Paper delivered to the ‘Studies of Modern Capitalism’ Conference
Center for Marxist Social Theory
Nanjing University
9-10 November, 2006
In this paper I compare Marx’s first conception of capital, in 1844, to his conception of the modern political state in 1843. I argue that Marx in 1844 conceives capital as a realisation of human ‘species-being’, that is, of the universality and freedom inherent in human nature. However it realises this universality and freedom only in the form of ‘abstract’ universality and freedom and therefore inadequately. Accordingly the transition from capital to communism consists in transforming the abstract universality and freedom realised in capital into a ‘concrete’ universality and freedom.
Hegel and the state
I begin by looking at the idea that the state realises the essence of humanity in some previous thinkers. In Aristotle humans are by nature rational animals, but they can only realise their rationality by entering into a certain kind of association with each other, the polis. This idea recurs in Rousseau, but now with a different conception of humans in which their essence is to be free. ‘To renounce freedom is to renounce being a man’. The social contract that initiates the legitimate state does not just preserve this essential human freedom, but brings about a ‘remarkable change in man’ which gives him a general will as well as a particular will, so that he thinks of himself as part of a larger whole as well as an individual. Thereby he acquires civil and moral freedom in place of natural freedom, and becomes truly free for the first time. So Rousseau’s legitimate state plays the same role as Aristotle’s polis, that of enabling humans to realise their own essence, although with a new conception of the human essence as freedom.
Fichte is a direct descendant of Rousseau. For him too the properly constituted state enables humans to realise their own essence as free. But whereas for Rousseau this freedom is brought into existence by a contract, for Fichte it is brought into existence by mutual recognition. It is by mutually recognising one another as free selves that individual human beings become free and so properly human. Fichte calls the relation of mutual recognition the ‘relation of right’ and sees the rightful or lawful (rechtlich) state as properly institutionalising that relation. Therefore, as for Rousseau, humans can only realise their essence as free by entering into a certain kind of state.
Hegel follows Fichte in conceiving human freedom as achieved only through mutual recognition, and in seeing this as institutionalised in a rightful state. However he differs fundamentally from Fichte in his conception of recognition. When we achieve mutual recognition in Hegel we recognise each other as free individual selves but also as part of a single ‘universal’ self, which we bring into existence though this very act of mutual recognition. Hegel calls this mutual recognition ‘universal self-consciousness’:
Universal self-consciousness is the affirmative knowing of one’s self in the other self. Each has absolute independence as a free individuality, but, through the negation of its immediacy or desire, does not differentiate itself from the other, and so is universal and objective, and has real universality as mutuality in that it knows itself to be recognised in the free other, and knows this in so far as it recognises the other and knows it to be free [.…] the self-conscious subjects related to each other have through the supersession of their dissimilar particular singularity risen to the consciousness of their real universality, of their freedom which belongs to all, and thereby to seeing their determinate identity with each other. (Philosophy of Mind §436, 436A; Werke 10:225, t.m. )
This double recognition - recognition of the other as autonomous and recognition of the other as at root identical to myself - is at the heart of Hegel’s concept of ‘spirit’. He says as much when he first introduces the concept in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what spirit is – this absolute substance which, in the complete freedom and independence of its opposite, namely different self-consciousnesses existing for themselves, is the unity of them: I that is We and We that is I. (Phenomenology of Spirit 110; Werke 3:144; t.m.)
Spirit is at once an ‘I’, a single collective self and a ‘we’, a multiplicity of separate selves. As a collective self it is self-grounding, a Spinozist ‘substance’ of which the individual selves are simply modes; and yet at the same time these individuals selves are themselves ‘independent’ and ‘existing for themselves’, so that the collective self is simply a combination of them.
The difference between universal self-consciousness and fully realised (or ‘absolute’) spirit is that spirit is constituted not only by a mutual recognition between individuals which brings into existence a universal self, but also by a second mutual recognition between this universal self (or individuals acting as members of this universal self) and the individuals that compose it:
The word of reconciliation is existing spirit, which see the pure knowledge of itself as a universal being in its opposite, in the pure knowledge of itself as absolutely being-for-itself singularity - a mutual recognition which is absolute spirit. (Phenomenology of Spirit 408; Werke 3:492 ; t.m.)
