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International Socialist Review, Fall 1959

William F. Warde

Alienation

From International Socialist Review, Vol.20 No.4, Fall 1959, pp.107-119.
William F. Warde was a pseudonym used by George Novack.
Basic text reprinted in George Novack: Understanding History (2002).
Transcription & mark-up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

The international socialist movement is witnessing a crusade in its own ranks nowadays for Moral Rearmament. To support their conclusions the intellectual apostles of this new tendency lean heavily upon the alienations suffered by man in modern society. Mixing socialist doctrines with psychoanalytical theory, they approach the problem of alienation as though it were pivotal in modern life and treat it as though it were the very centre of Marxist thought.

Their preoccupation with the question has been stimulated by numerous commentaries on recent translations of such early writings of Marx and Engels as The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The Holy Family and The German Ideology in which the concept of alienation plays a large part.

The intensified interest in this subject is not a mere crotchet of the radical intellectuals. It stems from the very real alienations experienced in present-day society and from the growing antagonism between the rulers and the ruled in both the capitalist and postcapitalist sectors of the world.
 

The People And Their Rulers

The contradictions of life under contemporary capitalism engender deepgoing feelings of frustration. The wealth pouring from the factories and the farms during the prolonged postwar boom has not strengthened assurance about the future. Instead, it has become another source of anxiety, for it is widely felt that a new depression will follow. Similarly, the enhanced control over industrial processes made possible by automation confronts the workers, not with welcome release from burdensome toil, but with the spectre of chronic unemployment. The command over nature involved in the tapping of nuclear energy holds over humanity’s head the threat of total annihilation rather than the promise of peace and plenty. An uncontrolled inner circle of capitalist politicians and military leaders decide matters of life and death. No wonder that people feel the economic and political forces governing their fate as alien powers.

Although the social soil is different, similar sentiments are widespread in the anticapitalist countries dominated by the bureaucratic caste. Despite the great advances in science, technology, industry, public health and other fields made possible by their revolutions, workers and peasants, students and intellectuals keenly resent their lack of control over the government and the administration of the economy. Freedom of thought, expression and organization are denied them. Despite the official propaganda that they have at least become masters of their own destinies, the people know that the powers of decision in the most vital affairs are exercised, not by them, but by bureaucratic caliphs. The cardinal duty of the masses in the Communist Party, the unions, the factories and collective farms, the educational institutions and publishing houses is still to obey the dictates from above.

That now discarded handbook of falsifications of history and Marxism edited by Stalin, The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, closes with the admonition that the “Bolsheviks” will be strong and invincible only so long as “they maintain connection with their mother, the masses, who gave birth to them, suckled them and reared them”. Khrushchev has told how Stalin in his later years never visited the factories or farms and was totally insulated from the lives of ordinary folk. But Stalin’s successor has lifted only a corner of the veil hiding the profound estrangement of the Soviet masses from the “boss men”, as they are called.

Many thoughtful members of the Communist Party have been impelled by the revelations at the 20th Congress and by the Polish and Hungarian events of 1956 to reconsider their former views. Some of them seek an explanation for the crimes of the Soviet leaders and the Stalinist perversions of socialism in the Marxist outlook itself.

This search has led them back to the young Marx. They believe that they have found in the early works, which mark his transition from Hegelianism through humanism to dialectical materialism, the clue to the falsifications of Marxism and the distortions of socialism which have run rampant in the Soviet Union and the communist parties. In these observations of Marx on the alienation of mankind under class society, in particular, they see the basis for a salutary regeneration of the tarnished socialist ideal.
 

The New Socialist Humanists

These intellectuals have raised the banner of a neo-socialist humanism against “mechanical materialism” and “economic automatism”. The seeds of the evil that bore such bitter fruits under Stalin, they claim, were planted by the “mechanical” Marxists and cultivated by the crudely materialistic Leninists. They call for a renovated morality and a more sensitive concern for the “concrete, whole, living man”. Monstrous forms of totalitarianism are produced by subservience to such “abstractions” as the Forces of Production, the Economic Foundations and the Cultural Superstructure, they say. Such an immoral and inhuman materialism leads to the reappearance, behind socialist phrases, of the rule of things over men imposed by capitalism.

The same message was proclaimed over a decade ago in the United States by Dwight MacDonald, then editor of Politics, and by the Johnson-Forest sect. It is a favourite theme of the social-democratic and ex-Trotskyist writers of the magazine Dissent, It is now becoming the creed of some former Communist Party intellectuals grouped around The New Reasoner in England.

E.P. Thompson, one of the two editors of The New Reasoner, wrote in a programmatic pronouncement in the first issue (Summer 1957):

“The ideologies of capitalism and Stalinism are both forms of ‘self-alienation’; men stumble in their minds and lose themselves in abstractions; capitalism sees human labour as a commodity and the satisfaction of his ‘needs’ as the production and distribution of commodities; Stalinism sees labour as an economic-physical act in satisfying economic-physical needs. Socialist humanism declares: liberate men from slavery to things, to the pursuit of profit or servitude to ‘economic necessity’. Liberate man, as a creative being – and he will create, not only new values, but things in scope and abundance.”

Despite their up-to-date reasoning, the “new thoughts” brought forward by such socialist humanists against dialectical materialism are hardly original. The essence of their viewpoint is to be found in the schools of petty-bourgeois socialism which flourished in Germany before the revolution of 1848. Scientific socialism was created in struggle against these doctrines, as anyone familiar with the ideological birth process of Marxism knows.

The “true socialism” of Moses Hess and Karl Gr¸n sought to base the socialist movement, not upon the necessary historical development of economic conditions and the struggles of class forces, but upon abstract principles and ethical precepts regarding the need for mankind, divided against itself, to recover its wholeness and universality. In the section on “true socialism” in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels ridiculed these phrasemongers who talked about the “alienation of the essence of mankind” instead of undertaking a scientific investigation of money and its functions.

In their justified revulsion from Stalinism, the new “humane” socialists have not gone forward to genuine Marxism, as they mistakenly believe; they have landed behind it. They have unwittingly relapsed into a stage of theoretical development that socialism and its materialist philosophy surmounted over a century ago. What is worse, in taking this backward leap to a prescientific socialism of the most mawkish variety, they discard both the materialist principles and the dialectical method which constitute the heart of Marxism.

The attempts of these disoriented intellectuals to insert abstract moralistic foundations under Marxism are retrogressive. Yet it must be admitted that the theory of alienation is by no means foreign to Marxism. It did play an influential part in the genesis and formative period of scientific socialism. Indeed, in the history of the concept we find a striking example of how the founders of Marxism divested Hegel’s central conceptions of their “idealist trappings” and placed them on solid materialist supports, transforming both their form and substance in the process. It is worthwhile to ascertain what the Marxist attitude toward alienation really is. This will be the best corrective to the wanderings of those upset socialists who are fumbling for a new equilibrium.
 

Hegel’s Contribution

Marx took the concept of alienation from Hegel. In this instance, as in so many others, Hegelianism was the ideological source and starting point of Marxian thought.

Alienation and estrangement are key categories in Hegel’s idealist philosophy. These are the most extreme expressions of difference or “otherness”. In the process of change everything necessarily has a divided and antithetical nature, for it is both itself and, at the same time, becoming something else, its “other”.

But viewed as a whole, the “other” is simply a development of the “itself”; the implicit becomes explicit; the possible, actual. This process is a dual one. It involves estrangement from the original form and the realization of the essence in a higher form of existence.

In his system Hegel applied this dialectical logic to the evolution of the “Absolute”, his synonym for the whole of reality. The Absolute first exists as mere Logical Idea, self-enclosed like a bud. It breaks out of itself by way of an inner revolution (just how and why is not clear) to a completely alienated condition – Nature. Hegel saw Nature as a lifeless dispersed mode of existence in contradiction to the lively perpetual movement and universal interconnection inherent in the Absolute.

This contradiction drives the Idea forward through a prolonged course of development until it emerges from its material casing and appears as Mind. Mind in turn passes through a series of stages from crude sensation to its highest peak in philosophy, and above all in Hegel’s own idealist outlook.

Throughout this complex process alienation plays the most positive role. It is the expression of the Negative at work. The Negative, forever destroying existing forms through the conflict of opposites, spurs everything onward to a higher mode of existence. For Hegel a specific kind of alienation may be historically necessary at one stage, even though it is cancelled out at the next in the universal interplay of the dialectic.

