On the Concept Individual in the Young Marx
[This article was included in a book collectively written as closure to a two-year assistantship in the Political Theory II course at the Faculty of Political Science and International Relations of the National University of Rosario. To access the complete book, please press HERE. ]
Abstract
This article integrates the results of a research process on the role of the concept “individual” in the theory of the young Marx, examining the texts “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Rigth”, “On the Jewish Question,” “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – Introduction,” and “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” The paper traces and reconstructs the concept of individual, man, der Mensch, in relation to the author’s materialist stance, the political constitution, and the production of the means of life.
[This text will use masculine words as generic terms in order to maintain the greatest conceptual fidelity in relation to the author, although not uncritically regarding this linguistic practice in contemporary times, understanding that it is exclusive of other genders and identities.]
Introduction
This article integrates the findings of a research process conducted around the conceptual piece “individual” in the theory of the young Marx. This category was addressed in the texts ” Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Rigth “, “On the Jewish Question,” “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – Introduction,” and “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” The exercise covered various themes from which the notion of the individual in the young Marx’s thought was reconstructed and its significance within the general framework of his postulates was explored. The concern with this concept arises from the importance that Marx seems to attribute to it in various instances, allowing for the recognition of the uniqueness of this concept in the author’s writings as a critical thinker and as a possible alternative to traditional ideas of the individual, typical of liberalism. Although it may be considered an aspect that is not central to the author’s theory, it is proposed here as a possible tool or opportunity to reflect on his thought from a different perspective.
The relevance of re-reading Karl Marx’s ideas from various interrogations is linked to the relentless pursuit of a “theoretical effort that aims to ensure that no one in the world suffers from material and intellectual need (Schmidt, 1976, p. 36)” as “marxist materialism is primarily concerned with the possibility of eliminating hunger and misery in the world (Schmidt, 1976, p. 36).” In this sense, it is enriching to reflect on the contributions of the author’s thought, which adds up to the construction of a critical horizon in our contemporary world.
This writing will attempt to provide reflections arising from a meticulous and critical reading exercise in which references (literal, metaphorical, and implicit) to the question of the individual in the sources were traced. Addressing the concept of individual, man, der Mensch in the young Marx implies recognizing that it is part of a broader problem, which appears in a general framework: the conception of the human being and its relationship with politics, as an expression of life in community. The issue is framed, in turn, by a strong critique of idealism and the impact of such a theoretical standpoint when attempting to think and transform the political constitution and the material existence of men. Marx argues that German philosophy has generated what he calls “fictions,” abstract elements that end up objectifying individuals and present themselves as external, alien, beyond their control. As he states in “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”: “the producer is converted into the product of the product (Marx, 1982, p. 323)” and “the empirical fact acquires in its empirical existence a different meaning from what it itself has (Marx, 1982, p. 323).” The fictions hide two things: on the one hand, the existence in a system of exploitation, and on the other, that the political force that is conceptualized and constructed as external to individual existence is only authentic and effective in the lives of people if “the individual has learned to recognize and organize its ‘forces propres’ as social forces (Marx, 1982, p. 484).”
If each individual lives and exists effectively manifesting the political constitution, that is, the organization of life in society and the interdependence of the species, only then is the realization of the generic being achieved, which until then is divided between the private person and the political citizen. In the realization of the generic being, the political coincides with the material existence of each individual, and it is the real subject who determines the political constitution—not the other way around. This enables people to take ownership of their impact on general issues from their reality, from the very life of each individual.
Marx’s materialist stance invites us to beggin thinking from what exists in reality, considering the manifestation of bourgeois society in which modern capital has developed, the alienation of labor by the private property understood as accumulated labor, and the constitution of man as a commodity and as a machine. The relationship between the individual and the productive forces is established through labor, which loses the appearance of one’s own activity and diminishes the life of man through alienation. At the same time, the productive forces appear as separate from individuals, who are scattered and in opposition to one another, existing as members of a class and not as individuals. It is necessary to think of social organization based on certain existing individuals in reality since it emerges from the life process of people.
