By MAURÍCIO VIEIRA MARTINS*
180 years have passed since the writing of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, revisiting them also holds some additional surprises for us.
In 1806, Ludwig van Beethoven completed the composition of the three string quartets of opus 59 of his work, which became known as the Razumovsky quartets. Scholars report that the professional musicians responsible for the first performance of these pieces had great difficulty in understanding their sound: when they talked among themselves, they initially assumed that, rather than being the fulfillment of the commission commissioned by Count Andreas Razumovsky to the composer, they were simply dealing with a random musical game made by him (which, by the way, provoked one of Beethoven's famous outbursts of anger).[1]. However, in our 21st century, the Razumovski quartets occupy a privileged place among the pinnacles of Western musical production: they mark a revolution in the classical structure of string quartets, developed by musicians of the stature of Haydn and Mozart.
A little less than 40 years after the episode involving Beethoven and the performance of his quartets, Marx wrote the text that came to be known as the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Here, it is not important to know whether Marx was aware of the episode in question or not: what is important is to emphasize that in Manuscripts from 44 there are several elements for what is usually called today a theory of subjectivity. In fact, it is there that we can read that “The formation of the five senses is a work of the entire history of the world up to now.” Which is why, the text continues, “for the non-musical ear the most beautiful music has no meaning” (Marx, 2004, p. 110). Marx’s considerations seek to highlight that, once constituted, the human sensory apparatus (“seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, intuiting, perceiving, wanting, being active, loving”[2], in the terms of the text) intervenes uninterruptedly on reality. Against those who saw in this apparatus only a legacy of nature (without a doubt its inescapable basis), Marx highlights the meaning active that is present in it, in deep interaction with a progressively altered objective world. If we take into account that around 1806 Beethoven's deafness was already advancing and causing great anguish in the composer, we must agree with Marx that, more than just reproducing the surrounding world, our senses also have their own thinking activity: they reshape material previously acquired in the history of subjects, not only reproducing reality, but creating upon it. In our 2024, 180 years since the writing of the Manuscripts from 1844, revisiting them also reserves some additional surprises for us. For, although much criticized by the Althusserian school, these Manuscripts have been receiving attention from more recent authors such as Franck Fischbach, Jason Read and Frédéric Monferrand, who point to a fertility yet to be explored in the work (for example, in its relationship with B. Espinosa).
* * *
Anyone who knows Marx's thought knows that it is through human work that the author states that not only the external reality changes, but also the subjectivity of the person who works. Although correct in a general sense, such a characterization demands some additional considerations. Because one of the most peculiar aspects of Manuscripts from 44 is also to highlight a category related to work (work), but which is not identical to it. We refer to the activity (activity), understood as a vital human externalization that is, strictly speaking, much more comprehensive than work. Thus, if it is true that all work is a form of human activity, the opposite is obviously not true: there are human activities beyond the universe of work, a circumstance that needs to be emphasized in our time where almost all human waking time is consumed by work. In other words: it was in Marx's interest to keep open the development of those human activities that were not within the circuit of work. Anyone who is willing to mine the dense structure of Manuscripts from 44 discovers that Marx placed, after all, his greatest expectations in an expansion of activity, plural, polymorphic activity, which relates to different segments of reality.
A broad form of exchange in which human subjects interact with a huge variety of objects, the activity takes place in the most diverse manifestations of human existence. And the examples of it that appear in the text attest to its diversity: listening to music is a conscious vital activity, watching a show is also a conscious activity, as is “feeling, thinking, intuiting, perceiving, wanting, being active, loving…” (Marx, p. 108). As for work, it is the particular mode of activity that is exercised under the daily pressure to satisfy inescapable human needs; it is related to the struggle of the species to ensure its survival, with all the consequences that arise from it. This is indicated by a brief but very enlightening passage from the Manuscripts where it is stated that “all human activity until now was work, therefore industry, activity estranged from itself” (Ibid. p. 111). Linking this statement with another in which shortly afterwards it is stated that “Work is only an expression of human activity within alienation (Entäusserung), the externalization of life (Lebensäusserung) as alienation from life (Life expectancy)[3]" (ibid, p. 149), the distinction between the two categories is illuminated. Work is understood by Marx – however much this clashes with the image that was later formed of his thought – as an activity that also involves alienation. Hence the striking title of the first of these Manuscripts: estranged work (or alienated work)[4], a category with a long and consistent duration in Marx's work.