All of this may appear to be a dull chapter in the life of the German universities of a century and a half ago. But Hegel saw the development of society as one of the outcomes of this evolution of the Idea. Moreover, he traced the course of alienation in human history. He noted such curious items as the fact that man alone of all the creatures on earth can take the objective conditions around him and transform them into a medium of his subjective development. Despite the bizarreness of considering a material process like that to be an expression of the evolution of Idea, such observations, it will be recognized, have a modern ring.

Still more, at turning points in his development, Hegel pointed out, man finds himself in deep conflict with the world around him. His own material and spiritual creations have risen up and passed beyond his control. Ironically man becomes enslaved to his own productions. All this the great philosopher saw with astounding clarity.

Hegel applied the notion of the alienation of humanity from itself to the transitional period between the fall of the Greek city-states and the coming of Christianity; and above all to the bourgeois society around him. Early in his career he described industrial society, as “a vast system of mutual interdependence, a moving life of the dead. This system moves hither and yon in a blind elementary way, and like a wild animal calls for strong permanent control and curbing”. (Jenenser Realphilosophie, p.237.) He looked to the state to impose that control over capitalist competition.

Of still livelier interest to our nuclear age, he had some sharp things to say about the institution of private property which forces men to live in a world that, although their creation, is opposed to their deepest needs. This “dead” world, foreign to human nature, is governed by inexorable laws which oppress mankind and rob him of freedom.

Hegel also emphasized that the complete subordination of the individual to the division of labour in commodity-producing society cripples and represses human development. Mechanization, the very means which should liberate man from toil, makes him still more a slave.

On the political plane, especially in his earlier writings, Hegel discussed how, in the Germany of his day, the individual was estranged from the autocratic state because he could not actively participate in its affairs.

The very need for philosophy itself, according to Hegel, springs from these all-embracing contradictions in which human existence has been plunged. The conflict of society against nature, of idea against reality, of consciousness against existence, Hegel generalizes into the conflict between “subject” and “object.” This opposition arises from the alienation of Mind from itself. The world of objects, originally the product of man’s labour and knowledge, becomes independent and opposed to man. The objective world becomes dominated by uncontrollable forces and overriding laws in which man can no longer recognize or realize his true self. At the same time, and as a result of the same process, thought becomes estranged from reality. The truth becomes an impotent ideal preserved in thought alone while the actual world functions apart from its influence.

This brings about an “unhappy consciousness” in which man is doomed to frustration unless he succeeds in reuniting the severed parts of his world. Nature and society have to be brought under the sway of man’s reason so that the sundered elements of his essential self can be reintegrated. How is this opposition between an irrational world and an ineffectual reason to be overcome? In other words, how can the world be made subject to reason and reason itself become effective?

Philosophy in such a period of general disintegration, Hegel declared, can discover and make known the principle and method to bring about the unity mankind needs. Reason (we almost wrote The New Reasoner) is the authentic form of reality in which the antagonisms of subject and object are eliminated, or rather transmuted into the genuine unity and universality of mankind.

Hegel related the opposition of subject and object to concrete social antagonisms. In his own philosophical language he was struggling to express the consequences of capitalist conditions where men are misled by a false and distorted consciousness of their real relations with one another and where they cannot make their wills effective because they are overwhelmed by the unmanageable laws of the market.

Hegel further maintained that the solution of such contradictions was a matter of practice as well as of philosophic theory. Inspired by the French Revolution, he envisaged the need for a similar “reign of reason” in his own country. But he remained a bourgeois thinker who never transcended his idealist philosophy in viewing the relations of class society. In his most progressive period Hegel did not offer any practical recommendations for overcoming existing social antagonisms that went beyond the bounds of bourgeois reform.

It was only through the subsequent work of Marx that these idealistic reflections of an irrational social reality were placed in their true light. Against Hegel’s interpretation of alienation, Marx showed what the historical origins, material basis and real nature of this phenomenon were.
 

The Young Marx

Marx began his intellectual life as an ardent Hegelian. Between 1843 and 1848, under the influence of Feuerbach, he cleared his mind of what he later called “the old junk” and emerged together with Engels as a full-fledged materialist.

The “humane” socialists are now embarked on the quixotic venture of reversing this progressive sequence. They aim to displace the mature Marx, the thoroughgoing dialectical materialist, with the youthful Marx who had yet to pass beyond the one-sided materialism of Feuerbach.

Marx recognized that the concept of alienation reflected extremely significant aspects of social life. He also became aware that Hegel’s idealism and Feuerbach’s abstract Humanism obscured the real historical conditions and social contradictions that had generated the forms of alienation.

Marx did not reach his ripest conclusions on this subject all at once but only by successive approximations over decades of scientific study. Between his Hegelian starting point and his final positions there was an interim period of discovery, during which he developed his preliminary conclusions.

Marx first undertook the study of political economy, which occupied the rest of his life, in 1843. He pursued this task along with a criticism of his Hegelian heritage. The first results were set down in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts he wrote primarily for his own clarification during 1844. These were published posthumously in our own time and did not appear in their first complete English translation until this year.

These essays were Marx’s earliest attempt at analysing capitalism. In them for the first time he applied the dialectical method learned from Hegel to the categories of political economy. In many passages his ideas are formulated so abstractly and abstrusely that it is not easy to decipher their meaning without a grasp of the terminology and mode of thought prevalent in German classical philosophy.

Whereas in his later works (The Critique of Political Economy, Capital) Marx takes the commodity as the cell of capitalism, he here puts forward alienated labour as the central concept. He even views private property as derived from the alienation of labour. It is both the product of estranged labour, he writes, and the means by which labour is estranged from itself. “Just as we have derived the concept of private property from the concept of estranged alienated labour by analysis, in the same way every category of political economy can be evolved with the help of these two factors; and we shall find again in each category, for example, trade, competition, capital, money, only a definite and developed expression of these first foundations”, he declares.

Having established alienated labour as the basis and beginning of capitalist production, Marx then deduces the consequences. Labour becomes alienated when the producer works, not directly for himself or a collective united by common interests, but for another with interests and aims opposed to his own.

This antagonistic relation of production injures the worker in many ways.

1. He is estranged from his own body which must be maintained as a physical subject, not because it is part of himself, but so that it can function as an element of the productive process.
2. He is estranged from nature since natural objects with all their variety function, not as means for his self-satisfaction or cultural fulfilment, but merely as material means for profitable production.
3. He is estranged from his own peculiar essence as a human being because his special traits and abilities are not needed, used or developed by his economic activities which degrade him to the level of a mere physical force.
4. Finally, he is separated from his fellow human beings. “Where man is opposed to himself, he also stands opposed to other men.”

Consequently the dispossessed worker benefits neither from the activity of his labour nor from its product. These do not serve as means for his enjoyment or fulfilment as an individual because both are appropriated by someone other than himself, the capitalist. “If the worker’s activity is torment to himself, it must be the enjoyment and satisfaction of another.”

The object which labour creates, the labour product, becomes opposed to man as an alien essence, as a power independent of the producer. “Wage-labour, like private property, is only a necessary consequence of the alienation of labour.” Society can be emancipated from both private property and servitude only by abolishing wage-labour.

Marx honoured Hegel for seeing that man is the result of his conditions of labour. He found this primary proposition of historical materialism in Hegel, though in an idealist shape. The greatness of the Phenomenology, Marx observed, lies in the circumstance that “Hegel conceives the self-production of man as a process – ”

Marx criticizes Hegel for seeing only one side of this process, the alienation of consciousness, and neglecting the most important aspect of labour in class society, the alienation of the actual man who produces commodities. Marx accepted Feuerbach’s view that Hegel’s philosophy was itself an abstract expression of the alienation of mankind from itself. Hegel’s Absolute Idealism separated the thought process from real active and thinking persons and converted it into an independent, all-powerful subject which absorbed the world into itself. At bottom, it was a sophisticated form of religious ideology in which the Logical Idea replaced God.

In the Hegelian dialectic, Nature, the antithesis to the Idea, was nothing in and for itself; it was merely a concealed and mysterious embodiment of the Absolute Idea. However, Marx, following Feuerbach, pointed out that this Absolute Idea was itself nothing but “a thing of thought”, a generalized expression for the thinking process of real individuals dependent on nature.