For Hegel ‘freedom is the one authentic property of spirit’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction 47-48; Hoffmeister 55), so humans become free through the two acts of mutual recognition (between individuals and between collective and individuals) whereby they bring spirit into existence. Thus for Hegel, as for Rousseau and Fichte, human freedom is a joint achievement:
[T]he community of a person with others must not be regarded as a limitation of the true freedom of the individual but essentially as its enlargement. Highest community is highest freedom (The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy 145; Werke 2:81)
However, for Hegel if human freedom is to be properly realised this community must be given an institutional form, as a state governed by rightful laws. This state will give spirit, and so the freedom that is the essential quality of spirit, an objective form. Like spirit, it will combine collectivity and individuality, so that its principle
allows the principle of subjectivity [i.e. the principle of individual freedom - AC] to attain fulfilment in the self-sufficient extreme of personal particularity, while at the same time bringing it back to substantial unity and so preserving this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself. (Philosophy of Right §260)
This state is the means whereby humans realise their essence as free:
Man is free, this is certainly the substantial nature of man; and not only is this freedom not relinquished in the state, but it is actually in the state that it is first constituted. The freedom of nature, the disposition for freedom, is not real freedom; for the state is the first realisation [Verwirklichung] of freedom. (Lectures on the History of Philosophy 3:504; Werke 20:306)
As Hegel puts in more succinctly, the individual ‘has its substantial freedom in the state as its essence, its goal and the product of its activity’ (Philosophy of Right §257; t.m.) and ‘The state is the actuality of concrete freedom’ (Philosophy of Right §260).
So for Hegel as for Fichte humans realise their freedom in a state that institutionalises relations of mutual recognition between them. But mutual recognition as Fichte understands it leaves individuals essentially separate, so that their freedom is a matter of their individual self-determination, even if it is dependent on their relations of recognition with others. By contrast mutual recognition as Hegel understands it forms individuals into a new complex kind of entity, an ‘I that is we and a we that is I’, and their freedom is the self-determination of this entity, a self-determination that somehow combines individual and collective self-determination without reducing to either alone. This freedom is ‘concrete’ rather than ‘abstract’ because it is the freedom of individuals who are simultaneously individuals and parts of larger whole, rather than the freedom of individuals considered in abstraction from that whole. Similarly, when Hegel speaks of the individuals in relations of mutual recognition as having ‘universal self-consciousness’ he has in mind not an ‘abstract’ universality which is opposed to particularity but a ‘concrete universality in which the universal ‘contains the particular and the singular within it’ (Encyclopaedia Logic §165R; Werke 8:313; t.m).
Marx and the state in 1843
In his 1842 writings Marx agrees with Rousseau, Fichte and Hegel that freedom is the essence of human beings, and that it is properly achieved only through an association with other human beings:
Freedom is so much the essence of man that even its opponents implement it while combating its reality (‘Debates on the Freedom of the Press’, CW 1:155; MEW 1:50)
The more ideal and thorough view of recent philosophy [...] considers the state as the great organism, in which rightful, ethical and political freedom gains its realisation (‘Leading article in no. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung’, CW 1:202; MEW 1:104)
Specifically, he agrees with Rousseau and Hegel that this freedom is inseparable from coming to see oneself as part of a larger collective:
[T]he state itself educates its members in that it makes them into state-members, in that it converts the aims of the individual into universal aims, raw drive into ethical inclination, natural independence into spiritual freedom, in that the individual enjoys himself in the life of the whole and the whole [enjoys itself] in the disposition of the individual. (CW 1:193; MEW 1:95; t.m.)
In the course of 1843 Marx takes this idea further. He begins to reformulate his idea of the essence of man around the core idea that humans are essentially ‘universal’ beings, beings whose essence is to think and live from a collective or universal standpoint (he does not distinguish these two) rather than from the standpoint of their own particular self-interest. He continues to see freedom and universality as inseparable aspects of the essence of human beings, but now puts the emphasis on universality. So, while he continues to assert that the state is ‘the highest social realisation [Wirklichkeit] of man’ (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, EW 98, MEW 1:240), he conceives this essentially as a realisation of human universality. So, describing what he clearly thinks is the correct approach, he says:
If the modes of man’s social existence, as found for example in the development of family, civil society, state, etc., are regarded as the realisation and objectification of his essence, then family, civil society, etc., appear as qualities inhering in a subject. Man then remains the essence of all these beings, while these then appear as his realised universality, and hence also as something common. (EW 99; MEW 1:241, t.m.)
Through these associations the individual ‘achieves his true universality’ (EW 99; MEW 1:242).