Beyond his labor dimension, Marx insists, man is a plural and active being: a set of capacities, aspirations, needs and, perhaps more than anything, “essential human forces” (Ibid, p. 110), capacities that only develop through interaction with the objects of the sensible world. Objects in the most general sense of the term, in the sense of everything that is outside the self, a definition that certainly encompasses not only the tools of a determined form, but also the entire perimeter of reality, including other men, women and nature itself. Let us also note that man[5] is formulated by Marx, at first, as part of nature (Ibid, p. 84), which explains the references that the Manuscripts they treat him as a natural being. But it turns out that this being created by nature has the peculiar capacity to interact with and modify nature. We are faced with a singular self-mediation: nature, through man (its product) interacts with itself, undergoing successive modifications. Where there was initially only one self, a difference slowly emerges, a separation between objectivity and subjectivity (subjectivity: that which belongs to men and their actions, a “determination of the subject”, in the precise sense). And men and women, now a distinct part of the original nature, do not stop self-mediating. They simultaneously transform nature (and are transformed by it), themselves and their fellow men. The continuous updating of this first-order mediator, activity, causes radical changes in the “essence” of nature and man.[6]. It is an open story that is being made.
The constitution of the human subject is therefore viscerally intertwined with a form of objectification: all human capacities, all human strengths and aptitudes are externalized, objectified through their action in the world. This gives rise to what Marx calls “humanized nature” (Ibid., p. 110), nature that has undergone human intervention. If in Manchester today there are “factories and machines where a hundred years ago one saw only spinning wheels and hand looms” (Marx & Engels, 2007, p. 31) – as a later text reminds us, the german ideology -, this occurred due to a gigantic transformation of the sensory world operated by human activity. It is a simultaneous exteriorization and updating of human capacities: transferring the subject's power to the real world. Modification of exteriority, therefore (and we now see that exteriority is not, strictly speaking, an absolute concept, since there is transit, interpenetration, between what exists in man and what prevails in the sensory world), and also modification of interiority, this is how the human subject is constituted.
With regard to the aforementioned estrangement of work, one of its most basic reasons is the loss of the multiple character of human activity. To the extent that man is conceived by Marx as the bearer of a differentiated set of essential forces, each of these forces (“looking”, “listening”, “tasting”, etc., in the examples in the text) demands an activity that expresses it. Therefore, it is the multiplicity – and also the possibility of variation –, the attribute that best enables the renewal of human action. In order for there to be an effective appropriation of human reality, its condition of multiplicity must be satisfied: “its behavior towards the object is the activation of human effectiveness (which is precisely why it is so multiple (multiple) how many are the essential determinations and human activities)” (Marx, 2004, p. 108).
Now, alienated labor is precisely the opposite of this: it is characterized by the drastic shrinking of an activity that is potentially plural. Under the aegis of the division of labor, each group of individuals, each social class, begins to interact with a very limited segment of reality. Losing its attributes of multiplicity, work in bourgeois society is characterized by repetition, by confinement to a grueling routine that empties its agents. This indicates that, already in a text from Marx's youth, we find a theorization that captures work in its ambivalence. An activity that incessantly modifies the profile of sensory reality, responsible for the monumental transformation of original nature and also for the objectification of human capacities, work does this under the aegis of alienation. Human capacities are externalized and emerge in the light of effectiveness: the development of science gives us unequivocal evidence of what men can transform in their environment and in themselves. But the ambivalence of work, its dialectical contradiction, is that, through its subordination to capitalist logic, these capacities are made effective. only for a very restricted number of individuals; for the rest of the population they appear as an alien power, which does not even remotely maintain an affirmative link with their daily work.
A materialism that embraces subjectivity
The possibility of the genesis of human subjectivity lies precisely within this discussion: only when articulated with its most general objective foundations can such genesis be correctly visualized. For the fact is that human activity and work produce, throughout history, a fragmented subject, which manages to differentiate itself from the community ties predominant in older social formations (a theme emphasized by Marx in later writings, such as in floorplans). It is in this context that it is worth stating that the Manuscripts from 44 present an analysis of the constitution of subjectivity, of the formation of specifically human attributes of men and women. A terminological clarification is in order here, since speaking of the constitution of subjectivity in the 21st century generates theoretical resonances that are different from those we are dealing with. It would be anachronistic to demand from Marx categories that were only developed in the 20th century, such as a theory of the unconscious, of original repression, of the signifying chain, to mention just examples from psychoanalysis.[7].
