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Marx's Dialectic of LaborAuthor(s): G. A. CohenReviewed work(s):Source: Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Spring, 1974), pp. 235-261Published by: Wiley-BlackwellStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2264980.Accessed: 26/09/2012 07:21

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236 Philosophy & Public Affairs

mind and the world, predating any form of reflection. The mind doesnot experience itself as divided from the world, and is incapable ofdistinguishing things and aspects in what lies before it. The elementsof the object are merged, and the subject is merged with them. Under-standing is the sphere of analysis: the subject asserts a distinctionbetween itself and the object, of an absolute kind, and is able to dis-criminate parts and features of the object. Understanding is a neces-sary phase in the acquisition of knowledge, but it must be surpassedby reason, which maintains understanding's distinctions, yet alsorecognizes deeper unities beyond understanding's competence. Rea-son recaptures the integration understanding suspended, withoutrenouncing the achievements premised on that suspension.Epistemology is not the only area Hegel trisected in the mannerjust sketched. While I do not seek endorsement of his procedure inepistemology or in general, I do submit that the rhythm realized inthe progress exhibited above sometimes occurs in a person's develop-ment. With respect to categorially various items to which a personmay be related-his spouse, his family, his country, his job, his role,his body, his desires-it seems possible for him to sustain somethinglike each of the three attitudes we have separated. He may fail insignificant ways to distinguish himself and what he is from the otherto which he is related; he may possess a strong sense of its otherness,so that it seems alien to him; or he may have that sense, yet find itcompatible with close engagement. What is more, it sometimes hap-pens that he occupies the three positions successively, in the orderHegel thought canonical in epistemology and elsewhere.A domain offering examples of the sequence Hegel favored is thatof marriage. In its early stages a person may feel his interests andpurposes to be identical with those of his spouse. Both may feel thatway, and thus combine their lives to an extent which from outsidelooks artificial or moronic. But then one or both may revolt againstfusion, and become hostile to continued connection. Finally, a newharmony may supervene, not through relapse into complete mutualabsorption, real or pretended, but by discovery of a unity which is notantagonistic to the individuality of each.Referring to this sequence in intimate relations, Hegel wrote in hisfragment On Love that the process is: unity, separated opposites,

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237 Marx's Dialectic of Labor

reunion. 2He thought the course of true love always has this structure,but we need not agree when we acknowledge that there is such astructure, and that it deserves attention. The term dialecticar' willhereafter be applied to processes of the envisaged kind. I shall say thata subject undergoes a dialectical process if it passes from a stagewhere it is undivided from some object, through a stage where it di-vides itself from it in a manner which creates disunity, to a stagewhere distinction persists but unity is restored. I shall label the suc-cessive stages undifferentiated unity, differentiated disunity, anddifferentiated unity. Finally, a process may be deemed dialectical,but incompletely so, if it passes from the first to the second stagewithout achieving the third, or from the second to the third withoutoriginating in the first.I shall be meaning nothing more than this by the term dialecticalhere. Some of the things to which so using the term does not commitme are worth noting.First, I do not maintain that all processes of spiritual growth aredialectical in the specified sense.Second, I do not claim that mine is the only defensible use of theterm, where a use of dialectical s defensible if it is both clear andappropriatelyrelated to some Hegelian or Marxian use.Finally, I do not affirm any dialectical laws. Processes displayingthe required structure count as dialectical whether or not their stagesgenerate one another: it is enough that they follow one another, forwhatever reason. In seeing dialectic in a process, we discern its con-tour in an intellectually satisfying manner, but the explanation ofwhy it unfolds as it does is not thereby disclosed to us. I am not as-serting that there is something necessary or natural about dialecticalsequence, not claiming that subjectivity merged with an object tendsin time to propel itself away from the object, and then tends to reunitewith it, the independence it has gained being preserved. But I do thinkmany processes in which subject and object are implicated in chang-ing relation are well conceived as transitions from undifferentiatedunity, through differentiated disunity, to differentiated unity.This concept of dialectic is the descriptive residue of a conceptwhich Hegel certainly, and Marx perhaps, thought had explanatory

2. OnLove, Early Theological Writings (Chicago, 1948), p. 308.

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import as well. Whether it admits of explanatory construal is a ques-tion not pursued here.Hegel constructs dialectical sequences in all his major works. Aparticularly clear one is his presentation of Ethical Life, the namehe gave to the object of philosophical sociology. Ethical Life beginswith the family, a sphere of merger, the members being immediatelyconcerned in one another'swelfare, not externally bound by calculatedties of advantage. The weal and woe of any member of the family isexperienced as such by each. Counterposed to the family is civil so-ciety, a collection of mutually autonomous individuals released fromthe family cocoon, engaged in economic competition and cooperation.Independence and separation predominate, and partnerships dependon unfeeling contract. But civil society is subordinate to the state,that is, not the political institutions merely, but the entire nationalcommunity, which sustains the independence at work in economic lifebut complements it by providing collective identity and culture. Thefamily shows undifferentiated unity, civil society differentiated dis-unity, and the state differentiated unity.

