From Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte and A note on James Mill, Die Structur der Gemeinwesen von Karl Marx

Abstract

With Hegel, dialectic “Stood on its head” and was incorporated in the system of idealistic speculation which took a mystical form. Marx criticised the Hegelian method while examining Hegel's views on bourgeois society, and by “turning it right side up” (man muss sie umstulpen as Marx says) produced a consistently materialistic dialetic which was “its direct opposite”. In this article, the author deals with Marx's Okonomisch-dhilosophische Manuskripte and A note on James Mill, reviewing what Marx aimed at in his theory of alienation of labour was to make clear the theoretical and practical grounds for abolishing the system of «Entfremdung der Arbeit» (“alienated labour”) by disclosing the low of how private property as capital did work. His analysis of “alienated labour” in. Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte had been the attempt to prepare the theoretical basis for it, the attempt which had necessarily to lead him to the confirming of what position the private property and the alienated labour had occupied in the preceding history of mankind. On the other hand, the aim of Manuskripte was not confined to the abolishment of the “self-alienation of labour”; the final aim of it was through that abolishment to remove the human self-alienation in its totality. The so-called historical materialism was formed in order to answer theoretically these two problems thus brought forward by Manuskripte. The theory of alienation of labour, therefore, did not liquidate itself by the formation of historical materialism, the latter being in fact the development of an element of the former. And thus the theory of alienation of labour constitutes a theoretical moment of the science of history called historical materialism.