"Karl Marx's Realist Critique of Capitalism - Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism" by Paul Raekstad

MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
Karl Marx’s
Realist Critique of
Capitalism
Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism
Paul Raekstad
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Series Editors
Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
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issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.
Paul Raekstad
Karl Marx’s Realist

Critique of Capitalism
Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism
Paul Raekstad
Social and Behavioral Sciences
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-031-06352-7 ISBN 978-3-031-06353-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06353-4
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Acknowledgements
I owe a great thanks to my Ph.D. supervisors Raymond Geuss and

Lorna “LoLo” Finlayson, who were a vital help during the research that
this book is based on. Their abilities and efforts are beyond anything
that anyone can reasonably demand or expect. Many other friends and
colleagues have been kind enough to listen to, read, and comment on
various parts of this work at different stages. For that, I would like to
thank professor Akshath Jitendranath, Al Campbell, Annelien De Dijn,
Ammar Ali Jan, Ben Cross, Dan Swain, David Bates, Enzo Rossi, Erik
Van Ree, Janosch Prinz, Jules Townshend, Mahvish Ahmad, Nicholas
Vrousalis, Mathias Thaler, Nina Rismal, Paul “OP” Giladi, Rachel “The
Malkinator” Malkin, Ragnhild Faller, Uğur Aytaç, and Zoe Baker.
Among those not already mentioned, I also owe a great deal to the
friends who have supported me, you know who you are.
I will always owe a special debt of gratitude to my mother, Evelyn
Melanie Rækstad, without whose incomparable efforts and devotion I
would never have been able to do any of this, and would most likely
not be around at all.
I have presented the research that’s gone in this book at various confer-
ences and workshops throughout the last handful of years. I am grateful
to all participants of them for their very helpful feedback, and in partic-
ular Catarina Neves for inviting me to present at the reading group on
“The predistributive politics of a property-owning democracy” and Enzo
Rossi for organising a book workshop at the University of Amsterdam.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A couple of chapters of the book have been previously published. Parts

of Part I have appeared as Raekstad, P. 2018. Human Development and
Alienation in the Thought of Karl Marx. European Journal of Political
Theory 17(3), pp. 300–323. Parts of Part II have appeared as Raekstad,
P. 2017. The Democratic Theory of the Early Marx. Archiv für Geschichte
der Philosophie 99(4), pp. 443–464. In all of these cases, as well as in the
case of the anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript for Palgrave, I
am grateful to anonymous referees and editors for their comments and
insights.
Finally, I’d like to thank Terrell Carver for his faith in the book and for
all his help and Uma Vinesh at Palgrave for her patience and help with
getting the book published. I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone, for which
I’m sorry.
Naturally, all mistakes remain my own, but realistically if there are any
that are too glaring you’d expect some of these people to have spotted
them.
Abbreviations
Throughout this book, I provide two references to quotes from Marx and
Engels’ writings, the first in the most widely available English translation I
can find, followed by one in one of the two editions of Marx and Engels’
collected works in German, where possible.
The current edition of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe—Marx, K. and
Engels, F. 1975-. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe. (MEGA 2 ).
Berlin: Dietz/ Akademie Verlag —has been cited by volume such that
volume 1:2, page 234, is cited as I:2, p. 234. There are some cases where
I reference texts without quoting, in which case I refer to them only as
e.g. I:2, p. 234.
In a few cases where I’ve been unable to get hold of the German
original in MEGA 2 , I’ve also instead cited from MEGA 1 —Marx, K. and
Engels, F. 1927–1932, 1935. Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels-Historische-
kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, Schriften, Briefe. Berlin: Marx-Engels
Verlag—in the same way, but preceded with MEGA1 , such that e.g.
volume I:3, page 206 is cited as MEGA1 I:3, p.206.
The English-language collection of Marx and Engels’ collected
works—Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1975–2004. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels:
collected works. London: Lawrence and Wishart—are cited by volume and
page number, such that volume 6, page 192, is cited as MECW 6, p. 192.
The Marx and Engels selected works in English—Marx, K. and Engels,
F. 1969. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works in Three Volumes.
Moscow: Progress Publishers—have been abbreviated MESW, followed
vii
viii ABBREVIATIONS
by the volume number, followed by the page number, such that e.g.
volume 1, page 502 will be cited as MESW 1, p. 502–503.
All other citations are given by author, date, and page number.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Part I Human Development and Freedom

2 Human Development 21
3 Freedom 49
Part II Alienation and Democracy

4 The First Theory of Alienation 79
5 Democracy 91
6 From Realisation-Oriented to Agent-Centred Political
Theory 103
Part III Alienation: The Unfreedom of Capitalism

7 Alienation and Unfreedom 119
8 The Socialist Alternative 155
9 Radical Theory and Revolutionary Practice 195
10 Towards a New World 213
ix
x CONTENTS
Appendix: A Brief Overview of the (Other) Principal

Interpretations of Marx’s Normative
Commitments 221
Bibliography 263
Index 283
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Marx is a theorist of emancipation, famous as a trailblazing analyst of

capitalism, a fierce critic of its alienation and domination, and perhaps
the greatest socialist thinker to date. Yet over a century after his death,
there’s little agreement on what any of these consist in or how they hang
together. This book aims to change that, explaining how they combine
to form a unified critique of capitalism that remains as powerful and
compelling as ever.
This task is rendered all the more important by Marx’s influence on
the rebirth of radical politics worldwide and the persistent interest in his
theory of alienation.1 Unsurprisingly, the resurgence of radical move-
ments has been accompanied by a number of new studies on Marx.2
Many of these rightly emphasise Marx’s critique of capitalism being one
of unfreedom, but display a number of interrelated shortcomings. One of
the most prominent ones is that in order to fit Marx’s work into popular
moulds that define freedom as not being subject to the arbitrary power of
1 For just a small handful of examples, see Dixon (2014), Graeber (2009, 2015),
Holloway (1997, 2010), Mészáros (1972, 1995), and Lebowitz (2003, 2010, 2012,
2020).
2 There are too many to list here, but they include Carver (2018), Heinrich (2012,
2021), Jones (2016), Musto (2020), Roberts (2017), Lebowitz (2010, 2020), and Saito
(2017).
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
P. Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06353-4_1
2 P. RAEKSTAD
another, there’s a tendency not to explore the foundational role played by

his theory of human development, as well as misunderstand his theory of
freedom and saying relatively little about his radically democratic vision
of socialism.3 This in turn leads to underestimating the challenge that
Marx’s ideas pose to contemporary proposals for free economic institu-
tions. Nobody has so far been able to provide a holistic account of Marx’s
critique of capitalism that can make sense of the connections between all
of these aspects of his thought and explore their implications for a free
and democratic socialist society.
These limitations are partly due to the long-standing neglect of Marx’s
approach to political theorising. Broadly speaking, the form that contem-
porary Anglo-American political theory has taken since the 1970s, with
its reinvigoration in the work of John Rawls,4 can largely be described
as Platonic and Kantian, focusing on the formulation, comparison, and
evaluation of abstract principles of justice, and only subsequently looking
to their application in the real world.5 In response to the manifest short-
comings of this approach, thinkers like Bernard Williams and Raymond
Geuss have spearheaded a revival of what they call realist approaches to
political theory.6 Realism is based on the idea that political theory should
3 Following many others in the literature, I prefer to speak of “socialism” rather than
“communism”. Largely, this is done because the term “communism” today is commonly
associated with the centrally planned single-party dictatorships of e.g. the USSR, which
were very different from the vision Marx himself lays out under that term. For the
literature on Marx and republicanism, see Abensour (2011), Fischer (2015), Isaac (1990),
Jones (2016), Leipold (2020, 2022), Leopold (2007), Roberts (2017, 2018), Thompson
(2019), and Vrousalis (2021). It’s worth pointing out that there are two very different
senses in which thinkers are labelled “republicans” in contemporary anglophone political
theory, including (a) adopting the republican/neo-Roman concept of freedom as not
being subject to the will/arbitrary power of another and (b) sharing a broad cluster of
concerns about domination, slavery, servitude, and the emancipation of at least some
people. In the former sense, Marx is not a republican, but in the latter sense he certainly
is in various ways, and there’s a growing cottage industry exploring it.
4 See Rawls (1999, 2001, 2005).
5 For more on this, see Raekstad (2015, 2020b, and forthcoming b).
6 For the discussions most relevant to my concerns here, see Baderin (2014), Brinn
(2019), Duff (2017), Finlayson (2015), Floyd and Stears (2011), Frazer (2008, 2010),
Galston (2010), Geuss (2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2020), Hall (2015, 2017), Honig
(1993), Menke (2010), Mészáros (2011), Mouffe (2006), Newey (2010), Philp (2012),
Prinz (2016), Prinz and Rossi (2017), Raekstad (2015, 2018b, 2020b, 2020c, forth-
coming b), Rossi (2010, 2012, 2014, 2019), Rossi and Sleat (2010, 2014), Sangiovanni
(2008), Sleat (2013), Valentini (2012), Williams (2008), Wolff (2011), and Wright
1 INTRODUCTION 3
above all seek to make sense of and guide real politics.7 On this view, the
tasks of political theory are first and foremost to help make sense of and
guide various forms of real politics—such as social and political move-
ments, political parties, and so on. This requires starting from questions
of the available forms of agency and their contexts, questions of timing
and priority of possible actions, and questions of motivation, justifica-
tion, and legitimation. Realists typically argue that doing this well entails
rejecting what they call the “moralist” or “ethics-first” approaches to
political theory of Rawls and others, because they tend not to be very
good at fulfilling this vocation. By contrast, realists tend to avoid abstract
theories of moral rules and rule-like systems of perfect justice and their
application, in favour of more embedded and contextual reflections on
political values; understanding and explaining the operations of different
forms of real politics; orienting political agents; evaluating achievable
alternative institutions, actions, and the like; various forms of genealogy
and ideology critique; and conceptual development and innovation.8 Key
realist thinkers like Raymond Geuss explicitly draw on Karl Marx’s work
as a paradigm case of the approach they advocate, yet nobody has so far
produced a detailed realist interpretation thereof.
Reading Marx through a realist lens enables a holistic reconstruction
of his critique of capitalism, tying together his normative commitments,
diagnosis of capitalist alienation and unfreedom, and positive vision of
(2010). Interestingly, these methodological developments are connected with the re-birth
of normative approaches focusing on human development—both within Marxist scholar-
ship (see esp. Lebowitz, 2003, 2010, 2012; other writers who have emphasised Marx’s
critique of capitalism in terms of human development include Booth, 1992; Hamilton,
2003; Mészáros, 1972, 1995, 2011, 2014; Ollman 1976; Sayers 2007a, b) and among
political theorists more broadly (see Nussbaum 1992a, b, 2011; Sen, 1984a, b, 1987,
1992, 1999, 2010; Wolff and de-Shalit, 2007). I’ve previously argued that Sen’s human
development approach and his methodology connects to Marx’s in Raekstad (2015,
2018a). Finally, it’s worth noting that Sen himself is an advocate of what he calls a
comparative approach to political theory, which I’ve argued elsewhere (Raekstad 2015) is
a kind of realism.
7 Realism is sometimes confused with non-ideal theory, which focuses more on what the
role of feasibility constraints should be in political theory. While they can come apart (one
can do e.g. realist ideology critique that makes no use of feasibility constraints) there’s a
lot of overlap between the two, with thinkers like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Amartya Sen,
and Charles Mills arguably falling into both camps. For a bit more on this, see Raekstad
(2015).
8 Geuss (2008, Part I).
4 P. RAEKSTAD
socialism. My reconstruction begins by explaining the normative commit-

