Critical Theory Lecture 4: (cont) & Lecture 5:Critical Theory Version Two: The German Ideology

The Unity of Theory and Praxis

10. If this first formulation of critical theory is considered from the standpoint of strategy, an immediate problem emerges. Marx has designated the workers as the subject and bearer of the critical theory. They have the emancipatory role to practically realise socialism: they are the negation of the negation, of bourgeois alienation. However, as Marx describes the dialectics of bourgeois society, the workers are the radically dehumanised class with no real stake in this society. It is hard to see how such a group, while it might be nihilistically destructive, will have the capacity to transcend this society. If the workers are the embodiment of absolute dehumanisation, from whence comes the motives and the practical/intellectual preparations required to overcome their brutalisation. As Marx initially has a completely negative attitude to towards trade unions, he seems to have no practical political strategy to connect his theoretical account of the workers (extreme dehumanisation) with his rather idealised view of the worker’s first politico- educational associations. In other words, his initial account of strategy is disabled by the lack of immanent means to realise what appears to be a utopian goal.

Socialism

11. This problem at the level of strategy is compounded by Marx’s account of socialism. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx offers us no more than a glimpse of socialism. Nevertheless, from what Marx does say, we gain a reasonable idea of his vision of the unalienated future. He initially understood socialism along the lines of an organic unmediated totality. Despite the stress on historical development that constantly underscores his view of humanity in this work, the features of his concept of socialism expressed the idea of a utopian reconciliation of all historically experienced antagonisms and oppositions. Marx speaks of the overcoming of all oppositions: those between man and man, man and nature, freedom and necessity, the individual and the species. This overcoming is understood as the realisation of an anthropological teleology. Socialism is the ‘riddle of history solved’. Of course, there is some difficulty in accurately interpreting precisely what Marx meant with these fairly vague and general ideas. But this image seems to invoke a radicalised Hegelian style ‘end of history’ in as much as he implies the elimination of all sources of serial conflict. In opposition to conditions of alienation where the wealth of the species is opposed to the deprivation of the individual, socialism seems to posit social conditions in which each and every individual would actually be able to assimilate and realise the totality of socially and historically created human abilities and needs. There would exist a real identity between the individual and society and such an identity corresponds to the idea of the realisation of the species.

12. In adopting this view of socialism as ‘the riddle of history solved’ Marx seems to foreclose the historical process and lapse into a teleological conception of history like the one he castigated in Hegel. In place of Hegel’s spiritual essence, Marx posits an anthropological teleology in terms of human species essence. The historical realisation of this essence means the reconciliation of all historical tensions (both social and natural). In a word, the culmination of the total historical process and the attainment of a universal perspective. So despite a general tendency to move towards a growing theoretical realism emphasising the finitude of human subjectivity against the idealist tradition, his practical vision reasserts utopianism in terms of a cessation of the historical tensions that sustain historical development and human unfolding. This view of socialism will undergo quite substantial changes in the later versions of Marx’s critical theory.

13. The shortcomings of this formulation of the idea of socialism was probably not the reason that Marx soon abandoned the version of critical theory presented in the Manuscripts. This is better explained in terms of a generally maturing outlook as he consolidated the main outlines of his standpoint. Also the internal polemics amongst the surviving Young Hegelians determined Marx to formally distance himself from philosophy and especially all teleological views of history and of human essence.

Lecture 5: Critical Theory Version Two: The German Ideology

1. If one compares the German Ideology to the E and P Manuscripts probably the most noticeable transformation is the striking change in Marx’s attitude to philosophy. In the E and P Manuscripts, Marx mounted a philosophical critique of the political economists using a philosophical notion: alienation. In the German Ideology Marx appears to quite consciously discard this understanding of critical theory as philosophical critique. He states very directly that critique is the empirical science of history. In the first pages of the text it is stated: ‘We know only a single science, the science of history’. This new positive understanding is accompanied by a full-scale critical onslaught and caricature of philosophy, its abstract method and terminology. Is this change a manifestation of Althusser’s famous “epistemological break”: the abandonment of humanist philosophy for the science of history or something else? What are the motive, meaning and significance of this change?

2. The first obvious thing is that concepts that Marx had favoured and made central to his articulation of critique in the E and P Manuscripts are repudiated and caricatured. The terms “human essence”, “species being” “alienation” are lampooned and rejected in the German Ideology. However, despite this polemical attack on philosophy and its method, Marx’s critical remarks are not directed at his own previous use of the concepts in the manuscripts. This is confirmed by a close look at the German Ideology. Marx may have abandoned the terms themselves but he continued to employ the concepts in the same or only slightly modified ways. For example, the concept of “alienation” continues to be present in the German Ideology:

And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. (Tucker p.160)

It is no longer the basic term of analysis that explains social relations by indicating the contradiction between human essence and the social situation of the particular individual. In the German ideology, alienation is the result of a long historical process mainly determined by other developments - the division of labour being the crucial one. This changing role of the concept undoubtedly involved a change in Marx’s view of the relation between social theory and economics.

3. Part of the reason for the spectacular reversal of Marx’s attitude to philosophical critique is to be found in his desire to clarify his stance towards the other Young Hegelians. To him these philosophical terms were tainted by their continued abstract and speculative employment amongst the disputing Young Hegelians. Some commentators have suggested that Max Stirner’s book Der Einzige und seiner Eigenthum (The Ego and his Own (1845)), which set out a critique of all philosophical abstractions - of God, Spirit, Reason, Man - from the standpoint of anarchism, claiming the individual as the only real actor and axis of values, forced Marx to clarify his own position and distinguishing it from all the other Young Hegelians. The crux of this critique of philosophical terminology turned on finally overcoming abstraction. For example, Marx, Hess and the later Bruno Bauer had viewed socialism as an ethical postulation corresponding to the telos of a universal human essence. But for the Marx of the German Ideology, “human essence” is not some unchanging, eternal fundament of humanity.

