Hegel and Marx on Freedom

"For Hegel freedom consists in being in a certain reflective and deliberative relation to oneself, which itself is possible, so it is argued, only if one is also already in a certain (ultimately institutional, norm-governed) relations to others, if one is a participant in certain practices... Put most simply, for an action to count as mine, it must make a certain kind of sense to the agent, and that means it must fit in intelligibly within a whole complex of practices and institutions within which doing this now could have coherent meaning... On his view, all of the standard conditions of action (e.g. "doing it voluntarily, uncoerced") could be fulfilled, yet we would not want to say that the action is truly "mine" such that I could fully or truly stand behind it, own up to it, and claim ownership of it... Hegel denies that we can separate the moral-psychological, individual dimension of freedom from social relations of dependence and independence said to be equally constitutive of freedom..." Robert Pippin, Hegel's Practical Philosophy, p.4-7

There is much about this that is very attractive as a conception of freedom. Hegel rejects the impoverished "negative" liberal conception of freedom that claims that we are free to the extent that we, as isolated individuals, are not "interfered" with by external coercion. Whereas this anemic view of freedom begins from the idea that persons are asocial atoms unto themselves, Hegel's conception of freedom proceeds from the fact that we are not isolated individual atoms: the institutions, traditions, practices, norms and social relations which surround us are partly constitutive of us. To be free is, therefore, not to be cut off from these constitutive features of human life. To be free is to stand in the right kind of relation with respect to oneself and others. It is to be able to affirm the basic institutions of social life; it is to be able to see oneself and be at home in such institutions.

But, of course, life under modern capitalism is such that we cannot rationally be at home in our society. We cannot see ourselves in the basic institutions of society (e.g. the market, private ownership of the means of production, etc.), since they lord over us as something alien to us, something not under our control. As I noted in a previous post:

"Consider the well-worn idea that you 'can't buck the market'. We have become so used to things as 'market forces'...that you are just as likely to come to grief as if you ignored natural forces -gravity, magnetism and so on.... you'd better do what the market says or else you will be in trouble. But what is the market? Simply the accumulated effects of innumerable human decisions about production and consumption. It is, thus, our own product, from which it follows that, once more, we come to be dominated by our own product."

Think of the terms in which the present financial crisis is described. People in the media talk about the economy as though it were a natural disaster, completely beyond our control, laying waste to human lives in its wake. But the market is no force of nature; it is something that human beings constructed. And what we've built up, we can tear down. "The market is like a monster we have accidentally created, but which now comes to rule our lives". Capitalism is, thus, in Marx's words, "the complete domination of dead matter over men". We cannot affirm the basic institutions of capitalist societies as our own since they dominate us. They are not the products of deliberative, collectively exercised reason, as are the expressions of a democratic process. The basic institutions of capitalism are the products of a system whose basic function is to generate profit for the ruling class. The result is that work, daily life, leisure, the majority of cultural production, etc. all tend to be structured around this unsavory, inhuman end of profit accumulation. This condition of not being able to affirm and recognize our social condition as our own is what Hegel called alienation. Freedom, then, is a kind of "non-alienation", an achievement in which alienation is overcome by way of a socially-grounded self-determination.

Moving from Hegel to Marx, it's worth saying a bit more about why contemporary capitalism is both alienating and unfree. By any measure, capitalism has succeeded in developing the forces of production (e.g. technology, productive instruments and techniques, instrumentally useful technical knowledge, etc.) to a very high degree. But rather than putting this powerful productive capacity in the service of meeting human needs, developing human talents and capabilities, creating the conditions for flourishing, etc... instead, almost all human potential is subjected to, and dominated by, the need to increase profit. Growth for the sake of growth, accumulation for the sake of accumulation, profit for the sake of profit. These are the unsavory priorities that shape social life under capitalism.

Whereas a free society would be one in which the productive forces were put in the service of human interests... ours is one in which human interests are subordinated to the expansion of the productive forces for the sake of expansion. Whereas a rational society would be one in which capital was subordinated to human ends, ours is a society in which human ends are subordinated to the dictates of capital. Whereas capitalism makes us feel as though we're the playthings of larger economic and social forces beyond our control... a socialist society would be one in which we could take control over our own lives by democractizing the basic structure of society. We can only call a society our own when we are able to say of the basic goals of that society that they are the products of our collective deliberations.