ments that Marx’s critique builds on. The two most prominent candidates
here have long been theories of human development9 and of positive
freedom.10 Yet nobody has so far been able to explain how these two
connect in Marx’s work. This book does, starting with developing a
more sophisticated interpretation of Marx’s conception of human devel-
opment than any other so far. On the basis of this, I show how Marx
develops a positive concept of freedom as self-direction, which is key
to understanding the resulting critique of capitalism. With this in hand,
I reconstruct what I argue are two methodologically and substantively
distinct diagnoses of capitalist unfreedom in two different theories of
alienation, one earlier (1842–1843) and one later (from 1844 onwards
all the way to Capital ), along with their corresponding visions of a free
future society—democracy and socialism, respectively. One thing that’s
often missing from the alienation literature is a precise account of what
makes alienation undesirable. I, by contrast, reconstruct both theories
of alienation as diagnosing how capitalism thwarts human freedom and
thereby human development. Against some recent republican readings of
Marx, I show how only a positive theory of freedom is able to make
sense of these diagnoses of capitalist unfreedom and his radically demo-
cratic proposals for how to cure it. This in turn enables me to defend
Marx’s analysis against its most insightful critics, showing that it remains
both compelling and defensible today. Finally, against the widespread
misconception that Marx’s ideas of capitalist alienation and unfreedom are
ill-at-ease with his later theories about human beings, society, and socialist
revolution, I show that they in fact provide the core of his later theorising
about the driving forces of socialism: the revolutionary contradictions of
capitalism.
This should be of interest to anyone concerned with understanding
Marx’s critique of capitalism, his theories of alienation and socialism, the
prospects for radical forms of realism, contemporary debates about the
unfreedom of capitalism, and visions of free future economic institutions.
To those interested primarily in Marx, what this book offers is the first
9 Esp. Mészáros (1972, 1995), Lebowitz (2010), Leopold (2007), and Sayers (2007a,
b, ch. 9).
10 Esp. Blackledge (2012), Sayers (2007b, 2011), Swain (2019a, b), and Tabak (2020).
1 INTRODUCTION 5
reconstruction of how all the main elements of his critique of capitalism

fit together and feed into his mature theory of revolution.
To those interested in alternatives to capitalism, this book shows how
Marx’s ideas continue to pose a powerful challenge to contemporary
proposals for economic reform and offer important ideas about how we
can democratise economic institutions and why we have reason to do so.
Inspired by the republican tradition that Marx was part of and responding
to, a number of contemporary thinkers have criticised the personal
power of capitalists over workers and the structure of property relations
that forces workers to subject themselves to it, recommending things
like co-determination, dispersing ownership of the means of produc-
tion, and democratising individual firms as sufficient to secure economic
emancipation.11 Marx challenges these ideas in a number of ways. He
develops a positive concept of freedom that can capture both personal
and impersonal forms of domination. He also diagnoses the impersonal
domination inherent in capitalist-type competitive markets and how hier-
archical divisions of labour entail personal relations of domination in the
workplace. Based on this, he shows that economic freedom thus requires
not just replacing the power of capitalists with workers’ councils, but also
replacing competitive markets with democratic planning and abolishing
the hierarchical division of labour.
To those primarily interested in realism, this book reconstructs two
models of how Marx did it in ways that are both radical and transfor-
mative. The first of these is a radical democratic critique of capitalism
and the state; the second is his socialist critique of capitalist society. Both
of these merge empirical and normative components and seek to make
sense of and guide real politics—but this is no obstacle to their radical-
ness. On Marx’s view, the inhabitants of capitalist societies have at our
disposal all the potentials we need for a truly free society, one that better
enables the development and flourishing of all. What’s preventing us from
making use of these potentials are the inherently unfree social relations of
capitalism. Marx’s later political theory aims to make sense of this situa-
tion and guide the revolutionary working-class movement to better realise
its interest in its own empowerment and emancipation, replacing capi-
talism with a free society that enables us all to develop our potentials.
11 See e.g. Anderson (2017), Breen (2015), González-Ricoy (2014) Gourevitch (2015),
Hsieh (2008, 2012), and White (2011). Naturally, there’s a lot more detail to their
proposals, and differences among them, than can be discussed here.
6 P. RAEKSTAD
Marx is not reading a normative ideal of capitalism off from its existing
institutions, nor from the ideas and values of pro-capitalist theoreticians.
Instead, he’s analysing the inherent potentials and limitations of capitalist
societies from the perspective and interests of the oppressed who already
are fighting for their self-emancipation. Marx doesn’t need some abstract
theory of justice to do this, nor impose some enlightening principles on
the working-class movement from the outside. Instead, this critique is
offered to a (potentially) revolutionary working-class movement that’s
already perceiving the unfreedom of capitalism and seeking to overthrow
it. In this way, Marx is fulfilling the realist vocation of making sense of real
politics and contributing to the actions of the agents involved, helping the
present give birth to one of the futures it’s already pregnant with.
The book is structured as follows. Part I begins by laying out a unified
account of the normative commitments that Marx’s critique of capi-
talism builds on, namely a commitment to human development and to a
notion of freedom as self-direction as an important aspect thereof. Thus,
Chapter 2 develops a more sophisticated interpretation of Marx’s concep-
tion of human development than others so far. I argue that Marx is
committed to a conception of human development as the development
of powers, i.e. as real possibilities to do and/or to be, and that these can
only be understood through their interaction with human needs in lived
human practice/praxis.12 Chapter 3 builds on this analysis to explicate his
concept of freedom and the role it plays in his critiques of capitalism. Here
I argue that Marx has a conception of freedom as self-direction, according
to which humans have an internal species-specific power for free or self-
directed activity. The realisation or exercise of this power is both valuable
in itself and valuable because it positively impacts the development of
many other humans powers. This view is contrasted with conceptions of
12 Praxis and practice are two different translations for the same German original. The
theory of practice is explained in Chapter 2 and in Raekstad and Gradin (2020), so readers
of that book may wrongly think that I first figured out the theory of practice and then
used it to reconstruct Marx’s theory of human development. The reality is the other way
around. During my PhD research (specifically during 2012–2013), I first reconstructed
Marx theory of human development based on readings in social movement Marxism
(which I felt didn’t quite nail his theory of needs and its role correctly), work by Bertell
Ollman, and Deleuze’s first book on Spinoza; then realised that was simultaneously his
theory of practice; and then that many historical anarchists also shared that theory and
that it was a core component of their political theory and practice, including their views
on prefigurative politics.
1 INTRODUCTION 7
freedom as non-domination and defended against common misconceived