4. Marx’s critique of philosophical concepts was not merely cosmetic or only confined to terminology. My appraisal of the E and P Manuscripts argued that Marx’s view of socialism was utopian and teleological. The German Ideology clearly rejects all conceptions implying historical teleology. In this respect, the realistic tendency already evident in Marx’s analysis of economic alienation and his idea of finite subjectivity in the Manuscripts (his critique of idealist abstraction) is taken a step further. Marx is now specifically concerned with concrete, objective, institutionally determined relations between individuals: these impose their own independent ‘logics’ upon social actions and activity. This is a direction and a tendency, which in the course of Marx’s later development, will continue and be progressively concretised.

5. The German Ideology offers no speculations on the historical process as a ‘whole’. Marx no longer attempts to interpret the meaning of history. Aside from of that created and ascribed to it by the practices of living, concrete individuals, history has no immanent meaning.

“History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all the preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. (Tucker p.172). "

The historical process itself does not act and has no independent or inherent telos. The only real historical actors are concrete individuals. Only philosophical abstraction and its inbuilt mystification could impute some autonomous purpose to the collective results of these actions. However, Marx is not about to deny that supra-individual historical structures and processes both material and idea exist. This is the main import of his theory of alienation. Social production gives rise to economic forces which then take on a life and dynamic of their own to which individuals are subordinated: means become ends. But Marx was intent upon avoiding the philosophical inclination to give some meaning or direction to the whole of the historical process from a detached, impartial perspective somehow external to and beyond the actions of real concrete actors.

6. That Marx’s move towards an empirical science of history is deliberately framed to avoid philosophical abstractions and its various ‘spectres’, does not mean that he was now prepared to see critical theory as purely descriptive and neutral. Actually, the opposite is the case:

“ This method is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is for the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.’(Tucker p.119)"

Marx understands his ‘science’ as an organ of a real historical movement, which expresses the needs and the potential consciousness of the vast oppressed majority. Marx’s science is the theoretical expression of the historically becoming perspective of the social movement growing amongst workers. Far from succumbing to a crude empiricism that merely describing the ‘facts’ and relations of capitalist society, Marx’s science is a fusion of empirical analysis and philosophy. In this synthesis, philosophy organises and centres the empirical material around the problems and goals of the working class movement from a historically immanent perspective. It should be noted that this understanding of a science of history perfectly fits with Marx’s attack on philosophical history and its abstractions. His science is not the voice of an impartial reason lying somehow above the contradictions and struggles of ongoing historical processes. Rather it is tied to the interests of the historically developing, potentially universal class, to the real movement of concrete history. It is not the last word in history but a totalisation: a practical contribution to the self-clarification of the individual members of the class and hence to the formation of a fully conscious, collective revolutionary subjectivity.

New Methodology

7. Marx’s new understanding of critical theory as an empirical science of history also involves a new method. The phenomenology materialism of the Manuscripts is abandoned. Marx now sees that his attempt to deduce the social relations and economic categories of capitalist society from the analysis of the circumstances of its representative individuals was speculative and circular. Why concentrate on representative individuals rather than the relations, in which they exist? Social relations are just as constitutive of the totality of any organization of social production as the life-situation of representative individuals. In the German Ideology, the subject of critical theory remains concrete individuals but now “concreteness” is defined in terms of the reproducible social relations, in which they stand. Critical theory is therefore now a practical and historical analysis of the concrete relations, which determine the total life situation of individuals: a science of specific, historically determined productive social relations.

8. To facilitate this new approach, Marx introduces a new conceptual armoury that, in a modified form, will become the stable conceptual arsenal of historical materialism. He now refers to relations of intercourse, production forces, class divisions, class struggle, state, ideology, cultural production and so on. This new conceptual armoury is devised in order to theoretically reproduce and analyse bourgeois society as a social totality. Marx is concerned to specify precisely those reproducible social relations that constitute the basis of the capitalist society. With this emphasis, the notion of social totality moves to the forefront of his analysis. The social totality is that ensemble of interlocking socio-economic relations which constitute the social whole in the sense of an ongoing process of uninterrupted reproduction: these are the relations which structure and regulate the material life situation of all the social agents in any given society. Marx’s analysis in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts already touches upon the question of social reproduction. Marx argues that alienated labour reproduces all the other manifestations of alienation; that the worker not only produces products but also produces the capitalist and his/her relations to all others. In the German Ideology, this theme of social reproduction becomes the most central concern. The present generation inherits and, reproduces in a changed form, the sum total of social and cultural relations, which altogether comprise the social totality. But this appropriation is never passive: it is always a practical transformation from the standpoint of current needs. However much Marx wants to stress the conditionedness of all human action, he was not the technological or social determinist that he is sometimes painted as. A popular representation of Marx’s ideas is that he maintained that socialist revolution was a historical necessity according to some laws of the capitalist development in the same way that lawfulness in the domain of natural sciences have, or are posited as having, an iron necessity. A brief look at the passages in the German Ideology where Marx speaks of ‘historical necessity’ show that he generally means two things: 1. The abolition of capitalist relations is a practical necessity if the working class is to raise itself above the level of grave dehumanisation and deprivation and be able to realise the potential human wealth made possible by the current level of the productive forces; 2. Revolution was necessary simply because the possessing classes would not give up its privileges without a struggle and violence.

"Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew." (Tucker193)

For Marx, the concept of ‘necessity’ typically has a practical rather than a naturalistic meaning.

