Marxism

Social Alienation. Classes and Class Struggle in Human History

The next stage in the formation of Marxism occurs in the "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," where Hegel's category of "alienation of spirit" is transformed by Marx into "alienation of labor," or "self-alienation of the worker." What, then, is alienation of labor, and why did he reinterpret Hegel’s formula? For Marx, alienation of labor unfolds through the following phases: a) alienation of the product of labor, that is, the outcome of labor; b) alienation of the activity itself, wherein the product is merely a summation of the activity; thus, if I (the proletarian) do not own the product of labor, I do not own the activity itself; c) if I do not own the result and the activity, then I do not belong to myself; this is self-alienation, or the alienation of one person from another; d) when one person stands opposed to oneself, another person stands opposed to them, which constitutes social antagonism. Marx concludes: "What can be said about the relationship of a person to their labor, to the product of their labor, and to themselves, can also be said about the relationship of one person to another, as well as to the labor and the product of another person." Here, he speaks of "alienation," or "self-alienation," solely of the worker, infusing the concept of "alienation" with an entirely different—economic, class-based, historical—meaning. By "alienation," or "self-alienation," of labor, Marx refers to the forced labor of the worker for the capitalist, the appropriation of the product of labor by the capitalist, the separation of the worker from the means of production, and so on. Thus, Marx arrived at the category of practice and the idea of communism through the category of human alienation.

Marxism, as a product of the decay of German idealism, crystallized fully in the "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845). The central idea of the theses is the development of the question regarding the decisive role of practice in knowledge and the revolutionary transformation of reality; concerning the essence of humanity as a sum of all social relations; the dependence of ideological phenomena on material social relations; and the role and essential distinction of Marxist philosophical doctrine from other systems, for "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it," as he summarized in the theses. Herein lies the cunning and essence of Marxism (communism)—the right to change the world.

Even then, Marx committed a sin: he made the resolution of theoretical enigmas of existence the task of practice, transforming truth into an instrument of revolutionary (violent) change of the world; in other words, he turned the goddess into a concubine, whom he ruthlessly exploited, compelling her to yield practical benefit. The young Marx was convinced that resolving theoretical contradictions was possible only through practical means, solely by the practical energy of people, and therefore their resolution was by no means a task of knowledge, but rather a genuine life task, which philosophy could not resolve precisely because it saw only theoretical questions within it. Thus, the general philosophical maxim concerning the good of humanity, which guided the young Marx, gradually vanished in communist ideology, where the right to change the world would become the cornerstone of a new worldview.

Between 1845 and 1846, Marx and Engels composed their second collaborative work titled "The German Ideology," where, alongside a materialistic understanding of history, the dependence of social consciousness on social being, the defining role of material production in societal life, the dialectic of productive forces and production relations, a philosophical analysis of the idea of communism is presented: "Communism for us is not an arrangement that must be established, not an ideal to which reality must correspond. We call communism the real movement that abolishes the present state," and they continue, "communism is the necessary form and energetic principle of the immediate future. But communism as such is not the goal of human development, nor a form of human society." Summarizing, Marx and Engels assert: the theory of communism can be expressed in a single proposition—the abolition of private property. Moreover, communism, as the positive abolition of private property—this self-alienation of humanity—is, in Marx’s view, "the genuine resolution of the contradiction between humanity and nature, between humanity and humanity, the true resolution of the dispute between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, the individual and the species."

It is the solution to the riddle of history, and he knows that he is this solution. Marx paints a remarkably beautiful, romantic, and poetic vision of communism; however, he sins against the spirit of truth, for a hidden intention lurks behind the interpretation, a concealed explanation behind the matter.

Yet the deepest understanding of communism is not found among its creators, but in those who observed the process impartially at the moment of its birth, such as Vladimir Dal, who, in 1881 (long before the practice of Russian communism), provided the most profound and accurate definition of communism in his "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language": "Communism is a political doctrine of equality of classes, communal ownership, and the rights of each to another's property." Thus, the further life of any phenomenon or organism is nothing other than the realization of what was instilled at the moment of its conception.

According to this new worldview, legal relations, as well as their forms, cannot be explained either from themselves or from the so-called general development of the human spirit; rather, they are rooted in material life relations, the sum of which Hegel termed "civil society," and the anatomy of civil society must be sought in political economy.