Marx pays tribute to Feuerbach for exposing the religious essence of Hegel’s system and thereby reestablishing the materialist truth that Nature, instead of being an expression of the Idea, is the real basis for thought and the ultimate source of all ideas.

Hegel, Marx said, discovered “the abstract, logical and speculative expression for the movement of history”. What Marx sought to do was to uncover the real motive forces in history (comprising both nature and society in their development, as he was to emphasize in The German Ideology) which preceded all theorizing and provided both the materials and the motives for the operations of thought.

Moreover, Hegel had mistakenly identified all externalization of man’s vital powers in nature and society with alienation because it represented an inferior grade of the Idea’s existence. Actually, the objectification of his capacities is normal and necessary to the human being and is the mainspring of all progress. It is perverted into alienation only under certain historical conditions which are not eternal.

Many brilliant thoughts are to be found in the pages of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. For example, Marx brings out the differences between the animal and human senses in a way that counterposes his historical materialism to vulgar materialism. Sensation is the basis for human knowledge as well as for the materialist theory of knowledge. Although the human sensory equipment is animal in origin, it develops beyond that. Human senses pass through an historical, social and cultural development which endow us with far more discriminating modes of sensation than any known in the animal state. “The cultivation of the five senses is the work of the whole history of the world to date”, he concludes.

Capitalism is to be condemned because it blunts sensitivity instead of sharpening it. The dealer in gems who sees only their market value, and not the beauty and unique character of minerals, “has no mineralogical sensitivity”, he writes; he is little different from an animal grubbing for food. The task of civilization is to develop a specifically human sensitivity “for the whole wealth of human and natural essence”.

An entire school of contemporary American sociologists, headed by David Reisman, has based its analysis of the condition of men in “the mass society” on the fact that the average person is bored and depressed by the drudgery of his work in factory or office and finds satisfaction for his individuals needs only in leisure hours. The split between labour and leisure under capitalism was long ago noted by Marx in these manuscripts where he pointed out:

“Labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being. Therefore he does not affirm himself in his work but denies himself. He does not feel contented but dissatisfied. He does not develop freely his physical and spiritual energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself to be himself outside his work, and in his work he feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working, he is not at home.”
 

Development of the Concept of Labour

Marx did not leave the concept of labour as treated in these early essays. Extending the range of his criticism of bourgeois political economy and probing deeper into the secrets of capitalist production, he filled out and corrected his original presentation. He developed the features and forms of labour into a brilliant constellation of diversified determinations, reflecting the facets of the many-sided relations of production in their historical evolution.

The younger Marx, swayed by Feuerbach’s humanism, analysed capitalist relations by counterposing what is dehumanized to what is truly human. The later Marx viewed them in terms of class oppositions.

Most important was his discovery of the twofold character of labour: the concrete labour which produces use-values and the abstract labour which produces exchange value. In abstract labour Marx found the essence of alienated labour in commodity-producing societies. His discovery, which Engels rightly lauded as Marx’s chief contribution to the science of political economy, enabled him to explain the nature of commodities and the source of value as well as such mysteries as the power of money. The distinction between the two kinds of labour asserts itself at every decisive point in his analysis.

Marx took another step beyond his predecessors by distinguishing between labour as a concrete activity which creates specific use-values and labour power, the value-producing property of labour. He demonstrated how the peculiar characteristics of labour power as a commodity make capitalist exploitation possible. He also showed that the exploitation of labour in general, under all modes of class production, is based on the difference between necessary and surplus labour.

It would require a summary of the whole of Capital to deal with all of Marx’s amplifications of the concept of labour. The pertinent point is this: the complex relations between capital and labour which were sketched in broad outline in the early essays were developed into a network of precise distinctions. The concept of alienated labour was broken down into elements integrated into a comprehensive exposition of the laws of motion of capitalism.
 

Primitive Source of Alienation

Before examining the specific causes of alienation under capitalism, it is necessary to note that the phenomenon is rooted in the whole previous history of humanity. The process by which man becomes oppressed by his own creations has passed through distinct stages of evolution.

The most primitive forms of alienation arise from the disparity between man’s needs and wishes and his control over nature. Although they have grown strong enough to counterpose themselves as a collective labouring body against the natural environment, primitive peoples do not have enough productive forces, techniques and knowledge to assert much mastery over the world around them. Their helplessness in material production has its counterpart in the power of magic and religion in their social life and thought.

Religion, as Feuerbach explained and Marx repeated, reverses the real relations between mankind and the world. Man created the gods in his own image. But to the superstitious mind, unaware of unconscious mental processes, it appears that the gods have created men. Deluded by such appearances – and by social manipulators from witch doctors to priests – men prostrate themselves before idols of their own manufacture. The distance between the gods and the mass of worshippers senses as a gauge for estimating the extent of man’s alienation from his fellow men and his subjugation to the natural environment.

Alienation is therefore first of all a social expression of the fact that men lack adequate control over the forces of nature and have thereby not yet acquired control over sources of daily sustenance.
 

Dialectical Development of Alienation

Alienation has been a general feature of human history. The alienation of labour, however, is peculiar to civilization and is bound up with the institution of private property. In primitive society men are oppressed by nature but not by the products of their labour.

The rudimentary alienation observable in the magic and religion found in savagery and barbarism becomes overlaid and subsequently overwhelmed by another and higher type of alienation engendered by the conditions of class society. With the development of agriculture, stock breeding and craftsmanship, the most advanced sectors of mankind became less directly dependent upon raw nature for their food supplies. They increased their sources of wealth and reduced nature’s oppression.

But civilized man’s growing control over nature was attended by a loss of control over the basic conditions of his economic activity. So long as production remained simple but collective, as in primitive tribal life, the producers had control over their process of production and the disposition of their product. With the extension of the social division of labour, more and more goods became converted into commodities and entered exchange in the market.

The producers thereby lost control over their product as it became subject to the laws of the commodity market. In turn, these laws came to rule the producers to such an extent that in time men themselves became commodities to be bought and sold. Slavery was the first organized system of alienated labour; wage labour will be the last.

Wage labour is a special type of alienated labour. In this mode of production the labourer becomes the victim of the world market, a slave to the law of supply and demand, to such a degree that he can stand idle and his dependents starve when there is no demand for his labour power as a commodity.

The historical groundwork for the alienation suffered by the working class is private property in the means of production. This enables the owners to appropriate the surplus product of the labourers. There is nothing mysterious about the material origin of alienation in class society. It comes about as a consequence of the separation of the producers from the conditions of production and thereby from what they produce. When the labourers lose control of the material means of production, they forfeit control over their lives, their liberties and their means of development.

Hegel pointed this out when he wrote in the Philosophy of Right:

“By alienating the whole of my time, as crystallized in my work, and everything I produced, I would be making another’s property the substance of my being, my universal activity and actuality, my personality.”

This second kind of alienation reaches its apex under capitalism, where every individual involved in the network of production and exchange is ruled by the laws of the world market. These function as coercive external powers over which even the masters of capital have no control, as the fluctuations of the business cycle demonstrate.

The influence of the earlier type of alienation, on the other hand, based upon lack of command over the forces of nature, lessens as technology and science expand with the growth of the productive forces from one stage of civilization to the next. As Marx wrote: “The miracles of God become superfluous because of the miracles of industry.” Today, when man’s conquest of nature is conclusive, though far from completed, the influence of unconquered nature as a factor in producing alienation is small compared to its economic causes.
 

Alienation of Labour under Capitalism

The alienations imposed by capital upon tabor reinforce and intensify those forms of alienation carried over from the barbarous past by adding to them estrangements bred by capitalism’s own peculiar type of exploitation. It is necessary to analyse the economic foundations of capitalist society in order to bring out its characteristic processes of alienation.

• Capitalism emerges as a distinct and separate economic formation by wrenching away working people from precapitalist conditions of production. Before capitalism could be established, the mass of direct producers had to be separated from the material means of production and transformed into propertyless proletarians. The processes of expropriation whereby the peasants were uprooted from the land and the social elements fashioned for the wage labour required for capitalist exploitation in Western Europe were summarized by Marx in Chapter XIX of Capital.
   