criticisms. At their core, both of Marx’s critiques of capitalism consist in
a diagnosis of how it thwarts freedom and thereby human development,
along with a proposed cure that realises freedom by removing alienation.
Now, although my reading is gaining ground, it is far from the
only position on Marx’s normative commitments. Since I think these
other positions deserve serious discussion, and since any such discussion
requires so much space as inevitably to break up the narrative of my
argument in a potentially disorienting way, I have added an appendix
where the other major positions, along with my objections, are very
briefly discussed. There are at least three groups of readers who will
likely find this appendix especially valuable: those with strong ideas that
Marx is an amoralist who rejects all forms of normative theories; those
who think Marx is a moralist with rule-like principles of justice or
morality grounding his critique of capitalism; and those highly interested
in different kinds and sources of normativity, and how Marx may or may
not fit or inform contemporary debates thereon. If this sounds like you,
I strongly recommend starting with the appendix, and then moving on
to the other chapters in order. For other readers, I’d recommend reading
the chapters in order, only diving into the appendix if and when you feel
like it.
With an understanding of Marx’s normative commitments in place,
Parts II and III turn to what I argue are two distinct critiques of capi-
talism. My realist interpretation allows me to show that each of these
critiques consists of an integrated whole that combines his normative
commitment to human development and freedom; a diagnosis of how
capitalist society thwarts freedom and thereby human development; and a
proposed future society to cure these ills. Together, Parts II and III show
how some elements of Marx’s earliest work carry over to his later work—
e.g. his general realist approach to political theorising, his commitment
to human development, his basic account of human nature, and his deep
commitment to radical participatory democracy. What changes from the
former to the latter is his diagnosis of how modern society thwarts human
freedom, in particular his expanded analysis of the alien powers and forms
of unfreedom inherent in modern capitalism. As a result of this so too
does his conception of the cure required.
Thus, the chapters in Part II examine what I term Marx’s first theory
of alienation, his radical notion of democracy, and the methodological
development he undergoes during the years 1843–1844. They argue,
8 P. RAEKSTAD
inter alia, that prior to 1844 Marx has a distinct critique of capitalism
from the later, socialist Marx, and that this theory of alienation and his
conception of an alternative form of society—democracy—jointly consti-
tute a realist critique of capitalism which is distinct both methodologically
and substantively from the one he articulates later on. Once this is under-
stood, we can see how this provides the radical democratic core of Marx’s
later diagnosis of capitalist unfreedom and vision of socialism.
Chapter 4 presents a novel reading of what I call Marx’s first theory
of alienation, which he develops during the years 1842–1843. On this
view, Marx’s first theory of alienation consists in a critical diagnosis of
capitalism and the state, according to which they are both alienating on
the grounds that they thwart the human species-specific power for partic-
ipating in deliberation and decision-making on public affairs. This chapter
argues for four original theses with respect to the existing literature: that
the early Marx did in fact have a developed theory of alienation distinct
from the one he developed in the 1844 manuscripts13 ; that this theory is
not centred solely on a critique of the modern state, or Hegel’s concep-
tion thereof14 ; that this theory centred on the suppressing of human
species-powers principally by their being subjected to seemingly external
power and domination, rather than in any significant way consisting in
some sort of “split” between citizen and private person distinctive of
the modern society/state complex15 ; and that this in turn means that
this early account of alienation applies much wider than merely to capi-
talist civil society and the state, but also e.g. to feudalism.16 Already at
this stage, Marx critiques how capitalist social relations subject people to
alien powers which those subject to them cannot control, driving him
to develop a vision of democracy that’s significantly more radical than is
typically recognised.17
13 Contra Colletti (1992), Lukács and Livingstone (1974), and Plamenatz (1975).
14 Contra Berki (1990), Breckman (1999), McGovern (1988), and Mészáros (1972).
Against this view, and for mine, see Draper (1977).
15 Contra Avineri (1968), Duquette (1989), Hudis (2013), McGovern (1988), and
Tucker (1970, 1972).
16 Although these points have not all been noted and fully explicated together, some
authors do come close, esp. McLellan (1970, 1971).
17 This relates to another controversial issue, namely my choice to distinguish explic-
itly between two different “theories” of alienation, despite the fact that they have
very different structures. What I call Marx’s first theory of alienation, and examine in
1 INTRODUCTION 9
With the analysis of Marx’s first theory of alienation in place, Chapter 5

examines Marx’s proposed alternative to capitalism and the modern state:
democracy. Here I argue that Marx advocates a vision of radical democ-
racy inspired by the radical enlightenment, seeing democracy as a form of
society in which all people participate in deliberation and decision-making
on public affairs, replacing both the modern state and capitalism and
thereby doing away with alienation. This includes an unwavering commit-
ment to freedoms of speech, press, conviction, and association. This
affirms that Marx is, in some important senses, a republican concerned
with ideas of popular power and the harms of absolutism. At the same
time, it’s worth noting that many historical republicans, especially those
popular today, were not democrats in any meaningful sense and explic-
itly said so, frequently explicitly excluding women, people of colour,
and the working classes. Marx does not. Finally, by eliminating the
separation between state and economy and subjecting the economy to
democratic control, Marx’s notion of democracy goes far beyond many
of his contemporary republicans and prefigures his later socialist ideas.
These two chapters show how Marx’s realist approach to political
theorising prior to 1844 was what I call “realisation-oriented”, in the
sense that it focuses on comparing competing achievable alternatives—
democracy compared to the modern state and capitalism. Chapter 6 then
explores the methodological development that Marx underwent during
Chapter 4, basically consists in a familiar Young Hegelian critical concept of “alienation”

(Entfremdung), which in Marx’s early works refers to the ways in which the human
capacity for conscious participation in deliberation and decision-making on public affairs
is thwarted by a seemingly external socially generated power. By contrast, the much
more familiar theory of alienation that Marx first presents in the Economic and Philo-
sophical Manuscripts of 1844, which I call his “second theory” of alienation and discuss
in Chapter 7, consists in a much more developed account of how capitalism specifically
thwarts the human power for self-directed activity. It may be doubted whether what I
call the first “theory” of alienation really merits the term at all, since it is very different
in structure from the second one. I cannot properly discuss the issue of whether the first
theory truly deserves the label “theory” of alienation in the same way that the second
theory clearly does here and I very much recognise that the two “theories” of alienation
are very different in structure and the extent to which they are developed. Noting these
important differences, however, I will call the first “theory” of alienation a distinct “the-
ory” for three reasons: it is part of an interesting critique of the basic institutions of
contemporary society that can be found in Marx’s early works; it is clearly distinct from
the later theory he develops from 1844 onwards through to the published volumes of
Capital; and it forms part of a distinct critique of modern society that his later critique
develops from in interesting ways, both methodologically and substantively.
10 P. RAEKSTAD
the years 1843–4, leading to the second theory of alienation that he

begins to develop during 1844. Here I show that Marx’s focus on
comparing achievable alternatives leads him to investigate which social
agents he can find to bring about his envisioned alternative, leading him
to the proletariat. Having identified the proletariat as his revolutionary
agent, Marx investigates its nature through studying political economy
and by making contacts and engaging with groups of socialist workers.
Part of this investigation involves coming to grips with how the capitalist
economy, and the alien powers it entails, functions in more detail, how
it generates different and conflicting classes, and how best a theorist or
critic can act to help the process of proletarian agency along its route
to revolution. At the end of this process, Marx develops what I call an
“agent-centred” approach to political theory. This approach starts from
a descriptive account of a particular form of society, draws from this a
conception of the available forms of political agency, including their struc-
turally determined capacities and constraints, and focuses on contributing
to these forms of agency and their actions. I briefly analyse the implica-
tions of this for Marx’s later political theorising, focusing on how this
shift led him to acquire a different, and much more detailed, diagnosis of
how capitalism thwarts human freedom.
With the stage thus set, Part III shows how Marx employs this agent-
centred approach in developing his second critique of capitalism. This
includes developing a second theory of alienation as a distinct diagnosis
of how capitalism thwarts human freedom and thereby human develop-
ment, a further developed conception of its cure in his vision of socialism,
and his understanding of the (best) practice of the political theorist to
help bring this about. I also argue that this critique remains both defen-
sible and compelling, by considering and responding to the arguments
of two of its most insightful critics: Max Weber and Friedrich Hayek.
Together with the foregoing part, it also shows how many components of
Marx’s thought—his realist approach to political theorising, his commit-
ment to human development, his conception of human nature, and his
deep commitment to democracy—are carried over from the one to the
other. What changes are the details of his approach to political theorising,
his diagnosis of the ills of capitalism, and his corresponding conception
of the required cure.
Chapter 7 reconstructs the theory of alienation Marx first develops
in his 1844 manuscripts and retains for the rest of his life. The theory
of alienation diagnoses how, in capitalist social relations, people produce
1 INTRODUCTION 11
and reproduce certain forms of power that come to dominate their

producers. Marx distinguishes four kinds of alienation: alienation from
product; alienation from productive activity; alienation from species-
being; and alienation from others. Each of these is examined in turn,
with an emphasis on the personal and impersonal forms of domination
they show to be inherent in capitalist production. I show in greater detail
than has been done before that there are convincing and oft-overlooked
connections between the different kinds of alienation that Marx discusses,
and that once understood not as an analysis of capitalism’s effects, but of
its inherent structure, common misunderstandings can be cleared up. At
its heart, the second theory of alienation, like the first, is an analysis of
how capitalism thwarts human freedom and thereby human development.
Throughout this analysis, I show how Marx’s ideas about capitalist alien-
ation persist through his later works, all the way to Capital. I finish by
defending this diagnosis against common criticisms, arguing that it still
applies to contemporary capitalism.
With this diagnosis in place, Chapter 8 examines Marx’s concep-
tion of its cure: socialism. Since the diagnosis of modern society has
changed with Marx’s increased understanding of political economy, so
too must his conception of its cure. However, I argue that Marx’s new
vision of a future society retains the core idea of his earlier conception
of democracy, namely that it must be a full participatory democracy—
including freedoms of speech, press, association, etc., as well as, critically,
the democratic organisation of all aspects of social life. Overcoming
capitalist alienation requires that socialism also feature a democratically
planned economy, replace capitalism’s hierarchical division of labour, and
distribute according to need. I defend this vision of an alternative form
of society against prominent Weberian and Hayekian criticisms, showing
that Marx’s critique of capitalism remains not only compelling, but also
defensible. If Marx is right, human emancipation from the tyranny of
capitalism requires much more ambitious changes than many recognise.
Chapter 9 delves deeper into Marx’s realist understanding of the role
of the theorist in bringing about a socialist society. Here I explore how
Marx’s views on the revolutionary nature of the proletariat shift during
1844 and the implications this has for his political theorising. Chapters 7
and 8 have already shown that Marx retains all the components of the
theory of alienation throughout his mature works, especially Capital.
Chapter 9 goes further to explain how this theory forms the core of
his famous doctrine of the revolutionary contradictions of capitalism:
12 P. RAEKSTAD
between the productive powers/forces and relations and between workers

and capitalists. There’s a clear red line through his normative critique of
capitalist unfreedom and his understanding of the forces of social struggle
that can drive a successful socialist revolution. By the same token, there’s
no real conflict between Marx’s normative critique of capitalism and his
later views on dialectical and historical materialism. Quite the contrary, it
forms both the developmental root of these mature ideas and the core of
their notion of the driving forces of socialist revolution under capitalism.
I go on to discuss how Marx seems to de-emphasise normative political
theorising largely because he believes it not to be as useful as his more
descriptively focused research on the political economy of capitalism for
furthering socialist revolution. Against this, I argue that there is good
reason to think that normative political theorising can play a significant
role in social change, and that therefore, on the grounds of Marx’s own
realist approach to political theorising, there is good reason to resurrect
these ideas today.
Finally, Chapter 10 summarises and concludes with some reflec-
tions about the continued importance of Marx’s thoughts on human
development, freedom, alienation, and socialism today.
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PART I
Human Development and Freedom
The core of Marx’s thought is his conception of human beings, activity,

