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How Marx Came to Discover the Alienation of Labor: Mary Gabriel
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How Marx Came to Discover the Alienation of Labor: Mary Gabriel
By Mary Gabriel - Sep 21, 2011
Joblessness was liberating for Karl Marx in 1844 -- it meant he could go
back to school. His classrooms were Paris’ gaslit cafes and wine cellars,
and small offices filled with cigar smoke.
There were no lectures, there were discussions --boisterous gatherings that
drew curious passers-by who watched men from many nations shout at one
another about the relative merits of socialism, communism, nationalism,
liberalism and democracy, and whether governments should be taken by force
and rebuilt from the ruins, or whether appeals should be made to the ruling
class that fundamental social change was coming.
All sides of the debate saw the need for new forms of government in Europe;
the nature of society had changed. Absolute monarchs with their obsequious
courtiers and despots with their bloody henchmen seemed like costume
characters from another era. The men in Marx’s circle agreed the monarchies
must go. They could not agree, however, on how, or on what would replace
them.
At that time, there were no international organizations under whose auspices
these men could gather. Gradually, however, in the melting pot of Paris,
those who were at the forefront of the new ideologies began transcending the
barriers of languages and customs to talk about common concerns. Several
dominant strands were prominent among these middle-class reformers:
liberalism, radicalism, nationalism and socialism.
Proletarian Army
All of those isms, however, existed largely in the theoretical realm, topics
of discussion that could not be applied because they had no mass support --
no army. The reason for this was relatively straightforward: The working
class was suspicious of middle-class reformers and consequently of their
ideologies. Marx, too, was suspicious of these ideas.
Marx did not recognize in any of the isms a real understanding of the
disease spreading through Europe’s fledgling industrial economic system,
and without that knowledge, no meaningful social change was possible. Fully
admitting that he, too, did not completely understand, Marx set out in
search of answers.
He returned to the books he had been reading that year, specifically texts
by French and English economists, filling notebook after notebook with
scrambled jottings. These became the “Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts” or “1844 Manuscripts,” which Marx left unfinished but which
formed the basis for his life’s work.
‘Bourgeois Economists’
The study of these “bourgeois economists” led Marx to the conclusion that
these thinkers believed economic systems operated according to cold,
immutable laws that carried men along and were beyond their control. These
economists also believed that business, left to grow without government
interference, would eventually produce a general benefit for all mankind.
But Marx had seen and heard evidence to the contrary, and he set out to
demythologize economics, to describe its real- world mechanics and, most
forcefully, its consequences.
Marx worked his way through wage, rent, credit, profit, private property vs.
communism, and the relations of capital to labor. What he discovered was
that acquisition of the glittering prize of the new economic system, money (
and by extension the things that such capital could buy), had become the
driving force in modern man’s existence, perverting every aspect of his
relations with other people, even how he viewed himself. It magically
enabled the rich man to become whatever he chose.
‘Stupidity, Cretinism’
Meanwhile the labor that produced the rich man’s wealth robbed the worker
of his lifeblood: “It produces palaces -- but for the worker, hovels. It
produces beauty -- but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by
machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to a barbarous type
of labor, and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces
intelligence -- but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.”
Marx sought to explain how this corrosive relationship had developed. He
began placing man in a system in which the grand bourgeoisie, which
controlled all the money as well as the means of production, dehumanized the
worker by reducing him to selling his labor for a wage determined by his
employer. The worker in the new industrial relationship became alienated
from his work, laboring for a class of men who reaped all the benefits and
gave him in return only the means to survive.
Falling Wages
Marx’s theories became spectacles; evidence was luminescent everywhere.
Wages had been falling for nearly 20 years while the cost of living during
the same time rose 17 percent. In 1844 wide-scale food shortages began. A
series of scandals exposed how French officials had helped create the
economic imbalance by concentrating extreme wealth in the hands of a select
few.
Although he had once discounted communism as unrealizable, Marx now saw it
as the means to recalibrate society. Wealth would not be private property
but shared. Men would work, but their work would benefit themselves and the
greater good, not the property owner. He described communism as “the
genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man
and man … between freedom and necessity.”
French and German workers in Paris who identified themselves as communists
believed revolution was the only way to end exploitation, as its
beneficiaries had so much to lose. Marx agreed, writing, “It takes actual
communist action to abolish actual private property.”
Silesia Uprising
As if on cue, such violence occurred. Word arrived of an uprising in the
Prussian region of Silesia, where on June 4, 1844, a group of weavers
marched on the home of Prussian industrialists. Their demands for higher pay
denied, the weavers stormed the house and destroyed it. The next day, as
many as 5,000 weavers and their families burst into homes and factories,
destroyed machines, and looted and ransacked residences and offices. The
industrialists called in the Prussian military, which fired on the crowd,
killing 35.
The revolt was the first of its kind involving industrial workers in Germany
, and though it failed, Marx recognized in it the connection he sought
between an impassioned proletariat, economics and the state. The driving
force behind the rebellion was not an abstraction such as religion or
ethnicity or a throne, as many had been in the past, but something much more
tangible: bread.
Energized by events at home, exiled Germans, including Marx and Heinrich
Heine, began meeting on Sundays at a Paris wine merchant’s shop. French
police informers reported they discussed killing kings, oppressing the rich
and religious, and other “words of horror.”
Steadfast Jenny
Jenny Marx’s letters to her husband during this period indicated a creeping
anxiety about their future. She was evidently struggling to be strong,
while raising their daughter at her parents’ house in Trier, as her husband
traveled further along a dangerous road. But in the end she seemed resigned
that the path Karl had chosen was inevitable and correct. To those who
doubted his course, she said, “Can one not see everywhere signs of
earthquake and the undermining of the foundations on which society has
erected its temples and shops?”
About a month after she wrote those words, a failed assassination of
Friedrich Wilhelm IV raised alarms throughout the kingdom. In a letter to
Karl she wrote: “It was a social attempt at assassination! If something
does break out, it will start from this direction ... the seeds of a social
revolution are present.”
Marx, who in the summer of 1844 began writing for Vorwarts! (Forward!),
published Jenny’s letter in the newspaper on Aug. 10, 1844, and signed it
“A German Lady.”
Prussian Pressure
Her first piece of published writing appeared three days after Marx’s own
initial contribution to the Paris-based weekly, which was known as the only
uncensored opposition German- language newspaper in Europe and the most
radical. Soon Vowarts! attracted the attention of the Prussian authorities.
The Prussian government pressured its French counterpart, and the newspaper
’s editor in chief was imprisoned for two months. The rest of the staff
braced for more charges and possible expulsion.
In that atmosphere Jenny prepared to return to Paris. As she always would,
she rallied to her husband’s side when he was under threat.
Within days of receiving her letter, Marx made the acquaintance of the man
who would be his other lifelong protector, Friedrich Engels.
(Mary Gabriel is the author of the biographies “Notorious Victoria” and “
The Art of Acquiring.” This is the second in a five-part series excerpted
from her new book, “Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of
a Revolution,” published in September by Little, Brown & Co.)
To contact the writer of this article: Mary Gabriel at mgabriel1883@yahoo.
com.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Max Berley at mberley@
bloomberg.net.
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