Turning to Marxism, we may cite the legendary development fromprimitive communism, a collective structure and consciousness in-hibiting individuation, through the divisions of class society, whichstimulate an assertion of selfhood, to modern communism, preservingindividuality in a context of regained collectivity.The sequence primitive communism/class society/modern commu-nism is more prominent in Soviet and kindred doctrine than in thethought of Marx, which is dominated by a different triad: from pre-capitalist society, through capitalism, to the communism of the future.Whereas precapitalist society, even in its class-divided forms, displaysthe appearance of community in a society integrated with nature,capitalism sets individuals against one another, and society againstnature. Communism preserves the inherited individuation, but re-stores community, and equilibrium between man and his environ-ment. 'The association of the future' will combine the sober reason-ableness of the bourgeois era with the 'care for the common socialwelfare' which characterised previous societies. 3 The Marxian

3. Hal Draper, in The Socialist Register (London, 1970), p. 305, quoting an un-published I884 fragment. For an interesting exposition of communism's many

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would enable him to think of it as impeding him, or dictating to him.He does not experience it as in opposition to his will, for it envelopshis will.A young child is in the thrall of his parents' ideas and values. Theyenter his being, and control him more directly than by means of thepunishments and rewards required once his identity is more devel-oped. In Hegel's language, the immature person's will is (in part)immediately identical with that of his seniors. But the identity is notsymmetrical. Though the child's world is the world of his parents,theirs is not the world of the child. One may say that he knows themto be separate from him, yet does not know himself to be separate fromthem.

To the extent that such a child is engulfed, he does not feel con-strained. But no engulfment is total. The self is never effaced by en-vironing circumstances or other selves. Hence engulfment by X iscompatible with a feeling of constraint by Y, where X and Y are dis-tinct: a person lacking the freedom of detachment may also experi-ence obstacles to, and pressures upon, his will. It is necessary to iden-tify finely the values X and Y take here. The child may be engulfed byhis parents in some of their manifestations and not others.

Engulfment in X involves lack of awareness of oneself as capableof independence from X. This includes the case of the child, who isnot in fact so capable, and the case of the spouse, who is but does notgrasp the fact. In either instance, engulfment does not survive a lucidrecognition of the nature of one's relation to the engulfing agency.When that relation becomes perspicuous, it is broken. It may thenbe true that the unfreedom of engulfment is replaced by an experienceof constraint. Iwas unaware how much I fell in with X's desires andintentions, how much my life was immersed in his. But I becameaware, and I now experience X and his plans as an obstacle to me.One could not be aware of that immersion. (It does not follow that theidea of a feeling of engulfment is self-contradictory, though it doesfollow that any such feeling will include at most a confused awarenessof engulfment.)The characterization of engulfment ventured above is incomplete.I have, for example, left it open whether engulfment by X is com-

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24I Marx's Dialectic of Labor

patible with constraint by X. This suggests a reductive maneuver whichwould eliminate the interest of the concept. Someone hostile to myattempt to find in engulfment the absence of a freedom which is notfreedom from constraint might contend that if I have a phenomenonin view it is just that of an agent who is constrained without realizingit. The contention is mistaken: this will not suffice for engulfment.For a person may know himself to be independent of X, yet not knowthat X promises the failure of a project he has. He may not know thatsomeone of his acquaintance by whom he is in no sense enthralled hasensured that he will have to act against his wishes. Or he may notknow that a door through which he wants to pass is locked, and sois forcing him to remain in the room.Here there is ignorance of constraint without engulfment. Whatmust be added-added if engulfment is indeed compatible with con-straint-is that the subject does not experience himself as independentof X. That conception requires further clarification, but the latter isnot supplied by the clear idea of a constrained person's not knowingthat he is constrained.III. TRADITIONAL AND MODERN LABORMany observers of the emerging factory civilization pictured the an-cestral work scene as a garden from which the rhythms of capitalistdevelopment expelled the producers, to deposit them in an industrialhell. The artistic work of the handicraftsman, performed for its ownsake, not merely for the living it yields, appears in favorable con-trast to the alienated toils of working class life. Traces of this outlookmay be found in Marixs writings. But he does not finally accept theromantic attitude that the new society disrupted a preindustrial idyll.5For he thinks the very values of traditional artisanship reveal theengulfment of the artificer. His contentment with, and absorption in,his own narrow trade compose what Marx deemed a slavish relation-ship. 6He identifies with his work and his role, but his mind is sub-

5. For an idealized conception of preindustrial life, with which Marx andEngels were to break, see the opening pages of Engels's Condition of the Work-ing Class in England in I844 (any edition).

6. The German Ideology (London, I965), p. 67.

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jected to his occupation, whereas the modem proletarian does not careabout the job he performs, or what kind of job it iS.7 The wageworker'sindifference manifests his alienation. But it also betokens a birth offreedom. The artisan using his own means of production, typicallyhanded down by his father, is caught like a snail inside its shell ;8but the fact that the nineteenth-century worker is propertyless, whichexplains his misery, signifies an independence, a detachment fromthis particular machine and this particular job, a disengagement theguildsman does not know.

Engels is not just thinking of the future when he finds such disen-gagement appealing:... it was absolutely necessary to cut the umbilical cord which stillbound the worker of the past to the land. The hand weaver who hadhis little house, garden and field along with his loom was a quiet,contented man, 'godly and honourable,' despite all misery and de-spite all political pressure; he doffed his cap to the rich, to thepriest and to the officials of the state and inwardly was altogethera slave. It is precisely modern large-scale industry which has turnedthe worker, formerly chained to the land, into a completely prop-ertyless proletarian, liberated from all traditional fetters, a freeoutlaw. ... 9The person here called free s typically forced to spend the best

part of his time and energy doing what he has no inclination to do,in factory labor. That he does not doff his cap to the rich is compatiblewith their extensive control over him. He has not escaped constraint:he has won the freedom of detachment. By contrast, the workerof thepast could not so much as conceive the idea'10 of rejecting his con-ditions of life. He understood himself only as part of them.