and society. Viewed from the perspective of Marx’s theories of human
social structures, history, and social change, we call it his theory of practice
or praxis. From the perspective of his critique of capitalism, we call it his
theory of human development. Though oft-neglected, it offers the key to
unlocking an understanding of the evolving totality of Marx’s thought.
Thus, Chapter 2 explains the basics of Marx’s conception of human
development through his concepts of powers, needs, and their interaction.
Chapter 3 then shows how Marx builds upon this to develop a posi-
tive concept of freedom and its value. This provides us with the necessary
components for exploring how capitalism shackles human development
and how socialism can set us free.
CHAPTER 2
Human Development
Marx values human development as the development of powers, as the

development of real possibilities to do and/or to be. As we will see, his
conception of this is inherently contextual, pluralist, and open-ended in
nature. It is also intricately connected to his theory of human needs and
his views on consciousness and freedom. To understand this properly, I
will first outline the role of Marx’s conception of human development
in his critique of capitalism. I will then move on to explain how Marx
thinks about human development as the development of human powers,
his theory of needs, and how powers and needs intertwine. I finish by
showing how, despite its openness and pluralism, Marx’s theory of human
development can still be useful for informing real politics. One way it
can do so is by identifying human powers which are particularly valu-
able in their own right and for the development of many other human
powers and using these to compare and evaluate competing institutions.
We will then be able to see, in the following chapter, how this furnishes
the basis for Marx’s understanding of the nature and importance of
freedom.

Switzerland AG 2022
22 P. RAEKSTAD
The Basic Structure of Marx’s

Critique of Capitalism
Marx criticises capitalism for holding back the potentials for human devel-
opment1 available in contemporary society. This is a kind of internal
critique that criticises something by virtue of how it fails to live up to
certain achievable potentials internal to a particular context (for more on
which, see the appendix). In other words, Marx thinks that we are in a
context where a much greater degree of human development is possible if
we replace capitalist with socialist relations. To see this more clearly right
from the start, it’s worth looking briefly at the bare-bones structure of
Marx’s later critique of capitalism2 :
1. It is valuable for human beings to realise their powers of free or self-

directed activity, because this promotes their greater development.
2. Capitalism has major shortcomings when it comes to the promoting
of human development, due to how it, by its very nature, prevents
the realisation of these powers.
3. There is an alternative form of society, a socialist one, which is
currently achievable and able to realise these powers.
4. There is an existing social agent capable of and, under the right
circumstances (such as being made aware of their interests in doing
so), likely to replace capitalism with a socialist society, namely the
working class.
5. By 3 and 4, the diagnosis of 2 is one that is curable through a
working-class overthrow of capitalism in favour of a socialist society.
6. Thus, by 1, 2, and 5, capitalism is both unable to satisfy certain valu-
able requirements of further human development and is replaceable
by a socialist society, which can satisfy these requirements.
1 See Lebowitz (2003, and esp. 2010) for a similar Marxist account of human
development, but with a different specification of socialism/communism’s institutional
requirements. Other Marxist writers who have emphasised Marx’s critique of capitalism in
terms of human development include Booth (1992), Hamilton (2003), Leopold (2007),
Mészáros (1972, 2011), and Sayers (2007a, b, ch. 9). For well-established non-Marxist
approaches see Nussbaum (1992a, b, 2011) and Sen (1984a, b, 1987, 1992, 1999).
2 This overall view, albeit with modifications of point 1 regarding the details of Marx’s
normative foundations and without the detailed structure I have laid out, is largely in
agreement with Collier (2009), Raekstad (2015), and Wright (2010).
2 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 23
It’s important to note the contextual parameters involved in 3 and 4.

Whereas Marx holds capitalism to be regressive in the nineteenth century
and beyond, he can also hold it to be progressive compared to other social
formations at earlier times. If there are earlier social formations where
socialism is not an achievable alternative, then this argument would fail
to apply. Furthermore, if the development of capitalism is held to clear
the way for socialism—e.g. by developing the powers of production to
the required level and by developing a potentially revolutionary prole-
tarian class—then capitalism may, in principle, coherently be advocated
in different historical contexts by means of the very same considerations
as it is critiqued for in the argument just reconstructed. As I’ll show
in Chapter 9, the revolutionary contradictions of capitalism that Marx
emphasises throughout his later work—between the powers and relations
of production and between workers and capitalists—are rooted in the way
that capitalist social relations restrict the emancipation and thereby human
development that it has also helped to make possible.
We can thus see how important Marx’s realist approach is in terms of
his overall political theory. Recall that realism emphasises the need for
theory to help make sense of and guide real politics, especially by helping
to guide the actions of real political agents. Since Marx’s focus is on
comparing different achievable alternatives, only those alternatives which
in fact can be brought about by some social force or agent, inherent in
a particular social formation, are acceptable candidates for political theo-
rising (of this kind). As a result, the scope of this political theory is rightly
constrained by its conception of political agency. Having laid out the
general structure of Marx’s critique, I turn now to outline the conception
of human development that it’s rooted in.
Human Development as the Development of Powers

Many discussions of Marx start from a basic misconception about
what Marx thinks is valuable, because they misunderstand what Marx
(and many other political economists at the time) mean by “wealth”
and “value”. Classical political economy featured a standard distinction
between two different concepts—wealth and value—which typically have
very different connotations to contemporary readers. The concept of
“value” refers to the core of a kind of theory (a “theory of value”) that
attempts to explain changes in equilibrium prices, around which actual
prices are thought to fluctuate. This is in turn used to explain and predict
24 P. RAEKSTAD
the various operations, what Marxists often call the laws of motion,
of capitalist economies. “Wealth” refers instead to what the political
economist in question takes to be valuable, desirable, worthy, and so on.
For obvious reasons, this often trips contemporary readers up.
Marx is clear that, for him, true wealth—i.e. what’s really valuable—
consists in human development as an end in itself. He writes that:
[T]he society that is fully developed produces man in all the richness of his
being, the rich man who is profoundly and abundantly endowed with all
the senses...3
[T]he rich man and the wealth of human need [should or must] take
the place of the wealth and poverty of political economy. The rich man is
simultaneously the man in need of a totality of vital human expression; he
is the man in whom his own realisation exists as inner necessity, as need.4
The same sentiment is echoed in the Grundrisse, where Marx writes

that:
[W]hat is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities,

pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The
full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-
called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working-
out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the
previous historic development, which makes this totality of development,
i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as
measured on a predetermined yardstick?5
Before this, in the same work, Marx describes the production of a

human being “as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and
relations” and “the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human
being” as “the most total and universal possible social product”.6
3 Marx (1992, p. 354/I:2, p. 271/394), emphases in the original.

4 Marx (1992, p. 356/I:2, p. 273/397, emphases in the original).
5 Marx (1993, p. 488/II.1.2, p. 392, emphasis in the original). While I prefer the
translation here to be “productive powers” rather than “productive forces” here, for
reasons I discuss below, I’ve retained the original translation here in order not to not
confuse the reader at this stage. See also II.1.2, p. 427.
6 Marx (1993, p. 409/II.1.2, p. 322).
Finally, he returns to this point in Volume 3 of Capital, writing of the

“true realm of freedom” as the “development of human powers as an end
in itself”.7
These quotations emphasise a number of things. First of all, they
express an intimate connection between human development and human
powers (Kräfte): a “rich” or well-developed person is one who has
acquired a wide range of human powers.
Furthermore, human development as the development of human
powers is an end in itself. It’s not valuable only by reference to other
considerations or insofar as it realises some particular “pre-determined
yardstick” of what is supposed to constitute “adequate” or “full” human
development. This immediately raises a number of questions. Must we
think that all human powers are valuable? Can we make no distinction
between who is more or less deserving of having certain powers? How,
if at all, do we rank and/or compare different valuable powers? These
are all important questions, the answers to which are determined by how
different people find it best to use a theory of human development in
different contexts.
By avoiding any particular predetermined standards, Marx’s concep-
tion of human development is inherently open-ended (because it’s not
evaluated in terms of any predetermined yardsticks), pluralistic (because
it acknowledges that there are many different valuable ways to develop,
and no particular vision of full or perfect development is imposed upon
anyone), and flexible (because, as we will see below, it can be used to eval-
uate things in a variety of different ways). Marx is an inherently contextual
thinker, and is well aware that any appropriate standards for human devel-
opment that people come up with will rightly vary a great deal with
natural, social, and historical context. The ability to fish, sail a boat, and
pillage Ireland are likely core aspects of the powers expected of Norwegian
would-be raider of the Viking Age, while contemporary Norwegians are
much more likely to think it’s important to be proficient at assembling
IKEA furniture than murdering and enslaving unsuspecting civilians.
They are also less likely to think that pillaging powers are valuable to
develop, both in themselves and because they harm the development of
many others’ powers. It’s this openness, pluralism, and contextualism that
means there’s no universal answer to the questions raised in the preceding
7 Marx (1991, p. 959/II:15, p. 795).

26 P. RAEKSTAD
paragraph. Instead, particular decisions about which powers to value and

how much must be made by particular political agents (including theo-
rists), using a theory of human development to address the problems and
opportunities they’re concerned with in their particular contexts. We’ll
see how Marx does so in the last sections of this chapter and beyond.
Human development is not only valuable in itself, it’s also the most
universal product of political economy8 —perhaps of all human activity.
We can make sense of this idea in the following way: Human economic
activity is always a process of double production, in which one and the same
labour process creates both a given good or service and, at the same time,
creates and re-creates the various powers and needs of the human beings
(both as individuals and as groups) that partake in it. Since the goods and
services produced vary across different branches of production, and since
human powers and needs in general are produced and reproduced in any
and all such activity, the latter constitutes a more universal product than
any of the former. But if human powers are so important, what are they
exactly?
Marx’s conception of “powers” here is, I propose, best understood as
referring to real possibilities to do and/or to be.9 Drawing on socialist
thinkers like Marx, what today are called capabilities in the capabilities
approach roughly correspond to what Marx called “powers”.10 To see
8 Marx (1993, p. 409/II.1.2, p. 322).

9 See esp. Ollman (1976, ch. 7).
10 I read Marx’s “powers” as close to what are called “capabilities” in the capa-
bilities approach – indeed, what today is called the capabilities approach is sometimes
explicit about drawing on socialist thinkers like Marx. For discussions of Sen’s capabilities
approach, which is in many ways close to Marx in both substance and general application
(if not specifically to Marx’s more radical ends), see Sen (1984a, b, 1987, 1992, 1999,
2010). Sen’s capabilities approach has been discussed in Marxist literature in both more
general discussions in the context of egalitarian political theory (e.g. Callinicos, 2000, ch
3; 2008, ch. 7) and more specifically to spell out Marx’s ideas of human development
(Lebowitz, 2010; Raekstad, 2018a). I’ve argued elsewhere that Marx’s approach to human
development differs from Sen’s in that (a) “Marx pays more attention to the processual
and relational aspects of the acquisition of capabilities (though Sen also mentions both),
(b) “Marx has a theory of human needs which forms an integral part of his conception
of human development”, and (c) “Marx develops a conception of freedom or conscious
self-direction as a distinctively human internal ability, the exercise of which is particularly
important both in its own right and for the development of other capabilities” (Raekstad,
2018a: 306).
how, let’s begin with the idea of functionings, which consist of “beings”—
states like being well-fed, being educated, being literate, and so on—and
“doings”—activities we undertake like eating, reading, voting, deliber-
ating, and so on. Often things can be described as either a being or a
doing—like a person being housed in a pleasantly warm house and that
person consuming a lot of energy to keep their house warm. For Marx,
who sees all beings in terms of processes of becoming of various kinds, the
two terms are co-extensive. Powers or capabilities, in turn, are a person’s
real possibilities for achieving functionings—like having the real possibility
of feeding oneself, of reading, and so on. In other words, functionings are
beings and doings, and powers are real possibilities to do and/or to be.
A functioning is thus the realisation of a power, and a range of powers is
a range of really possible functionings.11
A power in this sense consists of the right combination of two things.
First of all, it consists of a context or set of conditions which enables
one to do or be certain things (e.g. a book for learning German and
not having a boss forcing me to work so much that I’m prevented from
using it). Secondly, it consists of what I shall call internal powers, i.e. the
abilities or capacities internal to a person required to take advantage of the
relevant context or conditions (e.g. being able to read the instructional
language that the book for learning German is in).12 To have a (full)
11 See Sen (1992, 1993, 1999, 2010).

12 I use this term synonymously with what is sometimes called “internal capabilities” in
the capabilities approach, see e.g. Nussbaum (2003, 2011). Here I use the term “internal
powers” instead, in order to make it cohere better with Marx’s “powers”. One point I
would like to make, though, is that Marx’s use of the term “power” is vague between
two things which are distinguished in the capabilities approach, namely between what the
latter calls capabilities and it calls internal capabilities and I call internal powers. Although
I’ve associated it more with capabilities, I think Marx uses “powers” in both senses and
that he does not explicitly distinguish between them. The distinction is a relative one,
as every internal power is itself a functioning of some sort. For instance, the power of
listening to music requires the internal power of hearing; that internal power is itself
a functioning, in the sense that it is being in the state of being able to hear; it is thus
trivially (since a functioning implies a power) also a power (albeit obviously a different one
from the power of listening to music, which also requires additional external conditions).
For some of the discussion in the next chapter, however, this distinction is important to
bear in mind, since it’s central to Marx’s argument that human beings have an internal
power for conscious self-direction, but that this only becomes a full power under the
right circumstances. Calling humans’ capacity for conscious self-direction a “power” in
the first sense clearly does not, and should not be taken to, entail them also automatically
possessing a “power” in the latter sense as well.
28 P. RAEKSTAD
power is thus to have the right combination of both the requisite external
context or conditions and the internal powers required to take advantage
of them.
We must understand these complexes as an inherently processual and
relational kind of thing.13 My power to learn German is predicated on
access to certain external materials—for instance, books devoted to that
purpose. Such access requires me to be in certain relations which enable
me to get hold of that book—viz., relations of property, access to a place
to purchase or borrow the book, being able to transport myself or the
book to a suitable location for pickup, and so on. The particularities of
these conditions are only obtained as a result of the continual production
and reproduction of complex social relations and institutions in which I
must partake.
Secondly, in order to be able to learn German from the book in ques-
tion, I need certain internal powers to understand the language the book
is written in, to see, to read, to write, to learn in some systematic way, and
so on. These powers are themselves currently constituted by an ongoing
process in which my body (including my brain) continually reproduces
itself through time in interaction with the world around it (breathing,
drinking, eating, etc.).
Thirdly, any such powers I presently possess are the result of a wider
process of maturation and development, of which its current time-slice is
a moment. This process of maturation and development, through which
I have come to acquire and maintain the internal powers to do things like
process natural language, hear, read, and write, etc., is in turn a function
of the interplay between my powers and needs at previous moments of
development on the one hand, and the context and conditions within
which that development has taken place on the other. In this manner, not
only do complex powers consist of a conjunction of internal powers and
external conditions, these internal powers are, in turn, constituted by a
processual unity itself consisting of an interplay between internal powers
13 It might be objected to the following discussion that it really speaks only of the
acquisition of human powers, or perhaps also of their development and maintenance.
This objection only makes sense if we ignore Marx’s process ontology and philosophy
of internal relations, according to which things are thought of as processes and as partly
constituted in and through processes of interaction with other things. I cannot examine
this issue here, but for an excellent account see Ollman (2003).
and external conditions, and this process goes, as it were, all the way
down.
We should therefore not think of powers, in Marx’s usage, merely
in terms of an abstract set of possibilities. Instead, we should think of
them as the range of options available to an organism constantly engaged
in turning (some of) its powers into functionings, in interaction with
its wider environment, in order to satisfy its needs.14 Doing so in turn
continually maintains, alters, destroys, and/or creates new powers and
needs—hence Marx’s comment, in the Grundrisse, about a society where
one “does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his total-
ity”, where one “[s]trives not to remain something he has become, but is
in the absolute movement of becoming?”.15
Finally, the passages quoted earlier in this section express an intimate
connection between powers, needs, and the senses. We can now begin
to make sense of this. Powers, in Marx’s sense, include abilities both to
affect things in the world (like being able to hold someone’s hand or join
them in defending a picket line) and to be affected by things in the world
(like transforming the sound waves hitting your ear into the experience
of enjoying Beethoven’s 9th symphony). On Marx’s view, the production
of various pleasures and enjoyments, and the drives and desires they are
connected to, is an inherent part of his theory of human development. To
understand how, we must unpack his theory of needs and see how they’re
connected with his theory of powers.
Needs
For Marx, there is an intimate relationship between what he calls “needs”
(Bedürfnisse) and human powers, a relationship that must be understood
in order to make sense of his conception of human development. Having
already discussed powers, I turn first to discuss Marx’s conception of
needs and thereafter to the nature of their interaction.
To do this, it’s first necessary to dispel a common misunderstanding in
what Marx means by “need”. Some believe that Marx has what might be
14 This, as well as the importance of the passions, drives, and strivings in Marx is
explored further in van Ree (2020).
15 Marx (1993, p. 488/II.1.2, p. 392).
30 P. RAEKSTAD
called a normative theory of needs16 that’s distinct from his commitment

to the development of human powers. Such a conception of needs can be
spelled out in a few different ways, including in terms of.
(a) something which is a requirement for the avoidance of harm,

malfunctioning, or pathology17 ; or
(b) something which is a requirement for full human development.18
There are, however, other conceptions of needs which are
relevant here, including:
(c) something which is a requirement for someone to do or attain
something, thus fitting the general formula “X needs Y in order
to Z”.
Reading (c) is, then, broader than, and extends over, (a) and
(b), in so far as the latter two give, for Z, the avoidance of
harm, pathology, or malfunctioning, or full human development
and flourishing, respectively.
The two most important alternative ways of interpreting Marx’s
conception of “needs” include:
(d) the drive or striving of an animal, e.g. a human being19 ; and
(e) the drive or striving of someone or something.20
It is evident that (e) is broader than and extends over (d). The sense of
“drive” in (e) is to be broadly understood to include not only individuals’
conscious intentions and desires, but also something’s stated goals, values,
or concerns (where the “something” in question might even be a theory
or an ideology), as well as the unconscious motivations or tendencies of
16 See esp. Hamilton (2003), Leopold (2007), Soper (1981), and Springborg (1981).
The positions of the two former will be discussed below. Those of the latter are too
complex to be dealt with here.
17 Examples of such a theory include Doyal and Gough (1991), Geuss (1981, 2012),
and one of the two senses Leopold (2007) takes Marx to have. Note that I am referring
to these as instances of a conception of needs of this kind, nor claiming that all of the
authors hold this to be an accurate reading of Marx’s conception of needs.
18 Hamilton (2003) and Leopold (2007).
19 E.g. Chitty (1993), Ollman (1976, ch. 7), and Maslow (1970) and many other
psychological theories of need.
20 See Springborg (1981, ch. 6).
individuals, social institutions, and more besides. It therefore includes all