It should be obvious why so much of Hegel's conception of freedom appealed to Marx. To be sure, Hegel did not properly understand what the institutions and basic structure of modernity are like. Moreover, whereas Hegel claimed that modern capitalism was a product of a rational historical process, Marx was unrelenting in showing this to be false. History, Marx argued, is not the gradual unfolding of reason, culminating in modern capitalism. History is a political struggle among different groups, framed by the way in which the social surplus is produced. Capitalism, therefore, is not the rational overcoming of alienation, but merely another form of alienation, another class society like those that preceded it. The difference, however, is that capitalism, for the first time, creates the conditions for a free society in a way that previous societies did not. Whereas a free, egalitarian society may not have been possible in the Bronze Age, capitalist societies have made possible such a high degree of productivity that we can satisfy all basic human needs without working ourselves to death doing it. For the first time in human history, the high level of development of the productive forces under capitalism make possible a society free from alienation, class domination and objectively necessary poverty and suffering.

Freedom would not be to walk through a supermarket perusing 20 different brands of toilet cleaner without "external interference"... freedom would be to see in basic social institutions the mark of human, democratic reason. It would be to see oneself, as a member of a modern democratic society, in the basic structure of society and, thus, to be able to reflectively endorse and affirm that society. Such is not possible when the iron law of profit dictates what is to receive investment and what is to wither on the vine. It is not possible to reflectively endorse and affirm what is imposed upon us in the interests of inhuman ends. That is to say, it is not possible to be fully free in a society in which the commanding heights of the economy is governed by the demands of profit and controlled by a small class of capitalists.

In light of the above we can make sense of Alasdair MacIntyre's claim that "...at least one philosophy course, and, more adequately two, should be required of every undergraduate. Of course an education of this kind would require a major shift in our resources and priorities, and, if successful, it would produce in our students habits of mind which would unfit them for the contemporary world. But to unfit our students for the contemporary world ought in any case to be one of our educational aims." To "unfit" students for the modern age, as I'm reading it, means to get them to think critically, i.e. to become aware of alienation (to see clearly the sense in which we cannot truly be at home, and hence free, in modern capitalism). A good education would not be one that subordinated all curricula to the capricious demands of the labor market. A good education would be one which produced in us "habits of mind which would unfit them for the contemporary world" in such a way that they would come to demand that the world itself change. Rather than pandering to the world as it is, good education would challenge us to think seriously about how to change it for the better and truly make it our own.

It should be obvious, but it's nonetheless worth saying, that bureaucratic central planning is equally condemned by this view of freedom. The mechanistic distortions of Stalinism are anathema to freedom. If the basic institutions of society are under the control of a bureaucratic nomenklatura, this is hardly better than capitalism. In such a case we would still feel that we were subject to forces beyond our control, forces which were emphatically not the products of collective, democratic deliberation. For if the state, rather than private capitalists, dominates production there is still the question: but who controls the state? Thus, it should be obvious that taking this Hegelian-Marxist view of freedom leaves only one route to overcoming alienation and class domination: the most radical form of democracy. Only when we're all able to interact with each other as equal co-legislators are we fully free. As long as social relations of domination exist, freedom is not possible. Thus, freedom and equality are not antagonistic others, but mutually constitutive aspects of the same goal.

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Alienation in Marx

I read Jonathan Wolff's generally excellent, short book Why Read Marx Today? (Oxford 2002) this afternoon. It's basically a short, book-length version of his lecture notes for undergraduate courses he's taught on Marx.

There's plenty to disagree with (esp. his technological-determinist reading of historical materialism that he takes from his teacher, G.A. Cohen). But I must say that the summaries of the philosophical background to Marx's thought, his early works, and the theory of value in Capital are unparalleled in their clarity and succinctness.

Below is more or less how he explains alienation in the early Marx (pp.13-47).

We begin with the common use of the word alienation. Typically we mean to refer to some sort of subjective feeling of disorientation, disconnection or disaffection of some sort or other. Now, this is part of Marx's analysis of alienation, but not the whole picture.

Importantly, Marx analyzes alienation as an objective phenomenon, rather than an individual malaise. That means, basically, that alienation isn't in the first instance an individual affliction inside the minds of particular people, but a social phenomenon that is part of the very society we live in. (Compare this with apolitical versions of existentialism which talk about alienation as part of the "human condition", rather than as rooted in a particular kind of society that could be changed).

As Wolff succinctly puts it, the "basic idea with alienation is that two things which belong together come apart". To be alienated, then, is to be alienated from something.

According to Wolff, there are four principle forms of alienation that Marx identifies.