The transition is from engulfment in nature, one's work, and one'srole in a society itself engulfed in nature; a passage from what Marx7. Idem. See also Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen okonomie (Berlin,

1953), p. 204; and Excerpt-Notes of I844, in Writings of the Young Marx onPhilosophy and Society, eds. Easton and Guddat (Garden City, I967), p. 276.8. Capital i (Moscow, I96I), p. 359.9. The Housing Question, Marx-Engels Selected Works I, p. 563. (All em-phases reproduced from original, unless otherwise stated.)Io. Ibid., p. 564.

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called naturwiichsig conditions of existence, to alienation, abstractindividuality, and the freedom of detachment. At one point Marxstates the difference cryptically: only wageworkers stand in a relationto their conditions of labor and life.'2 He means one can be related tosomething only if one is suitably independent of it, whereas medievalworkers are, he says, merged with their instruments of labor.'3

This merger was not a useless misfortune, for the subjection ofthe producer to one branch exclusively ... is a necessary step in thedevelopment of the human productive faculty. The enclosure of theworker inside a definite locale within the material and social condi-tions of production ensures that

each separate branch of production acquires the form that is tech-nically suited to it, slowly perfects it, and, so soon as a given degreeof maturity has been reached, rapidly crystallises that form.Even the shape of the instruments of labor

once definitely settled by experience, petrifies, as is proved by theirbeing in many cases handed down in the same form by one genera-tion to another during thousands of years.Thereby the worker and the tools come to fit one another. But capitalistindustry violates this happy accommodation. The new modern sci-ence of technology resolves each production process into its constit-uent movements, without any regard to their possible execution bythe hand of man.'4 The inhumane disregard breaks the snail's shell.The resultant transition is dialectical in the sense specified insection i. In the first stage the craftsman is fastened to his work facil-ities and surroundings, absorbed into a particular cell within the bodysocial, which is at peace with nature. The proletarian is free of suchencumbrance, but also bereft of the solace and security it confers. Heenjoys an independence but loses the possession the craftsman knew.To complete the dialectic, the socialist producer would have to estab-

ii. This term is discussed in section iv.I2. Grundrisse, p. 389.13. Ibid., p. 404 (tr. in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, ed. Hobsbawm

[London, I9641, p. io8).I4. Capital i, pp. 485-486, my emphasis.

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lish some new form of unity with his situation, without sacrificing theacquired autonomy.The respective experiences of craftsman and proletarian, the con-trasting phenomenologies of their everyday lives, reflect and consoli-date similarly antithetical ownership positions.'5 The preproletarianlaborer has the right and the duty to work with particular means ofproduction in a particular place. He is both endowed with and boundto particular means of production. The proletarian lacks the right andthe duty to work in any particular factory. A labor contract, whichneither he nor his employer need renew, is required for him to engagein production.

For Marx, the central episode in the genesis of capitalism is a dualseverance of the laborer from his means of production. Gone are hisintimate control of and by them, and his rights over, and duties to,them. The prelude to capitalism isa series of historical processes, resulting in a Decomposition of theOriginal Union existing between the Labouring Man and his Instru-ments of Labour.... The Separation between the Man of Labourand the Instruments of Labour once established, such a state ofthings will maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantlyincreasing scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in themode of production should again overturn it, and restore the orig-inal union in a new historical form.16

So we again encounter: undifferentiated unity, differentiation withoutunity, differentiated unity.Marx's dialectic of labor draws upon Hegel's dialectic of conscious-ness and nature, but adds emphasis on the technological aspect. Thecraftsman is sunk in the object, nature, means of production, land, theimmediate environment. The son succeeds his father as one seasongives way to the next: it is his natural destiny.17 The conflict between15. Or production relations. For the connection between ownership and pro-duction relations, see my On Some Criticisms of Historical Materialism, Pro-ceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 1970.i6. Wages, Price and Profit, Marx-Engels Selected Works I, p. 425. Cf.Grundrisse, p. 404 (tr. ed. Hobsbawm, p. I08), pp. 850-851; Capital i, part viii.17. See the quotation from Hegel's Realphilosophie in Avineri, Hegel's Theoryof the Modern State (Cambridge, 1972), p. io6 n. 66.

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consciousness and nature is undeveloped. It explodes under capital-ism, as man splits himself off from nature, and splits it apart, exercis-ing a destructive freedom. Capitalism is spirit in its negative form,assaulting nature and hallowed naturwiuchsig social conditions. Afreely realized unity is established under socialism. Nature is returnedto spirit, but it is now a spiritualized nature.

The materialist elaboration of these formulae stresses that craftproduction keeps man attached to nature by blocking the further de-velopment of the productive faculty it once advanced, since it hindersthe collectivization of labor, which is a premise of increasing produc-tivity. In handicraft the workermanages a total process of production.He employs his own instruments in his own shop and fashions a com-plete article, which he can call his own work. He does not serve up afragment to be joined to other fragments made by other men, ormerely add a contribution to an ensemble traveling along the factoryfloor. Capitalism socializes labor and insults craft pride, but becauseit makes the laborer cooperate systematically with others, he stripsoff the fetters of his individuality and develops the capabilities of hisspecies. 18