the things included in (d), and more besides.
If Marx’s concept of needs is to be held to do any independent norma-
tive work in his writings, it needs to be of kinds (a), (b), or (c)—most
plausibly one of the two former. However, there are five reasons why
only sense (e) is consistent with Marx’s usage of the term.21
The first thing I wish to point out about Marx’s conception of needs
is that, since my focus is on Marx’s critique of capitalism, the question
of Marx’s conception of needs here mainly comes down to whether or
not, and if so how, that conception of needs plays a normative role
in the writings in which this critique is developed. If we look at the
early works leading up to and including the Economic and Philosoph-
ical Manuscripts of 1844—i.e. the works in which Marx first develops
his theories of alienation—we find, however, that Marx’s conception of
needs plays no important normative role whatsoever. Whenever the term
“needs” does appear, it can, in each and every instance, be read simply as
a term for something somebody desires, or for something that something
or someone is driven or striving towards.22 Moving on to his later works,
we see that needs and drives are frequently used synonymously. This alone
renders the normatively loaded readings in (a) and (b) implausible.
The second thing we should note with regard to Marx’s usage of needs
is that he typically does not distinguish between needs and their objects of
satisfaction, collapsing any clear-cut distinction between means and ends
in this regard.23 As we saw earlier, readings (a)–(c) all rely on a distinction
between ends and means. Since Marx’s usage of “needs” collapses a key
distinction these readings presuppose, they cannot be accepted as accurate
readings of Marx’s conception of needs.
The third thing we should note about Marx’s employment of needs is
that it is extremely broad. He includes needs which might be considered
21 I thus, like Soper (1981), not only refuse to categorically distinguish between wants
and needs; I also, unlike Soper, explicitly subsume the former under the latter.
22 To support the first part of this claim further it would be necessary to discuss each
and every instance of the term’s usage in the first few volumes of Marx’s collected works.
Doing so is impossible here. If the empirical premise my argument rests on is not fully
demonstrated here, it is at least easily testable: all that is required is to find one, or a
significant number of, instances in the early works in which Marx uses “Bedürfniss(e)” in
a manner incompatible with the readings I advocate, namely (d) and/or (e).
23 For more on this see Hamilton (2003, p. 57).
32 P. RAEKSTAD
basic physiological needs, like “a human need for sustenance (he talks
about ‘eating, drinking’ and, more generally, ‘nourishment’), for warmth
and shelter (he lists ‘heating’ and ‘clothing’ as well as a ‘dwelling’),
for certain climatic conditions (he mentions both ‘light’ and ‘air’), for
physical exercise (the need ‘to move about’ and the need for ‘physical
exercise’), for basic hygiene (‘the simplest animal cleanliness’), and for
reproduction and (heterosexual) sexual activity (he writes of ‘procreation’
and describes sexual relationships between women and men as charac-
teristic of the ‘species’)”.24 Marx’s usage also includes needs for things
like self-development and community. However, he also mentions a range
of other needs which would be difficult to fit into any plausible single,
unitary, and predetermined set of criteria of the kind required for (a) or
(b). These include a “human need for recreation (to ‘go drinking’, to
‘go dancing’, to ‘fence’, to ‘sing’), for culture (to ‘go to the theatre’),
for education and intellectual exercise (to ‘think’, to ‘theorise’, to ‘buy
books’, to engage in ‘learning’), for artistic expression (to ‘paint’), for
emotional fulfilment (to ‘love’), and for aesthetic pleasure (Marx identi-
fies ‘a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form’ as among our essential
human capacities and powers)”.25 It’s hard to square this with any other
reading than one in terms of (socially and historically mediated) drives.
Such uses were common at the time, as when e.g. the anarchist Peter
Kropotkin writes that once “material wants are satisfied, other needs,
which, generally speaking may be described as of an artistic character,
will thrust themselves forward”.26 It might be argued that many of these
are mentioned only in passing and that a reconstruction of Marx’s views
on human needs need not necessarily be bound by the strictures of off-
hand remarks and singular mentions in notebooks and letters. This reply is
correct, but inadequate. The fact remains there is at least one reading, that
of (e) (and, as far as our argument so far has been concerned, also (d)),
on which these uses are all made coherent. Consequently, this alternative
reading is the most plausible one.
Fourthly, whenever Marx talks about what “needs” are, he clearly takes
every instance of a human drive or impulse to constitute a need, including
all manner of wants, desires, and preferences, regardless of origin. As a
24 Leopold (2007, p. 228).

25 Ibid, p. 233–234.
26 Kropotkin (1995, p. 94).
result, he does not distinguish at all between “true” and “false” needs or
between “actual” needs and “imaginary” ones, because these aren’t the
sort of things that can be true or false—though one can, of course, desire
things that are contrary to one’s interests. In Volume I of Capital, for
instance, Marx asserts that a necessary condition for being a commodity
is for an object to satisfy a need, regardless of “nature” of these needs,
“whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination,
makes no difference”.27 In an associated footnote, Marx quotes from
Nicholas Barbon’s A Discourse on Coining the New Money Lighter. In
Answer to Mr Locke’s Considerations about Raising the Value of Money,
where Barbon explicitly talks in terms of “Desire” and “appetite” using
(as does Marx in his discussions of “needs”) the example of hunger.28
This makes no sense at all from the point of view of the more objective
and normatively laden conceptions of needs in (a)–(c). Simply creating
a desire does not of itself make it into a requirement for avoiding harm
or pathology, a requirement for human development or flourishing, or
a requirement for achieving some particular purpose (other than merely
the satisfaction of that particular desire). By contrast, all of this fits snugly
within readings (d) and (e), since desires clearly and unproblematically fall
within the scope of needs conceived of as drives or strivings.
Relatedly, throughout his oeuvre, Marx talks about creating wants or
demand for commodities in a capitalist marketplace in terms of creating
(unsatisfied) needs.29 As we’ll see in Chapter 7, this plays an important
role for understanding some of the harms of alienated, unfree labour, as
when Marx argues that alienated labour results in that labour becoming
undesirable, so it’s no longer itself the satisfaction of a “need”, i.e. people
feel no drive or impulse to do it apart from in order to satisfy needs
external to it, like hunger. This clearly supports a reading of needs in
terms of drives or strivings.
Finally, in other instances Marx writes about things becoming “needs”
only if and when they become actual drives:
27 Marx (1990, p. 125/II:6, p. 69).

28 As we will see below, Marx does, of course, distinguish natural from historically
restricted needs, but, pace Springborg 1981, this in no way amounts to an normatively
loaded distinction.
29 See throughout the Grundrisse, Capital, and other economic works, as discussed in
Ollman (1976, ch. 7).
34 P. RAEKSTAD
When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruc-

tion, propaganda, etc. But at the same time they acquire a new need – the
need for society – and what appears as a means has become an end. This
practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of
French socialist workers. Smoking, eating and drinking, etc., are no longer
means for creating links between people. Company, association, conversa-
tion, which in its turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The
brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility
of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures.30
Here it is clear that new needs are developed when and only when they
become driving forces for concrete living beings, which fits perfectly with
how we’ve just seen that Marx talks about what “needs” are in Capital.
By contrast, if needs are, as they must be according to readings (a)–(c),
the requirements Y for ensuring certain ends Z, and if society is important
for human beings, then society becoming a conscious human end cannot
plausibly be accepted as an instance of acquiring a new need, since the
mere fact of becoming the object of a conscious human end does not, in
itself, affect whether or not that particular Y is a requirement for some
Z—unless Z is nothing more than e.g. the realisation of ends or satis-
faction of desire, in which case it collapses into a version of (d). On
the other hand, a reading of needs as drives as per (d) and (e) coheres
perfectly with Marx’s wording: since conscious ends, desires, and so forth
fall under needs, the acquisition of a desire for society is unproblematically
the acquisition of a new need which one did not previously possess.
It might be argued that the links Marx makes between needs and
desires do not show that he conceives of needs as drives, but instead
that he conceives of them as an individual’s perceived requirements for
the avoidance of harm. This would be a variant of interpretation (a). The
connection between desires and needs would then be that if someone
has a sufficiently strong and enduring desire for X, then they will come
to see the non-satisfaction of X as causing them suffering, which is a
kind of harm, they will perceive X as a requirement for them to avoid
a harm, and so will come to “need” X in the above sense. If this is the
kind of thing Marx has in mind, we would expect him to mention the
strength or endurance of a drive for it giving rise to a need. He never
does so. Furthermore, we would expect some sort of distinction between
30 Marx (1992, p. 365/I:2, p. 425).

drives and needs, where the latter would be associated with strength
and/or endurance, and perhaps also with consciousness (in the sense of
self-awareness) and consequent plasticity and variation across contexts—
like we see in Hegel.31 No such distinction appears in Marx. Finally, if
“needs” were conceived in terms of strongly felt requirements, we would
also expect some sort of distinction to be made between “natural” and
“constructed” needs, “real” and “false” or “imaginary” ones, etc., of the
kinds we see in writers such as Rousseau and the Frankfurt School. As
I’ve shown, Marx makes no such distinctions with respect to “needs”.
In short, if Marx held a view of needs as perceived requirements in a
sense beyond merely drives, it would be extremely surprising that these
kinds of distinctions are never even alluded to, especially since they are
made in literature which he was intimately familiar with. If, however, he
was in fact construing “needs” differently, as drives, these interpretative
difficulties disappear.
One might also worry that a concept of needs as drives risks leaving
Marx unable to distinguish the requirements for healthy life and func-
tioning from things like luxuries and mere wants. The answer to this is
that Marx already has a concept for this, namely “necessity”, and that
this enables him to make just such a distinction. While Marx doesn’t
distinguish “needs” from mere wants, he does write that “[l]uxury is
the opposite of the naturally necessary”.32 On this view, “necessities” are
requirements for survival, healthy functioning, or the like, and the “natu-
rally necessary” is what we require to survive and function well by virtue
of being the kind of animal we are. Of course, what is, and what is consid-
ered to be, necessary varies according to natural, social, and historical
context, and Marx thinks it is a “tendency of capital” to transform “what
was previously superfluous into what is necessary, as a historically created
necessity”.33 We see again and again that what once was a luxury—cars,
31 Hegel mentions how “psychology relates and describes these [immediate and natu-
rally given] drives and inclinations and the needs derived from them” (Hegel, 1991,
p. 45), and distinguishes between the “universal needs, such as food, drink, clothing,
etc.” (ibid, p. 227), and the further development of human needs as “taste and utility
become criteria of judgement” (ibid, p. 229). This clearly involves a distinction between
more instinctive drives and inclinations on the one hand and more socially and historically
mediated impulsions on the other. By contrast, Marx talks of e.g. hunger and insists that
hungers for different things are different hungers.
32 Marx (1993, p. 528/II.1.2, p. 427).
33 Ibid.
36 P. RAEKSTAD
mobile phones, the internet—in time becomes necessary to function in

society.
The fifth and last point I wish to make about Marx’s usage of need is
that it occasionally occurs in the context of speaking about social relations
and institutions. Since reading (d) restricts the concept of needs solely
to human beings, or perhaps animals, whereas (e) is wider so as also to
include other things (such as institutions), this gives some support to (e)
as a reading over (d). However, for my purposes here it does not matter
at all which of the two is in fact the correct one, since either will work
for the below reconstruction of Marx’s account of the interplay between
powers and needs.34
The Interaction Between Powers and Needs

