criticism on Engels article contd
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Alienation and Contradiction
So the theory of alienation and the theory of contradiction are now seen as a single theory—one which (we may now add) embraces and encompasses within itself the theory of value. For the fundamental contradiction (see again the page from Capital) which takes pride of place is the separation which is immanent in commodities between ‘use-value and value’, between private labour and direct social labour, between a particularized concrete kind of labour and abstract human labour.
In a word, the contradiction arises from the fact that the private and social aspects of labour, which are ‘intimately connected’ (since they are aspects of the labour that the individual accomplishes in society), are given a separate representation and existence: the private or concrete aspect in the commodity’s ‘use-value’, and on the other hand the social aspect, with another existence of its own—separated, and hence abstracted from the former—as the commodity’s ‘value’.
The contradiction is determined, in short, by the very nature of this society. For this is a society in which, while individuals live together they are not only divided and competitive with each other, but precisely because they are separated from each other, they come to be separated from the society itself, i.e. from the complex of relations between them. It is a society in which, since everyone is independent, their mutual relations too become independent of everyone. So that the network of social relations (the society) takes on a separate existence of its own in money and capital—and since its existence is independent, it lies beyond the control of the very men it relates. It is, in a word, the contradiction between individual and class, between nature and culture, the contradiction which had been exposed by all the major analysts of eighteenth century bourgeois ‘civil society’, from Rousseau to Kant to Hegel, and which entered (albeit with profound changes) into the work of Marx himself. Modern society is a society characterized by division (alienation, contradiction). What was at one time united, has now been split and separated. The ‘original unity’ of man with nature and of man with man has been broken. For the very reason that this unity was the original, and hence ‘given’ state of mankind, it is not social links, in Marx’s view, that need to be explained, but the division or separation that occurs with the appearance in history of capitalism and ‘civil society’. ‘It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which demands explanation, or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage-labour and capital.’ [57] ‘Human beings’, Marx adds, ‘become individuals only through the process of history. He appears originally as a speciebeing, clan-being, herd animal . . . . Exchange itself is a chief means of this individuation. It makes the herd-like existence superfluous and dissolves it.’ [58] Marx concludes: ‘The historic process was the divorce of elements which up until then were bound together; its result is therefore not that one of the elements disappears, but that each of them appears in a negative relation to the other—the (potentially) free worker on the one side, capital (potentially) on the other. The separation of the objective conditions from the classes which have become transformed into free workers necessarily also appears at the same time as the achievement of independence by these same conditions at the opposite pole.’ [59]
In the beginning there was a oneness, succeeded by an era of rupture and separation, destined to culminate in capitalism; then, on the basis of these newly-emerged, superior conditions, an eventual reconciliation of the contradiction between individual and class, a supersession of the separation of man from man, and man from nature, becomes possible. If somewhat modified, the schema of Hegel’s philosophy of history blooms again. Therewith is revealed the second face of Marx, alongside that of the scientist, the naturalist and observer.
Conclusions
Let us now summarize our whole argument.
1. The fundamental principle of materialism and of science, as we have seen, is the principle of non-contradiction. Reality cannot contain dialectical contradictions but only real oppositions, conflicts between forces, relations of contrariety. The latter are ohne Widerspruch, i.e. non-contradictory oppositions, and not dialectical contradictions.
These assertions must be sustained, because they constitute the principles of science itself. Now science is the only means of apprehending reality, the only means of gaining knowledge of the world. There cannot be two (qualitatively different) forms of knowledge. A philosophy which claims a status for itself superior to that of science, is an edifying philosophy—that is, a scarcely disguised religion.
2. On the other hand, capitalist oppositions are, for Marx, dialectical contradictions and not real oppositions.
We have seen that this does not justify a rehabilitation of Diamat. For Marx, capitalism is contradictory not because it is a reality and all realities are contradictory, but because it is an upside-down, inverted reality (alienation, fetishism).
3. All the same, if it is true that this does not rehabilitate Diamat, it is nonetheless true that it confirms the existence of two aspects in Marx: that of the scientist and that of the philosopher.
I will confine myself for the moment to registering this fact. I do not attribute any conclusive significance to it. The social sciences have not yet found a true foundation of their own. Hence I do not know whether the existence of these two aspects is fatal or advantageous. What is not at issue is the fact that our task now is to find out whether and how they can be reconciled. It is one we must take seriously. It is not to be solved with any verbal subterfuge.
Translated by John Matthews
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