Marx, People and Society

From the February 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

These days it is fashionable to write long, confusing, dull books about Marx. The qualifications for the job are a commitment to Leninism, a selective bibliography and a capacity for dialectical distortions. The search to discover what went on in Karl Marx's mind has beaten the question of what a Scotsman wears under his kilt as the number one talking point in trendy pubs. To play the game you don't have to be a socialist - but it helps if you learn by heart the required Leninist cliches. Thanks to these modern Marxist scholars we have not just one Marx but many: Hegelian Marx, Young Marx, Mature Marx, not to mention Dead Marx who passed his words of wisdom beyond the grave to Young Lenin. One of the favourite topics of those who treat Marxism as a spectator sport is what they call 'Marx's ontology' (his conception of the nature of Man).

Marx's view of 'human nature' is essentially different from all others because it is historical (seeing people as socially developing beings) and dialectical (seeing humanity and Nature as two parts of the same whole). Marx speaks of 'reality' as being both 'naturally human' and 'humanly natural'. The idealist philosophers had always constructed their own model of the human race and placed it in Nature. It was not coincidental that these models corresponded to the ideals of the ruling class of the day. Thus, capitalist philosophers depict humanity as selfish, lazy aggressive and incapable of co-operation. Unlike the Utopian Socialists, Marx did not construct an ideal being to fit into a preconceived pattern of socialist society. His conception involved two questions, firstly, what are the general characteristics of a natural being, and secondly, what are the specific characteristics of a human being? He divided these human attributes into dialectically interdependent powers and needs.

Marx associates three powers and needs with human life; work, eating and sex. He did not say that people must work or eat or have sex in one way as opposed to another in order to be 'natural', but simply that these activities are in the nature of their being. The attributes of 'Species-Man' are more extensive, for it is these that separate it from the unthinking animals. Marx's concept of human nature, then, is concerned with natual and specific attributes of homo sapiens, not the particular moral predilections of the philosopher.

But he doesn't leave it that. Marx's view was that in private property society, an especially under capitalism, people are alienated from their real selves (or, to borrow a Feuerbachian term, alienated from their human essence). By alienation is meant - not surprisingly - the absence of unalienation, people living in accordance with their species and their nature: Socialist society. This is where the Redbrick intellectuals lose Marx's point entirely. He was not concerned with alienation as some kind of existential void to which 'modern man' is doomed. The existentialist, Hyppolite, has it wrong when he writes that alienation is a 'tension inseparable de l'existence' and is inherent in 'la conscience de soi humaine'. Marx consistently relates alienation in property societies to socialist unalienation:

[Communism is] "the complete return of Man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being - a return become conscious, and accomplished with the entire wealth of previous development."

This will mean:

"the positive transcendence of all alienation - that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, State, etc, to his human, i.e. social, mode of existence." (1844 Manuscripts).

In his only complete outline of his theory of alienation, Marx indicated four relations which cover the whole of human social existence. Firstly, people are said to be alienated from their activity. Marx especially refers to productive activity, for that is the most important form of human creativity:

" . . . labour is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being: that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not a home. His labour is therefore not voluntary but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it." (1844 Manuscripts).

Secondly, Marx explains how we are alienated from the product of our labour:

" . . . the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in the double respect; first, that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labour - to be his labour's means of life; and secondly, that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker."1844 Manuscripts).

The third relation of alienation, according to Marx, is that people are alienated from each other because of class divisions and inevitable social conflict:

"Just as [Man] estranges himself from his own activity, so he confers to the stranger activity which is not his own . . . a man alien to labour and standing outside it . . . the capitalist or whatever one choosed to call the master of labour." (1844 Manuscripts).

Finally, men and women are alienated from their species-being:

"In tearing away from the object of his production . . . estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his organic body, nature, is taken from him. Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes Man's species life a means to his physical existence. "(1844 Manuscripts).

There have been those who have questioned whether these early writings of Marx (only published in English in the early 1930's) should be treated as being consistent with his later developed theories, Clearly, any of Marx's writings, taken in isolation and detached from socialist conclusions, can be futile and even misleading. Used by socialists in the battle to free the working class from the world of capitalism, the concept of alienated people - with its dialectical negative, unalienated humanity - is a vital aspect of a coherent Marxist theory. For trendy academics the exercise is about as vital as a fortnight's holiday in Highgate Cemetery.
Steve Coleman

Why I Joined (1976)

From the January 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Having found some of the previous contributions on this subject to be quite fascinating, I would like to join in. After a pretty normal childhood in a petty-bourgeois Jewish family in darkest Manchester with fairly strict religious ideas till around the age of seventeen, I entered the rebel period (to be told by father that I would soon grow out of it like all the others; at the age of 92 he still thinks I will). Then, as now, it was obvious to any teenager with the slightest pretence to thought of any kind, that society was an unpleasant mess and could surely be made a damn sight nicer. Which meant, of course, that one must latch on to one of the left-wing parties or groups (my! how times haven't changed). It happened that at that time there was a new splinter group of the Labour Party coming into fashion led by a wealthy lawyer called Stafford Cripps — a sort of Wedgbenn of his day, though even more of a hypocrite but less of a clown (well, he had to be).

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This mob had a branch of sorts in the town so there I went to see how we we were going to change the nasty world of the 'thirties into a place fit for humans to live in. I didn't last very long (true, it didn't either; but I went first). Although I was young and keen and no doubt starry-eyed, I simply couldn't follow what they were on about. There was talk about nationalizing the Lancashire cotton mills and I seem to remember discussing a pamphlet on the subject by Zev Hutchinson (don't ask me who he was; I haven't the faintest idea — it is just that his name caught my fancy). But it was all terribly boring and seemed to have no relevance to anything as far as I could see. Also, young and foolish as I was, I soon got the feeling that the few people who were doing the talking were ambitious types on the make. Concerned with making a world fit for them to live in, and not really all that worried about the rest of the heap. One of them was a quite nice-looking, red-headed bird a couple of years older than myself and I remember thinking that here was someone who was going to make something out of all this political claptrap. Her name was Barbara Betts and in later years I sometimes thought how wrong I was in my prediction because after all she disappeared without trace. It was only quite recently that I got the message that a Barbara Betts who was then working as a trainee buyer in Lewis's store in town was rather better known and in a better-paid job by her name of Castle.