Human needs are highly plastic. They are canalised by our natural, social,
and historical contexts, and so vary across these contexts to different
degrees and in different ways. A need for a well-insulated house or flat
is very real to the contemporary Swede or Norwegian, but less so to
an experienced hunter-gatherer with the ability to construct their own
suitable habitation.
Of course, the fact that needs vary across contexts does not mean that
they can’t be said to exhibit certain convergences or similarities. At least
some need forms develop (barring rare exceptions and pathology) among
all human beings—for example, we feel hunger under certain circum-
stances. However, what people feel hungry for when they feel hungry
is something that varies across different contexts. In these cases, we have
a general kind of need (hunger) which human beings share, which is chan-
nelled by and varies across contexts to create different needs (e.g. hunger
34 One way of attempting to salvage a properly normative function for Marx’s concep-
tion of needs is arguing that there are two different senses in which Marx uses that
concept: on the one hand, a restrictive normative conception according to which some
goals and desires are of particular importance; on the other hand, a more expansive and
developmental conception of needs according to which it consists in mere wants or goals
of some sort. The problem with this is not only that Marx makes no such distinction; it
is also rendered wholly unnecessary on a sufficiently broad specification of “needs” as per
(e). If “needs” just refers to all drives and impulses, all goals and desires count without
any problems—regardless of their origin, normative value, and so on. In other words, a
distinction between different senses of “need” in Marx is neither conceptually necessary
nor textually well-founded.
for a medium-rare steak, for strips of raw flesh, for dried fish, and so on).
As Marx writes:
Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a
knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat
with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. Production thus produces not only the
object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also
subjectively. (…) Production not only supplies a material for the need, but
it also supplies a need for the material. As soon as consumption emerges
from its initial state of natural crudity and immediacy - and, if it remained
at that stage, this would be because production itself had been arrested
there - it becomes itself mediated as a drive by the object. The need which
consumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it. The
object of art - like every other product - creates a public which is sensitive
to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for
the subject, but also a subject for the object. Thus production produces
consumption (1) by creating the material for it; (2) by determining the
manner of consumption; and (3) by creating the products, initially posited
by it as objects, in the form of a need felt by the consumer. It thus produces
the object of consumption, the manner of consumption and the motive of
consumption. Consumption likewise produces the producer’s inclination
by beckoning to him as an aim-determining need.35
The connection between needs and powers alluded to in this passage,

and in the ones mentioned above, can now be explained. For Marx, the
potentials of human nature—including the senses—develop in and only in
ongoing interaction with their requisite stimuli. This is easy to see in cases
of practical activities such as learning to play an instrument or a sport.
But to Marx, as this and other quotations testify, the very same process
is believed to take place for the development of the human senses. Since
the latter seems harder to grasp, at least prima facie, I will expand on
the interplay between needs and powers using an example of this kind.
If something as basic as the human senses can be understood in terms of
the interplay of needs and powers, it follows trivially that the same will be
the case for practical activity, since all human practical activity involves the
senses in critical ways. It also follows non-trivially in the sense that if we
35 Marx (1993, p. 92/II.1.1, p. 29 (emphasis in the original), see also 1992, p. 352–
6/I:2, p. 269–73/393–7, and p. 391/I:2, p. 409).
38 P. RAEKSTAD
can understand the human senses by means of powers then we can likely
also understand the other things that human beings do in the same way.
To begin, it is important to understand that Marx has an expansive
conception of the human senses. By a sense being expansively conceived,
I mean that in the “sense” of, for instance, the ear or hearing, Marx would
certainly include not only the external organ (such as the outer ear), but
also the full range of auditory stimulation and processing which goes on
in a human being in response to the relevant kind of stimuli. Not only is
the outer ear thus included, but so too are the inner ear and the relevant
cognitive processes taking place in the brain.
Conceived of in this manner, senses are human powers which, like
others, develop and flourish within certain contexts and conditions, and
in response to their inputs. So having, for instance, a musical ear, means
that one has the internal power to partake in musical appreciation and
one is in the state of being able to appreciate (at least of some particular
kind of) music.36 Put differently, the internal power of, say, hearing is
the power to produce certain kinds of affects or affective experiences in
response to certain kinds of stimuli.
The requisite conditions for the development of these senses natu-
rally include the necessary nutrients and other basic requirements for
normally healthy physical growth and maintenance; but they also include
another set of inputs specific to the sense in question. Without attempting
a definition, I shall call this more restricted class a “power-specific” set
of inputs. According to Marx, humans’ internal powers will either not
develop at all, or will develop much less, without their required power-
specific inputs. Having a sense of hearing means being able to appreciate
(at least certain kinds of) music. It also creates a need—i.e. a drive, in this
case a desire—for the person to listen to (at least some kind of) music.
If and when this need is satisfied, one’s internal power of hearing, expan-
sively conceived, develops in response to these power-specific stimuli.
This, in turn, causes the needs associated with the relevant sense to alter,
as a result of which new needs emerge (and the old ones may or may
not disappear).37 To be sure, when human beings and other animals use
36 This is of course a state of being, and therefore a functioning. Since functionings are
actualised powers, and since something being actual entails (trivially) that it is also really
possible, this functioning is also (trivially) a power.
37 It should by now be clear that Bookchin’s (1974, p. 276) charge that “Marxism”
has neglected to form a concrete image of sensuous man, while correct about much that
their powers in order to satisfy their needs they are not only using their
sensory powers. They are using many of their other individual and social
powers as well—such as powers to play instruments, to compose music,
to purchase audio equipment, to stand, to walk, to read notes, and many
more—and the interaction between their powers and needs is crucial for
understanding how humans grow, develop, and flourish in and through
our lived activities.
For Marx, this theory of human development also constitutes a frame-
work for making sense of human activity, of lived human experience,
of praxis.38 We can get some sense of how this works by seeing how
the theory I’ve sketched generalises throughout human activities, from
gaming to theories of revolution. When you first start playing a new
computer game, simply learning the mechanics and completing a few
initial tasks or goals is enough. You may have long-term ambitions of
completing the game, but in the early stages, your focus tends to be
more on learning the basics and making immediate gains in the starting
location(s). Having developed your gaming powers and won these initial
victories, your needs develop further as well. Simply repeating these same
basic tasks is no longer as rewarding and doesn’t fill you with the same
excitement as it once did, so you set your sights higher—learning more
complex mechanics, carrying out more difficult tasks, and so on. Even-
tually, as your powers grow enough, you shift your focus to winning the
game completely, often by facing and defeating one or more final bosses.
The basics of socialist theories of revolution are not so different. Most
of them argue that, with or without grander ambitions in mind, you start
small and local, bringing people together to develop powers of organ-
ising and acting in concert, so that you can use those powers to win
small, particular victories that help better satisfy your needs (e.g. for better
has gone under the banner of “Marxism”, does not touch the thought of Marx himself.
In fact, Marx, especially in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, criticises
the classical political economists on precisely this point with regard to their conceptions of
needs. For more detail on this kind of process-reading of Marx, see esp. Adams (1991),
Lebowitz (2003, 2010), Ollman (1976), Parsons (1971, chs. 5–7), and Sayers (2007b,
2011).
38 I cannot, for obvious reasons, expand upon this here, but for some more of this
view from the perspective of social organisation and struggle, see Raekstad and Gradin
(2020). I’m currently working on another book reconstructing what are called Marx’s
materialist dialectics, theory of praxis, base and superstructure, and materialist conception
of history, where this will be explored in greater depth.
40 P. RAEKSTAD
wages and benefits, decreasing workplace domination, stopping workplace

sexual harassment, and so on). Having done so, you find that your needs
develop as well and you set your goals higher: more freedom and control
over your working life, in your community, etc. Having seen that you
can organise together and carry out complex tasks over time, and having
tasted a degree of empowerment and emancipation, you become better
able to, and more interested in, running the show yourself with your
comrades in fully free, equal, and democratic ways. Achieving these goals,
satisfying these new needs, will in turn require confronting and defeating
one or more final bosses. Of course, this is not to deny or obscure the
many and important differences of strategy and tactics advocated and
employed by different socialists—far from it. Rather, it’s to emphasise the
ubiquity of the framework provided by Marx’s theory of human develop-
ment as a way of making sense of things as different as individuals playing
games to classes overthrowing oppressive social systems.
Marx also thinks that humans tend to act in ways that maintain and
increase their powers. Note that this is a tendency only, nothing like
a universal or deterministic law of human nature. It doesn’t mean that
all human motives reduce simply to increasing their powers. Nor does
it mean that people always act in ways that succeed in increasing their
powers or in ways that would do so if the actions themselves succeed.
All it means is that human motivations, broadly construed, tend to be
structured such that humans tend, in general, to act in ways that increase
their real possibilities to do and/or to be. Furthermore, the experience
of increasing our powers tends to be enjoyable in itself. One particularly
important subset of those powers is of course our social powers, whether
helpful or harmful, from powers of organising ecologically sustainable
modes of life in the free queer communes of the future, to the domi-
nating and oppressive powers that are wielded by monarchs over subjects,
masters over slaves, and capitalists over workers.
This has two important implications that we will return to in later
chapters. First, it means that one vital aspect for making sense of
struggles for social change is understanding the prospects for human
development/further empowerment that inhere in the natural, social, and
historical contexts of particular groups and individuals; what it is that
prevents them from being able to take full advantage of those potentials;
and what they need to do to change the latter. As we will see especially in
Part III, Marx’s critique of capitalism contributes substantially to doing
just that. Second, it means that we should never expect people to give
up their powers willingly and that we should expect people in positions