Individuals are presented as dependent on their social relations, that is, the practical contact with the production of the world, the means of life, and the material conditions of production from which individuals make one another, and circumstances make man to the same extent as he makes circumstances. In this sense, real men are conditioned by the development of productive forces, which will determine the posibility of individuals that are divided, or individuals as such, that is, in control of the powers and social forces that arise from themselves.
The writing will begin, first, with a brief contextualization of the young Marx and the historical period in which his writings were produced. Second, it will mention Marx criticisms of Hegelian theory and religion from the texts “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, and “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – Introduction,” considered central to understanding the author’s materialist stance that permeates all the writings addressed in this research. Third, reflections on the political constitution and its link with the real individual will be considered. For this, reflections on democracy from the text “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ” will be taken into account, from which Marx begins to distance himself through the notions of State, citoyen, and bourgeois in the text “On the Jewish Question.” Fourth, the author’s notion on the individual and the conditions of production of means of life will be addressed, based on the notions of alienated labor, man as a commodity, the subjective essence of private property, and the social character of the individual, man, der Mensch.
The Young Marx
Marx’s thought is, throughout its development, closely linked to the political and historical context of his time. This implies that it is neither static nor attempts to be, and is developed in accordance with the events that shape and refine knowledge, and not presented as absolute but as a tool and possibility.
The young Marx was located in Cologne, from where he had to go into exile for opposing the Prussian monarchical regime with journalistic projects like “The Rhineland Gazette.” Towards the end of 1843, he moved to Paris in a context following the French Revolution and the emergence of organized workers’ movements. This is where he wrote “On the Jewish Question.”
During this period, the author was strongly influenced by German philosophy. On the one hand, he was part of the Young Hegelians, who attempted to criticize the ideas of their referent, though still adopting the dialectic. The group mostly debated issues related to religion, and Marx was one of the main figures arguing that religion could be a means to think about politics. Bauer, with whom Marx debates in “On the Jewish Question,” was part of this movement. The group of young thinkers encountered “the very contradiction of history” when Frederick William IV, acclaimed as a “liberal” candidate, became a despot after assuming power. Contradiction, according to Althusser (1967, p. 34), in which “History was, no doubt, in right, reason and freedom; in fact, it was only unreason and servitude (Althusser, 1967, p. 34).”
The debate over religion was also very strong at this historical moment as it implied a critique of the conservatism of the time. It was in this context that the Neo-Hegelians were influenced by Feuerbach’s writings, who “put back on its feet that world that philosophy had made walk on its head (Althusser, 1976, p. 34).” A critical path was being formed within the Young Hegelians to which Marx adhered. During this period, the author’s writings had a more philosophical character, before his more politically and later economically focused stage, a dynamism that is visible throughout his texts.
Between the Empirical and the Mystical
A fundamental aspect when reading the young Marx is the contrast he establishes between idealism and materialism from a critical stance characteristic of his historical context, influenced by criticisms of the writings of Hegel and Feuerbach:
In the mid-1840s, there was an atmosphere of searching for a new philosophy in Germany, and the Mensch (man), for Feuerbach, was to be the foundation of that philosophy. Feuerbach undertook this endeavor and delved into a thorough critique of speculative and abstract philosophy, particularly Hegel’s. By emphasizing the link between all speculative philosophy with theology and religion and opposing all a priori speculative knowledge, he laid the foundation for a new type of reflection to which the young Marx would not be indifferent (Monal, 1999).
In a brief passage, Althusser reflects on the idea/reality dichotomy present in Marx’s writings, concerning what he calls “real humanism”:
The specific difference lies in the adjective real. Real humanism is semantically defined in opposition to non-real, ideal(istic), abstract, speculative, etc. This reference humanism is simultaneously untouched as a reference and rejected for its abstraction, its non-reality, etc., by the new real humanism. The old humanism is thus judged by the new one as an abstract and illusory humanism. Its illusion lies in confronting a non-real object, in having as its content an object that is not the real object. (Althusser, 1976, p. 201).