9. Behind Marx’s elevation of the problem of social totality to the centre of concern is his interest in the task of comprehending relatively stable networks of socio-economic relations as unified wholes. In other words, Marx’s focus turns to the reproduction of the sum of those social relations which pattern and direct socio-productive activity. With this focus, the emphasis of the analysis is on historical discontinuity: the distinctive logic and reproduction of specific social formations. Clearly there is a shift here to a synchronic, structural analysis of the capitalist mode of production. However, this does not mean that diachronic, historical perspective is now abandoned. Certainly it is true that for the rest of his theoretical labours the analysis and theorisation of the structural aspect of socio-economic relations as a decisive conditioning factor in the understanding of society and history will be the central preoccupation. However, Marx never discarded his theoretically immanent revolutionary standpoint, which presupposed both the long-run primacy of an historical perspective and the practical necessity of the collective revolutionary action of the oppressed social class. Perhaps we can say more precisely that Marx's notion of 'social totality' necessitates a double emphasis. After all, Marx had learnt from his critique of the Young Hegelians that a revolutionary could not simply exhort the ultimate power of subjective praxis. To assert that existing institutionalised forms of human praxis were really the products of human activity, even if true, did not bring about their overthrow. This critical position was practically impotent:

The Young Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly world-shattering” statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare that they are only fighting against “phrases”. They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and they are in no way combating the real existing world….’(Tucker N 149).

Marx now emphasised the socially sanctioned forms of ossified human labour constituted self-reproducing socio-economic formations that organise productive life. While these constellations are essentially dynamic, they also are relatively stable insofar as they represented the material interests of dominant social classes who defend them against radical change. They, therefore, form an immediate obstacle and adversarial power to the concrete social forces pressing for such radical social transformation. Here Marx obviously is at pains to stress the resistances to historical praxis.

10. However, Marx also insists that the structural relations of bourgeois society do not reproduce themselves. Social reproduction is not an automatic process. It depends on the activity of living subjects who, while conditioned by existing social relations, also transform them in their very activity. The contradictions between these living subjects - their historically expanding need structure - on the one hand, and the inherited sum of existing socio-productive relations, on the other, introduce volatile tensions and strains into the process of social reproduction. The social totality is not a static social arrangement but a dynamic ensemble of contradictory relations with its own immanent historical dimensions. As immanently historical, the social totality undergoes periods of crisis and even breakdown when social contradictions become too severe and normal reproduction becomes impossible. This is the perspective of discontinuity, which shapes Marx's understanding of capitalist reproduction.

11. Marx's double perspective on the bourgeois social totality is of central significance in his understanding of historical materialism. He sees history as a process of continuity and discontinuity. But he does not superimpose this conception on the concrete historical totality. Rather, the ideas of continuity and discontinuity are internal to the concepts that he uses to analyse concrete societies. These basic terms in the conceptual armoury of historical materialism are (1) productive forces (2) relations of production. For Marx, both (1) and (2) undergo historical development and progress but it is the former which is the real axis of historical continuity and the measure of historical progress. The productive forces designate that which is growing through continuity - through the accumulation of inherited advances both technological and subjective. The objective results of human productive activity both in the areas of instruments, technology and human subjective skills accumulated in history. These productive forces ascribe man's relation to nature in terms of a growing technical mastery, which, according to Marx, can be empirically determined. This is an index for the measure of human historical progress. The relations of production (what Marx in GI calls 'relations of intercourse') designate the discontinuous historical socio-productive relations which, at various times, must be overcome in order to liberate new social and productive forces. The relations of production signify those sanctioned socio-productive forces, which regulate man's relation to man in any specific society. Marx's historical materialism views the antagonism between (1) and (2) as the great source of social dysfunction, which generates class struggle. But it is important to note that, for Marx, only class struggle implying the growing consciousness of the limitations placed on (1) by (2), is sufficient to actually bring about decisive historical change.

12. Essential to Marx's revolutionary standpoint and his critical approach was the conviction that the totality of these socio-productive relations must always be theorised from the dynamic perspective of its immanent future social and human possibilities. This is the meaning of the theoretically immanent revolutionary standpoint. However important it was for Marx to understand capitalist society as a self-sustaining and self-reproducing system of relations, he nevertheless views this totality from the negative, critical perspective of its inherent future social possibilities. This is why the diachronic historical perspective remains dominant. Even as a 'science of history', Marx's critical theory was articulated from the revolutionary standpoint of the historical transcendence of the present.

13. While it is necessary to re-emphasise the priority of the historical perspective in Marx's understanding of 'social totality' even in the German Ideology, it is still fairly obvious from the text itself that Marx is intent upon distancing himself from all the philosophical conceptions of history dominant in German cultural circles. This is strikingly evident when we see the weight Marx gives to empirical elements in shaping his concrete understanding of history. For Marx, the historical process is not just a critical construct whereby the theorist arranges the empirical material in a manner that reveals immanent possibilities and the present direction of historical movement. The new ingredient is Marx's emphasis on the palpable, extensive empirical manifestations of historical dynamism.

"This transformation of history into world history is by no means a mere abstract act of self consciousness, the world spirit but a quite material, empirically verifiable act".

History can no longer simply be construed as the serial unfolding of some philosophically ascribed human or spiritual absence. Marx is also clearly aware of historical contingency. He asserts: "World history didn't always exist; history as world history is a result". This assertion expresses the insight that even the possibility of conceiving history as 'world history' has very real empirical preconditions. World history exists all around the contemporary European: in the cosmopolitan manners and tastes of bourgeois reality, which was sucking in commodities and artefacts from the entire world. But more important than these was the ever expanding world commercial system itself. This world system of commerce interlocked the fortunes of different nations, cultures and societies into the all-encompassing intercourse of the bourgeois world market. In this most palpable sense, world history was a product: the result of bourgeois society and its thirst for markets, its expansionary competitive economic system and its extended division of labour. Such a profound unification with its scale and depth was quite unimaginable in pre-capitalist times. In these times, history was and could have been, only local, provincial, confined to the narrow horizons of relatively isolated peoples and races. In comparison to this situation, bourgeois society with its commercial market activity had, in the space of one hundred years, spread over the entire world and incorporated even the remotest areas into a single economic system:

It (bourgeois competition) produced world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. (Vol 5 P73) Tucker N 185 - Communist Manifesto 475.

