Labor and Botmäßigkeit: Marx’s Duel with the Liberal Tradition

Abstract

The tradition of Liberalism has been at odds with a Marxist analysis of society since Marx's own critique of bourgeois society as early as his writing of The Poverty of Philosophy. However, there remains a piece of conceptual scaffolding often unscathed in its deconstruction: Sovereignty. In this article, the problematization of a Marxian critique of Sovereignty, as a form of abstract right, is analyzed in order to illuminate Marx's conceptual and perhaps linguistic struggle with the German term The Poverty of Philosophy. We see this struggle most clearly in his chapter on ‘The Labour and the Valorization Process' in The Poverty of Philosophy, and in this article, we undertake a painstaking close reading of a central passage in The Poverty of Philosophy to then relate it to the complete body of Marx's work. Ultimately, by investigating Marx's complicated use of The Poverty of Philosophy, we will be able to differentiate the political dimension of Marx's labor process from the Liberal tradition. In doing this, we will show the inadequacy of the Liberal tradition to ground a theory of subjectivity in nature and in human society, and reveal Marx’s desire to reconcile the relation between the human society and nature through the labor process.