From the text “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx postulates that it is essential to start from what is real and material when conceptualizing and proposing categories: to consider that the real determines its own meaning and not that the abstract signifies the real, as otherwise “the producer is converted into the product of the product (Marx, 1982, p. 323)” and “the empirical fact acquires in its empirical existence another meaning than it itself has (Marx, 1982, p. 323).” The fact, reality itself is not conceived as such, but as a “mystical result (Marx, 1982, p. 323).” What the author proposes is that, according to Hegel’s postulates, reality must adjust to pre-established thoughts, which prevents philosophy from generating political determinations as it turns into a logical exercise that is even characterized by being “the thing of logic and not the logic of the thing (Marx, 1982, p. 331).” In this sense, Hegel’s postulates turn logical-abstract categories into subjects and present the concrete real as formal, as logical-metaphysical. In response to the theoretical opposition Hegel establishes between individuality-State, Marx argues that he does it:
“(…) forgetting that particular individuality is a human individuality and that the affairs and activities of the State are human functions; forgetting that the essence of the ‘particular personality’ does not reside in its beard, in its blood, in its abstract physique, but in its social quality, and that the affairs, etc., of the State are nothing but modes of existence and action of the social qualities of man. It therefore follows that individuals, as exponents of State affairs and powers, must be considered in terms of their social quality, not their private quality (Marx, 1982, p. 335).”
Here two issues are presented: a) the importance of thinking from reality as opposed to thinking from theoretically pre-established concepts, and b) the notion that individuality, and the State being composed of individualities, implies or needs to be considered from its social quality. This approach would allow us, according to Marx, to establish a link between philosophy and politics and avoid theoretical exercises that result in logical equations abstracted from what materially exists, and even more so, that end up forcing the historical and political to be molded to the formal, turning mystical substance into reality.
Regarding religion, Marx makes a strong critique in the text “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – Introduction,” known as die Enleitung. According to Marx, reality drives people to seek a fantastical reality, and it is then that religion becomes necessary and that people lose their true reality, forgetting that it is them who make religion and not the other way around:
“And religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has not yet found himself or has already lost himself. But man is not an abstract being, hiding outside the world. Man is the world of men, the State, society” (Marx, 1982, p. 491).
Society is thus founded on an arbitrary general theory of the world that attempts to justify and soften a miserable reality, hindering human realization and the attainment of true happiness, deceiving man and preventing him from perceiving the chains to which he is subjected. For this reason, the autor considers that it is a fundamental task of philosophy to criticize religion to unmask the self-alienation of man, dismantling the illusory so that man can access the real: ” The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo” (Marx, 1982, p. 492). Religion is nothing but “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. Religion is the opium of the people” (Marx, 1982, p. 491).
According to Marx, the critical exercise must be conducted not only on reality but also on its abstract extension. In this sense, pointing out those speculative exercises that abstract from real man allows theory to have the potential to become material power, for example, if it were to ignite the masses, as it exposes that man is the root of problems, making it a categorical imperative to “overthrow all those conditions in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned, and despised being” (Marx, 1982, p. 497). The piece of the individual, man, der Mensch, becomes fundamental as it is the root and must be perceived as such to return to his true reality and material power, to take control and reverse the unjust conditions that emanate from him.
Expression of the Genus and Political Constitution
In the text “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, Marx argues that the political ceases to be something merely formal when it impacts the lives of men—and the people—understood from their real existence and not from conceptualizations established over that existence but not palpable within it. In this writing, Marx presents democracy as the instance that achieves the realization of politics in this sense, i.e., impacting the daily lives of individuals. From this point of view, in democracy, the State and the political constitution are created—and to some extent controlled—by the people, so they no longer present as something external, alien, that dominates and objectifies them. Hegel starts from the State and turns man into the subjectivized State; democracy starts from man and turns the State into objectified man. Just as religion does not create man, but it is man who creates religion, the constitution does not create the people, but it is the people who create the particular constitution (Marx, 1982, p. 342).
The sense of the State changes according to the real influence that individuals have on it, and when it is not linked to the daily, material life of individuals, it becomes an abstraction that ends up subordinating the existence of men to the unreal, the conceptual, the formal. Democracy is therefore understood as the form in which politics manages to impact the reality of people and, therefore:
“(…) it stands related to other constitutions as the genus to its species; only here the genus itself appears as an existent, and therefore opposed as a particular species to those existents which do not conform to the essence. (…). All other forms of state are a certain and specific particular form of State. Democracy is human existence, while in the other political forms man has only legal existence (Marx, 1982, p. 342).”