This empirical dimension supplied Marx's view of world history with both a material and a spatial dimension. While Marx never overlooked the brutality of European colonisation and conquest, he clearly recognised that this incorporation of the entire known world into a complex network of mutual need satisfaction, not only dissolved the physical isolation of disparate native peoples and cultures but it also brought about a convergence of histories and historical destinies. The reality of a number of parallel but distinct histories in the pre-bourgeois epoch increasingly gave way to world history as every independent, local culture was incorporated into the world commercial system and subordinated to the tyranny of occidental values. While Marx could view this development in absolutely positive terms as a real historical progress, today we have to struggle with the thorny issue of separating Euro-centric and truly universal values.

Critical Theory Essay List: Sem 2 /2015

 Co-ordinator

John.Grumley@sydney.edu.au

Word Limit: Chose one question (2,000) words

          

DUE DATE: Monday 26^th Oct Late essays will be accepted up to 9^th Nov without excuse, but marks will be deducted.  Essays will only be accepted after 9^th Nov if a satisfactory excuse is submitted.  The only satisfactory excuses are illness or misadventure.  Pressure of other work, or computer equipment failure does not normally count as misadventure:  For further information contact course giver by email.  Work can only be submitted through the Turnitin facility.

NOTE:   Secondary reading included below is not a comprehensive list of all available literature. Students are encouraged to investigate other sources. However, remember all sources must be correctly footnoted and included in bibliographies.

Questions

1. Marx understands his version of theory as immanent criticism. Is the concept of alienation reconcilable with such an understanding? Is Marx’s synthesis successful?

Reading   Marx, K. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

                  Marx, K. German Ideology

Markus, G. Marxism and Anthropology, Van Gorcum, Assen, 1978

Meszaros, I. Marx's Theory of Alienation Merlin, London, 1970

Brudney, D. Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998 Ch 4,5,6,8

Torrance, J. Estrangement, Alienation and Exploitation Columbia University Press, New York 1977, Part 2&3

Axelos, K. Alienation, Praxis and Techné in the Thought of Karl Marx University of Texas Press, Austin, 1976 Part 1, 2

Henry, M. Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality Indiana University Press, 1983, Ch 1,2

Scott Arnold, N. Marx’s Radical Critique of Capitalist Society Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990, Ch1, 2

 Gamble, A. & Walton, P From Alienation to Surplus Value Sheed & Ward, London, 1972

Mandel, E. The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx Monthly Review Press, New York, 1971 Chapter 10

Althusser, L. For Marx Penguin, London, 1969 Chapters 1,2,5,7

Hyppolite, J. Studies on Marx and Hegel Heinemann, London, 1969, Chapter 4

Plamenatz, J. Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975

 Fleischer, H. Marxism and History Allen Lane, London, 1973

 Bell, D. ' The" Rediscovery" of Alienation ' in Marx 's Socialism (Ed) Avineri, S, Lieber-Atherton, New York, 1973

 Markus, G. 'Alienation and Reification in Marx and Lukacs ' Thesis Eleven 5/6, Clayton, 1983

Löwith, K. 'Man's Self-Alienation in the Early Writings of Marx’ Social Research 21, 1954

Suchting, W. Marx: An Introduction Harvester Press, London, 1983, Part 1 and 2

  2. In The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Marx offers a critique of Hegel’s theory of alienation. Explain the materialist dimension of Marx’s understanding of objectification.

Reading:   Marx, K. 'Critique of Hegel 's Doctrine of the State' in Early Writings Penguin, London, 1975

                   Marx, K. ' Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole' Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (many editions)

Scott Arnold, N. Marx’s Radical Critique of Capitalist Society Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990, Ch1, 2

Lukacs, G. The Young Hegel Merlin, London, 1975 Part 4 S4

Meikle, S. Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx Open Court, Illnois, 1985, Ch 2 v

Bernstein, R.  Praxis and Action University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Part 1

Henry, M. Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality Indiana University Press, 1983, Ch 1,2

Fetscher, I. ' The Relation of Marxism to Hegel ' Marx and Marxism Herder and Herder, New York, 1971

Axelos, K. Alienation, Praxis and Techné in the Thought of Karl Marx University of Texas Press, Austin, 1976 Part 1, 2

Hook,S.  From Hegel to Marx Anne Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1976

 Hypolite, J. (details as in Question 1)

 Cornu, A. The Origins of Marxian Thought Charles C Thomas, Springfield, Illinois, 1957

 Avineri, S  ' The Hegelian Origins of Marx 's Thought ' in Marx 's Socialism (Ed S Avineri) Lieber Atherton, New York, 1972

3. Explain Marx’ s critique of the Young Hegelians? In what lies the alleged superiority of his standpoint? Are Marx’s claims justified?

Reading: Marx, K. The Holy Family, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973

                Marx, K. German Ideology Progress Publishers (many editions)

                

Breckman, W. Marx. Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999

Brazill, W.J. The Young Hegelians Yale University Press, New Haven, 1970, Ch 7

Brudney, D. Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998 Ch 4,5,6,8

Hook,S. From Hegel To Marx Anne Arbor, New York, 1962

Henry, M. Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality Indiana University Press, 1983, Ch 1,2

McLellan, D. The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx McMillan Press, London, 1969

    ''    ''        Marx Before Marxism  Penguin , 1970

                Cornu, A. The Origins of Marxian Thought Charles C Thomas, Springfield Illinois, 1957, Chapter 4

                Dupre, L. The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism Hardcourt &Brace, New York, 1966 Chapter 3

 Markus, G. Marxism and Anthropology Van Gorcum, Assen, 1978

4. The concept of communication plays a vital role in Habermas’s understanding of critical theory. Explain this role and consider its strengths and weakness.

