by saying labor Estrangement produces the labor capitalist relationship. Private property is the product, the necessary consequence of, of alienated labor, not the other way around. So you don't explain alienated labor in terms of capitalism, private property, you do

36:01 Dylan: it the other way around.

36:01 Wes: And that is the big interesting counterintuitive point he's trying to make in this essay. And it's the one he's going to use to draw a distinction between himself and other quote, unquote crude communists.

36:15 Mark: So in the short time we have remaining, should we try to say a little about what this post alienation, when the alienation is sublated. Oh, it's going to be so awesome.

36:24 Lawrence: Awesome.

36:25 Mark: Did somebody have a good quote from the second essay?

36:28 Wes: Well, this is where he seems to be talking about his famous superstructures. So human institutions and cultural arrangements as kind of riding on top of the more fundamental material layers. So he will say, quote, religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, are only particular modes of production and fall under its general law all. And that's why you can say that if you transcend private property, you transcend the forms of estrangement inherent in those institutions. And so he will say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc to his human, that is social mode of existence is the transcendence of estrangement.

Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness of man's inner life. But economic estrangement arrangement is that of real life. So here we have him saying our authentic social mode of existence involves not just overcoming the alienation involved in religion, but in other institutions like family and state. And again, those institutional relation forms reflect the modes of production that underlie them. So the question is, what happens? It's not free love, Right? He rants about the collective ownership of women. Right.

And prostitution uses that as a metaphor for crude communism, state capitalism.

37:51 Mark: That's an interesting metaphor. Could we just pause on that just for a second? So the idea is marriage is inherently exploitative, like it's men owning women. Well, if the solution for that is saying let's have all the men own all the women in common, that would not be an improvement by comparison. Oh, everybody has their own store of property. These are my goods. If we just said, well, we still have this ownership relationship thing, but everybody owns everything in common, so I could just take your toothbrush, whatever, like that would in fact be worse. It certainly wouldn't fix whatever is wrong. We have some sort of this, this dominating relationship to things, to property. And if there's going to be a healthy post exploitative notion of property. It has to be something that is less creepy.

38:37 Lawrence: Right. Marx thinks that that would just be a kind of universalization of some of the kind of kinds of poverty and envy that we experience under the private property system. I'll also just point out because it's kind of surprising and significant in Marx that he. Well, first, the reason that possibility even occurs to Marx that collective ownership of women might be a form of communism is because some earlier communists argued for that sort of thing. And he's rejecting it as like obviously stupid and evil. And the explanation he gives for why is because he thinks that the biological relationship involved in reproduction is the most natural human relationship.

And the status of that relationship, for instance, whether it involves a slavery relationship is the surest indicator of how advanced we are as a species. Like if the relationship of man to woman is a relationship of enslavement, clearly we are not living under communism. That's a nice kind of negative indicator. If you want to know whether a system is communism, look at the relationship between men and women.

39:32 Wes: He gives a very psychological account of the ways in which we. Or of what transcendence of private property would mean. Right. Some of it's very abstract, like the sensuous appropriation of our own essence. But a lot of it sounds like we would have a different attitude towards the world. It wouldn't be instrumental. It's almost like he wants an attitude towards the world that Kant wanted us to have towards other people. We don't treat it merely as an ends. We can have a non instrumental relationship to it. Which doesn't mean necessarily just aesthetic because that's the way that we usually think of this non instrumental relationship to what otherwise would be objects of appetite.

He'll talk about the transcendence of private property, emancipating the senses, making them human, basically humanizing the objects, making them more like mirrors for ourselves in which we can become more self conscious, in which we can realize our individuality. All quite heady stuff here.

40:27 Lawrence: One thing you might come away from this essay feeling is like disappointment that we don't get a more concrete picture. And that's not accidental. Marx doesn't think that we can or should try to describe in detail what institutions will arise under conditions of non alienated labor. Because those institutions will spring from non alienated labor. This is not something we can prescribe from an alienated condition to our non alienated successors. In a way, they are the authorities on what institutions should arise. We are actually inhibited. We are less capable than the people who will decide how to organize these institutions.

41:03 Mark: Right. We can't necessarily say what the institutions will look like. We can say more about what we will look like. That we will lack some of the limitations that we currently have. That if you are a starving person, everything looks like a delicious piece of food. If you are a mercantile, if you're a trader, everything is just going to be like, what's the deal? How, how can I. We limit ourselves and people not under these conditions of necessity, not under the social motivations, these institutions that encourage us to be very narrow. We will have a much more open, aesthetic, appreciative attitude.