In this text, the definition Marx proposes of democracy attributes importance to the “self-determination,” in contrast to a society subsumed under the monarchical political constitution. Since monarchy is a particular constitution, Marx considers it to be opposed to the genus. In non-democratic constitutions, an external identity operates, and the political develops without people being aware that it coincides with their private essence: a transcendental alienation of existence is generated (Marx, 1982, p. 344). It is in democracy that the union between the general and the particular occurs, and the State is no longer a particular expression but rather the political corresponds with the material. This relationship between the particular and the generic as opposites will reappear in “On the Jewish Question” in a more distinguished manner.
In “On the Jewish Question,” Marx debates with Bruno Bauer regarding the aspiration of Jews to emancipate politically. According to Bauer, man, in general, must abandon religion to become a citizen, and the State must do the same to become the real State. He argues that the abolition of religion is necessary to achieve political emancipation, emancipate the State, and achieve the emancipation of humanity. However, Marx disputes this assertion, arguing that there is a limit to political emancipation understood in this way, because even if the State abolishes religion, it will possibly still exist in the lives of men:
“The limit of political emancipation is immediately revealed in the fact that the State can free itself from a shackle without man really freeing himself from it; that the State can be a free State without man being a free man (Marx, 1982, p. 468).”
In this passage, there is again a reference to the importance of addressing what happens in reality and the need to consider the effect that the political—State and laws—has on the lives of men, beyond the abstract, juridical, formal. In this sense, it is contradictory to recognize as free a State that eliminates religion to emancipate itself politically, while religion still exists in the lives of individuals: “The State may have emancipated itself from religion, even though the great majority continue to be religious. And they will not cease to be so by the fact that their religiosity is understood as something purely private (Marx, 1982, p. 469).” Here the State is defined in contrast to the elements that compose it, it does not end social, cultural, and political differences by defining them as private matters, but rather rests upon them. Because of this, men lead a double life, the life in which they are considered a social being, which is politics, the celestial, and the life of civil society, the earthly, in which he exists in a particular manner. Marx argues that in this way, the citizen becomes an imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty and inhabits an unreal generality, constituting himself as a being devoid of real life as an individual, as a manifestation lacking in truth (Marx, 1982, p. 470).
The Jewish Question from Marx’s perspective is an example of what happens when there is a separation between civil society and the political State:
“The difference between the citizen and the religious man is the same as that between the citizen and the merchant, between the citizen and the laborer, between the citizen and the landowner, between the citizen and the living individual. The contradiction between the religious man and the political man is the same as that between the bourgeois and the citoyen, between the member of civil society and his political lion’s skin (Marx, 1982, p. 471).”
This dichotomy present in modern societies prevents the realization of what Marx calls the real generic life of man: “During moments of heightened self-love, political life attempts to suffocate bourgeois society, which is its premise, and the elements that integrate it, to constitute itself as the real generic life of man, free from all contradiction (Marx, 1982, p. 472).” According to Marx, in bourgeois society, the political community is seen as a means to guarantee the preservation of what are called human rights, which, to him, correspond to the right to private property. The citoyen, i.e., the individual in his political existence, becomes the servant of the selfish man, of the bourgeois, having to preserve the rights of existence in particular terms. This implies a degradation of the sphere in which men behave as a community, and ends up subordinating itself to the sphere in which man acts as an isolated and partial being, and the authentic man is not the citizen but the bourgeois. Here Marx refers to bourgeois society as one in which man has the right to disassociate himself, is isolated, limited to himself. The generic being is defined in contrast to one who exists disassociated from his fellow beings and the community and who sees society as an external framework. In bourgeois society, this non-political man, a member of the bourgeoisie, a selfish man, presents himself as the natural man, as the true man who corresponds with individual and material existence. The citizen, by contrast, is abstract and artificial. There are, then, two elements: the member of bourgeois society, selfish and independent, and the citizen of the State. Human emancipation occurs when both are fused in the real man:
“Only when the real individual reclaims within himself the abstract citizen and becomes, as an individual man, a generic being, in his individual work and his individual relations; only when man has learned to recognize and organize his ‘forces propres’ as social forces and when, therefore, he no longer detaches from himself the social force in the form of political force, can we say that human emancipation has been accomplished (Marx, 1982, p. 484).”
