MARX ON ALIENATION AND FREEDOM

113 Pages·2014·0.36 MB·English

MARX ON ALIENATION AND FREEDOM: A REINTERPRETATION OF
THE ECONOMIC IN THE SOCIAL
_______________
A Thesis
Presented to the
Faculty of
San Diego State University
_______________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
Sociology
_______________
by
Roberto Danipour
Summer 2014

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Copyright © 2014
by
Roberto Danipour
All Rights Reserved
iv
DEDICATION

To my father.
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Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it
under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and
transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on
the brains of the living.
–Karl Marx
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ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
Marx on Alienation and Freedom: A Reinterpretation of the
Economic in the Social
by
Roberto Danipour
Master of Arts in Sociology
San Diego State University, 2014

My primary aim is to reconstruct Marx’s economic categories in terms of his social
theory of alienation and vice versa. In other words, I reinterpret the social in the economic
and the economic in the social by doing a close reading on Marx’s early and later writings.
My task is two-fold: first, to reveal within Marx’s economic categories—as they are
expressed in Capital and his later writings—his social theory of alienation. And second, to
extend his theory of alienation—as it is forcefully expressed in his early writings—through
talk of the inner-workings of capital, that is to say, by infusing the structure of alienation with
the language of economics. I argue that Marx’s social theory of alienation underlies his labor
theory of value, along with all the corresponding economic categories that unfold from it. I
reconstruct Marx’s conception of human nature to show how it informs his theory of
alienation, and how the latter ultimately anchors his socio-economic-historical analysis of
capitalist society and his conception of freedom. I conclude by sketching Marx’s vision of
the new society, that is, his conception of a non-alienating mode of production based on my
reinterpretation.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... ix
CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 
Method .....................................................................................................................4 
Outline and Structure ...............................................................................................4 
2 MARX ON HUMAN NATURE ...................................................................................7 
The Relationality of Human Nature .........................................................................7 
The Universality of Human-Species ......................................................................11 
Human Nature Versus Human Form .....................................................................14 
Egoism & The ‘Total Man’ ....................................................................................15 
3 MARX ON ALIENATION .........................................................................................23 
Subjective Versus Objective Alienation ................................................................23 
Labor Theory of Value and Commodity Fetishism ...............................................32 
Product Alienation .................................................................................................43 
Production-Process Alienation ...............................................................................46 
Community Alienation...........................................................................................51 
Species-Alienation .................................................................................................53 
Private Property and Division of Labor (and of Self) ............................................54 
The Money-Form as the Universal Alienable Commodity ....................................66 
The Capitalist State as an Alienating Force ...........................................................74 
Religious Alienation ..............................................................................................76 
Humanity’s Alienated Relation to Nature ..............................................................80 
4 MARX ON FREEDOM ...............................................................................................84 
Beyond the Realm of Crude Communism .............................................................84 
The Positive Suppression of Private Property .......................................................87 
Freedom and Necessity ..........................................................................................88
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Material and Temporal Wealth ..............................................................................93 
Individual Growth Through Zero-Growth .............................................................97 
5 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................99 
REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................102
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my committee members for all their guidance and support.
Professors Roberts and Choi are true educators in the most important sense of the word,
whose passion and inspiration moved me. I am truly appreciative for all their guidance they
have given me throughout my experience in graduate school. I would also like to sincerely
thank Professor Weston for all his insightful and detailed feedback. I am also very
appreciative of Professor Semm, my unofficial committee member, for graciously agreeing
to review my manuscript last minute and the feedback I received.
Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my wonderful and loving partner,
Carolina, for all her input, and for putting up with me everyday as I endured through this
entire process. I am happy to report that she is happy to finally have me back in her arms.
1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Marx was arguably a philosopher, historian, and a political economist in his own
right.1 Indeed, he was all three—humanist philosopher, dialectical historian, and political
economist—at all times. That said, in its more explicit form, we see Marx the humanist
philosopher and dialectical materialist historian more so in his early writings than his later
ones, and the political economist and labor historian more so in his later writings than his
early ones. Marx’s later writings, in particular, Capital, certainly emphasized his economic
mode of analysis in approaching the study of capitalist society. “It is the ultimate aim of this
work”, Marx (1990) declared in the preface of the first volume of Capital, “to reveal the
economic law of motion of modern society” (p. 92). Even though in an important sense
Capital is an economic-historical treatise, one of the aims of this thesis is to demonstrate that
underlying all of Marx’s economic categories is his social theory of alienation, as outlined in
his early humanist writings, in particular, the 1844 Manuscripts (and the German Ideology).
That is to say, I do not see a fundamental break between the “young Marx” and the “old
Marx”.
In examining the capitalist mode of production, as Marx does in Capital, we see that
his labor theory of value is the very foundation in which all his economic analysis rests. Hunt
(1988) puts it best when he describes how all intellectual roads to Marx’s thinking depart
from and return to the same source:
It is the labor theory of value…that connects all aspects of Marx’s various
writings and unites them into a single, coherently interconnected theoretical
whole – a theoretical whole that remains to this day by far the richest available
source of insights into the nature, structure and functioning of capitalism. (p.477)

1 In designating Marx a ‘political economist’, I mean to say that in the very act and process by which Marx
critiqued classical political economy—which he did so in a very rigorous, comprehensive, and intimate
manner—his own positive account emerged from his negative analysis that included new economic categories
like value, surplus-value, labor-power, and so on.