First, there is what is called "alienation from the product". Basically the idea is this. "The worker produces an object, yet has no say or control over the future use or possession of that object". But this is basically trivial until we say more about what this means on a mass, social scale.

The two keywords here are mystification and domination. We begin with the former.

Marx noted that everything we encounter, almost without exception, has been transformed by human labor. This doesn't just include human artifacts. Wolff points out that even the "natural" landscape around us is often also the result of human endeavor (e.g. National Parks in the USA). See 3:10-6:00 of this. And if the natural landscape isn't itself transformed or impacted by human labor, usually our mode of encountering it is shaped by social labor.

But although so much of the world is "largely a human creation, we rarely think of it as such, and, in this sense, we are alienated from our products". This means that we take most things for granted, having no sense for how human labor was fashioned in their production. We mistake the artifacts of human effort for "natural" parts of the background of social life (e.g. think of how people think about the automobile in the contemporary USA... it's as though its always been here and always will be).

As Wolff points out, "the mystification is complete when we come to reflect that so few of us really have any idea how common household objects even work... we human beings have created a world that we simply don't understand; we are strangers in our own world".

We're not just mystified, however, by the products we create. We're also dominated by them. Here Wolff is excellent:

"Consider the well-worn idea that you 'can't buck the market'. We have become so used to things as 'market forces'...that you are just as likely to come to grief as if you ignored natural forces -gravity, magnetism and so on.... you'd better do what the market says or else you will be in trouble. But what is the market? Simply the accumulated effects of innumerable human decisions about production and consumption. It is, thus, our own product, from which it follows that, once more, we come to be dominated by our own product."

Think of the terms in which the present financial crisis is described. People in the media talk about the economy as though it were a natural disaster, completely beyond our control, laying waste to human lives in its wake. But the market is no force of nature; it is something that human beings constructed. And what we've built up, we can tear down. "The market is like a monster we have accidentally created, but which now comes to rule our lives". Capitalism is, thus, in Marx's words, "the complete domination of dead matter over men".

The second category of alienation occurs at the site of production. Due to the highly advanced division of labor in capitalism, some people find themselves doing extremely specialized tasks. Now, Wolff correctly points out that specialization as such isn't always bad. Some amount of specialization can be challenging and rewarding. Marx's concern is not mere specialization. Rather, he's interested in the ways in which capitalism "de-skills" workers by requiring them to "perform highly repetitive, mindless tasks with little understanding of their place in the total process." We think of the worst elements of Taylorism here, with a worker asked to turn one screw over and over, day in and day out.

This is a nice lead in to the third version of alienation. In the Taylorist case above, the worker is alienated from her own creative, human capacities. That is, human beings aren't meant to do such repetitive, mindless, machine-like tasks over and over. We have faculties and capacities (such as the potential for creativity, reflection, etc.) which aren't exercised at all by such inhuman, mechanistic tasks. Marx's way of expressing this thought is to say that under capitalism we are alienated from our "species being".

The idea of a "species being" sounds rather obscure, but it's really rather straight-forward. The idea here is basically an Aristotelian one: human beings have certain capacities and faculties in virtue of which they are human. And we flourish when we make use of and exercise these faculties. So, Marx endorses the basically Aristotelian idea that human beings are creative, social beings (rather than individualistic, miserly, automatons like Mandeville thought).

But, importantly, there is another dimension of the "human essence" that we must discuss. It is not the case for Marx that our "species being" is an "abstraction inherent in each single individual." Rather, Marx argues, "it is in reality the ensemble of social relations". This means, Wolff supposes, that "human beings are engaged in an enormous and hugely complex division of labor, that goes beyond the sphere of production narrowly so-called. Our artistic and cultural achievements, our material advancement, depend on cooperation that encompasses the globe and the whole of human history".

"In any one day, a given individual may use or consume objects the production of which may have required, in the end, millions of others. This, then, reveals the social aspect of our species being". The thought here is that our individual lives and things we consume in order to live are the products of a dense network of social cooperation. If human beings didn't coordinate in these intricate ways, we simply wouldn't have the things we have (e.g. culture, art, cities, things of various kinds, history, etc. etc.).

Thus we come to see how perverse the individualistic ideologies that dominate our society really are. We are inundated with talk of "self made men", the "American dream", etc. We are by now used to hearing that the super-rich "earned" what they have by sheer effort and grit. Nowhere, however, do we encounter the sober admission that nothing in contemporary capitalist societies presently held by the rich would be possible without a massive system of social cooperation and effort that goes way beyond any individual.