• However, the alienation of the producers only begins with the primary accumulation of capital: it is continually reproduced on an ever-extended scale once capital takes over industry, Even before he physically engages in the productive process, the wage-worker finds his labour taken away from him by the stipulations of the labour contract. The worker agrees to hand over his labour to the capitalist in return for the payment of the prevailing wage. The employer is then free to use and exploit this labour as he pleases.
   
• During the productive process, by virtue of the peculiar divisions of labour in capitalist enterprise, all the knowledge, will and direction is concentrated in the capitalist and his superintendents. The worker is converted into a mere physical accessory factor of production. “The capitalist represents the unity and will of the social working body” while the workers who make up that body are “dehumanized” and degraded to the status of things. The plan, the process, and the aim of capitalist production all confront the workers as alien, hostile, dominating powers. The auto workers on the assembly line can testify to the truth of this fact.
   
• At the end of the industrial process the product which is its result does not belong to the workers who made it but to the capitalist who owns it. In this way the product of labour is torn from the workers and goes into the market to be sold.
   
• The capitalist market, which is the totality of commodities and money in their circulation, likewise confronts the working class – whether as sellers of their labour power or as buyers of commodities – as an alien power. Its laws of operation dictate how much they shall get for their labour power, whether it is saleable at all, what their living standards shall be.
  
  The world market is the ultimate arbiter of capitalist society. It not only rules over the wage-slaves; it is greater than the most powerful group of capitalists. The overriding laws of the market dominate all classes like uncontrollable forces of nature which bring weal or woe regardless of anyone’s plans or intentions.
   
• In addition to the fundamental antagonism between the exploiters and the exploited, the competition characteristic of capitalism’s economic activities pits the members of both classes against one another. The capitalists strive to get the better of their rivals so that the bigger and more efficient devour the smaller and less productive.
  
  The workers who go into the labour market to sell their labour power are compelled to buck one another for available jobs. In the shop and factory they are often obliged to compete against one another under the goad of piecework.
  
  Both capitalists and workers try to mitigate the consequences of their competition by combination. The capitalists set up trusts and monopolies; the workers organize into trade unions. But however much these opposing forms of class organization modify and restrict competition, they cannot abolish it. The competitiveness eliminated from a monopolized industry springs up more violently in the struggles between one aggregation of capital and another. The workers in one craft, category or country are pitted, contrary to their will, against the workers of another.
  
  These economic circumstances generate unbridled individualism, egotism, and self-seeking throughout bourgeois society. The members of this society, whatever their status, have to live in an atmosphere of mutual hostility rather than of solidarity.
  
  Thus the real basis of the forms of alienation within capitalist society, is found in the contradictory relations of its mode of production and in the class antagonisms arising from them.
   

The Great Fetishes of Capitalism

Alienation, like all relations, is a two-sided affair and its operation has contradictory consequences. What is taken from the dispossessed is vested in the dispossessors. In religion the feebleness of men on earth is complemented by the omnipotence of the deity who is endowed with all the capacities real people lack. His representatives in society, from the shamans to the clergy, exploit this situation to their advantage.

In economies, the servitude of the labourer is the basis of the freedom of the master; the poverty of the many makes the wealth of the few. In politics, the absence of popular self-rule is made manifest in the despotism of the state.

In The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx came to grips for the first time with the mysteries of money. In capitalist society, he remarks, money has displaced religion as the major source of alienation, just as it has displaced the deity as the major object of adoration and attraction. The money form of wealth stands like a whimsical tyrant between the needs of men and their fulfilment. The possessor of money can satisfy the most exorbitant desires while the penniless individual cannot take care of the most elementary needs of food, clothing and shelter.

Money has the magical power of turning things into their opposites. “Gold! Yellow, glittering, precious gold”, can, as Shakespeare said, “make black, white; foul, fair; wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.” The person without artistic taste can buy and hang pictures in his mansion, or put them in a safety vault, while the creator and the genuine appreciator cannot view or enjoy them. The meanest scoundrel can purchase admiration from sycophants while worthy individuals go scorned and unnoticed.

Under capitalism, where everything enters the field of exchange and becomes the object of buying and selling, a man’s worth comes to be estimated, not by his really praiseworthy abilities or actions, but by his bank account. A man is “worth” what he owns and a millionaire is “worth” incomparably more than a pauper. A Rothschild is esteemed where a Marx is hated. In this cesspool of universal venality all genuine human values and standards are distorted and desecrated.

Later, in the first chapter of Capital, Marx unveiled the secrets of these magical powers of money by tracing them to the forms of value acquired by the commodity in the course of its evolution. The fetishistic character of money is derived from the fetishistic character of the commodity form of value which expresses the relations between independent producers through the medium of things. The fetish of capital which commands men’s lives and labour is the ultimate expression of this fetishism of commodities.

If money in the form of capital is the supreme fetish of bourgeois society, the state which enforces the economic conditions of capitalist exploitation comes a close second. State compulsion is most harshly manifested in its penal powers, its tax powers and in its power to conscript for military service. The identity of the ordinary citizen has to be validated by documents stamped by government officials. He needs a certificate to vouch for his birth and to prove that he graduated from school, that he is married or divorced, that he may travel to other countries.

The tyranny of money and the state over the lives of people is reducible in the last analysis to the relative poverty of the social order.
 

Alienation Between the State and Society

The alienations embedded in the economic foundations of capitalism manifest themselves in a myriad ways in other parts of the social structure. They are crystallized in the opposition between the state and the members of society. The unity of US capitalism, for example, is embodied in a state organization which is dominated and directed by representatives of the ruling monopolists.

The alienation of this government from the people in our dollar democracy is the main theme of a study of the rulers and the ruled in the United States recently, made by Professor C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite. Its opening paragraph reads:

“The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family and neighbourhood, they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern. ‘Great changes’ are beyond their control, but affect their conduct and outlook none the less. The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of the mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power.”

Mills sums up the extreme polarization of power in our society by declaring that the big business men, statesmen and brass hats composing the power elite appear to the impotent mass as “all that we are not”. To be sure, even under the current conformity, the population is not so stultified and inert as Mills and his fellow academic sociologists make out. The Negro struggle for equality and the periodic strikes among the industrial workers indicate that much is stirring below the surface.

But it cannot be denied that the power of labour is largely untapped, unorganized, and so misdirected that its potential remains hidden even from its possessors. The policies of the union leaders help the spokesmen for “the power elite” to keep the people from envisioning the immense political strength they could wield for their own cause. They thereby keep the working class alienated from its rightful place in American political life as leader and organizer of the whole nation. This role is handed over by default to the capitalist parties.

However, the dispossession of the working class from its historical functions will not be maintained forever. Sooner or later, the labour movement will be obliged to tear loose from its subordination to alien class political organizations and form its independent political party. This will be the beginning of a process of political self-realization, an ascent to the position of supremacy now held by the capitalist minority. If today the plutocracy is, to the masses “all that we are not”, the struggle for socialism can bring about the Great Reversal when “we who have been naught, shall be all”.
 

Alienation of Science from Society

The basic class antagonisms in economics and politics distort the relations of people in all other domains of life under capitalism from their emotional responses to one another up to their most general ideas. This has been felt and expressed in much of the art and literature of the bourgeois epoch. The estrangement of the creative artist from the bourgeois environment, which buffets him between crass commercialism and cruel indifference, has been a perennial scandal. The cries of protest in the works of such contemporary American writers as Henry Miller and Norman Mailer testify that this remains a running sore.

Something new has been added to this schism between the intellectuals and the ruling class in our own day. This is the breach that suddenly opened up between the scientists and the monopolists with the advent of the atomic bomb.

Capitalist society in its progressive period was the foster father of modern natural science and for several centuries the two pulled forward together. Most scientists in the English-speaking world took the preestablished harmony of the two so much for granted that they went about their work without concern over its social applications and ultimate consequences. The chain reaction issuing from the release of nuclear energy blasted them out of this blind comfort.

From 1942 on, nuclear physicists have found themselves in the most excruciating dilemma. They were dedicated to the discovery and dissemination of the truth for the good of all mankind. Yet the militarists turned their labour and its results against everything which they, as scientists and scholars, most cherished. “Freedom of science” became a mockery when the results of their research were made top secret and atomic scientists were forcibly isolated “for reasons of state” from their fellows.

