Marx’s legacy – A response

What is the meaning and significance of the legacy of Marx for us, for critical thought about contemporary social conditions of life? This is the question addressed both by my old paper and Bolívar Echeverría’s recent reflection upon it. We share not only the same engaged question and topic. There is, I think, much more commonality in our approaches and answers than divides our views. We fundamentally agree that Marx’s critical theory is – and remained during his whole development – a value-oriented theory, based on practical value-choices. These choices, while deeply rooted in the actual conflicts and contradictions of his present, are irreducible to any facts of the past, present or (predicted) future. For them there can be no other legitimating instance than our collective practice towards their realization today and tomorrow.

Even the point at which Professor Echeverría locates the fundamental difference between our views – whether the core of critical theory, as he argues, is constituted by alienation or, as I have stated, by the dialectic of productive forces and relations of production – even this distinction is, at least prima facie, invalid. I certainly have argued in Marxism and Anthropology (1978) that the concept of alienation (which, as Marx stated, becomes the universal form of appropriation only under capitalism) is the fundamental orienting category of his whole conception of human essence in its historicity. Neither did I ever deny ‘the potentiality of the concept of alienation which is present in the discourse of Marx in Capital’. ¹ In several papers, partly provoked by Althusser’s once fashionable and influential interpretations of Marx, ² I have argued in detail that the concept of alienation is not only as a ‘philological fact’ very much present in the text of Capital (especially in the third volume), but I equally tried to show that it is foundational for Marx’s whole understanding of the historical place of capitalism, ‘the determination of the historical meaning of its conflicts and the direction and possibilities of overcoming them’ (Markus, 1982: 146). So also in this sense the difference in our views may seem to be illusory.

This is, of course, not really the case. Certainly the actual disagreement between us begins with our differing views/interpretations of Capital and its place in Marx’s oeuvre. To make it clear: this disagreement has nothing to do with the alleged ‘positivist scientism’ of this great work. In this respect I am equally ready to regard it, as Professor Echeverria does, merely an ‘outward appearance’. (And in this respect I would consider it as rather unimportant whether Marx late in his life to some degree did fall under the influence of that spirit of positivism which ideologically dominated his time, or alternatively, that this appearance was the result of a conscious tactical choice on his side, to make impossible the off-hand rejection of his work as based on some outdated Hegelian nonsense.)

In my own view, however, the fundamental practical value-orientation of Marx’s critical theory became ‘decomposed’ in Capital into a paradoxical combination of determinism and finalism. In the text under discussion I at least attempted to explicate in detail what I mean by this – I shall not repeat it here. This is the reason why I, so to say, ‘prefer’ the early writings of Marx – from the sole viewpoint that the emancipatory, practical value-orientation of critical theory is present in them in a more concise, explicit and coherent form.

It does not mean, however, as Bolívar Echeverría seems to suggest, that I regard the works of late Marx, including Capital, as some kind of ‘regress’. For this, certainly paradoxical (though in no way logically contradictory) combination of theoretical approaches, traditionally regarded as excluding each other, is not the outcome of some conceptual confusion. It is the result of the great, in itself quite coherent attempt of the late Marx to find from the practical viewpoint of human emancipation an appropriate answer and response to the historical experiences of his own time, partly disappointing his earlier, more optimistic expectations, concerning the situation, motives and actual interests of the very addressee of his theory, the potential subject of emancipation, the working class.

This is the point, I think, where the basic differences between our respective views and approaches really come to the fore: the question of the role of the collective subject in critical theory. Criticizing my emphasis on the role of ‘radical needs’ in Marx, Professor Echeverría writes: ‘it is not necessary…to search for those peculiar individual experiences in which the contradiction he posits between productive forces and relations of production would be present’. This seems to me a problematic statement, and on two counts. ³

It seems to draw from the fact that experience is necessarily that of an individual, whose personality leaves on it his/her mark, the conclusion that all experience is necessarily of a narrowly particular, personalistic character. ⁴ I regard this as unjustifiable. Feelings of mute suffering and self-gratifying satisfaction can be transformed into conscious experience, therefore communicable and understandable by others, only as the outcome of a complex social interaction between individuals, an interaction in the network into which they find themselves inserted (as something pre-given) at their very birth. At the same time, and more importantly here, individuals in a similar social position and situation necessarily share much in respect of what they experience and what effect such experiences have on their life. Whether this underlying communality of experience becomes effectively transformed into collective experience, this, of course, depends on the practical self-consciousness – intentions, motives and interests – of the concerned subjects, on the one hand, and the available organizational and communicative resources, on the other. But the communality of unintentionally shared experiences is the necessary precondition of the very possibility of collective experience.