Man transcends his limitations by working with others, and submis-sion to the capitalist division of labor enables the stupendous produc-tive feats of which the race is capable. The Promethean virtues listedin Marx'scharacterization of specifically human labor19are realized asproperties of the factory or industry as a whole.20But under capitalismthese values make only an alienated appearance. The power of thespecies is not suffused through its members. It confronts them assomething foreign,21as the possession of the capitalist, who monopo-lizes intention and knowledge. The capitalist may be personally ignor-

i8. Capital i, p. 329. Cf. ibid., pp. 76I-762.I9. See Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Karl Marx: EarlyWritings, ed. Bottomore (London, I963), p. I28; and Capital I, pp. 177-178. ForMarx human labor, as opposed to the animal's, is in its higher forms character-ized by intentionality, limitless scope, etc.20. The first definition given above of productive labour [i.e. on pp. 177ff.-GAC],

a definition deduced from the very nature of the production of material objects,still remains correct for the collective labourer, considered as a whole. But it nolonger holds good for each member taken individually (Capital I, p. 509; cf.ibid., pp. 36I, 508).21I. Capital iII (Moscow, I962), p. 85.

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ant, but he is the social repository of science, since those who knoware in his hire.22Knowledge and skill are applied in the productiveprocess, but not by the producers themselves.23Their action is imposedon them, by supervisor and machine. As social production grows insophistication, less talent is required of each operative. In future soci-ety the theory governing industry will be shared, and the achievementof the species will no longer face its members as an alien power, butwill enter their lives as production is democratically planned andunderstood by all. Socialism will provide for men the creative existenceachieved under capitalism by man.So men sunk variously in nature but also at home in it lose thatintegration to gain abstract freedom and collective power dissociatedfrom individuals-a step on the road to concrete freedom and dis-alienation of that power.IV. MODES OF THE DIVISION OF LABORThe opposition abstract/concrete pervades the work of Hegel, andwas used in the last paragraph to sum up a train of thought recoveredfrom Marx. He did not himself use the terms with Hegelian frequency,but they figure in the construction of a distinction basic to his eco-nomics. In this section I begin with that distinction and attempt toshow its conceptual continuity with the Hegelian opposition it verballyreproduces.For Marx all labor is both concrete and abstract. It is concrete in-sofar as it employs specific facilities in a specific way and issues in aproduct of determinate physical properties, capable of satisfying somehuman desires and not others, namely a use-value. It is abstract inso-far as it is a quantity of total social labor, measurable by the amountof time absorbedin its performance, and issuing, in market economies,in an exchange-value, and in all economies in a proportion of socialwealth, however that be reckoned. Now under capitalism the abstractmoment gains ascendancy. For it matters neither to the laborer nor tohis employer what concrete labor is performed. Each cares only abouthow much exchange-value he will obtain from its performance. Each

22. Capital i, pp. 386-387n.23. Grundrisse, pp. 584-587; Theories of Surplus Value pt. ii (London, i969),

p. 234.

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contrasts with the feudal serf and lord, since they consumed, and sowere interested in the concrete character of, the immediate result ofthe serf's labor. Under capitalism the abstract aspect takes precedencein fact and in consciousness.But labor becomes abstract under capitalism in a further sense.Concrete differences between different kinds of labor not only matterless, as explained above: they are also reduced in extent. I shall eluci-date by noticing the different forms the division of labor takes inmedieval and modern times.

Capitalism increases the number of distinct jobs involved in theproduction of a given product, but at the same time it decreases thespecialization of the worker. Precapitalist weavers and tanners partici-pated in several stages of the respective production processes, andweaving operations differed significantly in kind from tanning opera-tions, and among themselves. But mechanized textile and leather fac-tories demand similar simple movements from their operatives.24Theproducts of the factories differ because of diversity in raw materialsand machines on which, and at which, like labor is spent. Capitalism'sideal is to homogenize tasks across and within all branches of pro-duction, so that workers may move from job to job doing much thesame simple thing in a variety of settings.To recapitulate. Under the sway of capital the immediate interestin labor is for its abstract quality of producing wealth in general, ex-change-value, the particular embodiment of which ceases to matter;and the concrete differences between kinds of labor are diminished.Labor is then abstract not only as a category but in reality :

The fact that the particular kind of labour employed is immaterialis appropriate to a form of society in which individuals easily pass24. . . . as the division of labour increases, labour is simplifted. The specialskill of the worker becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple,monotonous productive force that does not have to use intense bodily or intel-lectual faculties. His labour becomes a labour that anyone can perform ( Wage-Labour and Capital, Marx-Engels Selected Works i, p. 102).

in the place of the hierarchy of specialized workmen that characterisesmanufacture, there steps, in the automatic factory, a tendency to equalise andreduce to one and the same level every kind of work that has to be done by theminders of the machines (Capital i, p. 420).

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from one type of labour to another, the particular type of labour be-ing accidental to them and therefore irrelevant. Labour, not onlyas a category but in reality, has become a means to create wealth ingeneral, and has ceased to be tied as an attribute to a particularindividual.25The last clause asserts that the transformation is liberating: it al-lows escape from engulfment. Since the abstract labor of capitalismlacks a definite shape, the man who performs it is not stamped by anyconcrete work process and he becomes aware of his capacity and hisneed for a full and unspecialized life:What characterizes the division of labour in the automatic work-shop is that labour has there completely lost its specialized char-acter. But the moment every special development stops, the needfor universality, the tendency towards an integral development ofthe individual begins to be felt.26Man as proletarian has become labor in general, though only ingeneral, and he therefore aspires to develop his abilities generally. Theartisan lacks the aspiration just because some few of his abilities aredeveloped and fused with conditions of labor and life he cannot con-ceive transcending. The automatic workshop wipes out specialistsand craft idiocy. 27The idiocy s the same as that referred to rurallife in The Communist Manifesto.28It is not feeble intelligence, forit is compatible with advanced craftsmanship. It is rather narrow

parochialism, 29an uncomplaining acceptance of a restricted life, notperceived as restricted.Marx's contrast between medieval and modern labor moves in anHegelian orbit. The proletarian's freedom is the kind Hegel calledabstract and negative, the freedom of the void, freedom as theunderstanding conceives it, for the understanding30 knows only25. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (London, I97I), p.

