Tying up some loose ends

Since the paper we turned in last week was a short foot note to Marx, I wanted to use this blog post to explore some what an idea that I left behind in last class, that I didn’t have time to adequately address in the paper, and since the paper was only meant to be a examination of Marx to show our knowledge of the text, not to reinvent the wheel with Marx.

At the beginning of the class Dr.J asked what we found interesting in the text, if we made any discoveries. My discovery was a small but interesting one to me. What I found was a new connection in estranged labor. Now, in the section of estranged labor, Marx takes a very logical sequence of steps. He first moves from man’s estrangement from his product, then from his labor, himself, lastly his species being. This sequence follows the order in which Marx says that these estrangements take place, as each new step is the cause of the next.

However, what I found interesting was coupling something I found in the German ideology with Marx’s theory of estranged labor. Marx says in the section on estranged labor that mans estrangement from himself causes him to lose his ability to relate to his species being. However, What I found was that in the German ideology was that Marx says, much like Hegel, that Man requires Man in order to recognize himself in the other. That ones own humanity can only be recognized in ones self in relation to another person.

With this in mind, it seems to me that if in fact this is the case, that it is not that man loses himself and loses his species identity as a result, It is the other way around. Man estranges himself from the owner from the means of production first, because he is the one that holds all of the foreign objects created by the worker. Then he estranges himself from his fellow workers, because he sees that they are no more free human agents than he himself, which would be fine, except he is constantly in direct competition with them. Finally he estranges himself from his species because he can no longer recognize other himself in other people. Since he can no longer see himself in others, the worker does not identify with any other people. Since the worker has no equals, only competitors and the owner of the means of production, now he can find no person that can recognize him as a human, and without this relation to his fellow man, the worker loses himself.

Like I said I know this is very condensed and provides no support, but I just wanted to give a quick footnote to what I meant, not so much to explain it and analyze it at length.