This fundamental rejection of the importance of the problem of ‘social experience’ in general, and therefore of the question about the historically specific character of the communal and/or collective experience of the producers, the exploited majority under capitalist conditions, in my view omits one of the most stable and fundamental aspects of critical theory. For throughout all the changes that concrete form and content have undergone during Marx’s development, the reference to that specific collective agent, who is simultaneously its ultimate addressee, remained an organic and decisive element of his very historical project and the end that this theory both articulated and intended to serve: human emancipation. And this collective subject and its revolutionary potential was always characterized and justified by referring to the specific nature of its social-communal experiences. With changes in the argumentative strategy of Marx the categorical specification of these practical experiences also changed. The radical needs of the early writings have been essentially replaced in the Grundrisse by capacities, necessarily awoken but made unrealizable under capitalist conditions, to be then substituted by (actual and potential) interests in Capital.

As is well known, Marx from the very beginning identified the collective agent of emancipation with the working class of the developed (essentially West-European) industrial countries. With the hindsight of nearly one and a half centuries a number of questions certainly can be raised about the validity of this view, leading to some basic changes in the very structure of critical theory among some of the most outstanding continuers of its broadly conceived tradition, e.g. Adorno. Without evaluating their justification or validity, the point to be made here is quite simple. Whether these historically emerging doubts about the Marxian choice of the social agent of potential emancipation are valid or invalid, without the specification of the collective subject capable of overcoming in practice the contradictions of capitalism, there is no critical theory, at least not in Marx.

This is the reason why the theory of alienation, in spite of all its indubitable importance, does not capture the core of Marx’s argumentation in general, including in Capital. To put it sharply: Marx’s critical theory is not a lament about the deeply devastating and inhuman conditions of contemporary life, where the human quality of being a subject is absorbed by capital itself, where the life of every individual without exception is submitted to the irresistible and impersonal logic of exchange value – even if a small minority in blissful ignorance does temporarily enjoy the effects of this condition. As a practically oriented theory of emancipation, it claims also for itself a practical role: intervening in the hidden, latent social conflicts of the present by assisting the potential social agent of emancipation, capable of challenging and transcending these social conditions, to acquire the adequate self-consciousness of its radical needs, suppressed capacities, or latent interests.

It is precisely this point of view that is expressed and grounded by the Marxian paradigm of production, articulated in the dialectic of forces and relations of production. For ‘among all instruments of production the greatest productive force is the revolutionary class itself’ (Marx, 1956a: 181). This famous and rhetorically powerful formulation, as it stands, refers of course to contemporary capitalist conditions. Marx, however, also makes it clear that this is only a particular (even if the most practically important) case of a general truth: man is necessarily and always the main productive force, as he points out in the Grundrisse (Marx, 1953: 325).

Humans are creative beings – beings who in their productive activity consciously and continuously bring forth the unencounterable in nature, the radically new. This is true, however, not only in respect of the effects of production upon environing nature, but also upon its own subject, the producers/labourers as well. For production is always, as Marx underlined, Selbsttätigkeit, a self-relating and self-forming activity:

In the act of reproduction itself it is not only the objective conditions that change…but the producers change themselves, for they bring forth new qualities in themselves, develop and transform themselves through production, form new powers and new ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language. (Marx, 1953: 394)

Certainly it is the historically dominant relations of production that determine the specific end of production (Zweck der Produktion), and thereby the direction of its development. But just because in the very same process the producing subjects acquire new needs, capacities and interests, they in principle acquire also the ability to challenge, change and transform these relations themselves.

It is on the basis of these theoretical premises that Marx characterizes the specific historical place of capitalism in human progress. For capitalism, precisely as the society of universal alienation, is at the same time the Durchgangspunkt, the watershed, the caesura in human history. It is only capitalism that endows labour in this abstraction, labour as such (which is the condition of subsistence in every society), with practical truth and reality (Marx, 1953: 25). It dissolves all the local, narrow communities that have bound the individual to a predetermined circle of persons and activities, kept his/her activity in the bondage of pre-given and seemingly natural, immutable social ties. With a destructive and revolutionizing power it drives production beyond all local and national boundaries – it creates not only the conditions but makes also economically necessary the incessant progress of production. It renders production inherently cooperative and collective – to the degree that in its progress, due to the ‘real subsumption of labour under capital’, the individual’s labour, taken in isolation, can no longer effectively function as a productive force (Marx, 1969: 90ff.).