Reading: Habermas, J. ‘Between Philosophy and Science: Marxism as critique’ Theory and Practice Boston, 1973

              Habermas, J. ‘The Relationship between Theory and Praxis Revisited’ Truth And Justification Boston, MIT, 2003  

Habermas, J. ‘ The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Polity, 1987, Ch 5

Held, D. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas London, Hutchinson, 1980, Part 2

McCarthy. T. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas Hutchinson, London, 1978, Ch 2.5, 3.1, 3.2. 4.1

Allen, A. The Politics of Ourselves: Autonomy, Critical Theory, Gender Columbia University Press, 2007, Ch 4, 5.

Dews, P. (Ed) Habermas: A Critical Reader Blackwell, Oxford, 1999

Thompson. J.B& Held, D. (Ed) Habermas: Critical Debates MIT, Cambridge MA, 1982, Ch 2

Bernstein, J. Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory Routledge, 1995, Ch 1,2

Ingram, D. Critical Theory and Philosophy Paragon House, New York, 1990, Ch 6, 7,8

Roderick, R. Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory McMillan, London, 1986, Ch 2, 3, 4, 5

Guess, R. The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas & the Frankfurt School Cambridge University Press, 1981

Outhwaite, W. Habermas: A Critical Introduction Stanford University Press, 1994, Ch 1,2,3

Owen, D.S. Between Reason and History: Habermas and the Idea of Progress State University of New York, Albany, 2002, Ch 1, 2

Bronner, S. Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, Ch 5, 14

5 Foucault views his own critical theory as standing in the tradition of a “philosophy of actuality”. Explain what he means?

How does his work stand in relation to the tradition of the Enlightenment?

Reading: Foucault, M. ‘What is Enlightenment?’ The Foucault Reader (ed) Rabinow, P. New York, Penguin, 1984)

Foucault, M ‘Critical Theory/Intellectual History’ Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy Culture Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, Ed Kritzman, L.D. (London, Routledge, 1988)

Foucault, M. The Politics of Truth Semiotext, Los Angeles, 2007

Foucault, M. Fearless Speech Semiotext. Los Angeles, 2001

               (For the other versions of critical theory, refer to the reading for other questions)

Kelly, M. Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate Boston: MIT, 1995

Han, B. Foucault’s Critical Project Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2002, Part 1 Ch 1, Part 3

Oksala, J Foucault on Freedom Cambridge University Press, 2005, Ch 8

Lemert, C. C. & Gillan, G. Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) Ch4

Bernauer, J. Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Towards and Ethics of Thought New York: Humanities, Press, 1990 Ch 5, 6

Dreyfus, H. L.& Rabinow, P. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics University of Chicago Press, 1982, Part 2

Simons, J. Foucault and the Political London, Routledge, 1995Ch 2, 4, 8

Rajchman, J. Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy Columbia University Press, 1985, Ch 3

Merquior J G Foucault University of California Press, 1985, Ch 3, 9, 10

Racevskis, K. Michel Foucault and the Subversion of the Intellect (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1983)

6. Analyse Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory of myth. In this context, explain their critique of instrumental reason. Is it is defensible?

Reading: Horkheimer, M &Adorno, T.W.  Dialectic of Enlightenment Stanford University Press, 2002

                  Habermas, J. ‘ The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Polity, 1987, Ch 5

Held, D. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas London, Hutchinson, 1980, Ch 5

Jay. M. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 Little Brown and Company, Boston, 1973m Ch 8

Bernstein, J.M. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics University of Cambridge Press, 2001, Ch 2

Dubiel, H. Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1985, pp.69-112

Honneth, A. Critique of Power MIT, Massachusetts, 1991, Ch 2

Wiggerhaus, R. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance MIT, Cambridge MA, 1994, Ch 4

Freidman, G. The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1981, Ch 10, 16

Jacoby, R. Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, Ch 4

Lunn, E. Marxism &Modernism: A Historical Study of Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno University of California Press, 1982, Ch7

Rabinbach, A. In The Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment University of California Press, 1997, Ch 5

7. Many commentators have noticed the heavy debt of the theorists of the Dialectic of Enlightenment to Adorno’s older friend Walter Benjamin. Explain in what this debt consists? What does Benjamin offer a contemporary critical theory?

Reading: Horkheimer, M &Adorno, T.W.  Dialectic of Enlightenment Stanford University Press, 2002

Benjamin,W. On the Concept of History & Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History in Selected Works Vol 4. Harvard University Press, 2003, pp 399-41

Jay. M. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 Little Brown and Company, Boston, 1973m Ch 8

Bernstein, J.M. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics University of Cambridge Press, 2001, Ch 2

Wiggerhaus, R. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance MIT, Cambridge MA, 1994, Ch 4

Ferris D.S. The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, Cambridge University Press, 2004

Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osbourne Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience Routledge, London, 1993

Handelman, S.A. Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem and Levinas Indiana University Press, 1994

Hansen, B. Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels California University Press, Berkeley, 1998

Hansen, B, Critique Of Violence Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory Routledge, 2000

Honneth, A. ‘ A Communicative Disclosure of the Past: On the Relation between Anthropology and Philosophy of History in Walter Benjamin New Formations 20 Summer 1993, pp 83-94

Leslie, E. Walter Benjamin Overpowering Conformism Pluto Press, 2000

Lowy, M. Fire Alarm Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ Verso, London, 2005