The scientists became vassalized to a military machine serving predatory imperialist purposes, just as the industrial workers form part of the profit-making apparatus. Instead of helping to create a better life, their achievements dealt quicker death. Their greater command over matter and energy was cancelled by a total lack of control over its social uses.

What could be more inhuman than for the scientist to become the unwilling agent of the destruction of his own kind and the poisoner of the unborn? No wonder the most sensitive and social-minded have cried out against this violation of their vocation, this impermissible injury to their inner selves. Some have refused as “conscientious objectors” to participate in war-work; others suffered nervous breakdowns; a few even committed suicide.

Those clustered around The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have been searching – without success – for an effective political solution. Some speak of “their collective guilt”, although they are the victims and not the guilty ones. The responsibility for their intolerable predicament rests entirely upon the ruling imperialists who have thrust them into this alienated condition.

This diagnosis indicates the only way in which they can overcome that alienation. That is to join with those forces which are opposed to the imperialists and obliged to fight them.
 

The Humanism of Erich Fromm

While the physical health of the populations in the Western world has been improving, their mental and emotional condition has been deteriorating. This is the thesis of the recent book The Sane Society in which Erich Fromm undertakes a study of the psychopathology of modern life. His work is particularly pertinent because the socialist humanism he advocates is a psychological counterpart of the more literary type of humanism found in Dissent and The New Reasoner. Fromm correctly takes issue with those analysts who proceed from the premise that capitalism is rational and the task of the individual is to “adjust”, that is, conform to its special requirements. On the contrary, he asserts, the system is inherently irrational, as its effects demonstrate. If men are to live productively and at peace with themselves and one another, capitalism has to go.

Fromm borrows the concept of alienation from Marx’s early writings as the central tool in his analysis of what is wrong with the sterile and standardized acquisitive society of the 20th century and the main characteristics it produces in people. He makes many astute observations on the ways in which capitalism mangles human personalities.

He professes to criticize capitalism from a socialist standpoint and as an admirer of Marx. But he turns Marx upside down by declaring that Marx had a concept of man “which was essentially a religious and moral one”. And Fromm himself tries to replace materialism with moralizing as the theoretical basis for socialism.

This former psychoanalyst denies that the basic cause of the sickness of modern society is rooted in the relations of production, as Marxism teaches. They are just as much due to spiritual and psychological causes, he writes. Socialism has to be infused with the wisdom of the great religious leaders who taught that the inner nature of man has to be transformed as much as his external circumstances. He agrees with the Gospels that “the kingdom of heaven is within you.”

“Socialism, and especially Marxism, has stressed the necessity of the inner changes in human beings, without which economic change can never lead to the ‘good society’.”

Nothing less will do the job than “simultaneous changes in the spheres of industrial and political organization, of spiritual and psychological orientation, of character structure and of cultural activities”. His practical program for curing the ills of modern society rejects the conquest of power by the workers and the nationalization of industry and planned economy. That is the way to totalitarian regimentation, in his opinion.

He proposes the establishment of small agricultural and industrial “communities of work” as hothouses in which the laboratory conditions will be created for the cultivation of the good life. Capitalist society is to be reconstructed and humanity regenerated through utopian colonies like those advocated by Owen, Fourier, Proudhon and Kropotkin, which were tried and found wanting over a century ago in the United States.

Thus the “communitarian socialism” of this humanist turns out to be a faded copy of the utopian fantasies of the last century. It is a form of flight from the real facts of modern technology which demand large-scale production on a universal scale to sustain and elevate the expanding population of the globe. It is also an evasion of the pressing tasks involved in eliminating the evils of capitalist reaction and Stalinism, because it alienates itself in theory and in practice from revolutionary Marxism. This is the only social movement, class power and political program that can effectively abolish the rule of monopoly capitalism, uproot Stalinism, and create the material setting for a free and equal social system.
 

Is Alienation Everlasting?

Are the alienations from which man suffers incurable? This is the contention of the Catholic Church, pessimistic Protestant theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, existentialist followers of Kierkegaard, and some interpreters of Freud. They picture man as eternally torn and tormented by irreconcilable aims and impulses, doomed to despair and disappointment in the unending war between his deepest spiritual aspirations and his insuperable limitations as an earthbound mortal.

The historical materialists squarely oppose all such preachers of original sin. Mankind does not have eternal insurmountable failings which have to be compensated for by the fictitious consolations of the church, the mystical intuitions of idealist philosophers, or the infinitely repeated but ever defeated efforts at self-transcendence of the existentialists. The real alienations which cripple and warp humanity have ascertainable historical roots and material causes. Far from being eternal, they have, as has been indicated, already shifted their axis in the course of social development from the contest between society and nature to the conflicts within the social structure.

These internal social antagonisms are not everlasting. They do not spring from any intrinsic and inescapable evil in the nature of mankind as a species. They were generated by specific historico-social conditions which have been uncovered and can be explained.

Now that mankind has acquired superiority over nature through triumphs of technology and science, the next great step is to gain collective control over the blind forces of society. There is only one conscious agency in present-day life strong enough and strategically placed to shoulder and carry through this imperative task, says Marxism. That is the force of alienated labour incorporated in the industrial working class.

The material means for liberating mankind can be brought into existence only through the world socialist revolution which will concentrate political and economic power in the hands of the working people. Planned economy of a socialist type on an international scale will not only enable mankind to regain mastery over the means of life; it will immeasurably enhance that collective control. The reconstruction of social relations will complete the mastery of nature for social purposes initiated under class society, and thereby abolish the conditions which in the past permitted, and even necessitated, the subjugation of man to man, the rule of the many by the few.

Once everyone’s primary needs are capable of satisfaction, abundance reigns, and the labour time required to produce the necessities of life is reduced to the minimum, then the stage will be set for the abolition of all forms of alienation and for the rounded development of all persons, not at the expense of one another, but in fraternal relation.

The abolition of private property must be followed by the wiping out of national barriers. The resultant increase in the productive capacities of society will prepare the way for the elimination of the traditional antagonisms between physical and intellectual workers, between the inhabitants of the city and the country, between the advanced and the undeveloped nations.

These are the indispensable prerequisites for building a harmonious, integrated, inwardly stable and constantly developing system of social relations. When all compulsory inequalities in social status, in conditions of life and labour, and in access to the means of self-development are done away with, then the manifestations of these material inequalities in the alienation of one section of society from another will wither away. This in turn will foster the conditions for the formation of harmonious individuals no longer at war with each other – or within themselves.

Such are the radiant prospects held out by the socialist revolution and its reorganization of society as projected by the masters of Marxism.
 

Prime Cause of Alienation in Deformed Workers’ States

This, too, was the goal toward which the Soviet Union, the product of the first successful workers’ revolution, was heading under the Stalinist regime, honest communists believed. Had they not been assured by Stalin that socialism had already been realized in the Soviet Union and it was on the way to the higher stage of communism?

Khrushchev has parroted these claims. But his own disclosures at the 20th Congress and the outbursts of opposition in the Soviet zone since then have ripped through the delusion that a socialist society has already been consummated there. The false ideological structure fabricated by the Communist Party machine lies shattered. How are the pieces to be put together again, and in what pattern?

The first thing that has to be done is to go back and cheek what actually exists in the Soviet Union at its present point of development with the fundamentals of Marxist theory. In their own way some of the “humane” socialists try to do this.

“It was assumed”, Thompson, editor of the New Reasoner, writes, “that all forms of human oppression were rooted, ultimately, in the economic oppression arising from the private ownership of the means of production; and that once these were socialized, the ending of the other oppressions would rapidly ensue.” (My italics.)

This proposition of historical materialism retains its full validity, even though the humanist critics question it. What, then, went wrong? Taken by itself, this historical generalization is an abstract standard which has to be wedded to existing facts and their state of development in order to become concrete and fruitful. The essence of the matter lies in the verbal modifier, “rapidly”. Between the ending of capitalist private ownership and the elevation of the nationalized means of production to the level of socialist abundance there has to be a transition period in which features carried over from the old bourgeois order are intermingled with the fundamental institutions of the new society in the making.

