4 - Alienation and property

Summary

THE MATERIALIST PREMISE

Marx formed his ideas on alienation through confrontation with Hegel's views on Entfremdung in the Phenomenology. Marx's discussion is thus related to issues of general philosophical significance, and the more limited idea of alienated labour is meaningful only within this wider context. Marx's critique of the way in which Hegel handled the question of alienation restates Marx's general critique of philosophical idealism, and the Marxian version of materialism emerges from this discussion of alienation. Marx's views on alienation and his materialism are thus inseparable.

The theme of alienation in Marx's writings was taken up for the first time by Georg Lukács in his monumental Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923). Unaware of the existence of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, Lukacs none the less succeeded in reading the Hegelian issue of alienation back into Marx's later writings, and thus established the importance of alienation in Marx's theory. This was an outstanding intellectual feat, and the subsequent discovery of the Manuscripts confirmed most of Lukács' insights. Lukacs was, however, wrong on some crucial issues, and his epoch-making book of 1923 must still be read with some reservations.

Since alienation appears in Hegel's work in an epistemological context, Marx confronts it on the same level of discussion. He does this in the last and most neglected of the 1844 Manuscripts, entitled ‘Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and Philosophy in general’. Alienation, for Hegel, is the state of consciousness as it acquaints itself with the external, objective, phenomenal world.