At the same time, Marx now draws a sharp contrast between the modern political state as described by Hegel and the form of human association that would properly realise human universality and freedom. The former accomplishes only a ‘political emancipation’ (or political freeing) of human beings, while only the latter can accomplish their ‘human emancipation’, i.e. can make them properly free. Specifically, in the modern state humans become free only in an indirect and so unreal way, through the medium of an association which is external to them, just as in Christianity they only see themselves as divine in an indirect way, through the medium of a particular man (Jesus Christ) who is external to them:
[I]n so far as he frees himself politically, man frees himself in a roundabout way, through a medium, even it is a necessary medium. […] he recognises himself only by a roundabout route, only through an intermediary. Religion is precisely the recognition of man in a roundabout way, through a mediator. The state is the mediator between man and man’s freedom. Just as Christ is the mediator to whom man transfers all his divinity, all his religious constraint, so the state is the mediator to whom man transfers all his non-divinity and all his human unconstraint. (On the Jewish Question, EW 218-9; MEW 1:353; t.m.)
Likewise, in the modern state humans only realise their essential universality in an indirect and unreal way:
The perfect political state is, in its essence, the species-life of man as opposed to his material life. […] Where the political state has attained its true development, man – not only in his thought, in his consciousness, but in reality, in life – leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community [politischen Gemeinwesen], in which he counts to himself as a communal being [Gemeinwesen], and life in civil society, where he is active as a private individual. [In civil society,] where he counts to himself and to others as a real individual, he is an untrue appearance. In the state, on the other hand, where man counts as a species-being [Gattungswesen], he is the imaginary member of an imagined sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality. (EW 220; MEW 1:354-5. t.m.)
Here for the first time Marx uses the term ‘species-being’ (or ‘species-essence’, Gattungswesen) to refer to the essential universality of human beings. Every entity that belongs to a species has a ‘species-essence’, meaning the essential characteristic of the species. But in the case of human beings this essential characteristic is not just universal in the sense of belonging to every member of the species but is universal in that its content is universality. The feature that is universal to all human beings is universality itself. Marx expresses this by saying not just that a human being has a ‘species-essence’ (which is the case for every entity that belongs to a species) but that it is a species-essence. This expression does not sound odd in German, since the word Wesen can mean ‘a being’ as well as ‘an essence’, but it does sound odd in English, hence the usual English translation ‘species-being’, which I shall follow here whenever Marx uses Gattungswesen to refer specifically to the human essence.
In short, for Marx in 1843 the state realises human universality and freedom in an ‘estranged’ way. The political emancipation it brings about is an incomplete and contradictory form of human emancipation. Nevertheless it is a step towards genuine human emancipation:
Political emancipation is, of course, a great advance. True, it is not the final form of human emancipation in general, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order. (EW 221; MEW 1:356; t.m.)
In fact Marx envisages human emancipation as an extension of the emancipation that has already been accomplished in the modern political state. In the kind of association that accomplishes human emancipation humans will relate to each other as free and universal beings, as they do as citizens of the modern state, but they will do so in their everyday lives, thus in a ‘real’ rather than an ‘unreal’ way:
Only when the real individual man takes back into himself the abstract citizen, and has become a species-being as an individual man in his empirical life, in his individual labour, and in his individual relations, only when man has recognized and organized his ‘own powers’ as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished. (EW 234; MEW 1:370; t.m.)
If the essential characteristic of human beings for Marx is universality, then is this Hegel’s ‘abstract universality’ or his ‘concrete universality’, that is, is it a universality that is opposed to particularity or one that includes it? In the Science of Logic Hegel explicitly associates the idea of concrete universality with the term ‘species’, so Marx’s choice of the term ‘species-being’ already indicates that he has concrete universality in mind, and this is confirmed by the above quote. Marx’s vision of a society that realises human universality is one in which each individual realises that universality ‘in his individual labour, and in his individual relations’ rather than by playing the role of an ‘abstract citizen’ whose motivations are counterposed to those he has as a particular individual.
In fact Marx’s basic criticism of the modern political state can be stated by saying that in it individuals realise their own universality only in the form of an abstract universality that is opposed to their particularity, rather than in the genuine form of a concrete universality that includes their particularity. When Marx says that in the modern political state individuals realise their universality in an ‘estranged’ or ‘unreal’ way, he means that they realise it through an association that is ‘external’ to them, but more fundamentally that they realise it in the form of an abstract rather than a concrete universality. This is the essential difference between political and human emancipation.