2IO, my emphasis. Cf. The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow, n.d.), pp. 58-59.26. The Poverty of Philosophy, p. i6i.27. Idem.28. Marx-Engels Selected Works i, p. 38.29. Theories of Surplus Value ii, p. 475.30. See pp. 235-236 above.

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249 Marxs Dialectic of Labor

distinction and separation, and so conceives freedom as the lack ofevery restriction and every content. 31It is a freedom from every-thing particular, directed upon nothing in particular.Nevertheless, this freedom abstract and negative, fettered to nodeterminate existence, not bound at all by particularity, 32s anessential factor 33 n the formation of full and concrete freedom,which would appropriate its circumstances, not flee them.34Medieval work for Marx is concrete but not universal. It has adefinite contour with the result that the laborer is defined and limitedby it. Modern work is universal but abstract. The laborer is not con-fined but his activity has lost shape and sense. It has been robbed... of all real life-content and is performed by abstractindividuals. 35Activity under communism is to be both universal and concrete, anunrestricted engagement with something particular and definite, nolonger a freedom suspended in a vacuum (the proletarian), nor anunfreedom with content (the craftsman).V. THE PROGRESSIVE CHARACTER OF CAPITALISMThose who see in engulfment only integration and a sense of belong-ing oppose the disengagement capitalism brings. A representative com-plaint is Lewis Mumford's:

What was . . . the boasted mobility of labour but the breakdownof stable social relations and the disorganization of family life?36Capitalism tramples upon communal values, and it is fair to counterits boasts by recalling them. But it does not merely destroy. Mumfordforgets that mobility of labor is also mobility of human beings, whoescape confining perspectives and visit different milieux. I do not saythe gain outweighs the loss, for I do not know how to measure either.But I do think that to admire stability and the pastorale and to notice

31. Philosophy of Right (Oxford, 1958), pp. 21-22.32. Phenomenology of Mind (London, I96I), p. 232.33. Philosophy of Right, p. 227.34. Phenomenology of Mind, p. 234.35. The German Ideology, p. 82.36. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilisation (London, 1934), p. I95. ThatMumford's views are not normally conservative testifies to the attractiveness ofthe conservative position he adopts here.

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nothing good emerging in their collapse is to appreciate but one side ofhuman potential and need. Men want belonging and freedom, integra-tion and independence, community and individuality, and when capi-talism sacrifices the first member of these and like pairs, it concurrent-ly enfranchises the second.Labor mobility entails a prior release from economic bonds forgedby political and ideological authority. The impermanent ties replacingthem derive from what Marx called callous cash payment. 37Butthis did not prevent him from correcting romantics who saw thesubstitution of a monetary system, cold and hard, for picturesque re-lations between men, and neglected the attendant liberation.38That Marx was aware of the destructive side of capitalism needs noproof. On countless occasions he emphasized that nothing is so exaltedas to be immune to exploitation in the drive for profit; that all naturalendowments, all skill, all science, all passion, are prey to capital'scupidity. Less familiar is what he often went on to say, for example:

Hence the great civilizing influence of capital, its production of astage of society compared with which all earlier stages appear to bemerely local progress and idolatry of nature.39Its destruction ispermanently revolutionary, tearing down all obstacles that impedethe development of the productive forces, the expansion of needs,the diversity of production and the exploitation and exchange ofnatural and intellectual forces.It does away withnational boundaries and prejudices . . . the inherited self-sufficientsatisfaction of existing needs confined within well-defined bounds,and the reproduction of the traditional way of life.40Alienation is the cost of rescue from envelopment by his natural andsocial environment which is man's estate before capitalism. Capital37. Communist Manifesto, Marx-Engels Selected Works I, p. 36.38. Grundrisse, p. 874.39. Grundrisse, p. 313 (tr. in Marx's Grundrisse, ed. McLellan [London, 1971],p. 94). My emphasis on hence.40. Ibid., p. 313 (tr. ed. McLellan, pp. 94-95); cf. ibid., p. 389.

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steals and shrinks each man's laboring power but promotes an un-precedented increase in the power of mankind. Its enormous produc-tion within the frame of a global market transforms a collection ofisolated groups of parochial men into a wondrously creative universalhumanity. There flourishes in parallel with alienation a magnificentassertion of sovereignty over the physical world. A utilitarian attitude,in theory and in practice, supplants the idolatryof nature. There is,to be sure, no, wisdom in the exercise of this sovereignty. It threatens tomangle nature irreparably, and socialism will not perpetuate it in itsuncontrolled form.41On the other hand, it will in some respects ex-tend it, for not all humanly desirable transformations of nature arecompatible with the constraints of the market.42Marx holds not only that capitalism as a matter of fact develops acosmopolitan civilization of production but also that it must do so andthat it alone can do so. This extreme form of alienation in which theworker . . . is opposed to his own conditions and to his own product isa necessary transitional stage. 43Why is it necessary? Why must cap-italism give rise to the asserted result? And why can capitalism alonedo it, and a precapitalist economy not? Marx answers these questionsby economic reasoning which will not be discussed here.44To the ques-tion why capitalist, and not precapitalist, arrangements are capableof sponsoring great advances in production, he suggests an additionalanswer on the level of philosophical anthropology, which we nowexamine.