A broad theme that can be approached in several ways, subjectivity as formulated by Marx refers to everything that is located in the human subject (its active forces, feelings, passions, etc.), in contrast to the external, objective conditions of existence that precede the subject(s) entering into worldly interaction. Even though we know that exteriority and interiority are concepts that interpenetrate, simply placing an equal sign between them is a problematic procedure that is far removed from Marx's thinking. For even though the emphasis it places on the primacy of objectivity, on the objective conditions of existence with which each subject must necessarily deal, is characteristic of his approach, this does not prevent – rather, it better outlines – the historical contours of the subjective field. In fact, the belief in a possible identity between interiority and exteriority, between subject and object, is a hallmark of Hegelianism and its ramifications, having been criticized by Marx, who saw in it an excessive exaltation of subjective capacities. Against the idea of a demiurgic subjectivity, it is necessary to attest to its dependence on the object: only in this way are the different subjects – and this also applies to social classes – able to recognize themselves in their real historical insertion.
If it is true that the sphere of subjectivity in Marx encompasses all essential human forces, it is necessary to immediately add that the 1844 formulation is not limited to this, since up to this point we would still be on a terrain close to that of Feuerbachian sensorialism. What Manuscripts from 44 present again is a construction that shows that even the domain of subjectivity is unequivocally active and constructed: far from being originally given to man, it is constituted through a complex system of historical mediations:
[it is] only through the objectively unfolded richness of the human essence that the richness of subjective human sensibility, that a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short all human enjoyments become capable senses, senses that confirm themselves as essential human forces, […] The formation of the five senses is a work of the entire history of the world up to now. (Marx, 2004, p. 110)
It is then a subjectivity that was constituted throughout history. We began this text by commenting on the difficulties faced by the first performers of Beethoven's intermediate string quartets: the example was not chosen at random. They were experienced musicians, and the first violinist in the group was Ignaz Schupanzigh, a friend of Beethoven who closely followed the composer's work. But even for these qualified professionals, the sound produced by the new quartets caused discomfort. If we add to this the aforementioned fact that Beethoven's deafness already compromised his relationship with the outside world, we open the way for the recognition of the plastic character of the sensory apparatus, which made it possible to create compositions at progressively more elaborate levels. Strictly speaking, the very expression sensory apparatus must be modified to include the thinking attributes – and unconscious, as psychoanalysis would add many years later – present in it. Here, the poverty of the conceptions of art as merely a photographic mimesis of reality becomes evident – a conception against which G. Lukács fought so hard, vigorously differentiating, for example, realism from naturalism.
This active expansion of the original human faculties has as one of its results the possibility of forms of interaction and capture of sensitive reality that simply did not exist in other historical periods. Manuscripts from 44 are prolific in examples that aim to attest to the emergence of a singularized appropriation of the different dimensions of reality. Whether referring to the formation of the aesthetic eye, which is able to discern the beauty of form, or in the observation that the “hungry man” is unaware of the human form of food (prodded as he is by the pressure of necessity), or in regard to the man “full of worries” who is unable to access the appropriate sense for “the most beautiful spectacle” (Ibid, p. 110), what the text seeks to make visible is the capacity for enjoyment (enjoyment) of a historically constituted subject. What we call sensitivity today (using the word now in the sense of aptitude for the exercise of some creative activity) is the result of an extensive chain of simultaneously objective and subjective mediations that are not evident to the uninformed observer. The so-called modern subject, who has the capacity to establish an affirmative, internalized relationship with the “beauty of form,” this subject who has already freed himself from the immediate “practical lack” (in the terms of 1844) only exists through a historical process that actualizes potential human attributes in reality. And the fact that there may be a regression of such capacities – let us think of Th. Adorno’s theses on the regression of hearing promoted by the cultural industry – in no way nullifies their historical character, but only confirms them in their constructed and mediated character.
We are then faced with a feedback of the activity on the subject who exercises it. Years later, when writing The capital, Marx will return to this theme: “By acting on external nature and modifying it through this movement, he [man] modifies, at the same time, his own nature. He develops the powers that lie latent in it and subjects the play of its forces to his own dominion” (Marx, 2013, p. 255). Here we have the genesis of a process of subjectivation. And, fundamentally, such modifications in subjectivity are perfectly capable of being transmitted to subsequent human generations. Unlike biological evolution in the strict sense, where the modification of certain characteristics throughout an individual’s life is hardly inherited by his offspring, cultural transformations have a more plastic and cumulative character. Aware of this, and with a touch of irony, a biologist with knowledge of Marxism such as Stephen Jay Gould was able to write that “Human cultural evolution, in stark opposition to our biological history, is Lamarckian in character” (Gould, 1990, p. 71). We inherited from our ancestors a habitus, a set of internalized dispositions, which continually operates the updating of historical transformations in human beings. It should be noted that this record does not have an evaluative character: just as musical sensitivity can be transmitted, given certain conditions, to later generations, oppressive structures, such as patriarchy, are also updated, producing subjectivities appropriate to them.