It seems natural to conclude that for Marx the kind of association that will properly realise human universality as concrete universality will also realise human freedom as concrete freedom, the freedom of individuals who are simultaneously part of a larger whole, and that this is the kind of freedom that Marx has in mind when he says that other humans are the ‘realisation’ rather than the ‘limit’ of my freedom (EW 229-30; MEW 365), or as he puts it later ‘In the real community individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association’. (The German Ideology, CW 5:78; MEW 3:74). By contrast the modern political state realises human freedom only as abstract freedom, the freedom of individuals whose status as members of a larger whole is counterposed to their status as particular individuals.
In the second part of On the Jewish Question, Marx treats money in a similar way to the state. In the market system, humans can realise their own essence only in the form of something which is external to them, namely money:
Selling is the praxis of alienation [Entäusserung]. Just as man, as long as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essence only by turning it into an alien fantastic essence, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and practically produce objects, only by putting his products, like his activity, under the domination of an alien essence, and giving them the significance of an alien essence – money. (EW 241, MEW 1:376-7; t.m.)
If the essence of human beings is universality and freedom, then it follows humans realise their freedom in two ‘estranged’ and ‘unreal’ ways, first in the form of the state and second in the form of money.
Furthermore, these two kinds of estranged self-realisation are different in character. First of all, the state is an association, whereas money is a thing. But secondly, Marx speaks of money as dominating human beings as an alien power, whereas in 1843 he never speaks of the state in this way. While he compares the state to the religion of Christianity, in which humans see their own divinity in a particular human (Jesus Christ) who is external to them, he compares money to the religion of Judaism, in which they see their divinity in a God which is not only external to them but which also dominates them:
Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-constituted value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the human world and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s labour and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it. (EW 239; MEW 1:374-5; t.m.)
In short, ‘money has become a world power’ (EW 237; MEW 1:373). So in realising their essence in the form of money humans realise it in a way that is not only ‘estranged’ but also self-enslaving.
Marx and capital in 1844
I shall argue that Marx’s philosophical conceptions of the modern state and of money in 1843, as the means whereby humans realise the freedom intrinsic to their essence but in an estranged and even self-enslaving way, provides the template for the conception of capital that he forms in 1844 when he first engages with political economy.
In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx begins by adopting Adam Smith’s concept of capital. For Smith capital is that part of a person’s ‘stock’ or wealth (whether a stock of money or goods) which is used not for consumption but to earn an income. Capital can earn an income by being used to buy commodities at one price and sell them at a higher one (merchant’s capital), but Smith is mainly interested in capital that earns an income by being used to buy ‘useful machines and instruments of trade’ and ‘materials’, and to pay ‘workmen’ who use them to produce commodities which are then sold for a sum of money larger than the capital invested. So capital is a sum of wealth that is used to generate more wealth. But in turn the measure of a sum of wealth is the amount of labour that can be purchased with it. Since Smith takes the labour that can be purchased with a sum of wealth to be equal (at least as a first approximation) to the amount of labour it takes to produce it, we do not need to go far beyond Smith to understand capital as a quantity of labour, embodied in commodities or money, which is used to purchase living labour from labourers in order to generate a larger quantity of embodied labour.
This is how Marx officially understands capital in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Capital is ‘accumulated labour’ (EW 285, 287) or ‘stored-up labour’ (EW 295) which ‘yields its owner a revenue or profit’ (EW 295), mainly by being used to hire labourer and to buy raw materials and instruments of production so as to produce commodities for sale on the market.
But in these manuscripts Marx also characterises capital in terms similar to those he had used to describe money the year before. With the expansion of capital the worker’s ‘own labour increasingly confronts him as alien property’ (EW 285; MEW Erg1 473), the accumulation of capital ‘opposes the product of labour to the worker as something increasingly alien to him’ (EW 286; MEW Erg1 474) and leads to ‘enslavement to capital which piles up in threatening opposition to him’ (EW 285-6; MEW Erg1 474). That is, he construes the accumulation of capital as essentially a process of human self-enslavement. In it, human labour gives rise to a mass of products of which enslave that enslave the very workers who produced them. Of course Marx expresses this idea most clearly in the section ‘estranged labour’ in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:
The product of labour is labour which has fixed itself in an object, made itself thinglike, it is the objectification of labour. The realization of labour is its objectification. In the condition of political economy, this realization of labour appears as a de-realisation of the worker, objectification as loss of and servitude to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation [Entäusserung]. (EW 324; MEW Erg1:511-12; t.m.)
