Abstract
Despite the emergence of historical materialism in The German Ideology, several themes broached in the earlier works remain central to this text and none more so than the close identification of class and the division of labour. While the notion of man’s ‘essence’ and alienation — and, correspondingly, the inspiration these had provided for the doctrine of total emancipation — had been crucial in enabling Marx to produce a close theoretical link between class and the division of labour, the transcendence of anthropologism led to no significant adjustment in this respect. The idea of complete liberation remained a strong motif, although this time underpinned not by a conception of human nature but by a theoretical structure which left no room for doubt that class and the division of labour both derived from private property and that the abolition of the latter necessarily implied the disappearance of the former. Thus there is a significant continuity in the (reductionist) structure of Marx’s discourse between the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology. The assimilation of class to the division of labour now independently performs the discursive function which had previously been accomplished by combining this form of reductionism with an essentialist anthropology.
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Notes and References
Lenin, ‘The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism’, Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress, 1975) pp. 44–8.
Lenin’s judgement still seems to command unqualified assent: see, for example, G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: a Defence (Oxford University Press, 1978) p. 1.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. D. Struik (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) p. 177.
Cf. D. McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1969);
W. J. Brazill, The Young Hegelians (Yale University Press, 1970).
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965) p. 45. It is worth remarking at this point that ‘abolition’ as in ‘abolition of the division of labour’ is often rendered by the (Hegelian) term Aufhebung in the original Marx and Engels texts. Aufhebung implies ‘transcendence’ rather than simple ‘eradication’. But no amount of play on the term actually reveals its implications for the division of labour, which can only be grasped by analysing the more concrete proposals - few though they are - which appear at various points in their writings, and by placing these proposals in the context of the overall structure of Marx’s theorisation in which the ethic of total emancipation, as I shall argue, appears as an overriding principle. Besides, as Evans has pointed out, both Marx and Engels use several other terms in similar contexts, none of which are simply reducible to Aufhebung: cf. M. Evans, ’Marx Studies’, Political Studies, vol. 18 (1970).
Marx, Capital, III (Moscow: Progress, 1961) pp. 799–800.
Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx; R. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1961);
E. Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism, revised edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972);
E. Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx (London: New Left Books, 1971);
T. Bottomore, ‘Socialism and the Division of Labour’, in B. Parekh (ed.), The Concept of Socialism (London: Croom Helm, 1975);
K. Axelos, Alienation, Praxis and Techné in the Thought of Karl Marx (University of Texas Press, 1976).
I. Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation London: Merlin Press, 1970);
R. Garaudy, Karl Marx: the Evolution of his Thought (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967);
R. Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, 3rd edn (London: Pluto Press, 1971);
B. Oilman, Alienation (Cambridge University Press, 1971); idem, ‘Marx’s Vision of Communism: a Reconstruction’, Critique, no. 8 (1977).
D. McLellan, ‘Marx and the Whole Man’, in Parekh (ed.), The Concept of Socialism; A. Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: New Left Books, 1971);
M. Evans, Karl Marx (London: Allen & Unwin, 1975).
As Feurbach said of religion: ‘in the nature and consciousness of religion there is nothing else than what lies in the nature of man and in his consciousness of himself and of the world’. Ludwig Feurbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. C. Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1957) p. 22. Cf. E. Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feurbach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970);
M. W. Wartofsky, Feurbach (Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, ed. J. O’Malley (Cambridge University Press, 1970) p. 30.
Marx’s remarks on private property have sometimes misled commentators to argue that Marx had already developed a class theory of state in the Critique: cf. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, pp. 27–40. For readings of the Critique much closer to mine, see McLellan, Mark before Marxism, pp. 102–28; R. N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1974) pp. 59–84.
Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1967) pp. 236–37.
S. Avineri, ‘The Hegelian Origins of Marx’s Political Thought’ in S. Avineri (ed.), Marx’s Socialism (New York: Lieber-Atherton, 1973) p. 8.
Engels, ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 226. For Engels’s intellectual and political formation see, inter alia, Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, pp. 93–131; H. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. I State and Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977) pp. 149–60.
See, especially, the extended note on James Mill, which prefigures many of the themes of the Manuscripts: Marx, Collected Works, III (Moscow: Progress, 1975) pp. 211–28.
For detailed commentaries on the Manuscripts see, inter alia, McLellan, Marx before Marxism; L. Dupré, The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966);
H. Marcuse, ‘The Foundation of Historical Materialism’, in Studies in Critical Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1972).
Cf. Marx and Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow: Progress, 1956), esp. pp. 124–5, 167–79.
Writings of the Young Marx, p. 402. Marx’s disenchantment with Feurbach may well have owed something to Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, where Feurbach’s abstract notion of ‘man’ is mercilessly attacked: cf. M. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, ed. J. Carroll (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971);
R. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner (University of Hull Press, 1971) pp. 103ff.
Cf. L. Althusser, For Marx (London: Allen Lane, 1969);
L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970).
This point is conceded, even if only implicitly, by the more sophisticated of Althusser’s critics: Cf. N. Geras, ‘Althusser’s Marxism: an Assessment’, New Left Review, no. 71 (1972) pp. 78–9.
George Lukács is a good example of the first tendency: see History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971) p. 238 and passim; for the second tendency, see for instance, H. Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx (London: Allen Lane, 1968) pp. 51ff.
N. Geras, ‘Marx and the Critique of Political Economy’, in R. Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science (London: Fontana, 1972) pp. 289–91. Originally published as ‘Essence and Appearance: Aspects of Fetishism in Marx’s Capital’, New Left Review, no. 65 (1971).
Cf. R. Johnson, ‘Three Problematics: Elements of a Theory of Working-Class Culture’, in J. Clarke et al. (eds), Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1979) p. 202;
T. Benton, Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) pp. 182ff.
L. Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976) pp. 119–25.
Cf. inter alla, A. Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1971) pp. 24–34; G. Lichtheim, Marxism, pp. 141–61.
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Rattansi, A. (1982). The German Ideology. In: Marx and the Division of Labour. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16829-3_14
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