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Marx's Theory of Alienation

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As we face a globalised world of imperialist chaos this book reminds us that Marx's theory of alienation is the only one which can help people make sense of what is going on. Marx understood completely and dialectically that humanity is both a part of nature and also the historically unfolding self creativity of nature. But Marx was able to brilliantly distinguish between what is a characteristic of humanity as a productive species and what is specific to capitalism as a particular form of production. All those who seek to reduce capitalism to a generalised "production" and capital to "tools" etc. are apologists for capitalism who want to convince us that capitalism is only "human nature". Meszaros illuminates the difference between these "primary" and "second order" mediations of human history. Marx had no time for vapid psychobabble, of course, but he had a vision of non-alienated humanity drawn from classical notions of "homo universale" - the many sided, socially integrated and freely self determining individual free from bondage to alienating entities like state, class and race and their associated legacies of war and destruction. Marx, of course, recognised before anyone else the globalising attributes of capitalism - "the prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls" - and it can truly be stated that only now, with the disappearance of Stalinism and the global dominance of capitalism, does Marx's critique of capitalism attain its true validity and truth.

The subject of the book is fundamental if we want to understand why the « communist » experiment failed and was doomed to fail. The author is orthodox and intelligent enough to be faithful to Marx but he is also fundamentalistic enough not to see the mistake of the orthodox reading of Marx, of Marx himself. Marx wrote before the modern development of advanced anthropology. So he neglects the fact that man, as a species, was made possible in nature due to two great genetic and physical mutations. Brain and larynx, first, that made language, verbal communication, conservation through memory, transmission through education possible. From here rise the possibility to think with concepts and the necessity/possibility to understand in order to plan life and the satisfaction of human needs, hence to represent man's position in nature : from hence come religions, arts, philosophy, science and technology. Man is a speaking therefore representing being. Brain and hand, second, that made the production of tools, the emergence of means of production possible. This enabled the species to get on its way to controling and even changing nature, to producing more than needed, hence producing surplus value that could become accumulated into capital. The road to industrial development started there with the very first tool ever invented and transmitted in its technology. So what the book attributes to capitalism should be attributed to the emergence of the human species as a « producing species ». But Marx was also from a time before the discovery of the human psyche. So he is lost in considerations on good and evil, ethics, aesthetics and other questions of the type because he cannot know the human psyche is both dark and clear, eros and thanatos, love for others (personal and social survival) and death instinct (antisocial and jingoistic survival). But strangely enough the author of this book does not envisage the present phase of human development : the informational revolution, universal communication, globalization, the generalization of music, films, TV and even arts everywhere in society and at any time, the individual revolution of liberated - and yet to be controled, but how ? - impulses, desires, passions, etc... Istvan Meszaros probably wrote too early (1970) and too fast (just after 1968). But if we read it as a standard marxist approach of 1970, we know why the « communist experiment » failed : it negated the real historical development of humanity by rejecting the representative power of man and the explosive dimension of the liberation of individuals and individual initiative.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU