Author: Enrico Campo

Marx’s last years, when he famously failed to complete all the volumes of Capital, were for a long time viewed as a period of illness and even senescence, even though he was only 64 years old at his death in 1883. Since the 1980s, however, this period has received increasing attention, centering on two areas of intense contemporary concern: gender and the family, and Indigenous and village communities at the peripheries of capitalism. The first of these issues was brought to light through Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, published a year after Marx’s death on the basis of his notes on the Darwinian anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. For better or worse, Engels’s book is still considered in many quarters to be the classic Marxist treatise on the subject. The second of these topics was known through Marx’s 1881 letter to Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich — and the lengthy notes he made at the time — on Russia’s communal villages as a possible source of resistance to capital and as a building block for a communist future. But few were aware of the full extent of Marx’s research on which these two texts, one of them not even written by Marx, were based.
After the publication by Lawrence Krader in the 1970s of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and other notebooks from his last years, interest in the Late Marx slowly increased. A few feminist Marxists like Raya Dunayevskaya and Adrienne Rich in the 1980s, and later, Heather Brown, engaged Marx’s notes on gender and the family and found them more nuanced and complex than the perspectives of Engels, who tied gender oppression in reductive fashion to the rise of private property and the state. Others in the 1970s-1980s like Hans-Peter Harstick, Teodor Shanin and, again, Dunayevskaya — and later on David Norman Smith and this writer, among others — developed notions of the late Marx as a global, anti-colonial, and multilinear thinker. They did so based upon the notes on Russia that surrounded the Zasulich letter and a wide range of other unpublished notes on communal villages and Indigenous communities in South Asia, North Africa, and the Americas.
Marcello Musto’s intellectual biography enriches the discussion of the late Marx, here in an attempt to examine systematically the entirety of Marx’s intellectual concerns and projects during his last years, roughly 1875-1883. The book departs somewhat from the usual focus of an intellectual biography by covering Marx’s illnesses and the toll he suffered from the death of his spouse and collaborator Jenny Marx in late 1881, and then that of his daughter Jenny Longuet in early 1883. But as Musto constantly reminds us, Marx soldiered on with his scholarly and political projects until the very end. Thus, even after months of convalescence in Algeria and elsewhere in 1882 as ordered by physicians, a case of pleurisy, and other travails, Marx nonetheless resumed serious intellectual work in late 1882, only months before his death. This included notes on physics, ecology, and British imperialist designs on Egypt.
The book’s title, specifying the years 1881-1883, is a bit misleading, but this is all to the good, as it is hard to grasp Marx’s very last years without looking at the late 1870s as well. The period 1879-81 is the focus of the first and strongest chapter in the book, “New Research Horizons.” Here, Musto recounts Marx’s notes in his last years on a number of studies in the natural sciences, especially chemistry, and mathematics. All this research took place, he notes, during the same period as one of Marx’s key texts in the critique of political economy: his 1880 notes on the academic socialist economist Adolph Wagner, wherein he clarified his concept of value.
Not limiting himself to theoretical issues, Musto also takes up Marx on political matters, especially Ireland and India. In another blow to the notion of Marx’s last years as ones of decline and inactivity, Musto details his intense involvement in the French socialist movement. Marx had a major influence on the program put forward in 1880 by the French Workers’ Party, one of whose planks called for the “emancipation” of “all human beings without distinction of race or sex” (cited on p. 45). Soon afterwards, he also composed the questions for a lengthy Enquête Ouvrière, also intended for French workers.
In this chapter, Musto also takes up Marx’s notebooks on non-Western, colonial, and precapitalist societies during the years 1879-81. He begins with the 1879 notes on agrarian communally-oriented societies in precolonial and colonial Latin America, India, and Algeria. These notes were based on the work of a young Russian interlocutor of Marx during his last years, Maxim Kovalevsky’s book on communal property. (By this time, Marx had become fluent in Russian, a language he began to learn around the time when, to his surprise, Capital was translated into Russian in 1872 and soon garnered far more attention than the book’s German edition.) In his notes on Kovalevsky’s book, Marx rejects the common (including among his later followers) “feudal” appellation for these societies in their precolonial phases, thus breaking away from the slavery-feudalism-capitalism schema he and Engels advanced in the 1840s in the German Ideology. (This may account for the fact that, unlike the notes on Wagner, those on Kovalevsky were never included in USSR-sponsored editions like the Marx-Engels Collected Works.) In addition, as Musto argues persuasively, Marx saw the future of these societies in a non-deterministic manner in “his refusal to believe that either Indian or Algerian society was destined to follow the same course of development as in Europe” (p. 22).
As also recounted in an important part of this chapter, Marx pursued these interests further in what are usually termed the Ethnological Notebooks of 1880-81, his notes on Morgan, Henry Sumner Maine and other anthropologists. In those on Morgan, Marx identifies with the U.S. anthropologist’s critique of previous scholars who saw the family rather than the clan or gens as originative. In the latter, descent tended to be matrilineal and women to have exercised enormous social power, a phase that preceded the consolidation of the patriarchal family. At the same time, Musto is largely in accord with Dunayevskaya and Brown in showing Engels’s treatment of these issues as overly schematic in its reduction of changes in gender relations to those in the economic sphere. However, while Morgan, Marx, and Engels devoted tremendous space to Indigenous American societies (especially the Iroquois of North America), more briefly comparing them to the Greeks and the Romans, Musto concentrates almost exclusively on the latter. This leaves aside what many, including this writer, have seen as the more emancipatory implications for the future of their accounts, albeit varying ones, of these First Peoples.