In the case of the Soviet Union this intermediate period was neither so short nor so favourable in its setting as the forecasts of Marx and Lenin anticipated. This historical stage has stretched out over four agonizingly difficult decades and is still far from concluded. The obligation of a scientific socialist is to study the real conditions of the economic and social development of the first workers’ state over these 40 years in the light of all the guiding generalizations of his method. He must inquire to what extent the material circumstances have approached the theoretical norm; wherein they fell short and why; and then determine the ways and means required to bridge the gap between the existing state of affairs and the ideal standard.

Thompson and his fellow humanists, however, dismayed by the filthy features of Stalinism suddenly bared to their vision, proceed quite differently. They carelessly toss out the historical generalizations, which condense within themselves an immense wealth of experience and analysis of social development, along with their disfigured expressions in real life. This is not the first time that well-intentioned radicals, thrown off balance by the contradiction between the standards of what a workers’ state should be and its political degeneration under the Stalinist regime, have rejected both the theoretical norm and the existing reality. After having been cradled so long in illusions, they cannot face the objective historical facts of the Soviet structure.

Marxist sociology, however, demands that the facts as they are be taken as the starting point for theory and action. What are these facts?

In June 1957 Khrushchev swore over TV that there are no contradictions in Soviet society. This was no more credible than his assertion that all was well with the new “collective leadership” – shortly before Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovitch and other dignitaries were cashiered. The more prudent Mao Tse-tung admitted that certain types of contradiction can exist between the government and the people in the workers’ states but that those in China, and by inference the Soviet Union, are exclusively of the non-antagonistic, non-violent kind.

The divergences between the bureaucrats and the masses in the Soviet Union which have produced the all-powerful states give the lie to these theoretical pretensions of the leaders in Moscow and Peking. How is this estrangement between the rulers and the ruled to be explained?

The taking of power by the workers and public ownership of the means of production, especially in backward countries, cannot in and of itself and all at once usher in socialism. These achievements simply lay down the political and legal conditions for the construction of the new society. In order to arrive at socialism, the productive forces have to be promoted to the point where consumer goods are cheaper and more plentiful than under the most beneficent capitalism.

This cannot be attained within the confines of a single country, as the orthodox Stalinists claim, or by adding up separated national units, each following “its own road to socialism”, as the dissident Stalinists maintain. The poverty in consumer goods arising from the inferior productivity of the economy divorced from world resources is the material source for the growth and maintenance of malignant bureaucratic tumours within the most “liberal” of the workers’ states.

In principle, in essence, the prime causes of the alienation of labour under capitalism – private property in the means of production and the anarchy of the profit system – have been eradicated in the Soviet countries. Thanks to nationalization of basic industry, control of foreign trade and planned economy, the working people there are no longer separated from the material means of production but are reunited with them in a new and higher form.

However, these anticapitalist measures and methods do not dispose of the problems of Soviet economy. Far from it. To uproot the social alienations inherited from the barbarous past, the workers’ states require not only a powerful heavy industry but also a well-proportioned economy that can provide the necessities and comforts of life in increasing volume to all sections of the people.

Not one of the existing postcapitalist states has raised its economy anywhere near that point. These states have not yet even approached the productivity in the sphere of subsistence and the means of culture attained by the most advanced capitalist countries. The prevailing scarcities have resulted in tense struggles among the various sectors of their population over the division of the restricted national income. In these struggles the bureaucratic caste which has cornered all the instruments of political power plays the commanding role. The rulers decide who gets what and how much. They never forget to place themselves at the head of the table.

There is no exploitation of labour as in capitalist society. But there are sharp distinctions between the haves, who make up a small minority, and the have-nots, the majority of the working population. The manifest inequalities in the distribution of available goods and amenities erode the ties of solidarity between various parts of the population and dig deep-going differences in their living standards, even where these are somewhat improved. In this sense, the product of their labour still escapes the control of the producers themselves. When it enters the domain of distribution, their production passes under the control of the uncontrolled bureaucracy. In this way their own production, concentrated in the hands of omnipotent administrators, once again confronts the masses as an alien and opposing force.

Herein is the principal source, the material basis, of the alienation of rulers and ruled in the degenerated and deformed workers’ states of the Soviet zone. Their antagonisms express the growth of two opposing tendencies in the economic structure: one carried over from the bourgeois past, the other preparing the socialist future. The socialist foundations of nationalized industry and planned economy in the field of production are yoked to bureaucratically administered bourgeois standards which determine the maldistribution of the inadequate supplies of consumer goods.

The development of these two contradictory tendencies is responsible for the friction which threatens to flare up into explosive conflicts.
 

The Ultra-Bureaucratic State and the Workers

Why don’t the workers have control over the distribution of their product? Because they have either lost direct democratic control over the state apparatus, as in the Soviet Union, or have yet to acquire it, as in the Eastern European satellites and China. Just as the workers should enjoy higher living standards under socialism than under capitalism, so in a normal workers’ state they should participate far more fully in the administration of public functions, enjoy more freedom and have more rights than under the most democratic of the bourgeois regimes.

There was a foretaste, and a solemn pledge, that such would be the case in the seething democracy that characterized the first years of the Soviet Republic. The subsequent political victory of the bureaucratic upstarts reduced to zero the democratic functioning of the Communist Party, the trade unions, the Soviets, the youth and cultural organizations, the army and other institutions. The powers and rights supposedly guaranteed to the people by the Soviet Constitution were in practice nullified by the centralized caste governing through Stalin’s one-man dictatorship.

This autocratic system of political repression fortified the economic suppression. Through the spy system and the secret police, the jails and concentration camps, the penal powers of the state were directed far less against the forces of the overturned order than against the workers who were the bearers of the new order.

Instead of being an agency for carrying out the decisions of the people, the ultra-bureaucratized state confronted the workers and peasants, the intellectuals and youth, as well as the subject nationalities, as a parasitic, oppressive and hostile force which they yearn to throw off their backs.
 

Organization of Industry

Lenin envisaged, and the program of the Bolsheviks stated, that the workers would control and manage industry through their elected representatives. Instead, the division of economic functions which excludes the workers under capitalism from exercising their initiative, intelligence and will has been recreated in new forms under the bureaucratic maladministration of the Soviet economy.

“The universal brain” which supervizes production is no longer the capitalists – but it is also not yet the workers as it should be under a genuine Soviet democracy. The hierarchy of bureaucrats arrogated all major powers of decision to themselves under the successive five-year plans. Orders were issued from the single centralized command post in Moscow, even on matters of detail. All science and judgment were vested in appointed officials. Khrushchev’s recent decentralization of industrial management has modified but not essentially changed this setup.

The workers neither propose nor dispose freely of their energies in the labour process. They do not initiate the plan, participate in its formulation, decide its allotments, apply, oversee, and cheek up on its operation and results. They are relegated to the role of passive objects, subjected to unremitting exhortations and harsh forms of pressure to perform their tasks better.

The workers on the job are speeded up by means of piecework and arbitrary setting of work norms. Until the recent reforms they were chained to their jobs in the factories by workbooks and internal passports and liable to severe penalties for infractions of the rules and for being minutes late to work. They have no right to strike against intolerable conditions.

Meanwhile they see the multiplication of parasites in directing positions and gross mismanagement of the nation’s resources. Reports by Soviet officials themselves have cited many instances of such industrial waste and disorganization.

Thus the plan of production which should be collectively adopted and carried through by the producing masses appears as an alien pattern imposed upon them by heartless functionaries in disregard of their wishes and welfare.
 

Dictatorship of the Lie

The Soviet bureaucracy is itself the living embodiment of a gigantic fraud. This privileged, antisocialist force is obliged to parade as the representative and continuator of the greatest movement for equality and justice in history while riding roughshod over the most elementary needs and feelings of the working people. This immense disparity between its progressive pretensions and its reactionary course is at the bottom of the hypocrisy and deceit that mark Stalinized regimes.

Their dictatorship of the lie permeated every department of Soviet life. From the top to the lower depths the Soviet people were forced to lead double lives: one for public show conforming to the official line of the moment; the other, of suppressed resentment and frustration at their inability to express their real thoughts and emotions lest they be handed over to the Inquisition.

They became alienated from the regime which alienated them from their deepest thoughts and feelings and from one another. “The worst in our system was not the poverty, the lack of the most essential necessities, but the fact that this system made life one great big lie, having to listen to lies, to read lies every hour of the day, all day long, and being forced to lie oneself in turn”, a nameless Budapest intellectual complained to a German reporter.