Under capitalism men are restless and unfulfilled. The identitythey once borrowed from their circumstances is gone, and no new onehas appeared. Precapitalist men are at peace with themselves and athome in the world, unfrustrated and possessed of plenitude. It41. In a forthcoming article on Use-value, Exchange-value, and a Distinctive

Contradiction of Advanced Capitalism I argue that it is specifically capitalistindustrialism which portends ecological disaster.42. Grundrisse, pp. 313-314 (tr. ed. McLellan, p. 95).43. Ibid., p. 414 and cf. p. 317.44. See Use-value . . . on why capitalism and capitalism alone fosters un-limited production. There is also the point made above (p. 245) that precapitalist

economies fetter production by preventing the collectivization of labor. Technicalprogress requires the latter, but it presupposes the mobility of labor which pre-capitalist rules forbid.

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is Marx's idea that they enjoy fulfillment only because their powersand wants are limited, their human nature stunted. Prodigiouspower develops explosively under capitalism, dissociated from individ-uals, by virtue of an economic system which presupposes their aliena-tion from that power. Only such a system can advance that power,only a system in which it is not directed to serving their needs. Forthose needs, inherited from past society, are narrow in range. If thepoint of production were to fulfill them, it would fail to be prodigious.It is only once production is out of gear with limited human needs thatthey will be caused to lose their limited character; their developmentwill be stimulated by the development of production itself. The con-tentment and order of the ancient world must be forfeited if humannature is to grow:

At early stages of development the single individual appears to bemore complete, since he has not yet elaborated the abundance ofhis relationships, and has not established them as powers that areopposed to himself. It is as ridiculous to wish to return to that prim-itive abundance as it is to believe in the continuing necessity of itscomplete depletion. The bourgeois view has never got beyond op-position to this romantic outlook and thus will be accompanied by it,as a legitimate antithesis, right up to its blessed end.45

The second sentence rebukes both those who would retreat to bygonetranquillity and those who think men are by nature unsatisfiable anddoomed to endless quest. The latter bourgeois view is fittingly resistedby the former romantic one. Neither understands the nature of humanpotential.The theme is elaborated in a text worth quoting at length:

. . . the ancient conception, in which man always appears (in how-ever narrowly national, religious, or political a definition) as theaim of production, seems very much more exalted than the modernworld, in which production is the aim of man and wealth the aimof production.The parenthesis implies that the man of antiquity is man in confine-ment. Forgetting that, we find antiquity superior to modernity, whichconsumes individuals on the altar of productivity. Yet if we look

45. Grundrisse, p. 8o (tr. ed. McLellan, p. 71).

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through the alienation to what is being achieved within it and dis-torted by it, we find that to be the basis of true wealth and a largerfulfillment. For.. . what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, en-joyments, productive powers, etc., of individuals, produced in uni-versal exchange? What, if not the full development of human con-trol over the forces of nature-those of his own nature as well asthose of so-called nature ?What, if not the absolute elaborationof his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other thanantecedent historical evolution which makes the totality of thisevolution-i.e. the evolution of all human powers as such, un-measured by any previously established yardstick-an end in itself?

It is a familiar socialist criticism of capitalism that it fosters produc-tion for production's sake, not for the satisfaction of human need. Yetit is an equally familiar socialist ideal that labor should be performedas an end in itself, not as a mere means to acquiring goods externalto it. What socialists despise in capitalism is thus an anticipation, onan alienated plane, of what they value. Under capitalism's productionfor production's sake, men produce only for rewards enjoyed outsidethe production process. Under socialism's production servicing humanneeds, they find productive activity itself rewarding.46The passage concludes:

In bourgeois political economy-and in the epoch of production towhich it corresponds-this complete elaboration of what lies withinman appears as his total alienation, and the destruction of all fixed,one-sided purposes as the sacrifice of the end in itself to a whollyexternal compulsion. Hence in one way the childlike world of theancients appears to be superior; and this is so, as long as we seekclosed shape, form and established limitation. The ancients providea narrow satisfaction, where the modern world leaves us unsatisfied,or, where it appears to be satisfied with itself, is vulgar and mean.47

46. Capitalism produces the complete material conditions of the entire anduniversal development of the productive forces of the individual (Grundrisse,p. 415). But what it makes possible for future individuals it makes alreadyactual for mankind, the latter being the foundation of the former. Cf. Theoriesof Surplus Value ii, 117-lI8.47. Grundrisse, pp. 387-388 (tr. ed. Hobsbawm, pp. 84-85). Cf. ibid., pp. 75-76(tr. ed. McLellan, p. 67).

