Robert C. Tucker - The Marx-Engels Reader (Chapter 1.10. Alienation and Social Cla**es) lyrics

Alienation and Social Cla**es KARL MARX A meeting between Marx and Engels in Paris at the end of August, 1844, inaugurated their lifelong collaboration. Their first jointly written work, published in 1845, was The Holy Family: A Critique of Critical Criticism, a heavily satirical polemic against Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. The following pa**age, probably written by Marx, shows the alienation doctrine of the 1844 man*scripts merging into the cla** struggle doctrine as we encounter it in The German Ideology and later Marxist writings. It is also of value as a revelation of Marx's special way of conceiving and explaining historical necessity. The translation for this edition is by R. C. Tucker * * *The proletariat and wealth are opposites. As such they form a whole. They are both products of the world of private property. The whole question is what position each of these two elements occupies within the opposition. It does not suffice to pro-claim them two sides of one whole. Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to preserve its own existence and thereby the existence of its opposite, the proletariat. This is the positive side of the antagonism, private property satisfied with itself. The proletariat, on the other hand, is compelled to abolish itself and thereby its conditioning opposite private property which makes it a proletariat. This is the negative side of the antagonism, its disturbance within itself, private property abolished and in the process of abolishing itself. The possessing cla** and the proletarian cla** represent one and the same human self-alienation.2 But the former feels satisfied and affirmed in this self-alienation, experiences the alienation as a sign of its own power, and possesses in it the appearance of a human existence. The latter, however, feels destroyed in this alienation, seeing in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence. To use Hegel's expression, this cla** is, within depravity, anIndignation against this depravity, an indignation necessarily aroused in this cla** by the contradiction between its human natureand its life-situation, which is a blatant, outright and all-embracing denial of that very nature. Within the antagonism as a whole, therefore, private property represents the conservative side and the proletariat the destructiveside. From the former comes action aimed at preserving the antagonism; from the latter, action aimed at its destruction. In its economic movement, it is true, private property presses towards its own dissolution, but it does this only by means of a developmental course that is unconscious and takes place independently of it and against its will, a course determined by the nature of the thing itself. It does this only by giving rise to the proletariat as proletariat this poverty conscious of its own spiritual and physical poverty, this dehumanization which is conscious of itself as a dehumanization and hence abolishes itself.3 The proletariat executes the sentence that proletariat producing private property pa**es upon itself, just as it executes the sentence that wage labour pa**es upon itself by producing others' wealth and its own poverty. When the proletariat wins victory, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it wins victory only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Both the proletariat itself and its conditioning opposite-private property disappear with the victory of the proletariat. If socialist writers attribute this world historical role to the proletariat, this is by no means, as critical criticism a**ures us, because they regard the proletarians as gods. On the contrary. Since the fully formed proletariat represents, practically speaking, the completed abstraction from everything human, even from the appearance of being human; since all the living conditions of contemporary society have reached the acme of inhumanity in the living conditions of the proletariat; since in the proletariat man has lost himself, although at the same time he has both acquired a theoretical consciousness of this loss and has been directly forced into indigna¬tion against this inhumanity by virtue of an inexorable, utterly unembellishable, absolutely imperious need, that practical expression of necessity-because of all this the proletariat itself can and must liberate itself. But it cannot liberate itself without destroying its own living conditions. It cannot do so without destroying all the inhuman living conditions of contemporary society which are concentrated in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the harsh but hardening school of labour. It is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole pictures at present as its goal . It is a matter of what the proletariat is in actuality and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically becompelled t o d o . Its goal and its historical action are prefigured in the most clear and ineluctable way in its own life-situation as well as in the whole organization of contemporary bourgeois society. There is no need to harp on the fact that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is continually working to bring this consciousness to full clarity. Footnotes: I. e., qua proletariat. The verb is auiheben [R. T.] 2. The term u sed here is Selbstent fremdung. [R . T.] 3. Here and further on in this paragraph, the word translated as "abolish" is auf heben. [R. T.]