Lowy, M. Redemption and Utopia Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe: A Study in Elective Affinities Stanford University Press, 1992

Moses, S. The Angel of History Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem Stanford University Press, 2009

Pensky, M. Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1993

Smith, G. (Ed) Benjamin: Philosophy, History,v Aesthetics Chicago University Press, 1989

Smith, G. (Ed) On Walter Benjamin Critical Essays and Recollections, Cambridge MA, 1988

Steinberg, M.P. Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History Cornell University Press, 1996

Steiner, U. Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought Chicago University Press, 2010

Lecture 3: (cont) and Lecture 4: Marx's Critical Theory Version 1

 

7. It is worthwhile to highlight the nuances in Marx theoretical synthesis. In emphasising the importance of consciousness and communication, he does not discount the reality of regularities and laws underlying social life. Marx often points out that social institutions, especially the market in bourgeois society, possess law-like necessity. Institutional arrangements have a logic of their own that resists human intentions; social action is not transparent and individual actions do not always bring about the intended results. Human beings do not create ex nihilo like God but within the bounds of given historical conditions and objectively imposed historical tasks.  Marxs says in For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing;

 ‘ mankind begins no new work, but consciously accomplishes its old work’ (P15).

 Yet, Marx’s fundamental strategy is to assert that “social laws” are only an appearance that can be changed when individuals collectively manage their own social arrangements. However, until workers comprehend that social institutions are nothing other than the accumulated and congealed result of their own activities, they will continue to face the reality of a reified society with quasi-autonomous mechanisms. The task of critical theory is to awaken in its addressee a consciousness of the dynamic reality behind this fixed, reified appearance of which they are collective producers. Critical theory must demystify this appearance by revealing its real basis in the bourgeois structure of existing social arrangements.

8. A truly practical theory must communicate an adequate sense of self-awareness to the social agent whose condition and aspirations it expresses. In other words, this theory does not, like philosophy, address itself to each and every subject: its subject and its object are the same. Critical theory is addressed to the collective social actors who have the historical potential to radically transform the fundamental structural contradiction in modern society. In short, the condition of the proletariat is the object of Marx’s critical theory and the proletariat is also the subject to whom the theory is addressed as a form of self-enlightenment. The theory expresses and explains the misery and the oppression of their living conditions. It therefore takes up the position of those who do not find their affirmation in the existing social organization; it claims to locate the reason and the causes for their misery and prescribe, at least, the negative conditions for its elimination. By pointing to the subjective forces capable of such a social transformation, by enlightening this agent about itself and the practical necessities of its own lived situation, the theory transforms these agents and posits them as subjects, as agents of radical change. Theory both explains the agent’s real situation and clarifies their consciousness of it.

9. This double relation to its object - as an explanation and as communication/self-interpretation - means that Marx’s critical theory imposes on itself a twin condition of adequacy. First, it must be able to show that the existing social arrangement does not meet the demands and needs it creates, how it engenders a dynamic subjective power compelled by its own structural disadvantage to abolish existing arrangements. Secondly, this theory must find its subject: if it fails in this communicative task, it also fails in its aim. In defining itself in this active role, critical theory becomes a really practical theory aimed at enlightening and clarifying its object (the proletariat) about itself. No longer above practice or external to the situation it describes, critical theory purports to play an active role in changing the practical situation. It throws its weight on the historical scales in an effort to resolve the crisis situation. This requires the revolutionary transformation of existing social arrangements in favour of a new socialist society.

 
10. This general understanding of theory as critical theory does not fully emerge until the Paris Manuscripts. However, Marx had been focused on the theory/praxis problem for some time. Already in his 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge, he had formulated the idea of the historically immanent role of theory as a self-clarification to the actors of their historical situation without nominating the proletariat as its addressee:

We do not say to the world: “Stop fighting: your struggle is of no account. We want to shout the true slogan of the struggle at you.” We only show the world what it is fighting for, and consciousness is something that the world must acquire, like it or not.
The reform of consciousness consists only in enabling the world to clarity its consciousness, in waking from its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. (Tucker 15).

Marx writes these words before he had come into contact with the proletariat, socialist politics and before having performed a scientific analysis of the bourgeois economy. It might be suggested that Marx’s nomination of the proletariat to an emancipatory historical role was not originally a scientific judgement at all, but an ethical and theoretical inspiration. Somebody like Alvin Gouldner has argued that the Marxist theory is less an expression of the consciousness of working class than of the alienated intellectuals. I will leave it to you to think about this!

11. However, if we look at Marx’s life at this time it seems like a fairly organic product of his own personal unification of theory and praxis. After resigning his editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung, he immigrated to Paris. This adventure led him to entirely new areas of theory. His critique of philosophy and journalism led from philosophy to the French historians and political economy. In these later efforts, Engel and Hess assisted in enlarging the theoretical tradition that he then submitted to critique. In France he also came into contact with socialism. The newly emergent industrial proletariat had already given rise to a considerable body of socialist literature. Workers were already aware of the defects of the bourgeois system and their representatives were expressing and explaining their refusal to accept the miserable conditions and servitude. Collective misery and spontaneous protest gave rise to socialism. Marx now incorporates this doctrine into his synthetic theory of revolution.


12. Although German economic backwardness meant that the proletariat there was relatively underdeveloped, German thinkers had noted the social problems of a significant segment of property less, pauperised individuals. Hegel had spoken of der Pöbel as a structural problem of modern civil society. This rabble was a destabilising element in society who, because they lacked means, could not participate in the personal autonomy that signified the ‘progress’ of bourgeois civil society. In this sense, der Pöbel was a deficient subject. However it was really the conservative critics of unrestrained bourgeois development who drew particular attention to the potential seriousness of this socio-structural problem. In 1842 the historian Karl Von Stein published Socialism and Communism in Contemporary France. Stein viewed the proletariat as the world historical force.