So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital. (EW 324; MEW Erg1:512)
The alienation [Entäusserung] of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and becomes a self-sufficient power confronting him; that the life which he has given to the object confronts him as hostile and alien. (EW 324; MEW Erg1:512; t.m.)
The result is ‘the relationship of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object that has power over him’ (EW 327; MEW Erg1:515), in which the worker becomes a ‘slave of his object’ (EW 325; MEW Erg1:513). It is not the particular object that one worker produces that enslaves him, but the totality of objects produced by all workers that, when these objects take the form of capital, enslaves them all.
So Marx’s characterisation of capital in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts involves the same idea of self-enslavement that we saw in his brief account of money in On the Jewish Question. But it also involves the other idea that we saw in his account of money, and that was central to his account of the state, the idea of capital as an estranged realisation of the human essence, of species-being.
In fact in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx introduces a substantial development of his conception of the humans as ‘species-beings’, in which for the first time the idea of labour plays a central role. To begin with, he defines a species-being as a being that makes its own species, and the species of other things, the object of its thought and action, that is, a being that thinks of itself and acts towards itself not as a singular individual but as a member of its own kind, and likewise for every other entity that it encounters:
Man is a species-being, not only because he practically and theoretically makes the species – both his own and those of other things – his object, but also – and this is simply another expression for the same thing – because he relates to himself as the present, living species, because he relates to himself as a universal and therefore free being. (EW 327; MEW Erg1:515)
The second part of this definition reiterates his earlier views. The first part rephrases those views in terms close to the definition of the essence of man in the first lines of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity. However, while Feuerbach only says that the essence of humans consists in their ability to take their own species as the object of their thought, Marx says that they make their species their object ‘practically and theoretically’, i.e. they make it their object of their thought and activity. Correspondingly ‘relates’ in the second part of the definition must refer to both thought and activity. In fact Marx goes on to develop his conception of a species-being entirely in terms of the kind of activity in which humans engage, saying that ‘The whole character of a species, its species-character, resides in the nature of its life activity’ (EW 328; MEW Erg1:516). He identifies this specifically human kind of activity with labour, as it features in the works of the political economists. It is (1) universal, both in that it is oriented towards species, whether the human species or the species of other entities, and in that it is directed to any part of nature, (2) consciously undertaken, and (3) free. But most importantly of all it is (4) ‘world-producing’, in that it refashions nature as a human-produced world in which humans can see their own essence:
It is therefore in his fashioning of the objective world that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it, nature appears as his work and his realisation. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of the species-life of man: for man doubles himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore see himself in a world he himself has created. (EW 329; MEW Erg1:517, t.m.)
It is clear that Marx sees this creation of a human-produced world not just as evidence that humans are species-beings but as the process through which they realise themselves as species-beings. Therefore capital is an estranged realisation of the essence of human beings:
Estranged labour, therefore, turns man’s species-essence – both nature and his intellectual species-power – into an alien essence (EW 329; MEW Erg1:517)
So in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx says of capital just what he said of both the state and money in On the Jewish Question: that it is an estranged realisation of the human essence. But he has now characterised this essence in a new way. Whereas before the central features of the human essence were universality and freedom, now the central feature is labour, and freedom and universality are reduced to aspects of labour.
If capital is the estranged realisation of the human essence, then what is needed in order to genuinely realise the human essence is to replace capital by something that retains its positive features but lacks its estranged character (and of course that no longer dominates individual human beings), just as what was needed in On the Jewish Question was to replace the state by a form of society that would retain its positive features of universality and freedom but would lack its estranged character. In fact Marx speaks of the genuine realisation of the human essence in just this way. It will be:
the appropriation of the objective essence through the supersession of its estrangement […] the real appropriation of [man’s ] objective essence through the destruction of the estranged character of the objective world, through its supersession in its estranged existence (EW 395; MEW Erg1:583, t.m.)
Here ‘the objective essence’ means the essence of human beings in so far as it has been objectified by labour as a world of products, or as a refashioned nature. Currently, this objective essence takes the form of capital, and what is needed is not to destroy it but only to strip it of its estranged character.