Returning to the Manuscripts from 44, in them we learn that an expansion of the subject's field of existence is obtained when he, through the successive externalization of his human forces, frees himself from the domain of necessity and manages to achieve the enjoyment of the specific object with which he interacts. The relationship between subjective capacity and the singular object with which it interacts becomes clear, especially because “the meaning of an object for me (it only has meaning for a meaning that corresponds to it) goes precisely as far as my meaning goes” (Ibid, p. 110). This very general observation gains its empirical reference when Marx recalls that:
To the eye an object becomes different from what it becomes to the ear, and the object of the eye is another than that of the ear. The peculiarity of each essential force is precisely its peculiar essence, therefore also the peculiar mode of its objectification, of its objective-effective living being. (Ibid, p. 110)
The theme of multiplicity is reiterated here: it presupposes an understanding of the human being as a multiple set of forces, impulses, desires and singular capacities that demand a polymorphous, non-fixed activity, so that this plurality can express itself. Only in this way is it possible to develop an effective interaction between each human sense and the object with which it interacts. If the eye enjoys in a different way from the ear, if touch establishes an object relationship different from that of taste, this occurs because human subjectivity ultimately finds its necessary foundation in the field of real objective diversity. Beyond this, it is pure abstraction, a pure creation of those philosophers who believe in the possibility of a disembodied subjectivity, “without eyes, without teeth, without ears, without anything” (Ibid, p. 135).
The recognition of the potential multiple character of human capacities makes the conception of what human wealth is appear in a different way, considering that the “rich man is simultaneously the man lacking a totality of the human manifestation of life” (Ibid, p. 112-113). This subjectivity therefore demands to externalize itself, to see its different capacities actualized. Externalization that is felt as a necessity, as an urgency of the essence that demands its unfolding as existence. It is an affirmative conception of subjectivity that is defended by Marx, which also explains his repulsion towards bourgeois society. For the latter, instead of providing the conditions for the expansion of being, instead of engendering “man in this total richness of his essence” (Ibid, p. 111), produces, on the contrary, individuals prevented from externalizing human life. Alienated labor, a partial form of conscious vital activity, confines the individual to an interaction with a very restricted number of objects; the rigid division of labor mortally staunches the flow of activity. What was the production of life now appears as its atrophy; additional reasons for Marx to affirm his socialist project.
Thus, Marx's critique of private property does not only focus on the most visible economic distortions it produces: a brutal concentration of income in the hands of a few in stark contrast to the impoverishment of the majority of the population. It also involves denouncing a form of sociability that prevents men and women from producing themselves as such, limited as they are to an extremely unilateral way of realizing life. Potentially, men are a plurality of essential capacities and objective forces, but capitalist logic restricts these capacities and confines each individual to just one of their predicates.
With regard to the recurring mutilation of human subjectivity, it is also worth noting the persistence of Marx's criticism, throughout his work, of the consequences of the imperatives of capitalist productivity linked to the division of labor and private property. Years after the writing of the Manuscripts from 44, already in The capital, we will find a fundamental divergence regarding the deformations brought about by the division of labor in manufacturing among its workers:
It [manufacturing] cripples the worker, turns him into a freak, artificially promoting his ability to detail through the repression of a world of productive impulses and capacities, in the same way as, in the States of La Plata, an entire animal is slaughtered only to remove the skin or the fat. (Marx, 2013, p.434)
The philosophical substratum of these blunt words of Marx is precisely his conception of human capacities as being potentially plurals – lasting acquisition of Manuscripts from 44 -, requiring a varied set of objects to be able to be exercised. On the other hand, we know that from the third part of the 1999th century onwards, theories emerged that predicted a growing decline in the use of human labor. Although with significant differences, they shared the idea that increasing automation would increasingly eliminate the use of human labor. In XNUMX, the German group Krisis, which had Robert Kurz as one of its most prominent representatives, used provocative words to refer to the supposed decline in the sale of human labor power: “The sale of the commodity labor power will be as promising in the 21st century as the sale of mail coaches was in the 20th century.”
It is necessary to recognize that the course of history has not confirmed this prediction. Far from it. What we have in our 21st century is a historical configuration that bears unprecedented technological development that coexists with multitudes of precarious and poorly paid workers. Instead of the end of the working society, we are witnessing an expansion of the working day even during periods that were traditionally considered free time: weekends, holidays, night shifts (such is the horizon of an unstoppable working day, which today deserves the just repudiation of left-wing activists and intellectuals). Not to mention those who plunge into pure and simple unemployment, constituting what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once referred to with the uncomfortable name of human waste: the remnants of a society that do not find conditions to live and exercise their life potential.