The significance that the real individual, the material man, acquires in the emancipation of humanity is key. The appropriation of his social force and political power by the individual is what enables the realization of human emancipation. The fact that the political and the State present themselves as something external, and that the notion of an isolated, selfish, and independent individual seems natural, does not correspond with the generic being. The generic being is that which is not realized in the lives of real men in modern society, as they, in their individual material existence, are divided between two manifestations characteristic of bourgeois society: the citoyen and the bourgeois. The first—the citoyen, an abstract and unreal construction of the bourgeois political revolution that managed to constitute politics as a means to guarantee the second—the bourgeois.
From this research, it is observed that there is a shift between the first text “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ” and the second “On the Jewish Question” regarding the way in which the relationship between the individual, democracy, and the State is interpreted. In the first, there is a notion of democracy that corresponds with the realization of the generic being. In this second text, it seems that Marx assumes that in democracy, both the State and the laws can be functional to the people. The political constitution in democracy no longer represents a mere formal issue but rather the realization of politics in the lives of men who have the possibility of having some control. The political constitution is created by individuals without them being subordinated to it as something external. This notion, that seems to consider the possibility of a State and democracy consistent with the realization of man, is no longer present in the same way in “On the Jewish Question.” In this latter text, a deeper critique of the State as such can be observed. The State begins to present itself as something more intrinsically differentiated from the reality of individuals and does not correspond with them, “the State may have emancipated itself from religion even when the vast majority continue to be religious (Marx, 1982, p. 499).” In this sense, it represents a stage that actually allows the private to act in its way and opposes and contradicts man in his material existence. However, considering the nuances and shifts inherent in the author’s trajectory, it is interesting to mention a possible trace of continuity throughout the analyzed writings. It seems that based on the importance of the real in contrast to the general, a specific significance is attributed to the political as it manages to be effective in the concrete, material life of individuals.
Marx postulates in “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ” an idea of democracy according to which there is a correspondence between the genus—the formal principle—and the material principle, in which man is the real principle and the one who creates political constitutions. We could consider that this idea does not refer to democracy according to laws, institutions, and the State, but rather in relation to the effective existence of the political in the lives of individuals. In this sense, there seems to be a continuum between the previously mentioned idea and the so-called human emancipation in “On the Jewish Question” where he states, as cited before, that emancipation will be accomplisched when people reocognize their own forces as social.
The reflection that arises from possible traces of continuity is that the importance of real individuals, the material existence of men, is crucial: an indispensable factor when thinking about the political configuration of societies and their distinctive characteristics, as well as the possibilities of emancipation. Democracy is understood as the instance in which the political constitution finally identifies with the reality of men and is realized in their material existence, enabling the correspondence between the individual and the generic being. Something similar happens with the concept of human emancipation formulated in “On the Jewish Question,” which is linked to an idea of the integrity of the individual, where the political does not constitute a formal abstraction detached from the lives of men but is precisely the instance in which they recognize social and political power as their own.
The Individual and the Production of the Means of Life
Marx postulates the need to think from historical materialism to overcome false ideas that have been disconnected from what really exists. For this, in “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” he proposes thinking of men and individuals based on the material conditions of production, what is produced, how it is produced, and the types of social relationships/organizations that are established.
From the text, it is possible to observe references to the concept of individual within the framework of the critique of contemporary Political Economy assumptions. While Smith and Ricardo argue that workers’ wages should be reduced to the minimum possible, Marx makes a distinction between man and worker, as he considers that according to such assumptions, “the worker is only entitled to the smallest and strictly necessary portion of the product; only what is necessary to survive, not as a man, but as a worker, to perpetuate, not the human species, but the slave class of workers” (Marx, 1982, p. 563). This situation reverses the capital-labor relationship: the rent of the land and the profit of capital should be deductions made from the wage, from what the worker receives for the product generated through his labor, and not the other way around.
