8 - The Factory of Subjectivity

Summary

It is necessary to insist here on the remarkable continuity of Marx's analysis in the works that followed the 1844 Manuscripts, not just up to the Grundrisse but including Capital, beyond the differences of vocabulary and form which are themselves comparable to the different ‘ways’ in which one can try to find the right way to express something. The 1844 Manuscripts present the situation of the worker as that of a being ‘without object’ (gegenstandlos): in other words, if the worker, like every living being, is essentially an objective being, a being that has vital relations to objects that are essential (objects that are the objective conditions of its proper activity), then the situation of the worker as a being without object, and therefore as a non- objective being, an unnatural (or denatured) being, is one a sense of loss which is in fact that of alienation. It is the theme of reversal – from an objective being to a non- objective being – which is mobilised to make sense of this state of alienation. The object of this reversal is work considered as ‘productive life’, as ‘vital activity’. The reversal is thus only comprehensible from the place of the natural form of labour as a vitally productive activity. The natural situation is one in which ‘the worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world’. The natural condition is characterised by a relation of perfect continuity between the worker (as a natural being whose natural activity is productive activity), their work and nature: work is here the vital activity of a natural and objective being existing as part of the objective totality of nature. It is this situation that underlies the idea, expressed by Marx a few pages later, according to which ‘nature is man's inorganic body.

What Marx refers to in this passage as the ‘stage of the economy’ (that is to say, modern civil society, or what he will later refer to as the capitalist mode of production) is marked by the historical accomplishment of the rupture of the continuity between a living and working being, its vital activity (work or production), its vital milieu (where it finds the objective conditions of its activity), and the products of this activity.