Matter, Spirit, and Labor in Marx’s Philosophy

“The modern world is rooted in spirit and it can be free, can release the other, nature, out of itself.”

§  Karl Marx, CW; 1:423

When Marx first began to measure, in his own words, “the individual existence by the essence, and the particular reality by the idea” as the “direct realization of philosophy,” (1841 ‘Doctoral Dissertation’) he asked, “Must philosophy adopt different principles for every country”? “Is there no universal human nature”? Philosophy, said Marx, asks what is true not what is accepted as such.  It does not “recognize the boundaries of political geography.” Its outlook is “the true horizon of the human mind.” (1842, CW: 1:191)

In a series of letters to Arnold Ruge, in 1843, he posed the theoretical aim of a new periodical to be the “reform of consciousness” or “A self-understanding of the age concerning its struggles and its wishes.” What Marx was searching for was “the universal question of the age.” (1843 Essay  ‘On the Jewish Question’) It is true that the one “categorical imperative” he recognized was the overcoming of “all conditions in which man is debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being.”

But he did not forget to add that in order to complete its task, “that genius which animates material force,” needs to set as its goal “the universal human emancipation,” (‘Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, 1843) and, therefore, not be defensive lest the ‘practical party’ brands its concept as a “utopian dream.”

In truth, Marx maintained, because those who have experienced an actual revolution, i.e. the French, are now enduring a counter-revolution, it is now “a partial, merely political revolution” that will keep the “total redemption of humanity” an unfulfilled dream. Marx’s greatest problem with the utopians of his time was with “the chimerical game played with the future structure of society.” (1877 letter to Sorge) Utopians, precisely so-called, are really those who rely on “the authority of science” to predict the future, to “improvise systems and pursue a regenerative science to meet the demands of the oppressed.” (1846, The Poverty of Philosophy) However, Marx always stressed that the ideas of Fourier, Owens and Weitling contain critical elements: “They attack every principle of existing society.” (1947, The Communist Manifesto)

By rejecting the “construction of the future” as his task, he was, at the same time, looking for “a new gathering point” as the “country of reason” for a “suffering mankind that thinks” and a “thinking mankind that suffers.” Instead of a one-sided preoccupation with the principles of the philosophy of the future, Marx perceived in the rupture of the present society, the emergence of what he called “a new humanity” whose “quest for universality” would replace the ‘will’ in bridging the gap between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is.’ However, as opposed to positivist philosophy, which adheres to the element of reality, to the substantial “non-concept,” Marx posed dialectical philosophy, or what called “the party of the concept,” as that which would actuate a “true state,” “the free association of moral human beings.” (CW; 1:192)

Hence, from the very beginning, in the 1841 Doctoral Thesis concerning the philosophy of nature in two classical thinkers, Democritus and Epicurus, Marx left no doubt that, for him, human freedom was the energizing principle. As against Democritus, he sides with Epicurus as “the philosophy of the age.”  Unlike Democritus who “only maintains the material side,” that is, grasps ideality itself as but a moment of substantiality, “what is lasting and great in Epicurus is that he gives no preference to conditions over notions.” (CW; 1:415) What Marx singled out from Epicurus was “the absolute freedom of mind.” While for Democritus “the atom is only the general objective expression of empirical investigating nature as a whole.” (Ibid, p.73) Epicurean philosophy “swerves away from the restrictive mode of being” and establishes “The soul of the atom.” (P.50) This, noted Marx, is “the absolute movement itself.”

“Dissatisfied with philosophy,” Democritus as a “Man of Science,” “throws himself into the arms of positive knowledge.” In contrast, Epicurus who is even been called “an enemy of science,” has nothing but “contempt for the positive sciences.” (P.41) Thus, the double trend, which Marx also perceives in his own era, after Hegel, is between positive philosophy with its attachment to the material moment and dialectical philosophy which maintains that all relation is negation and establishes motion as “self-determination.” (P.52) Throughout his life, Marx would uphold the subjective principle, “the active side,” as opposed to a one-sided grounding of thought in the passive, material element.