Of course, capitalism is destructive in another sense as well. It drives production incessantly forward, but through ever more devastating and ever more frequent economic crises, causing inhuman suffering and depravation for the majority constituting the main productive force – the proletariat. Its relations of production, determined by the very logic of exchange value, ever more clearly disclose their ultimate irrationality in the threat of an ultimate collapse that only the transformation of the economic catastrophe into the bloody reality of war can temporarily ward off. This very threat, however, not only makes the only radical solution, the direct communal organization of the whole social production process, ever more urgent, it also makes the solution ever more clear and obvious to the very collective agent capable of realizing it, the international working class as the main productive force. Its transformation from a ‘class in itself’ with shared motives and interests into the ‘class for itself’ as self-conscious actor-subject, whose interests are not of particular character, but in fact express the interests of the whole of endangered humanity – this is the very task, to the actualization of which Marx’s critical theory aims to directly contribute.

This is the general background of his own time, on the basis of which Marx formulates his theory of alienation. And just as this understanding is explicitly based on his paradigm of production as the dialectic of forces and relations of production, so also is his conception of alienation as the universal characteristic of capitalist society. He consistently characterizes and defines alienation in terms that refer back to this paradigm and are understandable only in its context. Already in The German Ideology he clarifies its notion in the following way:

The social power, i.e. the multiplied production force, which arises through the cooperation of different individuals…appears to these individuals, since their cooperation is not voluntary, but has come about as if it were naturally given, not as their own united power, but as a force external to them, the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, but on the contrary unfolds a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of men. (Marx, 1958: 34)

In his late writings this necessary dependence of the very idea of alienation on the paradigm of production appears in a particularly clear and explicit way. Thus in the Grundrisse he characterizes alienation as ‘the appropriation of living labour by objectified (vergegenständlichte) labour’, which confronts it as the power that rules it in the form of capital (Marx, 1953: 584). In the 1861–63 manuscript he states that this process, the inversion of the subject into object and vice versa, ultimately represents ‘the domination of things over man, of dead labour over living labour, of the product over the producer’ (Marx, 1969: 17–18). And one could continue at length invoking formulations of the same character from the writings of late Marx.

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We still live in a world dominated by capital, a world of universal alienation. The Marxian analysis of its fundamental characteristics and contradictions still retain for us their enlightening power and critical-practical relevance. But of course well over a hundred years have passed, great changes have occurred and not only on the surface. Marx was certainly not a prophet with superhuman abilities to foresee some inevitable future – nothing could be more alien than any such claim to the fundamental practical orientation and aim of his work. He was the great radical thinker of the late 19th century and his theory is embedded in its realities.

Today we face, on the one hand, new extremely important problems, of which Marx was not and could not have been aware. This refers first of all to the great ecological crisis that in our days threatens the whole of humanity. It would be for us rather impossible to simply take over Marx’s self-confident attitude (in his times quite plausible) that rejected any criticism of the instrumentalization and exploitation of nature as the Romantic revival of the primitive deification of nature, a bad case of Naturidolatrie (Marx, 1953: 312–14).

On the other hand, such a hindsight discloses in Marx’s writings some ambiguities and strains concerning conceptual issues of major theoretical signification – strains that cannot be accounted for simply as a change of views and which leave the late interpreter with serious difficulties. They may well be explainable by those extremely unfavourable, exhaustive and distracting conditions under which he had to undertake his theoretical work during most of his life. One ought to remember that he worked on Capital – with many prolonged interruptions – for nearly 20 years and still could not finish the project (the third volume ends abruptly at the very beginning of the discussion of a crucial point: clarification of the notion of ‘class’). He certainly had no possibility of overseeing and reviewing the work as a whole.