However in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts goes further and says not just that capital is an estranged realisation of the human essence, but that this estranged realisation is the necessary means towards the genuine realisation of the human essence, rather as he suggested that political emancipation is a necessary means towards human emancipation in On the Jewish Question. Here it is worth mentioning Feuerbach’s account of God in The Essence of Christianity. For Feuerbach God is a misconception by human beings of their own human essence as a being external to them, but this misconception is not just an unfortunate error. Humans could only become aware of their own essence by first becoming aware of it in the shape of a being external to them:
[R]eligion, the consciousness of God, […] is the first, but indirect, self-consciousness of man […] Man transfers his essence outside himself before he finds it within himself. His own essence is an object for him first in the form of another essence [...] Hence, the historical development occurring within religions takes the following course: What an earlier religion regarded as objective, is now recognised as subjective; i.e., what was regarded and worshipped as God, is now recognised as something human. (Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity 13, Sämtliche Werke 6:16)
In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Max directly draws an analogy between capital and God, although of course capital is a product of practical activity whereas God is a product of thinking. And, in a parallel way to Feuerbach, he sees the estranged realisation of humans as species-beings in capital as a necessary step towards their genuine realisation as species-beings. He says this most clearly in his commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which he sees as expressing this basic idea (albeit in an ‘estranged’ form) . Thus he praises Hegel for seeing that:
religion, wealth, etc., are only the estranged realisation [Wirklichkeit] of human objectification, of human essential powers born into work, and therefore only the way to true human realisation [Wirklichkeit] (EW 385; MEW Erg1:573; t.m.)
That is, Hegel sees that capital is a step towards the realisation of humans as species-beings:
Hegel grasps man’s self-estrangement, alienation of his essence, loss of objectivity, and de-realisation as self-discovery, expression of his essence, objectification and realisation. (In short, he sees […] man’s relating to himself as an alien essence and his activation of himself as an alien essence as the coming to be of species-consciousness and species-life.) (EW 395; MEW Erg1:583, t.m.)
To summarise, then. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx reworks his earlier conception of what it is to be a species-being so as to organise it around the idea of universal, free, conscious productive activity. He gives a philosophical account of labour as this activity. Thereby he is able to give a philosophical account of capital modelled on his earlier account of the modern political state and money. Capital is the realisation of species-being in the estranged form of a thing that enslaves the very humans whose essence it realises. The philosophical accounts of labour as the activity constitutive of species-being and of capital as the estranged realisation of species-being go together because Marx, following Smith, sees capital as consisting in nothing other than objectified labour.
This still leaves the question of the exact sense in which capital is an ‘estranged’ realisation of species-being. In the case of the modern political state we have argued that it realises species-being in an estranged way because it realises the concrete universality of humans in an association external to them and in the form of an abstract universality. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx clearly sees a genuine human association (or society) as realising concrete universality:
Man, however much he may therefore be a particular individual – and it is just this particularity which makes him an individual and a really individual communal being - is just as much the totality, the ideal totality, the subjective existence of society which has been thought and experienced for itself (EW 351; MEW Erg1:539 ; t.m.)
This suggests that by contrast capital, like the modern political state in On the Jewish Question, realises human universality only in an external thing but also in an abstract way. There is one passage where Marx implies just this. If we return to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx begins by rejecting the idea of a monarchy in which one person exercises political power, but he then goes on to reject ‘the political republic’ or ‘democracy within the abstract form of the state’ (EW 89; MEW 1:232), saying:
In monarchy for example, or in the republic as merely a particular form of the state, political man has his particular existence beside the unpolitical, private man. (EW 88; MEW 1:231-2; t.m.)
Therefore ‘The struggle between monarchy and republic is itself still a struggle within the abstract form of the state’. By contrast Marx calls for a ‘true democracy’ in which ‘the political state disappears’ (EW 88; MEW 1:232). His point is that expanding the number of people who share in political power leaves untouched the fact that insofar as individuals share in this power they do so only as citizens, in counterposition to their status as a private individuals. Even if everyone is a legislator, the individual as a legislator thinking for the common good remains counterposed to the same individual as a private self-seeker. By gaining the status of legislator, the individual realises his or her universality only in form that is counterposed to his or her particularity, that is, in the form of an abstract universality. So a constitutional democracy fails to overcome the estranged character of the political state. By contrast true democracy is a ‘true unity of the particular and the universal’ (EW 88; MEW 1:231).