After pottering around for a year or so, I had a lucky break. In the local library I came across, quite by accident, a journal I had never heard of, called (yes, you've got it; if only lots of others would get it. A few million circulation would be rather useful) the Socialist Standard. I know it sounds awfully corny to say this, but the very first reading was really a blinding light. I could understand it! I had really felt quite miserable with the pamphlets of the Socialist League (or with the Daily Worker or Daily Herald); apparently the others were quite happy reading and discussing them while I was out of step and found them boring and almost meaningless. So here was a party, whose existence I had never even heard of, talking the kind of language I could almost drink like nectar. (I remember immediately buying a bound volume of old Standards for fourteen bob and having an awful row with my father for wasting my money like that.)

So the next thing was to visit the branch which was listed in the paper. It met in the parlour of two great Socialist stalwarts, Bert and Edie Atkins and I think there were two—or it could have been three—other members in sight. And, remarkably enough, one of them was Uncle Joe, my mother's brother. I used to see him quite often and when I asked him why he had never mentioned the SPGB to me he replied that he thought it would upset my family if their little lad was to get mixed up with revolutionary Socialists so he kept quiet about it. (As, with failing eyesight, he reads this article, I hope he realises that this mention is intended as a salute.) And I well remember, when expressing the wish to join the little throng, Bert giving me a long lecture to the effect that it was no use my joining if I was a young man in a hurry. The party was miniscule (looking round the room I did not find that hard to believe) and I must realise if I joined that the road to Socialism was going to be a long and stony one. So, in all my long years of membership, I never became disillusioned; Atkins had made sure I had no illusions in the first place. And sadly one must confess that the real Socialists in the great working-class city of Manchester, with some quite proud traditions from Peterloo onwards, could still meet in the Atkins's parlour. And this despite the fact that one of the young comrades was the daughter of Tom King — a proud honour as he was a founder-member of the SPGB. A place in history.

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I will not waste more space as there is nothing special about my story. But perhaps I did create some sort of record. The very first time I took the platform at an outdoor meeting (I was giving the party view on the Stalin Terror which was then at its height) the soap-box was literally smashed from under my feet by a rush of Communist Party thugs. It was their only answer to my criticism. It still is the only answer that they can think of, although they are more circumspect nowadays.

L. E. Weidberg

Joining the Party (2000)

From the July 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politically speaking before I applied to join the Socialist Party of Great Britain I had all but given up. Many years of my life had been spent either within or on the periphery of reformist organisations. I voted Labour and for years I marched in the columns of CND. I was a member of the Young Communist League and later the Communist Party. I became a Trotskyist and admit that to my shame I joined the Labour Party for infiltration purposes. I was twenty five years old and thought of myself as madly revolutionary. I must have been suffering from chronic amnesia. I had forgotten how excited I had been, to what extent my imagination had been fired, when at about the age of thirteen my father talked to me about a world without money.

I must have heard talk of free access when I was still in my pram. The theory was according to my father that the then Soviet Union had state capitalism but eventually the state would wither away and money would be abolished. Every day I scanned the Daily Worker to see whether the Soviet Union had turned into a moneyless society. Needless to say there was no sign of the state "withering away".

At school I embarked with zeal on my own propaganda exercise. In every essay set for us by the teachers I managed to include in mine a reference to the idea of a world without money. I was childishly optimistic about this. I was convinced that one day the English teacher's interest would be aroused and a class discussion would ensue. When this didn't immediately happen I decided to talk to my classmates about it. They thought I was nuts. Then one day a marked essay was returned to me and to my chagrin all my remarks about money had been deleted with red ink. It was a composition about the English countryside and I had waxed lyrical about the beauty of Kent. My suggestion was that if we did not have a monetary system the countryside could be even more beautiful. I supplied a few reasons for why I thought this but can no longer remember what they were. I adored my English teacher. She and I shared a love of reading but from that day on my conviction grew that she wasn't all I had cracked her up to be. I exchanged my interest in free access for boys, clothes and dancing.

I joined the SPGB in 1994. Yet I feel I have always been a member. A comrade was selling the Socialist Standard in the city and I bought a copy. My preconceptions warned me that the SPGB was just another one of those outfits like the Socialist Workers' Party. I skipped through the pages, skimmed one or two of the articles and tossed it aside. My husband asked if I had read the Declaration of Principles. I had not.

I read the Object: "The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community." And I read on. That did it. SPGB, where have you been all my life? Whilst I was marching against war, agitating for better conditions in the workplace and voting for a Labour government that supported capitalism the SPGB was waiting in the wings. How had I missed it?

Every member knows that it is not easy to join the Socialist Party. It is not just a matter of filling in an application form and receiving that little red membership card through the post. I know of no other political organisation requiring potential new members to understand their aims and be capable of arguing for them. I mildly resented the twelve questions. I felt the Socialist Party should be grateful to me for wanting to join their ranks. It was rather like sitting an exam. I thought it would be a doddle. It wasn't. But goodness how it focused my mind. I do not think I made a very good job of the twelve questions but my answers must have been satisfactory enough for someone to write back and tell me I could join if I liked. There are times now when I am tempted to ask for those twelve questions again. Next time I may give a better account of myself.

Heather Ball