Karl Marx: His Life and Thought

"This is jumping forward quite a bit. Berlin made the study of Marx intellectually respectable because he was an Oxford academic and went on to greater things. His book is still in print in its fifth edition. So Marx was noticed in the Anglophone sphere, but mostly in a fairly crude version. The only other book of the time that approaches Berlin’s sophistication in taking Marx seriously as a thinker, and bringing on board the politics to some extent, was Sidney Hook’s. He was a ‘fellow traveller,’ based in New York. He wrote in the American context, as a contemporary of Berlin’s. McLellan was a student of Berlin’s in Oxford. By that point, which was the early to mid-60s, Marx was quite acceptable as an academic subject. You could go through the history of British university teaching in philosophy and politics and see when and where Marx pops up, but there wouldn’t be much before 1960. By then things had settled down enough to make him respectable. McLellan set himself up to write a contextual study of the early Marx. It’s interesting from an intellectual and philosophical point of view. He doesn’t have the central European, 48er perspective that Berlin had. He’s been the beneficiary of what happened to Engels and Marxism in the 1930s. In the 1920s, a project was developed between the Bolsheviks and the German Communist Party to collect the Marx archive as well as published works. 1932 is the magic date there, in that the so-called German Ideology , and the so-called Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 were both published. It was difficult to circulate them in the 1930s with people preoccupied with the run-up to World War II, Stalinism, and everything else that was going on. The material doesn’t really start to circulate until the late 1940s, and then largely in French, where it is treated seriously, and the early manuscripts in particular were picked up. “As publicity manager, Engels provided simplified, popular versions of Marx’s great ideas” ‘Alienation’ caught people’s eye as an obviously philosophical concept, and they ignored the fact that in the so-called German Ideology Marx is very dismissive about it, and actually pretty much drops the term, used in that way, after the 1840s. These people are academic, professional philosophers interested in philosophical concepts — they’re not going to find much philosophy in the writing about the fetishism of commodities (even though it’s there), and they’re certainly not going to find much in the theory of value as it emerges later on —which is actually the end point of what Marx was starting to get to, albeit in what appears to be a philosophical way. Essentially, McLellan investigates this as philosophy, in a philosophical way, and isn’t so strong on what’s there on the early reception by Marx and Engels of economic ideas. So you won’t find much about alienation in Engels’s “Outline of a Critique of Political Economy” of 1844, which Marx published, and was one of the pieces that excited Marx most. But Marx had to get in touch with political economy and he did it through Hegelian philosophers. He had a lot of philosophical battles to fight. McLellan’s dissertation was about the young Hegelians and Marx. McLellan developed his own publication industry on this point: he published a book a year for ten years, mining this seam. The next book was Marx Before Marxism . He puts down a marker that there is a Marx there before Marxism, and that you can date Marxism from further down the line. Most of my career has been involved in exploring that, which is why I’ve been so interested in Engels. McLellan himself was very interested in liberation theology, which was largely Catholic, mostly Latin American and French. Besides being interested in philosophy, he’s very interested in religion and in politics done in and through religion. In terms of communicating the existence of a different Marx to a very large audience, this is a notable achievement. Marx suddenly became much more complex and interesting, and much less formulaic. Alienation is a very complicated and disputed notion. It comes out of the German idealist philosophical tradition. It’s essentially about projection — that is, the thesis or trope derives from the idea that we have various ideas and project them into entities that are not ourselves. The origin of this was, amongst other things, in Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity where he argued that specifically human characteristics of love, forgiveness, and redemption are projected out onto alien entities like gods or spirits. This idea was not wholly invented with them, but it is collected up into an attack on orthodox doctrinal theology, particularly on any kind of theology. It was read as an atheist work and Feuerbach was chased out of universities. He never worked properly after that, for being heterodox. There are a number of different terms for ‘alienation’ in German and they relate to this idea of projecting human qualities into abstract entities. What Marx did was borrow this and suggest that our human relationships of production, consumption, distribution, exchange—where essentially we make the goods and services of life in a human community for each other to benefit from—are projected into alien entities such as money and the market, which come to have a life of their own and become idols in a literal sense. We bow down and worship them, and think that material objects such as coinage, paper notes, and so on, actually have social relationships with each other in a sort of parallel universe. We let these human creations control us. There is a thesis here not just about otherness, but about investing material objects with human powers, and then, because of this investment, we let them control us. That, in a short outline, is what alienation is about. Marx develops more refined and specific concepts to do this, and goes off the idea of alienation later because it is vague and unspecific and less connected with the literatures and concepts of political economy that he was actually attacking in detailed terms. That, in my view, is why the term tends to drop out of the later Marx’s writings. Yes. There’s a huge amount of that in Capital . If you go through the metaphors— I’ve made a list of them actually—it’s full of occult references. You have vampires, werewolves, necromancy, table-turning (which is material objects coming to life), metempsychosis, the Whore of Babylon — it goes on and on. I developed this idea in the 1980s and published it in the Times Higher Education Supplement and elsewhere. The idea is that he didn’t just use these as colourful metaphors. They make the argument that you, as a rational, atheistic, scientifically-minded reader, don’t accept these fairy stories, so why should you accept the idea that the market rules your life when it’s so clearly a human construction? Of course if you believe in werewolves, then you look for them and you’re afraid. Marx transfers that argument, saying that if you’re worried about market relationships and spend your time phoning insurance companies (and things like that) you should see yourself as a victim of this kind of entity, which is ultimately social and something we should be able to control. This is the commodity fetishism version of alienation. Alienation was useful in gathering in religious people and philosophers, and providing an introduction to what became known as ‘the humanistic Marx.’ David McLellan didn’t invent the humanistic Marx, but he popularised it for an Anglophone audience by writing a book every year. They came out as originals in paperback. This was a huge intellectual phenomenon and industry. His Marx looks a lot different from the Marx that emerged in the 1920s, and starting in the 1870s, when he was dressed up as an empirical scientist — not a fuzzy humanistic thinker at all. He was, in that earlier version, a thinker who believed in iron laws of history that were independent of human will. That, in itself, is a construction, largely due to Engels, I think, and his interest in physical science and the scientific determinism and positivism of the 1860s and 70s. That was politically valuable for a lot of people, but it does generate issues about human agency, and the problem that if history is moving by itself, why bother to do anything? It generates very authoritarian interpretations of Marxist scientists who tell you what’s what, and what to believe. Alienation was a breath of fresh air; but you have to realise how stale the air was between 1879 and 1959 to see what a revolution that was."