These kinds of issues come to the fore in a more focused way in chapter two, “Controversy Over Capitalism in Russia,” the whole of which is devoted to Marx’s well-known 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich and other of his writings concerning agrarian Russia from 1877-82. Here, Musto wrestles with a deep contradiction: On the one hand, Marx celebrated the development of the productive forces through capitalist industrialization, which involved uprooting those villages and creating a proletariat, as had occurred in Western Europe in what he termed primitive accumulation. On the other hand, he wrote in the 1880s that Russia might be able to build communism around its communal villages without passing through capitalism and having to see its early form of communism uprooted. If the second possibility were true, then, as Marx wrote in 1877, his Russian defenders like Nilolai Mikhailovsky made a serious error by “transforming [my] historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historical-philosophical theory of the general course imposed upon all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves” (cited on p. 64). As a whole, Musto presents this issue with perspicacity, writing of “the thesis, falsely attributed to [Marx], that the bourgeois mode of production was everywhere an inevitability” (p. 59) and finding an “ever greater theoretical openness” (p. 69) in Marx’s approach to these and other issues by his last years.
At the same time, Musto differs strongly with the main bent of Shanin’s 1983 collection, Marx and the Russian Road, which saw the late writings on Russia as a sharp break with his earlier perspectives, as in the Communist Manifesto, where he had celebrated the expansion of capitalism eastward as a painful but necessary form of progress. In his brief 1881 reply to Zasulich, in the notes surrounding it, and in the 1882 preface to a new Russian edition of the Manifesto, Marx theorized about Russia’s communal villages, not as destined for absorption by a progressive capitalism, but as a possible social base of a progressive resistance to both capitalist encroachments and the Tsarist autocracy. They could, if they mobilized, move toward the modern communism Marx envisioned, and they might be able to do so without passing through capitalism. This kind of thinking, the Shanin book suggests, explains why Marx counted many Russian Populists among his friends during his last years. However, contra Shanin, Marx did not envision an autarkic socialism in one country, even one as large as Russia. Instead, as he wrote in the 1882 preface to the Manifesto, success on the communist project in Russia would depend upon linkages to the Western labor movement in a wider revolution, in which the Russian village might nonetheless be the spark, “the starting point for communist development” (cited on p. 71). At this juncture of the argument, Musto seems to bend Marx in the opposite direction from Shanin. Rather than a possible starting point for a serious revolution, the Russian villages instead become a mere bit player: “In [Marx’s] view, sporadic rebellions or resistance struggles must not be confused with the establishment of a new social-economic order on a communist basis” (p. 69). This too is a one-sided view.
All of this impinges on a larger question, whether Marx’s studies in his final years of communal social relations in a number of agrarian or nomadic societies in South Asia, North Africa, and Indigenous America were linked to his Russia writings in the sense that he saw their precapitalist communal social forms also as possible loci of resistance to capital. Musto answers decisively in the negative, underlining the uniqueness of the Russian case and writing that Marx did not intend to create a “general model” out of these wider studies of communal social forms (p. 69). But what about an inclination in that direction rather than a model per se? Many commentators on the late Marx, including this writer, would not dismiss the possibility of a broader research and political project. In this view, Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and similar late writings were concerned not only with social and economic development but also with real possibilities of resistance and revolution against capital outside Western Europe. It was in this sense that Dunayevskaya saw a return on Marx’s part to his 1850 concept of “Revolution in Permanenz.” It was also notable that Marx turned his attention eastward and southward in search of allies after the Western labor movement had been severely weakened in the wake of the repression of the Paris Commune and the break-up of the First International.
The rest of the book is more biographical, as it recounts Marx’s mounting health problems, the terrible blow inflicted on him in late 1881 by Jenny’s death, and other personal and family problems. Yet as Musto recounts, it was after his wife Jenny’s death that Marx completed a massive set of notes on European history, in the winter of 1881-82. These notes, still unpublished, are slated to fill an entire volume of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe. Under doctor’s orders, Marx traveled to Algeria from February through May 1882 for convalescence, but the weather was cold and stormy and the trip did not improve his recurrent bronchitis and other problems. While he apparently followed his physician’s recommendation to avoid mental or physical strain, his letters from Algeria to family members show some keen and admiring descriptions of Arab society and culture. Still in weakened condition upon his return to London, by fall 1882 Marx was again engaging in research, as seen in his notes on physics, ecology, and Egypt. The notes on Egypt took up an October 1882 article on the impact of British imperialism, its financial pressures, and local despotism, at a time when Britain was moving to directly occupy Egypt in the wake of the Urabi nationalist revolt.
Given that Marx’s health irrevocably deteriorated from late 1882 until his death in March 1883, those on Egypt may have been his last set of research notes. When one considers these very late research notes alongside the fact that Marx’s last publication — dated January 1882 — was the preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto that conceptualized Russia’s communal villages as a possible starting point for a European-wide communist revolution, it is no exaggeration to say that in his last years, Marx increasingly turned his attention eastward and southward, outside the areas of the world where the capitalist mode of production had penetrated the most deeply.
Musto’s study makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Marx in his last years, offering an angle from which to consider him that departs from the more usual focus on either the young Marx of alienation, dialectics, and humanism, or the “mature” Marx of the Grundrisse and Capital. Moreover, since Musto, as a biographer, surveys the whole of Marx’s intellectual and political projects during his last years, one gets for the first time a sense of how the various pieces fit together, or at least connected somehow.
This biographical focus also illustrates what some may consider a limitation of this study, that it is undertheorized. For example, the book never develops a real thesis or argument beyond the notion that Marx was an original thinker who worked in creative ways that have not been fully captured by the Marxist tradition or in previous biographies. But that would be a different book. As it stands, this study by Musto fills a huge gap in our understanding of Marx.

This book, published in English this year by Palgrave Macmillan, presents a selection of Marx’s texts on alienation.

The topic is particularly relevant today, when precarious living conditions and the generalization of remote work during the pandemic have once again raised the question of the impact of the production process (not only in an industrial context) on working class life, beginning with its effects on free time. In the United States, the “Great Resignation” is part of this phenomenon, as is the “Striketober” strike wave, and many other expressions of working-class struggles around the world.

The book is organized in two parts. First is an introductory study by the book’s editor, Marcello Musto, titled “Alienation Redux: Marxian Perspectives.” Musto presents Marx’s characterization of alienation, then traces its changes within the broader course of developing Marxist theory, addressing the various interpretations of the question in other traditions and various schools of 20th-century Marxism.

Part two comprises a set of Marx’s original writings, organized into three sections. The “Early Political and Philosophical Writings” section contains texts from 1844 to 1856, with passages from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The Holy Family, and The German Ideology, among others. It is followed by excerpts from the Grundrisse, from Marx’s unpublished critique of political economy from 1861–63, and from Theories of Surplus Value. The last section includes draft writings of Capital and passages from Capital itself, including excerpts from the 1863–65 manuscripts, and from the unpublished chapter 6.

The book’s selection of writings provides a clear idea of Marx’s treatment of alienation, and its place in his thought. This article is a review of the main arguments made by Musto in the introduction.