It is also in the Doctoral Dissertation that we originally find a reference to the mystical objectivity of money: “Real dollars have the same existence as the imagined gods have. Has a real dollar any existence except in the imagination, if only in the general imagination of man?” (CW; 1:104) In this sense, wrote Marx, “any God, heathen or Christian, has had real existence. Did not Moloch rule?” It is precisely to this topic that he returns in Capital. In the section on ‘The Fetishism of Commodities,’ he draws an analogy between the world of things and “the misty realm of religion.” “At the level of material production, we find the same situation that we find in religion at the ideological level, namely the inversion of subject into object and vice versa.” (Capital; 1:990)

Thus page one, chapter one of Capital volume one, establishes the ground for what’s to come. In a quote from Nicholas Barbon, Marx sets in motion the meta-physical character of the world of things. “Desire implies want; it is the appetite of the mind, and as natural as hunger for the body… the greatest number (of things) have their value from supplying the wants of the mind.” (P.125) In characterizing commodity as having an “immaterial essence” with “theological niceties,” Marx is also hitting out against the unknowable ‘thing-in-itself’ that resembles the predicate-less religious absolute. In the value-form as the consummate expression of commodities, all objectivity is extinguished. As such, it transcends all sensuousness.  It is true that in this phenomenal form, in this purely social, supra-natural relation between things lay hidden a “definite social relation between men themselves.” But the value-form is “a purely ideal or notional form.” (P.189)

It is the money form, as the consummate fetish, that acts as a self-mediating “automatic subject” in which all determinations are neglected. In it all connections with the social process have been terminated. But an indeterminate, unmediated being is a non-being, it is irrational, a thing of imagination, a phantom. As Marx expressed it elsewhere, “as the general form of wealth, the world of riches stands opposite it [money]. It is their pure abstraction – hence, fixated as such, a mere conceit. Where wealth as such seems to appear as in an entirely material, tangible form, its existence is only in my head, it is pure fiction. Midas.” (Grundrisse; P.223)

It is in the 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, the birthplace of Marx’s thought, that we find some of the most critical remarks on the fetish. Thus in the essay on ‘Money,’ it is described as the “divine power.” Money is the active concept of value that represents a “world upside down.” (CW; 3:326) The essence of money, is its being “the mediating activity or movement. The human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man.” The alien world of objects created through labor is presented as power above and beyond man.

It is in the essay on ‘the Critique of Hegelian Dialectic’ that Marx reaches a new moment in articulating Labor as man’s act of self-objectification through alienation and the transcendence of the alienated character of the objective world. It is not just labor in its negative sense as alienated but in its positive nature, as “a condition of human existence” that separates Marx from all political economists but also draws him closer to Hegel. Thus in summing up Hegel’s achievements, Marx singles out his grasp of labor process, as man’s act of self-creation, as “the absolute and hence the final expression of human life which has itself as its goal.” (CW; 3:342)

In the labor process as a creative process, man enjoys the free play of his/her physical and mental powers. At the end of the process “a result emerges which had already existed ideally… Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials.” (Capital; 1:284) If we now follow Marx carefully, we see that he has nothing but disdain and contempt for Matter vis-à-vis Labor. As raw material, it is characterized as “the formless matter, the mere material for the form-positing, purposive activity.” (Grundrisse, P.298) As in Hegel’s Science of Logic where it is stated that “matter is that which is indifferent to form,” (P.451) Marx too says that “there is an indifference on the part of the substance towards the form… Labor is the living, form-giving fire, it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time.”  (Ibid, Pp.360-361) Living human activity transforms objects into “the body of its soul and thereby resurrects them from the dead.” (Ibid, p.364)

