Suffering and the feeling of suffering in Marx's Capital

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay traces Marx's conceptualisation of ‘feeling’ from his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, to Capital of 1867, in order to identify its importance for a critique of political economy and theory of revolution. In doing so, I offer a corrective to the reading of Capital as a scientific textbook of historical materialism, and insist upon the text's poetics as essential to its truth. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx argues that, while all living things suffer, what differentiates humans is that they feel that they suffer. This feeling of suffering, for Marx, is essential for the critique of political economy and the subsequent destruction of capital. However, while the young Marx takes humanity's ability to feel this suffering for granted, the Marx of Capital suggests that they need to be made to feel it. This can be seen in his use of Hegel's concept of Selbstgefühl [self-feeling] – a concept which has been lost in the Anglophone reception of the text by being mistranslated as ‘class-consciousness’. I will finish by arguing that the poetics of Marx's texts are not supplementary ornamentation, but essential to the critique itself, as the means by which his reader might feel their suffering.