The revulsion against such spiritual degradation was one of the main causes behind the uprising of Hungarian and Polish intellectuals and youth. It is also one of the main themes of the newly awakened, critical-minded generation of Soviet writers. They are articulating as best they can the rankling protest against regimentation of cultural, scientific and artistic activities; against the suffocating atmosphere of double-talking and double-dealing; against official impostures that not only stifle creative work but make even normalized existence difficult.

In the “People’s Democracies” of Eastern Europe, in the Baltic countries, the Ukraine and other oppressed nations within the Soviet Union itself there is another source of resentment: the grievance against a Great Russian regime which governs heedless of the special demands, traditions, autonomy and interests of the oppressed nationality.
 

Cult of the Individual

Religion is primarily the product of mankind’s lack of control over the forces of nature and society. The socialist movement has as one of its objectives the abolition of the material conditions which permit such degrading fictions to stunt men’s outlooks and cramp their lives.

The influence of orthodox religion has been considerably curtailed by atheist education in the Soviet Union since the Revolution. But in its stead there arose that secular “cult of the individual,” the deification of Stalin. This revival of idolatry is all the more startling and paradoxical because it emerged, not from the most unenlightened strata of the population, but on the very heights of the ruling Communist Party which was avowedly guided by the materialist philosophy of Marxism. The working class anthem, the Internationale, says: “We need no god-given saviours.” Yet the Soviet peoples and the communist parties were indoctrinated with the myth of the infallibility of the all-wise “saviour” in the Kremlin.

How did the practices of the Roman and Byzantine empires, which deified its emperors, become duplicated in the first workers’ state?

The answer is not to be found in the exceptional virtues or vices of Stalin but rather in the role he performed for the privileged bureaucratic caste. Having elevated itself as the sole ruling power, it could no more practice democracy within its own circle than it could permit democracy in the country as a whole. It was necessary to find other means of solving the internal problems and conflicts. The means had to be in consonance with the methods of rule: autocratic, violent and deceitful.

Stalin took supreme command, and held it unchallenged for so long, because he best fulfilled the assigned function of the ruthless, all-powerful, omniscient arbiter. Just as the bureaucracy settled everything in the country, “the man of steel” decided everything within the bureaucracy and for it.

The power of the gods, indeed, their very existence, was at bottom derived from the powerlessness of the people in the face of society and nature. So the almighty power of the idolized Stalin was based upon the total usurpation of power from the people. The cult of the individual, so persistently inculcated for decades, was its end-product. The raising of Stalin to superhuman heights was the other side of the political degradation of the Soviet workers.

The breakup of the cult of the individual has been brought about by the reverse process: the growing strength of the Soviet working class and the weakening of the positions of the bureaucracy as a result of the postwar developments. Stalin’s heirs are trying – without much success – to substitute the more impersonal cult of the bureaucracy under the title of “the collective leadership” for the downgraded cult of the individual.

When the people get off their knees, the high and mighty rulers no longer loom so large. As the workers regain their self-confidence and feel their collective strength, their former prostration before fabricated idols vanishes. The outraged revolutionists of Budapest who pulled down the statue of Stalin on the first day of their uprising showed by that symbolic act the fate in store for all the bureaucratic overlords.
 

The Cure for Bureaucratism

The experience of the postcapitalist regimes over the past 40 years has shown that the danger of bureaucratic distortion and degeneration of the workers states in the transitional period from capitalism to socialism is genuine.

This danger does not flow from any innate evil in a human nature which has an unslakeable thirst for power, as the moralizers insist. It arises from the surrounding material conditions, from the inadequacy of the powers of production to satisfy the wants of the people, even under the most progressive social forms. This economic situation enables the specialists in administration to mount once more upon the backs of the masses and erect their regime, for a time, into an instrument of oppression. The more impoverished and undeveloped the country is, the more menacing this danger becomes. While overproduction is the curse of capitalist economy, underproduction is the curse of the socialized economies.

The causes and character of the malady which has infected the first workers’ states indicate the measures that must be taken to counteract it, so far as that is possible under the given circumstances. The prescription for the cure is nothing less than democratic control of both the government and the economy by the masses of working people.

The real power must be exercised through councils freely elected by the manual and intellectual workers of city and country. Their democratic rights should include freedom of organization and propaganda by all parties which recognize and abide by the gains of the revolution; freedom of the press; all public functionaries to be under the control of the electorate with the right of recall of representatives on all levels.

There must be such political reforms as the restoration of democracy within the workers’ parties with control of the leadership and policies by their members; the restriction of the income of officials to that of the most skilled workers; the drawing of the people into the administration of public functions; the abolition of the secret police, internal passports, labour camps for political dissenters and other abominations.

In the economic domain the workers must have control over national planning and its execution on all levels and at all stages so that timely reviews can be made of results in the light of actual experience. Wage standards and other means of distribution must be revized so that inequalities can be reduced to the minimum. The trade unions should have the right to strike in order to safeguard the workers against mistakes and abuses of their government.

All nationalities should have the right to be independent or to federate, if desired, in a fraternal and equal association of states.

Such measures would add up to a revolutionary change in the structure and operation of the existing workers’ states, a salutary change from bureaucratic autocracy to workers’ democracy.

How is such a transformation to be accomplished? Not by concessions doled out from above by “enlightened absolutism” or a frightened officialdom but through direct action by the working people themselves. They will have to take by revolutionary means the rights of rulership which belong to them, which were promised by the Marxist program, and which were denied them by the bureaucratic usurpers.
 

Stalinism and Capitalism

The “humane” Socialists bracket Stalinism with capitalism because both, they say, subjugate men to things and sacrifice the creative capacities of mankind to the Moloch of economic necessity. Let us agree that, despite their opposing economic foundations, the Stalinist regimes do exhibit many similarities with the states of the capitalist world. But these points of identity do not arise from their common exaltation of things above men. They have a different origin.

Under the guise of defending the free personality against the coercion of things, the neo-humanists are really rebelling against the facts of life formulated in the theory of historical materialism. All societies have been subject to severe economic constraint and must remain so up to the advent of future communism. The less productive a society is and the poorer in the means of subsistence and culture, the harsher these forms of constraint must be. The mass of mankind must labour under this lash until they raise the powers of production to the point where everyone’s needs can be taken care of in a work week of 10 hours or less.

This reduction of necessary labour will free people from the traditional social load that has weighed them down and enable them to devote most of their time to general social welfare activity and personal pursuits and pastimes. Recent developments in science, technology and industry from nuclear energy to automation place such a goal within sight. But our society is still quite a distance from this promised land.

The means for such freedom cannot be provided under capitalism. They have not yet been created in the transitional societies that have passed beyond capitalism. So long as the workers have to toil long hours daily to acquire the bare necessities of existence and compete with one another for them, they cannot administer the general affairs of society or properly develop their creative capacities as free human beings. Such social functions as government, the management of industry, the practice of science and the arts will continue to be vested in specialists. Taking advantage of their posts of command, these specialists have raised themselves above the masses and come to dominate them.

It is out of these economic and social conditions that the ultra-bureaucratic police regimes of the workers’ states have arisen. There, as under capitalism, though in different forms, the privileged minority prospers at the expense of the labours of the majority.

The evils of Stalinism do not come from recognizing the material limitations of production or acting in accord with them. Even the healthiest workers’ regime would have to take these into account. The crimes of Stalinism consist in placing the interests and demands of favoured functionaries before the welfare of the people and above the needs of development towards socialism; in fostering inequalities instead of consciously and consistently diminishing them; in concealing both the privileges of aristocrats and the deprivations of plebeians; in stripping the workers of their democratic rights – and trying to pass off these abominations as “socialism”.

The task of eradicating the scourge of bureaucratism in the anticapitalist states is inseparable from the task of abolishing bourgeois rule in capitalist countries. The role of the Kremlin hierarchy has been no less pernicious in foreign affairs than at home. If the menace of imperialist intervention has helped the bureaucracy to maintain its power, its international policies in turn have been a prime political factor in saving capitalist rule from being overthrown by the workers.