In the Beginning There Was Hegel
As Musto points out, the first systematic treatment of the question of alienation appears in Hegel, especially in Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s concept of alienation was built on an idealist theory of the spirit, which was objectified in reality, giving rise to the separation between subject and object, which would later be overcome by the identity of both. But his work also contained certain materialistic aspects: highlighting the importance of work as a form of objectification of human activity. But Hegel lacked a sufficiently clear picture of the specificity of labor under capitalism, and thus identified alienation with objectification (the activity that produces or modifies material objects apart from the subject and ideas).

Ludwig Feuerbach used the category of alienation in reference to religious phenomena, to explain their materialistic foundations. In Marx’s writings, the term appears only rarely in the works published during his lifetime, and it was generally ignored by Marxists until György Lukács’ published History and Class Consciousness in 1923.

Rediscoveries and Distortions
In the widely-read History and Class Consciousness, Lukács addressed the question of alienation, using the term “reification” to explain how productive activity confronts workers as something objective and independent of their will. Compared to the definitions found in works of Marx available to Lukács at the time of writing, Lukács tended to address the subject through a more philosophical lens. Under Hegel’s influence, he linked alienation to objectification, and it’s no coincidence that the idea of the proletariat as an “identical subject-object of history” was so central to Lukács’s work.

Isaak Ilyich Rubin’s works are much more in line with classical Marxism, and therefore far removed from the theory of the identical subject-object. Central to his explanation of the Marxian theory of value was the question of commodity fetishism, which he saw not as a problem of consciousness, but as a necessary social process of the capitalist economy, stemming from the private character of production for the market. But as Musto points out, Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value remained largely unknown outside the USSR until the 1970s, when it was translated into English.

The publication in 1932 of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 sparked new debates on the concept of alienation among those in various schools of philosophy and social sciences with an interest in Marx’s thought, as well as among certain sectors of activists, and in a new sector of “humanist” reinterpretations of Marx’s thought.

In his Manuscripts, Marx defined alienation in terms of a process by which the product of labor becomes an external object for workers, but also a power that confronts them as something foreign and hostile. He detailed four aspects of alienation experienced by workers in bourgeois society: (1) alienation from the product of their labor; (2) alienation from their labor activity, which they perceive as something directed against them; (3) alienation from their “species being” (from their own body and physical and spiritual faculties); and (4) alienation from other human beings.

While for Hegel, alienation was inherent in objectification, Marx conceived it as a specific characteristic of labor under capitalism. Thus, it was also not consistent to reinterpret the Manuscripts as a critique of human alienation in general, regardless of the class question. Incidentally, it should also be noted that in Hegel, the concept of self-production of human beings through their labor (as in his well-known master-slave dialectic) which was related to his readings of British political economy, and which Marx defended in his Manuscripts. But while he agreed with some aspects of Hegel’s elaborations on the question of labor, Marx pointed out that they were subordinated to an analysis of alienation that was especially focused on the alienation of abstract thought, which would be resolved by overcoming objectivity. For this reason, Marx considered Feuerbach’s materialism more satisfactory, though his interpretation of Hegel was not very sophisticated.

Musto adequately summarizes the scope and limitations of Marx’s text:

To underline the importance of the concept of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 for a better understanding of Marx’s development cannot involve drawing a veil of silence over the huge limits of this youthful text. Its author had scarcely begun to assimilate the basic concepts of political economy, and his conception of communism was no more than a confused synthesis of the philosophical studies he had undertaken until then. Captivating as they are, especially in the way they combine philosophical ideas of Hegel and Feuerbach with a critique of classical economic theory and a denunciation of working-class alienation, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are only a very first approximation, as is evident from their vagueness and eclecticism. They shed major light on the course Marx took, but an enormous distance still separates them from the themes and argument not only of the finished 1867 edition of Capital, Volume One, but also of the preparatory manuscripts for Capital, one of them published, that he drafted from the late 1850s on. In contrast to analyses that either play up a distinctive “Young Marx” or try to force a theoretical break in his work, the most incisive readings of the concept of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 have known how to treat them as an interesting, but only initial, stage in Marx’s critical trajectory. Had he not continued his research but remained with the concepts of the Paris manuscripts, he would probably have been demoted to a place alongside Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) and Feuerbach in the sections of philosophy manuals devoted to the Hegelian Left.1
Musto later reconstructs and discusses 20th century characterizations of alienation, notably including Heidegger’s “state of falling,” linked to the loss of authenticity of being in the experience of the world, which was far removed from the alienation of Marx. In Marcuse’s work, Musto underlines an identification of alienation and objectification, as well as a shift from the question of liberation from work to that of libido. In Adorno and Horkheimer, alienation appears as an estrangement related to social control and the manipulation of mass culture. Other interpretations, like those of Erich Fromm, influenced by psychoanalysis, addressed the question of alienation as characteristic of the individual subjective experience. In contrast, existentialist and neo-Hegelian interpretations of the question, from Sartre to Jean Hippolyte, presented it as characteristic of the experience of human self-consciousness throughout history.