The harsh relevance of estranged work and the mutilation of subjectivities it entails lead us to believe that returning to certain founding texts by Marx allows us to examine the genesis of a historical configuration that is now reaching its climax. For the fact is that in 1844, at the age of 25 – and still far, far from his great works of maturity – the young Marx, in his first contact with Political Economy, decided to review his philosophical heritage in order to better visualize the hydra that was forming before him. The contemporary reader who goes through these dense texts without prejudice Manuscripts from 1844, even with its real limits, will be able to witness there, in its infancy, the strength of a thought that is rising. Would it be excessive to say that this encounter paved by Marx between Philosophy and Political Economy changed part of the history of thought?
*Mauricio Vieira Martins He is a senior professor at the Department of Sociology and Methodology of Social Sciences at UFF. Author, among other books, of Marx, Spinoza and Darwin: materialism, subjectivity and critique of religion (Palgrave macmillan). [https://amzn.to/3OVvPJb]
Short version of the article “The 180 years of the Manuscripts from 1844 by Marx”, published in the magazine Verinotio.
References
GOULD, S.J. The Panda's thumb. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
GREENBERG, Robert. Music History Monday: M'Lord Falstaff. 2020. Available at: https://robertgreenbergmusic.com/music-history-monday-mlord-falstaff/
KRISIS GROUP. Manifesto against work. 1999. Available at: https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/7829978/mod_resource/content/1/Manifesto%20contra%20o%20Trabalho%20-%20Grupo%20Krisis.pdf
MARTINS, Maurício Vieira. Marx, Spinoza and Darwin: Materialism, Subjectivity and Critique of religion, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
______________ The 180 years of Manuscripts from 1844 from Marx. Verinotio, v. 29, no. 2, pp. 24-67; Jul.-Dec., 2024.
MARX, Carl. Economic-philosophical manuscripts. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2004.
__________. The capital, Book I. New York: Oxford University Press: 2013.
__________. “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844”. In: MARX, Karl; ENGELS, F. Works, Band 40. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968.
MARX, K. & ENGELS, F. the german ideology. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2007.
MESZÁROS, István. Marx's Theory of Alienation. London: Merlin Press. 1986.
Notes
[1] The most detailed account of this episode can be found in Greenberg: 2020.
[2] Marx, 2004, p. 108.
[3] Translation corrected according to the original German. It is worth noting that the german ideology reiterates the understanding of work as an alienated activity. It is enough to remember that when Marx and Engels present their political project of a communist revolution, they state that the latter “turns against the crafts of the activity existing until then, suppresses the day and overcomes [aufhebt] the domination of all classes by overcoming the classes themselves” (K. Marx & F. Engels, 2007, p. 42). The social situation sought by this project is one where individuals alternate their productive activities, not being restricted to just one of them.
[4] The translation of the German word alienation into Portuguese is the subject of endless controversy and, in our view, is actually undecidable (including for historical and philological reasons). In this article, we alternate between the two most common translations: estrangement e alienation. Further clarification on the Encounter and Entäusserung – categories used alternatively by Marx – can be found in full in my article cited in the first note of this text.
[5] Following the Marxian terminology of 1843-1844, the expression The man is used here without a more explicit qualification. Already in The German Ideology, in the context of the controversy with Feuerbach, we can read: “he [Feuerbach] says 'o man' instead of 'real historical men'" (Marx & Engels, 2007, p. 30). This is a clear effort to better circumscribe a historical singularity: the generality "man" was questioned, towards its temporal and social determinations. On the other hand, it is an undeniable achievement of the feminist movement to demand, with all justice, a greater precision of this designation, calling us to invoke men and women historical and real (as well as those who do not identify with a binary sexuality). If Marx's terminology has been maintained in this article, it was for the obvious reason that it was not up to me to modify the terms of a text produced at another historical moment. That said, it is worth remembering that Eleanor Marx, Marx's daughter, was one of the many intellectuals and activists who productively combined Marxism and feminism, rather than seeing them as conflicting.
[6] Regarding the categories “essence” and “essential forces”, we agree with István Mészáros’ statement: “Marx categorically rejected the idea of a ‘human essence’. But he kept the term, transforming its original meaning and making it unrecognizable” (1986, p. 13-14).
[7] I developed this aspect more extensively in Chapter 5 of my book. Marx, Spinoza and Darwin: Materialism, Subjectivity and Critique of religion.
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