And I think this is getting at Dylan. The very first thing you brought up in part one of this discussion seemed to be that he had this picture of mastery. Oh, it's us taking nature, making, pushing nature down and making ourselves the God of it. And maybe that is part of the story of how we initially deal with nature and why alienation comes out of it so quickly. But I think we can see here that that is not his goal, that is not his overall picture of our true nature.

42:00 Dylan: It does seem just utopian. Utopian in the sense of a complete confluence of the interests and realization of our own freedom in a not unconflicted way with the realization of everybody else's freedom in a way that leads to the production of the things that actualize those freedoms. That sounds great, but it's also very convenient that we remove the notion of what institutions and what structures of our relations between one another that actually facilitate that to happen. I'm glad Marx feels like, well, you know, those things will naturally arise, just like the invisible hand of capitalism that will in fact make it so that everything works out okay, it's just great that we can just avoid that.

There's all these criticisms of capitalism and like the alienation that we have with respect to work, especially in industrial society. You know, I just, I get what I found myself really reacting to was this utopian nature of the relation end game. That that's the thing we're going to get to that just seems to resolve the relationship between the individual and the community. Community in a way that just doesn't seem true because it seems to me that it just seems so clear that that relationship is one that will always be full of tension, that the interests of the individual are not commensurate with the interest of the community in a utopian way.

And it's that problem that needs to get resolved. And if you say that the solution to that problem is to make it so that there's going to be a future where they all just work together just seems to be dodging the problem. Problem. So the symptoms being diagnosed seem to be real symptoms. But the notion that the resolution of those symptoms to resolve in our alienation by making the alignment of the goods of the community with the goods of the individual. And that will just happen by us removing the sources of that alienation. I came away feeling like, no wonder he's such a polemic.

He's a priest. That's what I came away feeling like. Everything he writes is like, he's like a priest. And that's why it's so appealing, because there's nothing about it that is pragmatic about the way in which recognizing those tensions exist between us being individuals that are part of a community but are not the same thing.

44:15 Mark: So that's a great preview of what we're going to get. We actually have laid ourselves out that this is going to be a three episode voyage. The second one is actually going to be just on Feuerbach. Introduction to the Essence of Christianity and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future are the ones that Lawrence recommended for us. But then we're going to return to Marx and I think that we can really go freeform in our critiques. But Lawrence, we have not yet determined whether you're going to join us for any of that subsequent stuff. So, yes, address the audience as if this were your last word to them.

44:43 Lawrence: I guess I'll just say one word of defense of Marx here is that this really shows us that this text is doing a kind of metaphysics where he's asking the question, what is alienated human nature? What would be non alienated human nature? He hasn't talked about a mechanism that would bring us from alienated nature to non alienated nature. That does come in later in his work where because in our alienated nature we always arrive at social configurations that involve class difference, massive inequality, that massive inequality is always going to lead to conflict. That conflict is always going to lead to social structural change. He does have a hopeful notion that that social structural change will converge over time toward non alienated nature. And he spends a good part of the rest of his career trying to articulate how that mechanism really works at a kind of naturalistic level.

45:33 Wes: And we know from our episode on German ideology that critically involves technology, advances in the means of production. And it's a very important insight as a historical driving force.

45:44 Lawrence: And that has surely borne itself out to be true.

45:46 Mark: All right, thanks everybody. That's the end of this part of this. See you next time. Thank you so much, Lawrence, for joining us.

45:52 Lawrence: Thank you for having me.

Thanks, Lawrence.

45:54 Wes: Thank you.

45:54 Dylan: Yeah, thanks, Lawrence. It's just great having you on.

45:56 Mark: People should follow us at partiallyexaminedlife.com on Facebook, on X.com, on Instagram, email us pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com you can suggest things for us to cover. We will have a whole month before we reconvene to explicitly discuss Marx again. So there probably is actually room for you Marxists or anti Marxists or whatever, to send your emails reaction to things we've said and will at least address them in a nightcap. We'd love to do that. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks, everybody, and good night.

46:24 Lawrence: Good night.

46:25 Dylan: Good night.

46:26 Wes: Good night.