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Hannah Arendt's Human Condition48 s a contemporary paradigmof the search for closed shape, form and established limitation. Sheis revolted by current agitation and restlessness, by the fearful lacera-tion of man's natural and historical home by man. But she is not asocialist, for she discerns no good in the evils of capitalism, and soexpects socialism to perpetuate and magnify the evils, whereas itpromises to develop the goods.For Marx the goods can be brought forth only in the train of theevils. The process of inversion, in which men serve production insteadof production serving men, is necessary, though it

is obviously merely a historical necessity, a necessity for the devel-opment of productive forces from a definite historical starting point,or basis, but in no way an absolute necessity of production; it is,rather, ephemeral. The result and the immanent aim of the processis to destroy and transform the basis itself, as well as this form ofthe process.49

The definite starting point is one of engulfment, rendering the inver-sion necessary if production is to advance. The inversion advancesproduction, cancels engulfment, and, in the self-wrought collapse ofcapitalism, cancels itself. What is the condition of man in the societywhich lies beyond?VI. PROSPECTSTo determine Marx's reply we must recall his thesis that the dialecticspanning precapitalist society and capitalism is appropriately com-

48. (Garden City, 1958).49. Grundrisse, p. 7I6 (tr. ed. McLellan, p. I5I). In the following alternativestatement the analogy with Feuerbach's idea of the inversion inherent in religionis explicit: From the historical point of view, this inversion appears as a transi-tional stage that is necessary in order to obtain, by force and at the expense ofthe majority, the creation of wealth as such, i.e. the unlimited productivity ofsocial labor which alone is able to constitute the material basis of a free humansociety. It is necessary to traverse this antagonistic form just as it is inevita-ble that man begin by giving his spiritual forces a religious form by erectingthem opposite himself as autonomous powers ( Results of the Immediate Proc-ess of Production, in McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx [London, 197I], pp.II8-II9).

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cal properties also mattered. Indeed, they contributed to the socialengulfment which made craft labor engulfing, by facilitating thecraftsman's intense identification with his role.For the laborer to escape a slavish relationship 51 o his work, itwas necessary that artisanship be replaced by a labor of repellentmaterial character, but it does not follow that a return to the earlierphysical form betokens a renewal of the engulfment which attendedit. Craft labor can be unengulfing, but if engulfed craft labor is thepoint of departure, transition to craft labor without engulfment re-quires the demise of craft labor and the rise of proletarian. Proletarianlabor effects a break with the engulfment craft labor promoted, but itthereby enables craft labor to reappear free of its original idiocy. 52The passage from engulfment to integration without engulfment isimpossible without an intervening phase of fragmented, alienatedlabor. Craft labor cannot be fragmented: therefore proletarian laboris an historical prerequisite of unengulfed craft labor. We saw abovethat production for developed human needs cannot succeed produc-tion for undeveloped human needs.53A stage of production undirectedto human needs must first be traversed. Similarly, a meaningful workprocess which is also enslaving cannot just lose its enslaving quality,but can appear without it after a phase during which the work processlacks meaning.I have not said that Marx's socialism favors craft labor. I haveargued only that such favor would be compatible with his doctrine ofthe engulfment inherent in historical craft labor. Whether craft laboris supposed to flourish under socialism is another matter. To the ques-tion what does happen under socialism we now turn.Three familiar motifs in Marx's unfinished prognosis demand ourattention: (i) The conquest of nature by man, (ii) the abolition ofthe division of labor, and (iii) the persistence of the realm of necessity.(i) The precapitalist unity of man and nature rested on the factthat man had not escaped nature's dominance. The unity of the futurereverses the original one, since it is based on the subjugation of nature

5I. See p. 241.52. See p. 248.53. See p. 252.

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by man. Sometimes this appears to mean that nature is worked bylabor possessed of science and technology. But some of Marx's lessrestrained forecasts raise the question whether his socialism is com-patible with labor, in any economist's sense. He presents the conquestof nature in extremely radical terms, foreseeing it as so transformedby past scientific industry that technology is no longer applied to na-ture but integrated with it:

Labourdoes not seem any more to be an essential part of the processof production. The human factor is restricted to watching and su-pervising the production process....The worker no longer inserts transformed natural objects54 asintermediaries between the material and himself; he now insertsthe natural process that he has transformed into an industrial onebetween himself and inorganic nature, over which he has achievedmastery. He is no longer the principal agent of the production proc-ess: he exists alongside it.55The world has been wrought into a system which by its own actionproduces the environment and objects men need. Marx calls the bene-ficiaries workers, but the designation is inappropriate. They do notwield tools or work at machines, but rule over an industrialized naturethe line between which and machinery is invisible. The writ of theCurse of Adam lapses: there is no exploitation of labor because thereis no labor to be exploited, no toilers to be governed but only physical

process to be administered. Town and country are united because in-dustry and nature are one. The ravages of class society give way tofreedom in an industrial Eden. And since the need to supervise cannotconsume much time, there is full range for that development of hu-man energy which is an end in itself, 56 or activity which is not laborbecause it lacks an economic end-but which may nonetheless resem-ble activity which once was labor. Those who want craftsmanship torecapture its status as means of material existence must reject the pic-ture, but the picture does not reject widespread performance, along-side the production process, of the creative activity they prize.

54. I.e. tools, machines.55. Grundrisse, pp. 592-593 (tr. ed. McLellan, p. 142).56. See p. 26i below.

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(ii) If labor is abolished, so too is the division of labor. Marxprophe-sied the latter's disappearance in The German Ideology, a decade be-fore he wrote the Grundrisse text just discussed. I do not know wheth-er the early prophecy was already accompanied by a belief in thewithering away of labor itself, as activity geared to economic ends. It isunclear whether the attractively varied activity sketched below wassupposed to constitute production, or take place outside it. Let uswaive that question. The passage bears on the theme of integrationwithout engulfment whatever the answer is:

... as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each manhas a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced uponhim, and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman,a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does notwant to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society,where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can be-come accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates thegeneral production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thingtoday and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in theafternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just asI have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd,or critic.57Marx here attributes three desirable qualities to activity-be it laboror not-in future society. First, and most obviously, a person does not

give himself up to one activity only. Second, he does not relate to anyof his several activities as to a role in a settled social structure. Andthird, what he does is something he wishes to do. The last featureraises issues far from the center of this essay, but I shall look at itbriefly after considering the second, which is relevant to our theme.Communist man hunts, fishes, herds sheep, and criticizes withoutever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic. I believe thequoted phrase adds to the initial assertion of variation in activity.57. The German Ideology, pp. 44-45. In a deleted sentence, communist manis also said to go in for shoemaking, gardening, and acting. His interests (shoe-making apart) are curiously similar to those of a cultured gentleman farmer. Butthe meaning is clearly allegorical-which is not to say that the allegory is easy todecode.

