Alienation, Social Relationships and Free Individuality

Abstract

It has been said, and bears repeating, that the beauty and grandeur of the system is founded on this connection and on this material and spiritual interchange, which is spontaneous, independent of the knowledge and desires of the individual, and in fact requires their indifference to each other and mutual independence. Certainly this connection by means of things is to be preferred to a lack of connection, or a merely local association which is founded on a relationship consisting of blood ties, or one of supremacy or servitude; and it is just as certain that individuals cannot dominate their own social relationships until they have created them. But it is absurd to interpret these purely material relationships as natural relationships, inseparable from the nature of individuality (in contrast to reflected knowledge and desire) and inherent in it. These relationships are produced by individuals, produced historically. They belong to a definite phase of the development of the individual. The heterogeneity and independence in which these relationships still stand opposed to individuals, prove only that these individuals are still engaged in the production of the conditions of their social life, rather than that they began that life starting from those conditions.

From Grundrisse, pp. 5–31

This is one of the first parts of the Grundrisse to be written, dated August 1857. Marx did not publish it in his Critique of Political Economy since ‘any anticipation of results that are still to be proven seemed to me objectionable’. Marx begins with a critique of the eighteenth-century view of ‘natural’ man and the eternal laws supposed to govern economics by such writers as Mill. In the second section Marx considers the way in which production, distribution, exchange and consumption are intimately linked. The third section is particularly interesting for its discussion of method in political economy and the plan of the whole Economics. It ends with an unfinished digression on the appreciation of Greek art as an apparent difficulty for the materialist conception of history.