Existentialist interpretations, as well as others such as Hannah Arendt’s, only addressed the question of the “self-alienation” or alienation of the individual from other human beings, without taking into account the other aspects discussed by Marx in his critique of the capitalist economy.

Musto identifies three broad positions among Marxists on the question of the Manuscripts in the postwar years: (1) those who considered them a transitional text of little importance; (2) those who separate the “Young Marx” from the “Mature Marx,” supporting one or the other based on interpretations that contrast the Manuscripts with Capital; and (3) those who view Marx’s theoretical trajectory as consistent, attributing to him a kind of monographic unity through the question of alienation.

Musto points out the one-sidedness of these three positions, highlighting the importance of stepping on solid ground in the interpretation of Marx’s work. Such an interpretation must base itself on how the question of alienation changes in relation to Marx’s understanding of the capitalist economy and the resulting development of his critique of political economy. It is also necessary to differentiate it from other positions that emerged in the 1960s, such as those of Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, or, from a more conservative perspective, U.S. sociology.

Between Disalienation and Autonomy
The question of alienation was addressed in important Marxist debates during the 20th century. I would like to elaborate on two such debates, which, though Musto doesn’t specifically reference them, are particularly illuminating. The first is the appropriation of the theme of alienation by dissident communists in Eastern countries. They sought to use their readings of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (and, more generally, Marx’s critique of alienation and commodity fetishism) to develop a critique of various aspects of Stalinism. In particular, this critique was aimed against the systems of government reliant on bureaucracy and police surveillance, against productivism and the “despotic” methods of factories, and against the promotion of uncritical conceptions of reality. Karel Kosik’s Dialectics of the Concrete, Mihailo Markovic’s Dialectics of Praxis, and Gajo Petrovic’s Marxism versus Stalinism are representative of this breed of interpretation, with their differences and points of convergence. After the end of Stalinism, these reflections may seem anachronistic or too specific, but I believe that to be a mistake. Any discussion about what socialism should look like necessarily involves a balance sheet and a critique of Stalinism. In addition to the theoretical, programmatic, and political legacy of Trotsky and the Left Opposition, we should also consider the contributions of those who confronted Stalinism with a “return to Marx,” which seemed to them at the time to be the only alternative at hand, in the absence of clear political continuity as a result of the repression of the Left Opposition.

Another important theoretical lineage to this story are the schools of operaismo and autonomism. Originally akin to the interpretations of Galvano Della Volpe, this tradition was always against the Hegelianizing interpretations of Marxism, while theorizing a less classically Marxist relationship between class struggle and technological progress. For operaismo, as Mario Tronti explained in Workers and Capital, capitalist development was the result of the struggle of the working class. This point of view relativizes the “foreign and hostile” character of the production process for the worker; instead, it emphasizes the struggle against the capitalist command of labor and for workers’ control of production. Later, these themes were reinterpreted by Antonio Negri, under the influences of poststructuralism and the theories of “cognitive capitalism.” Negri amplified the notion of “general intellect” developed by Marx in his fragment on machines (some passages of which are included in this compilation) to a power that unfolds as affective, communicative, and cognitive labor. Paradoxically, this position results in a defense of the progressiveness of capitalist development, much less critical than that of Marx, who underlined the contradictions between the advances of science and technology and the capitalist mode of production. In Marx, these contradictions are an expression of class contradiction, characterized by the extraction of surplus value and the impossibility of freeing the labor force without changing the system by revolutionary means. Let us go back to Marx to see how he addressed this problem.

Alienation and Capitalist Exploitation
In Capital and its preparatory manuscripts, as well as in the unpublished chapter 6, Marx develops a notion of alienation that is more closely linked to a clearer theory of capitalist exploitation and the extraction of surplus value.