By imposing policies of class collaboration upon the communist parties, Stalin rescued tottering capitalist regimes in Western Europe at the end of the Second World War. At the same congress where he made his secret report on Stalin’s crimes (omitting this one, among others) Khrushchev made a declaration of policy on “new roads to socialism” which was essentially Stalin’s old course rendered more explicit. He stated that Lenin’s analysis of the imperialist stage of capitalism and the revolutionary struggle of the workers against it was outmoded by new world-historical conditions. According to Khrushchev, not only are there no conflicts within Soviet society but even the contradictions between monopolist reaction and the workers which provoked revolutionary actions in the past have become softened. The existing capitalist regimes may now, under certain conditions, be magically transformed into People’s Democracies by reformist methods and through purely parliamentary channels.

The Stalinist bureaucracy, and the parties it controls do not propose to follow the path of leading the revolutionary activities of the masses to the conquest of power. They rather seek a general agreement with Western capitalists to freeze the present map of the world and its relationship of class forces.

This reciprocal reliance of capitalist rulership upon Stalinist opportunism, and Stalinist opportunism upon “peace loving” capitalists, whereby one sustains the other at the expense of the world working class, can be broken up only by an international movement of the masses which is both consistently anti-imperialist and anti-Stalinist.
 

Toward the Abolition of Alienation

The question of alienation ultimately merges with the long-standing problem of the relation between human freedom and social necessity. Socialism promised freedom, cry the new humanists, but see what terrible despotism it has begotten under Stalinism. “Are men doomed to become the slaves of the times in which they live, even when, after irrepressible and tireless effort, they have climbed so high as to become the masters of the time?” asks the imprisoned ex-communist leader and newly-converted social-democrat Milovan Djilas in the autobiography of his youth, Land Without Justice.

How does historical materialism answer this question? The extent of man’s freedom in the past was rigidly circumscribed by the degree of effective control society exercised over the material conditions of life. The savage who had to spend most of his waking hours every day of the year chasing after food had little freedom to do anything else. This same restriction upon the scope of human action and cultural development has persisted through civilization for the bulk of mankind – and for the same economic reasons.

If people suffer today from the tyranny of money or from the tyranny of the state, it is because their productive systems, regardless of its property forms, cannot at their present state of development take care of all their physical and cultural needs. In order to throw off these forms of social coercion, it is necessary to raise the powers of social production – and, in order to raise these powers, it is necessary to get rid of the reactionary social forces which hold them back.

Scientific socialists can agree with the new humanists that it is necessary to live up to the highest moral standards. They recognize that the desires for justice, tolerance, equality and self-respect have become as much a part of civilized life as the needs for food, clothing and shelter. Marxism would not be fit to serve as the philosophical guide of the most enlightened people of our time if it failed to take these demands into account.

But that is only one side of the problem. Until their basic material requirements are actually assured for everyone, the higher activities are stunted and social relations must remain un-humanized. The forces of reaction, whose codes and conduct are governed by the will to defend their power, property, and privileges at any price, determine the moral climate far more than their opponents who have more elevated aims and ideals.

It would be more “humane” for the Western imperialists to withdraw quietly from their colonial domains, instead of fighting to hold them. But the actions of the French in Algeria again prove that ruthless terror, not peaceful reason, is more likely to prevail.

From the economic, cultural and ethical standpoints, it would be preferable if the monied magnates would recognize that their usefulness is finished and consent to yield their possessions and power to the socialist workers movement by mutual agreement between the contending classes. So far history has not provided any such sensible and straightforward solution to the transition from capitalism to socialism.

The principal task before the Soviet people is to get rid of the archaic monstrosity of their totalitarian political structure. It would be best if the Stalinist leaders would give up their functions as an oppressive ruling caste, grant independence to their satellites, and return complete power to their own people. But the case of Hungary indicates that they are unlikely to cede their commanding positions gracefully, gradually or easily,

“Humane” and “reasonable” solutions to the fundamental social problems of our time are blocked by these bulwarks of reaction. That is why the anticapitalist revolutions in the advanced countries, the anti-imperialist movements in the colonies, and the antibureaucratic struggles in the Soviet zone will have to be brought to successful conclusions before the causes of the antagonisms which plague mankind can be eliminated.

Over a century ago Marx emphasized that men cannot behave according to truly human standards until they live under truly human conditions. Only when the material conditions of their existence are radically transformed, when all their time becomes available for freely chosen pursuits, can they throw off the contradictory relations which have tormented mankind with separatism and conflict.

The aim of socialism is to introduce the rule of reason into all human activities. The alienations from which men suffer have been produced and perpetuated by the unconscious operation of uncontrollable natural and social forces. Socialism will eradicate the sources of alienation by bringing under conscious control all those hitherto unmanageable forces which have crippled mankind, frustrated its deepest aspirations, and thwarted its full and free development in any desired direction.

This process will start by eliminating the irrationality, anarchy and inadequacy of the economic foundations through planned production of the necessities of life and the means of cultural development. In this age of nuclear energy, electronics and automation the linking up of the workers’ republics in the industrialized countries with those in less developed lands, can, within a measurable period, bring the productive powers of society to the point where there can be abundance for all, for the economically retarded as well as for the most advanced peoples.

As this economic goal is approached, the conditions will be prepared for the reduction of all governmental compulsions over the associations and actions of men, culminating in the abolition of man’s power over man. The universal elevation of living and educational standards will break down the opposition between workers and intellectuals so that all intelligence can be put to work and all work be performed with the utmost intelligence. In this new form of social production labour can become a joyous and significant enterprise instead of an ordeal.

The progress of science will be planned to create the most worthy conditions for the all-sided improvement of humanity. The supreme aim of socialism is humanistic in the highest and deepest sense. It is nothing less than the remaking of the human race in a thoroughly conscious and scientifically planned manner.

The scientists of socialism will not only penetrate into galactic space. They will invade the remotest hiding places of matter, and especially living matter. They will systematically seek out and subdue the obscure forces at work in their own bodies and psyches, the legacy of blind animal evolution.

With knowledge and power thus acquired, humanity will become the freely creative species it has the potential of becoming. Men will recreate their natural environment, their organisms and their mutual relations as they wish them to be. To human beings of that happier time the welfare of their fellows will be the first law of their own existence.
 

Labour Time and Free Time

All economy is economy of labour time and man’s freedom comes down in the last analysis to freedom from compulsory labour. The expenditure of time and energy in procuring the material means of existence is an inheritance from the animal state which prevents men from leading a completely human life. Mankind will suffer from this alienation so long as it must engage in socially necessary labour.

The Bible says: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” This has been the lot of mankind throughout the ages. The members of primitive communities are the slaves of labour time as well as the members of class society. Savages, however, work only for themselves and not to enrich others.

The labouring force in class society has to produce extra wealth for the owners of the means of production in addition to their own upkeep. They are doubly enslaved by surplus labour time piled upon necessary labour time. The wage workers who are obliged to create an ever-expanding surplus of value for the masters of capital are more intensively sweated than any other class.

It is not the socialist but the capitalist who looks upon labour as the essence of humanity and its eternal fate. Under capitalism the wage worker is treated, not as a fellow human being, but as a mechanism useful for the production of surplus value. He is a prisoner with a lifetime sentence to hard labour.

Marxism assigns the highest importance to labour activity, recognizing that production of wealth beyond the mere means of subsistence has been the material basis for all advancement in civilization. But Marxism does not make an idol of labour. For all its mighty accomplishments, to work for a living is not the height of human evolution or the ultimate career of mankind. Quite the contrary. Compulsory labour is the mark of social poverty and oppression. Free time for all is the characteristic of a truly human existence.

The necessity for labour remains, and may even for a time become more imperious, after capitalist relations are abolished. Although people no longer work for exploiting classes but for a collective economy, they do not yet produce enough to escape the tyranny of labour time. Under such conditions labour time remains the measure of wealth and the regulator of its distribution.

But, contrary to the situation under capitalism, the greater their powers of production grow, the closer the workers come to the hour of their release from servitude to labour. When the production of all the material necessities of life and means of culture will be taken over by automatic methods and mechanisms, requiring the minimum of superintendence, humanity will be freed to develop its distinctively human capacities and relations to the full.

The prehistory of humanity will end and its development on a truly human basis begin, when wealth of all kinds flows as freely as water and is as abundant as air and compulsory labour is supplanted by free time. Then free time enjoyed by all will be the measure of wealth, the guarantee of equality and harmony, the source of unrestricted progress and the annihilator of alienation. This is the goal of socialism, the promise of communism.

 
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Last updated on: 2 May 2009