Lecture 4: Marx’s Critical Theory: Version One

1. Last time I gave a general account of Marx’s understanding of critical theory and I now want to suggest that this understanding was a constant of his theoretical work and the perspective that transforms his various theoretical contributions into a unified whole. However, I don’t want to give the impression that, in my view, in a long career Marx’s ideas about theory never changed.  Indeed, it is hard to think of a major thinker whose views did not change significantly over time and Marx is no exception.  In the 20th century there have tended to be two main schools of thought on Marx’s development. I have already mentioned Lukacs revolutionary interpretation that rediscovered the Hegelian Marx. This reading tended to emphasize a continuity thesis: that is, that these early works, however much Marx’s views were latter modified, are genuinely Marxist and that the philosophical problematic of alienation is constant in Marx’s theoretical works, even the late works like Capital. Against this is the more orthodox reading, which argues for discontinuity: that Marx moved from philosophy to science. On this view the early writings are at worst juvenilia, or at best pre-Marxist. The most theoretically sophisticated of the discontinuity theorists was the French Marxist Louis Althusser. He maintained that Marx achieved a radical “epistemological break” between the early humanist, philosophical writings and his genuinely scientific works. Althusser initially locates this break in 1845/6, however, he then noticed residues of the humanist Marx even in Capital. He was finally compelled into the almost untenable stance of maintaining that only a very few, relatively minor, works of Marx like the Critique of the Gotha Programme were truly Marxist. Today I don’t want to enter into this now long dead debate. However, it does bear on the issue of Marx’s relation to critical theory. If Althusser is right, then the mature Marx is not a critical theorist in the sense I have outlined so far. However, I will maintain that the concept of critical theory so far outlined is a theoretical constant in Marx’s thinking. However, this does not mean that his view of critical theory itself did not change over time. I will argue for a view of Marx first put forward by George Markus who was associated with Lukacs late in his life and who taught here for 20 years up to 1998. He maintained that there are various versions of critical theory in Marx and we will look at the first two of these. I will concentrate on these two versions because they largely substantiate the understanding of Marx that runs through the works of Lukacs, Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas that has become associated with the concept of critical theory.

2. In what sense can we speak of versions of critical theory in Marx? In the previous weeks we saw that critical theory connotes much more than allegiance to specific theoretical positions like a negative attitude to capitalism, or allegiance to the proletariat or a practical materialism. More important than these is (a) a critique of all philosophies as ideological on the grounds that they reproduce rather than change the world and, more positively, which conceives itself (b) as immanent theory, a theory that designates the forces within reality itself pointing to, and struggling towards, the radical transformation of bourgeois society. For such a theory, society is not simply an object of investigation to be described and explained but also a subject who can be assisted to a more enlightened self-consciousness or its own radical needs through the cognitive, communicative content of the theory. But despite the continuity of this conception of critical theory in Marx, his views nevertheless underwent significant changes: these concern not just particular theoretical theses—like his views on the immiseration of the proletariat (which he initially accepts but later rejects)—but also in the way that the critical theory itself can be realised both theoretically and practically. More specifically, these changes concern:

a) Methodology. By this I mean the varying interrelationship between analytico-theoretical and critical-practical aspects and with this changes in the various weightings of philosophy and economics.

b) Unity of theory and practice. Differing conceptions of how theory was to be linked to the working class movement, and different arguments for the role of the proletariat and political strategies suggested by them.

c) The aim of revolutionary action. By this I mean differing conceptions of socialist society: specifically of the nature of that society, relation between freedom and necessity and the character of the related activities.

The continuity thesis on Marx’s development gains a great deal of its immediate plausibility from the fact that from 1844 Marx worked on a critique of political economy that remained incomplete. Despite the many incidental pieces, like his journalism or various programmes like The Communist Manifesto, the great bulk of Marx’s oeuvre are drafts for his critique of political economy that was continuously revised and, of which, only the first book—Capital (1867)-- was published by Marx. However, beyond this overarching sense of continuity, there are significance differences in the various manuscripts and versions in the key dimensions mentioned above. I will now begin to look more closely at the first version of this critique.

Critical Theory: Version One (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

3. What we today know as The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 were drafts for a book for which Marx was contracted in Feb 1845 Critique of Politics and Political Economy. A large part of these manuscripts are lost but it is worthwhile to devote a little time to reconstructing Marx’s purpose in these drafts. They constitute the first recognisable and coherent version of his new critical theory. Much of this initial version, as I’ve suggested will be abandoned or transformed but some of the central ideas remain an essential core in Marx’s later versions of critical theory.

4. It appears that Marx wanted to write a work in three parts: economics, philosophical critique of capitalism (theory of alienation) and a philosophical critique of Hegel (opposing his theory of alienation to Hegel’s).

a. Analysis of Political Economy

His analysis begins in three sections connected to the revenue sources of political economy: Wages of labour, Profits of Capital, Rent of Land. Within this structure, he outlines the economic basis of existence of the three classes associated with these revenue forms. Marx simply excerpted the political economists, mainly Adam Smith, and then adds his own commentary and analysis of what the political economists are saying. Marx does not attempt to develop his own theory of political economy even when he notes problems in the theories he is analysing. Rather he uses Smith and the others to argue for conclusions radically opposed to those presented on the basis of some of the same facts and arguments.