This point needs to be raised here, because it has a direct relevance to one of the main concepts that constitute the topic of our conversation: that of use-value. To be quite fair to Marx, however, it first needs to be indicated that he does not invariably treat the relation use-value/exchange value as excluding each other. ⁵ He pointed out that this is not so at least in one specific, but for critical economy certainly very important, case: that of money. For in the case of money, use-value and exchange-value are not divorced and opposed, but coincide with and interpenetrate each other (Marx, 1953: 29, 83). While this observation well illustrates Marx’s critical acuity and his cautiously suspicious attitude concerning the validity of universalistic formulas, it does not change the fact that his discussion of use-value and its production within his later oeuvre is ambiguous, at points even contradictory.

To put it rather crudely: As Marx explicates in the first volume of Capital, it is the utility of something that makes its use-value. Accordingly he defines use-value as ‘an external object, a thing that by its properties satisfies human needs of some kind’ (Marx, 1960: vol. 23, 50). Being a use-value evidently depends on the particular properties, on the quality of this thing in its relation to existing human needs – and the active discovery of the potential usefulness of various objects or materials is just as much the work of history as the formation and development of human needs. But in the formed, present use-value, this reference to the previous human labour that created it is completely extinguished (ausgelöscht). Use-value expresses a direct and immediate (‘without any exchange’) relation between a particular thing and some present, given human need. Therefore, Marx in his late writings emphatically and consistently characterizes this relation – in spite of the embeddedness of both its constituents in history – as a ‘natural’ one. ‘Use-value as such expresses the relation of the individual to nature’ (Marx, 1953: 899). ‘Use-value expresses the natural relation (Naturbeziehung) between things and men, in fact the being (Dasein) of things for men. Exchange value…is the social existence (gesellschafliche Dasein) of things’ (Marx, 1956b: vol. 26.3, 291). Being a use-value is wholly defined by the concrete, natural existence of the thing in question, in a complete indifference to and independence of all social relations and determinations (Marx, 1960: vol. 13, 15–16). And Marx very consistently carries through this ‘naturalization’ of the notion of use-value. He repeatedly writes about the use-value of ‘things’, which are not products of labour at all, but elementary natural conditions of life on the Earth in general, like the air which we breathe.

This conceptualization of use-value runs, however, into grave difficulties when it is applied to a specific case that is of particular importance, not only from the viewpoint of economic analysis but also for the very project of a critical theory: the use-value of labour power, of the specific human capacity of production. Already the fact that Marx consistently ascribes use-value to ‘things’ is categorically rather unfortunate, since labour power is ‘the purely subjective existence of labour, stripped of all objectivity’ (Marx, 1953: 203). Much more important, however, the very question, whether the labouring/producing abilities of some individual are or can be useful to some other individuals – this question is simply, on the basis of Marx’s fundamental premises, meaningless in this general form. From the Marxian perspective between man and man there just cannot exist such relations of ‘natural immediacy’ that are assumed by his notion of use-value itself. And in respect of the use-value of a particular kind of labouring capacity as its ‘productiveness’ for others he again clearly draws this conclusion himself. The productivity of a particular kind of labouring capacity ‘is a determination of labour that follows neither from its content, nor from its result, but from its definite social form’ (Marx, 1956b: vol. 26.1, 128). Such a recognition, however, only makes the problematic character of his general conception of use-value rather evident, it does not solve its difficulties.

And as Marx’s discussion proceeds from the abstractions of the first volume of Capital towards the ever more concrete, also general doubts seem to emerge concerning the validity of the outlined conception of use-value. Especially important in this respect is his complex discussion – not analysable here in detail – of the problem connected with aggregate social use-value in the third volume (Marx, 1960: vol. 25, 186). The investigation of the question whether a definite mass, quantity of utilities of a particular kind constitutes (wholly or partly, and then to what extent) use-value for the members of a given society leads to the conclusion that this depends on the institutionally determined character of effective demand, that is, upon the dominant relations of production of society. ‘Social use-value’ in this sense is not at all indifferent to but is co-determined by the relations of production. However, though Marx’s discussion here unambiguously results in the recognition of this fact, in this case he does not formulate explicitly this conclusion in its general form.

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Those for whom Marx’s writings do not represent merely some ‘classical’ texts of an academic interest but who regard his legacy to be still vitally important for critical thought about our own conditions of social life have to face some of the difficulties of his theory indicated here as well as problems, which in his own time he could not foresee but which in the meantime have acquired a vital importance for all of us. To do so, however, in the very spirit of critical theory, it is necessary to recognize and renew its very core theoretical premises and assumptions. And I still think that it is the paradigm of production, understood as the dialectic of forces and relations of production, that constitutes this core.