David B. Shemano wrote:
Can you guys help me to understand the thinking here? If I am
ugly, isn't it a good thing that money exists so I can have a shot
at beautiful women? Is Marx really saying that it is unjust for an
ugly person to attract a beautiful woman? That an ugly person
should accept his lot in life? Is it unjust for a bald person to
use Rogaine? As an American, I believe in the inherent right of
all to reinvent themselves What exactly is the ethical/
philosophical issue that Marx finds so troubling?
Marx's "ethics" don't lead to "moralistic" judgments. They derive
from a wholly positive view of aesthetic, intellectual and ethical
value. Viewed from this "ethical" perspective, the problem with sex
for money is that it can't be as "good" as sex within an ideal
ethical relation of "mutual recognition". The latter relation is
inconsistent with capitalist relations and the particular form of
human "self-estrangement" they embody. At the end of the Manuscript
from which the passage you've quoted is taken, Marx points to the
kind of "exchange" that would characterize human relations where
"self-estrangement" has been overcome and the human
"essence" (understood as the potential for fully rational willing and
acting) actualized.
"Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human
one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc.
If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated
person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must
be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other
people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a
specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of
your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return
— that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love;
if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do
not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent — a
misfortune."
A more general statement of the same ethical idea, this time as an
account of how we would "produce" if "we had carried out production
as human beings", is found in his "Comments on James Mill".
Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings.
Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other
person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my
individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not
only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity,
but also when looking at the object I would have the individual
pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the
senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or
use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being
conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of
having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus
created an object corresponding to the need of another man's
essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator between
you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt
by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as
a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to
be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the
individual expression of my life I would have directly created your
expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I
would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human
nature, my communal nature.
Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our
essential nature.
This relationship would moreover be reciprocal; what occurs on my
side has also to occur on yours.
Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition:
My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment
of life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of
life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself
the means of life. My work is not my life.
Secondly, the specific nature of my individuality, therefore, would
be affirmed in my labour, since the latter would be an affirmation
of my individual life. Labour therefore would be true, active
property. Presupposing private property, my individuality is
alienated to such a degree that this activity is instead hateful to
me, a torment, and rather the semblance of an activity. Hence, too,
it is only a forced activity and one imposed on me only through an
external fortuitous need, not through an inner, essential one.
My labour can appear in my object only as what it is. It cannot
appear as something which by its nature it is not. Hence it appears
only as the expression of my loss of self and of my powerlessness
that is objective, sensuously perceptible, obvious and therefore
put beyond all doubt.
<http://mia.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/index.htm>
Both the "The Power of Money" and "Comments on James Mill" date from
1844. As I've more than once pointed out, however, the same ethical
ideas can be found endorsed and elaborated throughout Marx's writings
early and late. They place him within a very old tradition of
thought about both ethics and "political economy", a tradition that
includes Aristotle with his conception of a "good life" - a
"flourishing life" - as "eudaimonia" and of "political economy" as
the "art" of providing to "citizens" what each "needs" to be enabled
to live such a life (the art, as Marx puts it, of providing "to each
according to his needs").
Ted