5. Marx general analysis is now well known. The interests of capitalists and the interests of the majority in society are radically opposed. In short, bourgeois society polarises between wealth and poverty. But this is nothing new. What makes it historically unique is that this polarisation becomes even more extreme despite rapidly increasing material wealth. The ranks of the capitalists are increasingly depleted while the ranks of those without property continue to swell. This increase also does not exclude new levels of dehumanisation but even appears to systematically encourage them. On the basis of the views put forward by the political economists, Marx maintains that even in progressive economies wage labour is deadly for workers; work is arduous, mechanised and meaningless and competition between workers reduces wages to the level of bare subsistence. The worker is nothing more than a factor of production, a commodity whose treatment is determined not with regard to his/her humanity but by extra-human economic laws that pay it no whatsoever regard. Despite that fact that the workers are the ultimate producers of all social wealth, they also share in none of its benefits. (Marx/Engels Collected Works Vol 3, P. 270)

“On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of wealth in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes—the property owners and the propertyless workers”.

6. What is Marx’s theoretical method? Initially Marx seems to accept bourgeois political economy as a correct theory of capitalist society despite the internal contradictions amongst its individual theorists. In the totality of these contradictions, these theories simply describe the dynamic but contradictory empirical reality of capitalism. Political economy is the true science of capitalism: it reveals the essence of this social arrangement. It treats the capitalist economy and its related forms as a closed system, which obeys its own necessary logic and laws. The logic and telos of this system is determined by capital accumulation and is totally unconcerned with extra-economical considerations. From this perspective, the worker can only be a factor of production, a means. The needs, talents and human potentialities of the worker are irrelevant to a science concerned only with profit. The logic and aim of this economic system is irrational in the sense of being completely opposed to the general interests of the great majority of individuals in this society. The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that all purely economic theories are false. In assuming that a closed, purely economic system can be rational, they express a bourgeois ideology. They take the interests of the bourgeois class to be a universal rather than a partial interests. The idea of developing a critical political economy would be non-sense because the very standpoint of political economy excludes consideration of those factors that best illustrate its falsity. Therefore, Marx proposes an extra-economic, critique of political economy employing the philosophical concept of alienation. Only a philosophical critique can locate itself beyond the standpoint of political economy and actually confront this science with the real human needs, which it ideologically suppresses.

7. From this argument, Marx argues that critique has two essential tasks.

a. Firstly, to show the necessary interconnection between wealth and poverty. This means to show how the disparate economic phenomena of capitalist society form a closely integrated and interconnected system; a system, which nevertheless, has certain historical presuppositions making it historically transient.

b. Critique must locate the place of this system in the whole of human development. This amounts to designating the meaning at the present system of bourgeois economic relations in human history.

8. At this early stage in his development, Marx was ill equipped to achieve this first aim of critique in a completely satisfactory manner. He lacks the conceptual armoury to theorise the character of bourgeois society as a self-reproducing totality. He lacks a concept of social totality, of forces and relations of production. Having only recently commenced the study of political economy, coming from an essentially philosophical training, Marx uses a philosophical method to perform the task he sets himself. Taking over the phenomenological method familiar from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, he attempts to deduce all the interconnections between the categories of bourgeois economy out of the innermost characteristics and activity of the producing individuals: the workers.

9. The basic outlines of how Marx used this phenomenological method can be seen from the chapter on alienated labour. Marx executes his critical programme in three steps.

i) He takes as his point of departure the historically specific relation of the representative individual to the world of objects. Thus Marx focuses his attention on the relationship between the worker and his products in capitalist society. It is important to emphasis here that Marx makes production not distribution or consumption the centrepiece of his analysis. This shows his concerns differ radically from the political economists who concentrate on the latter. The key to this emphasis is that the analysis of production leads beyond the sphere of pure economic analysis. It implies a critique of the limitations imposed by the purely economic model. Marx’s essential point is to argue that through the workers very appropriation of nature, through their transformation of the world of objects, they become alienated and enslaved to a world of their own creation. In other words, the worker becomes a commodity. It is worthwhile to note here that Marx transforms what was, for the whole tradition of German Idealism, primarily a relation of theory or consciousness to the world of appearances into the practico-material relation of the representative individual to the sphere of objectivity. So material production becomes the paradigm for his understanding of human development. This emphasis on culture as a product of material practices takes over and transforms the Hegelian notion of reality as primarily a spiritual process, of changing forms of self-consciousness into a material process based on human practical activity.

ii) Marx explains the alienated subject/object relation between the worker and his objects in terms of the immanent character of alienated labour itself. He shows the necessary interconnections between all the disparate economic phenomena and relations of capitalist society as a system. In other words, he derives private property from the alienation of labour. He views private property and alienation as mutually conditioning. The free activity of the worker is transformed from a potential means of life and humanisation into a vehicle of dehumanisation and even death. This transformation is, in its turn, bound up with the historically specific relations that regulate production in this society. However, it is important to recognise that the concept of alienation is a construct of philosophical critique. This concept signifies a critical perspective on the system of bourgeois categories that transforms both the objects of the worker’s activity, and even the activity itself, into the property of another. Private property is the legal institutional condition of this historically specific form that manifests itself in real practical life in the institution of wage labour.

“Thus through estranged labour man not only creates his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to the powers that are alien and hostile to him; he also creates the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men”. (Collected Works Vol 3 p.279)

Marx goes on to make the point that every category of political economy is only a particular and developed expression of these two fundamental elements.

iii). Marx’s final step is to argue that the emancipation of society from this private property represents a universal human emancipation. All contemporary human servitude is just a modification of the relation of the worker to production. Marx here takes the first step towards fulfilling the second task he had set his critique. To locate the significance of the bourgeois system in human development and designate its overall anthropological meaning. The first notebook soon breaks off before the argument is complete. Marx does not present a theory of the concrete overcoming of this society. Nevertheless, he has already intimated that the present bears within it the key to universal emancipation. This means that the epoch of alienation can be situated within the course of human development and seen as necessarily rooted in the nature of that development. It is in this context that Marx later presents his conception of socialist society as universal emancipation.