It is this form-giving activity that is transformed into its opposite, into an abstract, homogeneous social ‘substance’ under the condition of alienation. The objectification of labor is no longer the transition “from activity to being” (p.301) but “the objectivity of subjectivity antithetical to the worker.”(p.512) It is, therefore, posited as man’s “non-objectivity.” Thus the entirety of the relationship of labor to nature, as the modified object of human activity, is turned upside down. Now matter as “the passive element” assumes a seemingly activist role. It now appears that the “active side” has been transformed to the status of a “bearer of value,” a “value-forming substance,” while the “dead materiality” has been “endowed by living labor with the soul of its own.” (p.454) It has “acquired the occult ability to add value to itself.” (Capital, 1:255)

However, it is essential to note that as opposed to classical political economists, especially Adam Smith’s concept of labor as ‘a curse,’ Marx highlights labor as “a liberating activity” in which “the external aims has been stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become… self realization, objectification of subject, hence real freedom.” (Grundrisse, p.611) Adam Smith, argues Marx, saw either idleness and non-labor or the slave, serf and wage labor; that is, he saw labor itself as something “purely negative.” “But something that’s merely negative creates nothing.”(p.612) Instead, says Marx, “Really free working, i.e. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion.”(P.611) Therefore calling labor a mere toil and sacrifice, or the negation of tranquility, fun and pleasure, Marx exclaims, “can also be called the sacrifice of laziness, unfreedom, unhappiness, i.e. negation of a negative state.” (p.613) We have, thereby, come right back to the 1844 Essay on the Hegelian dialectic. That’s where Marx states that the “greatest thing in Hegel’s Phenomenology and its final result – the dialectic of negativity as the moving and producing principle – is that Hegel grasps the self-development of man as a process, objectification as the loss of the object, as alienation and transcendence of this alienation; that he then grasps the nature of work and comprehends objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his own work.” (CW; 3:332)

But to those, including the economists, who are caught up in relations of commodity production, these relations appear as a “nature-imposed necessity.” While the economists themselves indicate that “people place in a thing the faith which they don’t place in each other,” they don’t ask why do people have faith in ‘the thing.’ To which Marx responds “obviously because that thing is an objectified relation between persons, because individuals have alienated their own social relationship from themselves so that it takes the form of a thing.” (Grundrisse, p.160) Where the social relations between people is “concealed beneath a material shell” (Capital; 1:161) and takes on the fantastic form of a relation between things, there these ‘things’, having been awakened from the dead, far from being under their control, in fact captivates them.

Thus, even the epoch making discovery that labor is the source of all value, argues Marx, “by no means banishes the semblance of objectivity possessed by the social characteristics of labor.” (Ibid, p.167) Thus when the political economists, whom Marx compares to ‘theologians,’ treat the existing social relations as eternal and imposed by the law of nature, what are they disclosing if not the mind-forged shackles of ‘belief’? The chief failing of classical political economy, according to Marx, is that while they uncovered the content concealed within the form of human association, they never asked why this content has that particular “absurd form.” The critical argument here is not just about the direct vs. indirect forms of association. What’s historically new in Marx is that after having penetrated the “dual character of labor” – abstract and the concrete - as what solves the riddle, the enigmatic character of the products of labor, he does not then proceed to ‘appropriate’ the content and dismiss the form. Unlike pre-capitalist societies, where the natural form of labor, its particularity, is its immediate social form, capitalism has already transformed this concrete form into an undifferentiated abstract labor, where “private labor takes the form of its opposite, namely labor in its directly social form.” (Ibid, p.151) The point is that to the producers, “the social relationship between their private labor appears as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between things.” (p.166) To transcend “all the magic and necromancy” that surrounds the value-form of products of human labor, Marx projects a new form, the “freely associated man” under which to work out “the human content,” where the absolute development of all human powers as such is an “end in itself.” This association of free individuals “does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property.” (p.929) In its positive position as “the negation of the negation,” and hence as “the next stage of historical development, the necessary actual phase of man’s emancipation and rehabilitation,” it is “the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future but is not as such the goal of human development – the form of human society.” (CW; 3:306)