Bourgeois society presents particularities that impact the real existence of individuals, workers and non-workers alike. These particularities are a consequence of man himself—man as the root—who appropriates the product of labor that belongs to another man: living as pleasure what is a torment for the worker and “it is not in gods nor in nature that we must seek this external power that rises above man, but in man himself” (Marx, 1982, p. 602). This creates enmity and self-alienation of man at the species level, which manifests in the practical real relationship with other men: “through alienated labor, the worker creates the relation of a man alienated to work, and placed outside of it with this work” (Marx, 1982, p. 603).
The worker is subordinated to the need for labor by the capitalist in a situation of unequal power since the capitalist can find another worker or make use of his accumulated labor—capital. The worker, on the other hand, must sell his own humanity, sacrifice his time in exchange for wages, on which his physical existence depends: “this class must continually sacrifice a part of itself in order not to perish completely” (Marx, 1982, p. 561). The worker is reduced to a commodity that has no value if supply exceeds demand, according to the needs of the rich:
“these hordes of workers, increasingly harassed, do not even have the reassurance of always finding employment; the industry that has gathered them only allows them to live when it needs them; as soon as it can do without them, it abandons them to their fate without the slightest regard; and the workers are forced to give up their persons and energies in exchange for whatever price is offered to them” (Marx, 1982, p. 570).
Through the division of labor, the worker must perform increasingly mechanized labor, while the competitiveness among workers is exacerbated by the competition of machines generated by capital accumulation. Prosperity worsens the living conditions of people who rely on their labor power and do not have accumulated labor:
“While the division of labor increases the productivity of the worker, the wealth and refinement of society, it impoverishes the worker, reducing him to the level of machines. While the division of labor provokes the accumulation of capital and, with it, an increasing prosperity of society, it increasingly subjects the worker to the dependency of the capitalist, imposes ever-greater competition on him, and drives him into the vortex of overproduction, followed by the consequent depression” (Marx, 1982, p. 564).
The more commodities the worker creates, the more the worker is devaluated, as the product of his own labor appears to him as something external and independent of him. As soon as labor is embodied in an object, the worker can not realize as he loses that object, which is alienated. The worker is forced to produce as much as possible and consume as little as possible, becoming more unworthy and deformed in the face of the product of his labor. He is the producer through his labor power, and yet nothing belongs to him:
“The more the worker exerts himself, the more powerful is the external world of objects created by him against him, the poorer he becomes and the poorer his inner world, the less this world belongs to him as his own. The same occurs with religion. The more man places in God, the less he retains for himself. The worker puts his life into the object, but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object” (Marx, 1982, p. 596).
Alienation occurs not only concerning the product of labor but also in the productive activity itself: the worker is not himself nor affirms himself in his work, but on the contrary, work is the loss of himself. It is an obligation that is not carried out of freedom or will but as a means to satisfy needs. His personality is resumed when he ceases to work, and in the meantime, he is outside of himself. This inverts the relationship between man and animal since the worker feels free in his animal functions, such as eating or drinking, and feels like an animal in his human functions, that is, in the production of his means of life. Private property, understood as accumulated labor—alienated—is a product of the alienation of human life. This occurs in a world created by man himself, in which individuality is a manifestation of existence in relation to others. To achieve the return of man to himself, then, it is necessary to recognize individual existence as a collective existence and man as social:
“The social character is, therefore, the general character of the entire movement; just as society produces man as man, he is produced by it. Activity and enjoyment, as its content, are also, in terms of the mode of existence, social, social activity, and social enjoyment. The human essence of nature exists only for social man, for it only exists for him as a link with man, as his existence for the other and of the other for him” (Marx, 1982, p. 618).
Man’s essence is social, and Marx’s warning at this point is that it is essential to avoid considering society as an abstraction against the individual: “The individual is the social being. His manifestation of life—even if it does not appear in the direct form of a common life manifestation, carried out together with others—is therefore a manifestation and externalization of social life” (Marx, 1982, p. 619). Individual life, then, is not different from generic life, and each individual is the totality of thought and felt society.