As Wolff points out, "it is said that no one person on earth could make a single pencil". Think about it, "it involves so many different technologies and knowledge of diverse materials that its production is beyond the ability of any one of us, taken alone".

The final, fourth, aspect of alienation is alienation from other people. This is related to alienation from our species-being. We are social beings, but this is disavowed, distorted and hidden from view in capitalist societies. "Rather than conceiving of ourselves as members of a vast scheme of social cooperation... we think of ourselves as people who go to work to earn money, and then go to shops to spend it. We are people with tunnel vision".

In other words, "the way in which we pursue our self-interest would not even possible if we did not have a communal species-essence. Yet we utterly disregard this communal aspect of our lives. We barely give a thought to the question of who will use the things we make, and even less how the objects we purchase came into existence. We screen off everything except our immediate consumption decision."

Thus we see why the typical individualist story so common in middle-class ideology is incoherent. That story teaches us that all we need to do is pursue our self-interest, work hard, and we'll "make it". But in order to even have such ideas and act in this way, we must tacitly assume that there is a massive social network of coordinated labor. In other words, individualist middle-class ideology presupposes, but disavows, a massive scheme of social cooperation. It is thus dependent on what it opposes, hence why it is incoherent.

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Work. Why I Hate It.

From Marx's Early Writings:

With the advent of barter [the labourer's] labour became in part a source of income. Its purpose and existence have become different. As value, exchange value, equivalent, the product is no longer produced on account of its direct personal connection with the producer. The more production is diversified, i.e. the more needs become diversified and the more the activity of the producer becomes one-sided, the more completely work falls into the category of wage-labour until, finally, no other meaning is left to it. It thus becomes wholly accidental and unimportant whether the relationship between producer and product is governed by immediate enjoyment and personal needs and whether the activity, the act of working, involves the fulfilment of his personality, the realization of his natural talents and spiritual goals.

Wage-labour consists of the following elements: (1) the estrangement of labour from its subject, the labourer, and its arbitrariness from his point of view; (2) the estrangement of labour from its object, its arbitrariness vis-a-vis the object; (3) the determination of the labourer by social needs alien to him and which act upon him with compulsive force. He must submit to this force from egoistic need, from necessity; for him the needs of society mean only the satisfaction of his personal wants while for society he is only the slave that satisfies its needs; (4) the labourer regards the maintenance of his individual existence as the aim of his activity; his actual labours serve only as a means to this end. He thus activates his life to acquire the means of life.

I really hate work. I know this cycle all too well, and I felt it before I ever read a paragraph of Marx. Labor is our means to life, and so, labor becomes our life. Of course, being aware of this type of estrangement and alienation makes it all the more hard to bear, I think. Why is it, with this critical perspective of work, I can't make myself do any less work or try to think about it any less in my day to day? Why do I still feel guilty when I don't work? Why can't we shape a life or identity apart form work, once we know it has the power to overtake us? And why does society insist on praising for my annoying "work ethic," as if there were some moral triumph in wage-labor.

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Defining "working class"--why the Marxist definition seems so strange now

Gwen at High on Rebellion has a thoughtful post about her understanding of working-class as an economic state, as opposed to the traditional Marxist understanding, which suggests one is working-class defined by the worker's lack of ownership over the means of production. This Marxist notion seems a little irrelevant to Gwen:

One thing I find really interesting and sometimes really upsetting about Britain in general and the British Left in particular is that everyone but me and Tony Benn identifies as working-class. At the Marxism conference a few years ago, I attended a session discussing “non-productive labour”, which I interpreted to mean people working in call-centres and similar areas. Imagine my surprise then when university lecturers and senior civil servants start discussing the difficulties they face as non-productive labourers and members of the working-class generally.

(...)

I don’t think the traditional Marxist definition is very useful today, because it erases the genuine economic privilege held by a lot of people who don’t own the means of production. There is no comparison between lecturers and call-centre workers. Solidarity is not going to spontaneously appear between those two groups. Furthermore, it’s not clear that those two groups HAVE much in common. Is a middle-class lecturer going to vote to increase her taxes to provide cheap housing for a call centre worker? We know for a fact that a lot of them don’t.

The reason for the dissonance between my idea of class and the Marxist definition is a great example of this. Most radical leftist North Americans would use my notion of class. The cradle of parliamentary socialism in Canada is the Prairies - farmers who could only make ends meet if they all worked together started a political party. Socialised medicine in Canada basically started as towns pooling their resources to pay for a doctor who would then see anybody as required - because no one in town could afford a doctor by themselves. But by the Marxist definition of class, these farmers - who were up to their ears in debt, and there was a depression and a drought happening simultaneously - were petit bourgeoise, ‘cause they “owned” the farms and farming equipment (usually heavily mortgaged) and as such did not sell their labour but owned the means of production. The fact that they were dirt poor doesn’t seem to matter.

