Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Kohei Saito
problematic. Consequently, it is no longer possible to enrich the physical and mental dimensions of the human species-being together. Instead of free mutual intercourse and collaboration, there emerges antagonistic and atomistic competition for survival.
To sum up, Marx’s analysis of estranged labor delineates the modern unfree reality where one cannot execute labor as an end in itself but rather labor functions as a process of loss of reality, impoverishment, dehumanization, and atomization. Marx argues that the only way to overcome this alienated reality is to transcend the system of private property so that humans can relate to nature through labor in a thoroughly conscious, free, universal cooperative manner and acquire self-affirmation with the totality of the external world with their own objectified products. This will lead to the absolute realization of human essence as species-being. Marx envisions communism as a goal of the historical process, in which humans overcome the estranged dichotomy of the subject and object through a revolution to realize the absolute unity between humanity and nature under the name of human species-being.
It is obvious that Marx’s project of 1844 is heavily influenced by Feuerbach, who is supposed to have achieved “the establishment of true materialism and of real science.”18 Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity put forward a theory of alienation as a critique of religion. Individuals suffer from alienation in religion because they are finite beings and project an infinite being (that is, God) in opposition to which they find themselves powerless. Feuerbach argues that this religious estrangement can be overcome if they are able to recognize the hidden truth that humans are actually projecting their own essence as a species-being onto God. God is nothing but the product of human imagination that later became more and more powerful and independent, dominating humans as an alien existence. Against this inverted reality, Feuerbach opposes the importance of “sensibility,” and particularly “love,” as the unique materialist foundation of truth:
Love is the middle term, the substantial bond, the principle of reconciliation between the perfect and the imperfect, the sinless and sinful being the universal and the individual, the divine and the human. Love is God himself, and apart from it there is no God. Love makes man God and God man. Love strengthens the weak and weakens the strong, abases the high and raises the lowly, idealizes matter and materializes spirit. Love it the true unity of God and man, of spirit and nature. In love common nature is spirit, and the preeminent spirit is nature.19
Feuerbach claims that with the power of love humans will be able to transcend religious estrangement, because through love they can cooperate with one another to overcome their isolated state of being and this intersubjective unity allows them to see through their own essence as species-being.
Feuerbach’s explanation of alienation together with its transcendence had a tremendous impact upon the Young Hegelians. Marx at the time firmly believed that Feuerbach had carried out a thorough critique of religion and revealed the true principle of a coming revolutionary “philosophy of the future.” He felt it necessary only to extend its scope to include other spheres of the modern bourgeois society: “For Germany the criticism of religion is in the main complete, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”20 Marx’s Paris Notebooks document his attempt to carry out this type of criticism of alienation, combining it with his recent discoveries in the field of political economy. However, he neither published these notebooks nor discussed the concept of alienation in an extensive manner again.
It has been heatedly disputed whether Marx stuck to his original plan to extend the concept of alienation to political economy in later works. Marx’s theory of alienation was interpreted from a philosophic perspective ever since the publication of the text as The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in 1932. What is more, the participants in this debate never questioned this tendency, something that must now change based on recent philological findings. At the time, Marx was reading various works of political economy, and if he started his discussion on alienation rather spontaneously while he was making other excerpts of political economy in his Paris Notebooks, political economy must have affected his theoretical interest even with regard to alienation.
In terms of philosophizing the text and ignoring political economy, Herbert Marcuse played a particularly important role. He published an article on the newly discovered manuscripts in 1932 titled “The Foundation of Historical Materialism” and shed light on the novel dimension of Marx’s “philosophical critique” of alienation. Marcuse argued that there is an important “breakthrough” within the first manuscript, and that Marx’s analysis “seems initially to proceed completely on the ground of traditional political economy and its theorems. Marx significantly starts by dividing his investigation into the three traditional concepts of political economy: ‘The Wages of Labor,’ ‘The Profit of Capital’ and ‘The Rent of Land.’” However, according to Marcuse, Marx’s radical critique of alienation and estrangement “point[ed] in a completely new direction,” and his critique emerged only after “this division into three [was] exploded and abandoned.” Marcuse went further, claiming that the “development of the concept of labor thus breaks through the traditional framework for dealing with problems.”21 Thus, Marx’s philosophical critique of modern bourgeois society and political economy as its ideologue only begins when he supersedes the “three traditional concepts of political economy.” A radical break exists between the economic and philosophic parts.
As Marcuse emphasized, Marx first excerpted relevant sentences by Jean-Baptiste Say and Adam Smith from his notebooks into the Manuscripts and then added detailed comments on them.22 Subsequently, he began his discussion of estranged labor only after page XXII of the first “Manuscript.” Yet, this fact does not mean that Marx’s comments on these economists within their framework are insignificant for his concept of alienation as Marcuse’s interpretation implies. Marcuse’s analysis almost completely neglects Marx’s economic critique in the first half of the first manuscript.23 This tendency of Marcuse to underestimate the economic part of the first manuscript was widely shared by later Marxists, showing that Marcuse’s interpretation was quite influential. For example, Erich Fromm shared the same view, and his popular edition of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts omitted the economic part of the first manuscript, which reinforced the philosophic interpretation of alienation.24 Marcuse and Fromm only recognized the original theoretical contribution by the young Marx in his philosophical criticism of “alienated labor,” without going into the very beginning, which deals with his critique of political economy.
The impression of Marx’s “breakthrough” was reinforced by an editorial title, “Estranged Labor,” at the beginning of the second half of the first Manuscript, which does not exist in Marx’s own notebooks. In contrast to the dominant tendency, I argue that the “emergence of a theory” in Marx’s notebook must be understood in a close relation to his analysis of political economy because his original theory of alienation is formulated in the process of a critique of it. If one misses the importance of the first part of the first Manuscript, one cannot avoid being confronted with a theoretical difficulty, as was the case in the earlier literature. In other words, the young Marx has been unjustly criticized being unable to explain the cause of modern alienated labor.
In 1844, Marx was trying to analyze the “facts” of private property, the existence of which bourgeois economists simply took for granted. He aimed at revealing the historical conditions of the system of private property, and he argued that its “essence” lies in a certain form of labor in capitalist society. In this sense, Marx stated that private property is the “product” and “necessary result” of estranged labor:
Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself. Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labor, i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labor, of estranged life, of estranged man. True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labor (of alienated life) in political economy. But analysis of this concept shows that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its consequence, just as the