As Musto points out,

Until the late 1850s, there were no more references to the theory of alienation in Marx’s work. Following the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, he was forced to go into exile in London; once there, he concentrated all his energies on the study of political economy and, apart from a few short works with a historical theme, did not publish another book. When he began to write about economics again, however, in the Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1857–58), better known as the Grundrisse, he more than once used the term “alienation.” This text recalled in many respects the analyses of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, although nearly a decade of studies in the British Library had allowed him to make them considerably more profound.2
In the Grundrisse, Marx directly associates the question of alienation with commodity exchange, just as, in the unpublished chapter 6 of Capital, he refers to the process of the personification of things and the reification of people. But he goes further, positing that capital subordinates to its own interest not only the worker’s immediate activity, but also the cooperative production process itself, as well as scientific and technological advances in the production,improvement and development of machinery. These matters are also addressed in Capital when Marx defines the phenomenon of commodity fetishism.

Marx explains commodity fetishism as a necessary process of capitalist production:

This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them. As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a two-fold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz. expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract. The two-fold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour, have one common quality, viz., that of having value.

The notion of commodity fetishism addresses the topics discussed by Marx in his previous writings on alienation, but in a more complex manner. In the Manuscripts, Marx focused on the process by which labor, the products of labor, and other people become foreign and hostile to the worker, sharpening his critique of the dehumanization imposed by private property. In Capital, Marx maintains the idea that the labor process and its products appear to the worker as something foreign and independent of his will, just as his relationship with other people is established through commerce, but now ties the idea more concretely to the question of exploitation. The separation of the working class from the means of production causes workers to see the means of production as something foreign and external to themselves. This is the prerequisite for the extraction of surplus value, because “free” workers must sell their labor power to capitalists and, in this process, produce the value necessary to pay their own wages and the surplus value that is the basis of capitalist profit.

Let us return to Musto’s argument:

Two elements in this definition mark a clear dividing line between Marx’s conception of alienation and the one held by most of the other authors we have been discussing. First, Marx conceives of fetishism not as an individual problem but as a social phenomenon, not as an affair of the mind but as a real power, a particular form of domination, which establishes itself in market economy as a result of the transformation of objects into subjects. For this reason, his analysis of alienation does not confine itself to the disquiet of individual women and men, but extends to the social processes and productive activities underlying it. Second, for Marx fetishism manifests itself in a precise historical reality of production, the reality of wage labour; it is not part of the relation between people and things as such, but rather of the relation between man and a particular kind of objectivity: the commodity form.3
In both the Grundrisse and Capital, Marx has a much more complex view of capitalism and, therefore, a much clearer materialist understanding of the phenomenon of alienation. His vision of society and revolutionary change also becomes more complex. Hence, in Capital, Marx points out that capitalism appropriates the advances of science, technology, and the organization of labor for its own benefit, but at the same time creates conditions for communism, such as cooperation in the labor process, the development and application of technologies, the appropriation of the forces of nature that can be used for production, the creation of machinery that can only be used jointly by several workers, the economization of the means of production, and the tendency to create a world market.

Why Communism Is Necessary
This book is a good introduction to the topic of alienation in Marx that contributes to a clear understanding of the scope and limits of his treatment of the matter. In this regard, Musto’s preliminary study is very effective.

Musto debates both those who minimize the importance of the issue, and those who say that it is the main theme of Marx’s thought. He shows how Marx’s ideas on the problem become much clearer and more solid as he gains a better understanding of capitalism itself.

But at the same time, Musto makes this argument in order to explain Marx’s revolutionary political thought. Alienation is not a problem of the human being in general, or of the individual conscience, or any form of abstract objectification. Marx’s approach shows the contradictory process between the creation of conditions for the construction of a communist society, which are inherent to capitalist development of the productive forces, and the orientation of production and reproduction toward extracting surplus value and realizing capitalist profit.

Capitalism creates the conditions necessary for the fight for communism, but that is all it does. It must be subverted through socialist revolution, overcoming the resistance of the exploiting and oppressing classes, to establish a society based on free cooperation, collective property, and the search for the broadest freedoms for the people.

Originally published in Spanish on November 11, 2021, in Ideas de Izquierda.

Translation by Marisela Trevin

Karl Marx died in 1883. In the more than 20 biographies written about him, most depict his final years as spent quietly waiting to die.

Certainly he had enough personal and family health problems to justify retiring into contemplation.

For example, in their authoritative 1933 biography Karl Marx: Man and fighter, Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen said that after a bout of illness in 1873, “Marx never regained his old capacity for work”.