Being a relative newbie to Marxist theory myself, I'll admit I have trouble making sense of the resonance of talking about working class (as defined by means of production). It's not that we can't still divide people up based on their relationship to the means of production, it just seems a little pointless. Sure, in the industrial revolution there really were two major classes that mattered: those that owned the means of production, and those who lived tedious lives by producing capital for those who owned the means of production. The tragedy of being the proletariat isn't just about the living conditions the proletariat faces by not owning the means of production, but it's about a metaphysical problem created by this relationship to capital. The argument, as far as I can recall (and I may be doing it a great injustice here) is that the tragedy of not owning the means of production isn't just poverty in the sense we know it, but because it leads to objectification and estrangement: (From Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)

Labour not only produces commodities; it also produces itself and the workers as a commodity and it does so in the same proportion in which it produces commodities in general.

This fact simply means that the object that labour produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an object, it is the objectification of labour. The realization of labour is its objectification. In the sphere of political economy, this realization of labour appears as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

So much does the realization of labour appear as loss of reality that the worker loses his reality to the point of dying of starvation. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects he needs most not only for life but also for work. Work itself becomes an object which he can only obtain through an enormous effort and with spasmodic interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital.

All these consequences are contained in this characteristic, that the worker is related to the product of labour as to an alien object. For it is clear that, according to this premise, the more the worker exerts himself in his work, the more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being over against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, and the less they belong to him. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains within himself. The worker places his life in the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the fewer objects the worker possesses. What the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The externalisation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien.

Let us now take a closer look at objectification, at the production of the worker, and the estrangement, the loss of the object, of his product, that this entails.

The workers can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material in which his labour realizes itself, in which it is active and from which, and by means of which, it produces.

But just as nature provides labour with the means of life, in the sense of labour cannot live without objects on which to exercise itself, so also it provides the means of life in the narrower sense, namely the means of physical subsistence of the worker.

The more the worker appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, through his labour, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in two respects: firstly, the sensuous external world becomes less and less an object belonging to his labour, a means of life of his labour; and, secondly, it becomes less and less a means of life in the immediate sense, a means for the physical subsistence of the worker.

Now personally, I'm never particularly compelled by arguments like this. And I'll admit, I can't really defend why it is that I wouldn't be moved by this argument, when I certainly can't reject the logical rigor or make a good argument for why this wouldn't happen to a laborer and wouldn't be a problem. It could and it might be. This was a good argument at the time, because the poor people were the same as those who had no access to the means of production and the wealthy or bourgeois people were the people who owned the means of production. So not only were those without the means of production suffering from material deprivation, but they were also suffering alienation and estrangement as a result, which made these spiritual problems more to compound the horror of the material problems for laborers. It was an industrial economy so the lines were much more clearly drawn.

But nowadays, as Gwen points out herself, dairy farmer friends of mine or my friends who own a glass cutting firm, yet barely scrape by, control the means of production, whereas, the accountants in my office make a quarter million dollars a year, have a lot of leisure time, take their families on vacation, are by Marx's definition, proletariats, because they don't own the fiber optic network we operate on.

This isn't to say the problems of estrangement and alienation aren't still a problem for even these accountants, because they have an estranged relationship to the product (in this case, as us the case in our late-capitalist economy, a service) their labor provides. And this isn't to say that having these relationships to the means of production, even if the laborer makes a comfortable income, isn't worth a revolution simply because of the estrangement and alienation. But when it comes to a scenario like Gwen mentions where she's listening to academics talk about what it's like to be "working class," I too have to wonder if this reliance on Marx's definition isn't an attempt to throw a pity party for privileged people and isn't more than a little offensive in light of the very real and very starkly different material conditions academics have as opposed to, say, my roommate who has worked as a fruit sorter for 5 years and just got a raise to $12/hour...

Something about it strikes me as sort of...well...who cares all that much about estrangement and objectification when there is such stark material inequality. In the case, as it is now, when Marx's classes don't line up with level of access to resources, I have to question the use of Marx's definition any more.

But, I have to wonder if Gwen and I haven't misunderstood something about the use of these terms and Marx's definition and how it would apply today...

I'm hoping T or some other friendly Marxist passerby can shed some light on this for us.

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