Only when the product is a social object does man cease to lose himself in his object since it becomes an objectivity of himself and not of another who appropriates it. Marx’s example is the manifestation of humanity’s greatness in grouping, doctrine, conversation, and camaraderie when they finally become themselves:
“Smoking, eating, drinking, etc., are no longer, here, the means that maintain the grouping, the social links. They suffice with society, association, conversation, whose end is, in turn, society; camaraderie among men is not, for them, a phrase but a truth, and the nobility of humanity shines before us in those faces hardened by labor” (Marx, 1982, p. 633).
This camaraderie opposes the decaying individual who enjoys ocious wealth and is engaged in the alienated labor of others, in a state of alienation by enjoying the product of others’ labor. Both himself and others become null, wasting what a hundred lives could produce through the arrogance and disdain for life, and human essential power is reduced to the realization of its own monstrosity.
Both camaraderie and the state of alienation correspond to a form of interrelation among men, of man with himself. Individual existence is constituted by and constitutes the social, and it is from the awareness of this reality, of man’s collective power, that the existing forms of oppression can be revealed to try to build enjoyment in labor and self-realization in the identification of each man with the potentiality of the social.
Final Considerations
This research allowed for addressing the potential of the concept of the individual in the thought of the young Marx from a perspective that attributes a critical value to it, distancing itself from the traditional liberal view in which the individual is the central piece of the political system in an isolated and selfish manner. The research attempted to accompany the dynamism of Marx’s thought throughout his writings, without considering them as absolute or as ideas that exhaust themselves.
The concept of the individual presents itself as fundamental for thinking about emancipation, which corresponds with the appropriation of social forces by real individuals. For this, it is essential that the individual is defined in terms of his existence in the community and that he recognizes his own social and political power effectively in his daily life and not as something external and alien over which he has no control. At the same time, the search for the political in the life of the individual and men should not become mere mysticism, a theoretical-abstract construction, reducing philosophical thought to logic. Marx’s proposal suggests doing so by considering material reality in contrast to idealist thought, abstracted from its social context. In summary, there is an incessant search by the author to address the real in contrast to that which abstracts and becomes independent of the material world. This is also manifested concerning the concept of the individual, man, der Mensch, throughout the writings of the young Marx, which seems to be resolved, in Monal’s (1999) words, in an overcoming of abstract humanism: “Ultimately, the search for the exit from abstraction through an ahistorical Gattung concluded in an abstract humanism that Marx would have to overcome.”
The traces of the notion of the individual and individuality in the writings of the young Marx lead to a scientific Marx who will argue that there is no individual other than the one existing in reality, in each moment of historical becoming, from his physicality and sensoriality, and above all from his social being. This research, therefore, exposes indications present in the writings of the young Marx that lead to “Theses on Feuerbach,” a text in which an explicit break is expressed concerning notions related to a generic being or the possibility of man’s realization according to an idea of universality:
“In the Thesen über Feuerbach (Theses on Feuerbach), Marx introduces a radical change. It is, at that time, about overcoming the very abstraction in which the concept of Gattung (species, genus) and of the human essence (menschliche Wesen) have been resolved, and it is also about placing the real human individual in concrete society and overcoming the idea of an abstract ahistorical essence (Wesen/ or being). (…) It marks the foundation, in its first elaboration, of historical materialism, and with it, the period of maturity and the leap to scientificity. The attack on the idea of a Gattungswesen and the strong and radical critique of any philosophy that, in one way or another, is inspired or supported by the idea of an abstract Man are the compelling evidence of Marx and Engels’ ‘settling accounts’ with those influences and the definitive abandonment of conceptions that seek to understand social phenomena not as the history of real and concrete individuals immersed in their historical conditions, but ‘as a genre’ (Monal, 1999).”
The individual, der Mensch, man, the human being, will have a real, material existence, subject to his political, collective, and social context, and it is necessary to approach it in an integral rather than an isolated and/or abstract manner. The social and the real go hand in hand as fundamental pillars for understanding the existence of this conceptual piece. What is truly important is to enunciate those realities, produced by man, that enable alienation, suffering, and humiliation, to invert and eradicate them.
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