In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx makes an exactly parallel argument about ‘crude communism’, in which the ownership of social wealth is extended from a few individuals to the entire population, so that:
Just as woman passes from marriage to general prostitution so the entire world of wealth, that is, the objective essence of man, passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a relation of universal prostitution with the community. (EW 346; MEW Erg1:534; t.m.)
Marx’s objection is that extending the status of capital-owner to every member of the community does not overcome the fundamental duality between individuals as owners of capital and the same individuals as labourers:
The community is only a community of labour, and the equality of wages paid out by communal capital, by the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality – labour as the determination in which every person is placed, and capital as the recognised universality and power of the community. (EW 346-7; MEW Erg1:535; t.m.)
So Marx’s fundamental objection to capital is not that it consists in a wealth of human products which are the private property of a few persons, but that it consists in a wealth of human products which are private property as such, and thus which are ‘external’ to those who produce them. If everyone became co-owners of the totality of human products then all would realise their universality through these products, but only in the form of abstract universality. For the individual as the co-owner of this totality of products, thinking of how to use them for the common good, would remain counterposed to the same individual as a labourer. ‘Crude communism’ would give everyone a share in the ownership of the products of the whole labour of the community, parallel to the share in political power that citizens of the political republic have, but they would possess this share only as capital-owners, in counterposition to their status as labourers.
Accordingly what is needed is a more fundamental transformation, in which private property in the totality of the products of labour is not just extended to all but abolished. But the resulting society would not simply be the negation of capital. Rather it would be a ‘positive supersession’ of capital, in which the human universality (and thus the human freedom) which is realised in capital only abstractly would be realised as concrete universality. Of course Marx never spelled out exactly what such a society would look like.
It might be said that to say that Marx in 1844 criticises capital on the grounds that it realises human universality only in an abstract way ignores his overwhelming preoccupation with the ways in which workers are coerced by capital. But this preoccupation is not incompatible with the account that we have given, any more than a preoccupation with the way that people are coerced by the modern political state would be incompatible with the account we have given of that. Marx’s aim in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts was not simply to protest against the coercion of workers by capitalists, or even to show that the agent of this coercion was ultimately capital itself. It was to give an account of the ultimate source and meaning of this coercion. In the interpretation we have given here, he saw its source precisely in the fact that capital realises the universality inherent in human nature in an abstract way, in such a way as to counterpose the universal to the particular, and therefore to establishes a relation of power between those who personify the universal and those who occupy only the position of particular, between the capitalist and the worker: a relation of power which would remain even if the ownership of the world of human products was extended from individual capitalists to the whole community. Whether such a view of the source of the coercion endemic to capitalist production is ultimately convincing, it is at least- that Marx in 1844 could have held it.
Conclusion
It might be argued that Marx’s first attempt to relate the concept of capital to that of human nature is of little interest, since within a year it had been superseded by a very different one. In the German Ideology Marx’s vision of realised humanity becomes one of beings who engage in ever-developing productive activity, and the relation between capital (or rather the set of capitalist social relations) and this realised humanity is that it is the set of property-based social relations that least hinders the free development of human productivity, so that the next step beyond it in the history of human self-realisation must be the abolition of property as such. This makes the relationship between capital and human nature rather contingent: there is no philosophical reason why some other set of property-based social relations might not have played the role of the last and most productive in the historical series of sets of social relations. Even the drive of capitalist social relations to expand to every part of the globe and to continuously expand and revolutionise the forces of production, emphasised further in the Communist Manifesto, seems to connect Marx’s conception of realised humanity to capitalism only in a contingent way, for in principle some other set of social relations of production might have possessed these drives.
My suggestion, however, is that the idea of humans as having as their essence a concrete universality and freedom which is realised only in the form of abstract universality and freedom in capital, and which can only be properly realised in communism, continued to inform Max’s mature economic writings, so that Das Kapital is implicit not just a theory of capital but also implicitly a philosophical anthropology. Whether this is the case, and if it is the case whether this helped or hindered Marx to grasp the nature of capitalism, can only be questions for future research.
Abbreviations
CW = Marx, K. and Engels, F., Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975-)
EW = Marx. K. Early Writings, ed. L. Colletti (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975)
Hoffmeister = Hoffmeister, J., Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Di Vernunft in der Geschichte (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955)
MEW = Marx, K. and Engels, F., Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956-)
MEW Erg1 = Marx, K. and Engels, F., Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Werke, Erganzungsband 1
Werke = Hegel, G.W.F., Werke, eds. E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970)
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