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This man is not even successively a hunter, fisherman, and critic,though he does hunt, fish, and criticize. For he is in none of these ac-tivities entering a position in a structure of roles, in such a way thathe could identify himself, if only for the time being, as a hunter, etc.He is nevertheless thoroughly engaged by what he is doing. The sumof which is that he enjoys integration without engulfment. Perhapsthe thought I have tried to elicit is present more clearly here:

... with a communist organisation of society, there disappears thesubordination of the artist to local and national narrowness, whicharises entirely from the division of labour, and also the subordina-tion of the artist to some definite art, thanks to which he is exclu-sively a painter, sculptor, etc., the very name of his activity ade-quately expressing the narrowness of his professional developmentand his dependence on division of labour. In a communist societythere are no painters but at most people who engage in paintingamong other activities.58I am claiming that the last sentence does not say: In a communistsociety there are no full-time painters but at most part-time painters.People paint, but the status painter s not assumed even from timeto time.The abolition of roles may be conceptual or sociological nonsense,but it is an idea we find in Marx. The reproach that he sought a com-plete absorption of the individual by society states the reverse of his

aim. Having complained that in modern times a general or a bankerplays a great part, but mere man . .. a very shabby part, 59he wouldnot be impressed by a jack-of-all-roles, who is other than mere man,whatever he took that to be. He wanted individuals to face one an-other and themselves without mediation of institutions. For they rep-resent fixation of social activity, consolidation of what we ourselvesproduce into an objective power above us. 60 t is no great exaggerationto say that Marx's freely associated individuals constitute an alterna-tive to, not a form of, society.6'

58. Ibid., pp. 431-432, my emphasis.59. Capital I, p. 44.6o. German Ideology, p. 45.6I. For more in this vein, see my Beliefs and Roles, Proceedings of the Aris-totelian Society, I966-I967, p. 32.

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(iii) The third desideratum is that a person's activity suits hiswishes, since societyregulates the general production and thus makesit possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrowjust as I have a mind....Recall the question we postponed: does the variegated activity sub-serve economic ends? Is it part of general production, or divorcedfrom it? On the first interpretation, something like this must bemeant: we draw up a budget of tasks, and each of us undertakeswhichever ones appeal most to him, subject to there being reasonablyharmonious order in the resulting arrayof activities. I may not be ableto do everything I want to do, but whatever I do will be something Ilike, and that is a significant recommendation.

This reading is compatible with the phrase just as I have a mindonly if economically productive activities can be generally appealing.If they cannot, then the variegated activity must proceed outside theeconomic sphere. Now at least sometimes Marx did view work tasksas bound always to be unsatisfying. There was probably a deep pes-simism on that score underlying his program for a nature which pro-duces by itself, with minimal human input.62A dismal perception ofthe labor that remains under communism informs this famous pas-sage:

. . the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour whichis determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases;thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actualmaterial production. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature tosatisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilisedman, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possi-ble modes of production. With his development this realm of phys-ical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the sametime, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also in-crease. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, theassociated producers, rationally regulating their interchange withnature, bringing it under their common control, instead of beingruled by it as by a blind power; and achieving this with the leastexpenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, andworthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a62. See above, p. 257.

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realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of humanenergy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which,however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as itsbasis. The shortening of the working-dayis its basic prerequisite.63On this account, freedom inside socialist industry is regrettablylimited, and Marx looks for what he calls true freedom beyond the

economic zone. His idea is not that labour has become not only ameans of life but life's prime want, 64 ut that, being a means of life, itcannot be wanted, and will be replaced by desired activity as theworking day contracts.This negative appraisal of future working conditions, however war-ranted it may be on other grounds, here rests on a fallacious confla-tion of distinct ideas. Granted, there will always be a set of operationson whose completion the provisioning of the race depends. But it doesnot follow, and it is not equally undeniable, that there will always betasks which men perform against their inclinations because they haveto. That a task must be and is fulfilled does not imply that the motivefor its performance is that its performance is necessary. But Marxaccepts this implication when he says that the realm of freedom, firstglossed as activity not determined by mundane requirements, mustin the very nature of things lie beyond the sphere servicing thoserequirements. Up to now the level of the productive forces has imposedon economic activity the property of not being performed for its ownsake. Whether it must retain that property in future is a complexquestion of technology and psychology, not a matter of the manifestverynature of things.The possibility Marx swiftly excludes is that economic necessitiesmight be met, at least partly, by that development of human activitywhich is an end in itself. One cannot decide a priori the extent ofcompatibility between labor and creative fulfillment. Marx thoughthe knew the compatibility would always be small. Hence his need toforecast a virtual disappearance of labor.65

63. Capital III, pp. 799-800 (translation corrected slightly). Cf. Capital II(Moscow, I957), pp. 515-5I6.64. Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx-Engels Selected Works II (Mos-COW,I958), p. 24.65. I thank Ted Honderich and Richard Wollheim for useful criticisms of anearlier version of this article.

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