Marx, they said, “remained the insatiable reader that he had always been; he continued indefatigably making extracts from what he read, he went on collecting material, but he no longer had the capacity to organise it”.

More recent biographies, such as Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital or Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, while touching lightly on this period, continue in the same vein.

Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins successfully interrogates Marx’s late intellectual trajectory, but leaves out the personal story.

Marcello Musto has stepped in to round out the account in this short, four chapter-long intellectual and personal biography. And what a story it is.

Musto presents Marx’s studies, political interventions, correspondence, personal life, diseases, sorrows, and journeys during his last decade. It is true that Marx did not publish much of consequence during this time, but he never stopped investigating social formations and other subjects.

After his death, mountains of notes were left for Frederich Engels and Eleanor Marx to trawl through. From this material Engels produced the second and third volumes of Capital and the famous segment of the Dialectics of Nature, entitled The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

All these notes have now become public, via the Marx-Engels Collected Works project, known as MEGA2.

Marx read and took notes on a wide range of disciplines such as agricultural chemistry, physiology and physics. When illnesses fogged his mind he turned to mathematical calculus for relief, resulting in his Mathematical Manuscripts.

He also studied anthropology, collected into his Ethnological Notebooks (from which Engels extracted). He researched ancient history, the history of banking and modern history, which are compiled into the Chronological Extracts.

The Extracts, Musto says, are “an annotated year-by-year timeline of world events from the first century BC on, summarising their causes and salient features”.

All the while, he corresponded with workers’ organisations and leaders around the world. Not bad for an aging, infirm revolutionary.

The German edition of Capital sold out in 1881 and the publisher suggested a revised edition, but Marx never got around to providing it. Musto says Marx was preoccupied by his wife Jenny’s final illness, he wanted to see how the 1880’s British industrial struggles would develop and he had started to study the development of US capitalism and it was leading him into new thinking.

It was Marx’s preparedness to allow new facts to broaden his theories that prevented him from being a rigid dogmatist, Musto believes, something that he believes succeeding generations of Marxists have suffered from.

Marx’s flexibility of thought is probably best illustrated in his response to the 1881 letter from Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, in which she asked him for his opinion on the Russian peasant village communes. She asked if Russian revolutionaries should organise among the peasants or look to the then-minute Russian working class.

Marx took the question very seriously and drafted multiple answers. He taught himself Russian to research Russian statistics and read Russian novels to understand the culture.

In his answer to Zasulich, Marx states that his analysis of capitalism in Western Europe need not apply to Russia. He says of the peasant form of collective property that “the special study I have made of it … has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.”

Marx drafted a letter to another Russian populist, Nicholai Mikhailovsky, in which he said that “events of striking similarity, taking place in different historical contexts” often lead to totally “disparate results”. This reads like an early formulation of what came to be known as the theory of Combined and Uneven Development, which holds that worldwide events, such as economic depressions or wars, can cause a variety of effects.

Musto gives a detailed account of Marx’s journey to Algeria in early 1882, to repair his health and research common land ownership among Arabs.

He was afflicted by weakness that dogged him his whole time there. He did research some social practices, observed the racist behaviour of the colonial police and wrote some witty letters home about how he had cut his beard and hair because of the heat. He slowly made his way home to Britain, but was shocked by the death of his daughter, Jenny, from cancer. Marx died not long after, quietly at home.

Musto’s combination of personal biography and intellectual appraisal makes for inspiring reading. He argues very well that Marx’s ideas cannot be limited to a simplistic formula, but are living and dynamic.

A disappointment is his brief treatment of Marx’s friendship and correspondence with the zoologist Edwin Ray Lankester. Lankester was a socialist who engaged with Marx in what Musto describes as a “prolific intellectual exchange”.

But little of this interaction is presented, in fact it occupies less than a page. John Bellamy Foster has examined this relationship in his book The Return of Nature.

Bellamy Foster argues that it was vital to the ecological underpinning in Marx’s works. In effect, Marxism should be seen as a philosophy of nature as much as a philosophy of social revolution.

Apart from that one quibble, Musto’s work has much to recommend it. It smashes any attempt to force Marxism into a rigid economic determinism.

Rather, Musto says, Marx looked to “the specificity of historical conditions, the multiple possibilities that the passing of time offered, and the centrality of human intervention in the shaping of reality and the achievement of change”.