of greater power39 to struggle to maintain both the positions of greater
power and the social relations that sustain them. Famously, no oppressed
group ever won their emancipation from the good will of their oppressors.
We will see in Chapter 7 that this is one reason why Marx thinks that, even
though capitalists are also alienated and unfree under capitalism in ways
they would not be under socialism, they will still reliably organise and
struggle to maintain capitalism and prevent socialist transition.40 Finally,
these points will enable me to explore, in Chapter 9, how the two revo-
lutionary contradictions of capitalism that Marx repeatedly emphasises
throughout his later works—between powers and relations and produc-
tion and between workers and capitalists—are rooted in his critique of
capitalism as unfree and therefore holding back human development.
This shows us that Marx’s conception of the interaction between
powers and needs in and through lived and experienced activity forms a
vital—if neglected—building block for his later work and ideas. We have
seen that, for Marx, human beings are continually interacting with our
human and non-human environments in ways that continuously shape
and re-shape ourselves and what we’re interacting with. We are contin-
uously engaged in realising our powers to satisfy our needs in ways that
develop our powers and needs in various ways—changing some, main-
taining some, eliminating some, and/or creating new ones. The existence
of such processes isn’t inherently good or bad; it’s simply a fact of life.
However, these processes can take place in better or worse ways—in ways
that empower and enrich us, increase what we can do, what we can
become, what we can appreciate and enjoy, or in ways that diminish and
constrain us. This in turn raises the question of how such a conception of
human development can be used for real politics.
39 This, in Marx’s very broad conception of “power”, includes not only broader forms
of social power conferred e.g. by being a capitalist or high-level manager dominating their
workers, or the political supremacy wielded by party apparatchiks, but also that conferred
by greater wealth and privilege more broadly.
40 Naturally, Marx does not hold this to be the case for each and every individual
capitalist, as is pointed out e.g. in The German Ideology.
42 P. RAEKSTAD
Human Development and Real Politics

Marx ultimately assesses things in terms of the ways and extent to which
they further human development. On this view, a social institution is
better than another if it advances human development more than its
competing achievable alternative(s). Such a metric can be used in many
different ways, thanks to its open-ended and pluralistic nature. One way
it can be used is to directly justify things like new institutions or policies.
Another way it can be used is more indirect: to specify some particularly
relevant sets of conditions for human development, broadly construed,
and evaluating things in terms of their (foreseeable) outcomes when it
comes to satisfying these (derived) conditions. A conception of human
development can be used not only to evaluate existing proposals (e.g.
whether Participatory Economics or market socialism is a better alterna-
tive to capitalism), but also for identifying new and hitherto unnoticed
issues (e.g. the importance of universal human emancipation through
intersectional working-class self-emancipation as a goal).
It is important to realise that a metric of human development is a very
different kind of thing from the normative principles and ideals common
in much contemporary political theory. The rules one follows or attempts
to follow in regulating one’s own behaviour, the rules and norms which
regulate different kinds of social interactions, institutions, and so on, the
objects and states of affairs one desires and values, the goals and purposes
one strives towards, the ideals one tries to realise or aspire to, are a
different kind of thing from whether or not—and in which ways—one
develops and flourishes, one’s real prospects for doing so, and the various
conditions that enable one to do so in different ways and to different
extents.
Furthermore, if our normative focus is on human development broadly
construed, various normative rules, precepts, and principles, while still
important in all manner of different ways, inevitably take on a rather
different—and more instrumental—hue. Goals, aspirations, rules, and
norms, etc., can be seen as enabling, aiding, or hindering various forms of
human development, and up for elimination or replacement when they no
longer serve a useful purpose in that regard. Take, for example, theories
specifying the appropriate and inappropriate modes of social interaction
within a given social structure—say, the correct way to conduct market-
capitalist exchange, or the best way of having a lord-serf relationship.
If well-formulated and accurate, such theories might be argued to be
of genuine moral import and potentially of significant value to agents

organising themselves within, and morally reflecting upon, the lives they
lead in the contexts within which they lead them. A principle specifying
what constitutes a just transaction, for instance, may usefully “fit”, or
be appropriate to, capitalism as an economic system by usefully guiding
and constraining agents, by aiding in the formulation and enforcement of
laws and regulations, and so on, thereby helping societies with capitalist
economies which adhere to this principle to function more smoothly, with
fewer interpersonal and inter-group conflicts springing from e.g. different
normative conceptions and expectations with regard to economic trans-
actions. On the other hand, such principles may well be categorically
worthless for the project of evaluating, criticising, and replacing capi-
talism itself, and would have to be violated in any foreseeable process
of transition.41
Despite its openness and indeterminacy, there are many cases where
straightforward assessments of greater or lesser human development are
easy to make. It is, easy, for example, to see that, ceteris paribus, physically
healthy people who are capable of acting courageously and compassion-
ately, and of taking an active part in their own life and that of their
friends, family, and wider community, possess a wider range of powers
than people who are not physically healthy, capable of acting in these
ways and, capable of actively participating in their community, and so on.
Therefore, by our definition they are better-developed versions of them-
selves than they would have been if they had lacked these powers.42 This
41 These concerns are at the heart of Marx’s critique of Proudhon, the Lassalleans,
and other contemporaneous socialists who built their critique of capitalism and vision
of socialism on theories of distributive justice, which you can find more about in the
appendix.
42 Note that this is only an appeal to intuitions about the principled feasibility of making
comparative judgements of human development. It makes no claims about certain powers
being (intuitively or otherwise) more valuable than others (although I think Marx, Sen,
and myself would all agree that this is the case) or about only some powers being valuable
and others not. This is why the ceteris paribus clause is important here: it excludes from
the thought-experiment the logical possibility that those who are e.g. less capable of acting
courageously have other (potentially more valuable) powers which those to whom they
are being compared lack. This may of course be a problem in cases of actual comparisons,
but this is a distinct empirical issue and must be treated as such. The empirical concern
makes sense, but it is not clear, especially in light of the further simplifying mechanisms
discussed below, that it poses any significant threat to the practical usefulness of this
approach in general.
44 P. RAEKSTAD
is not a list of what it would mean to be a fully developed human being,

nor an appeal to intuitions about what such a list would look like. Rather,
I am claiming that if all other things are equal it is intuitively obvious that
a person who is more developed in terms of powers (e.g. being able to
take part in one’s community) and the things that clearly imply them (e.g.
physical health is a functioning, and therefore trivially a power) can be
considered to be overall better developed than they would be if they were
less so. There is, then, no principled reason to suppose that comparative
assessments of greater and lesser human development are impossible.
As a concrete example of how such comparative assessments of overall
human development can function, consider Wilkinson and Pickett’s argu-
ment that unequal distributions of wealth—due to the unequal social
relations they both generate and result from, and these relations’ detri-
mental impacts on satisfying humans’ psycho-social needs—affect a vast
range of morally salient social metrics, such as physical health, mental
health, crime, poverty, and social mobility.43 If this is correct, then
more unequal social relations generate a large number of disadvantages
throughout the whole population (and which are stronger among the
most financially impoverished). On any plausible conception of human
development it is clear that, ceteris paribus, a society which does better
than another on a vast number of these metrics is one which better
serves the development of the human beings that inhabit it. Even without
further simplifying mechanisms, we can therefore see that an open-ended
commitment to human development can guide at least some practical
politics.44
Furthermore, using a theory of human development to assess
competing alternatives can be made easier by identifying instances of
clustering of disadvantages on the one hand and cases of corrosive
disadvantages and fertile functionings on the other. The clustering of
disadvantages refers to the fact that many kinds of disadvantage, under-
development, or lack of prospects for such, tend to come in clusters
rather than in even distributions across a population. This allows us to
identify and focus on the challenges faced by certain groups that are
clearly overall worse off than others, regardless of potentially complicated
43 Wilkinson and Pickett (2010).

44 This kind of case is different from the cases of clustering and corrosive disadvantages
discussed below, since social inequality is not an instance of one power or functioning
impacting a set of other powers.
issues to do with indeterminacy, disagreement, ranking, and commensu-

rability. By contrast, the existence of fertile functionings (where realising a
power positively impacts many others) and corrosive disadvantages (where
lacking a power negatively impacts many others), allows us to identify
powers of special importance. We can then assess relevant competing alter-
natives by the extent to which they realise or prevent such particularly
important powers.45 This is essentially what Marx does.
Rather than applying a general theory of human development directly,
Marx identifies a particularly important human power that he takes to be
valuable in itself and for many other human powers. Powers that impact a
range of others to a significant extent are of particular importance because
(a) they impact a number of others and are therefore valuable as a means
for these others and (b) regardless of how one ranks or weighs the other
powers affected, regardless of how determinate or indeterminate the other
powers are relative to one another, and regardless of whether or not
there is disagreement about the value of some of these other powers,
those powers which impact a range of others still come out as impor-
tant and valuable in a wide range of cases. Such particularly important
powers can be important constituents of other powers (e.g. maintaining
physical survival is a constituent of any power of political involvement)
or contribute causally to other powers (e.g. being literate causally affects
one’s power of political involvement). Once such instrumentally impor-
tant powers have been selected, one can compare feasible alternatives
(e.g. policies, legislation, institutions) in light of the extent to which they
realise these instrumentally important powers.46
The particularly important power that Marx’s critique of capitalism
focuses on is our power of freedom as self-direction. His theories of alien-
ation diagnose how capitalism prevents the exercise of this power and
thereby restricts human development, while his proposed cures articu-
late what modern society must become in order to realise freedom and
thus enhance human development. In this chapter, I have explained the
complexity of Marx’s theory of human development as the development
of human powers, needs, and their interaction in lived human activity.
45 For a good discussion of this from the capabilities-approach point-of-view, see Wolff
and de-Shalit (2007, ch. 7.).
46 Sen (1999, xii, cf. 38–53, 1993, 31–32); for its connection to Marx, see Raekstad
(2018a).
46 P. RAEKSTAD
In the next one, I will use this theory to reconstruct his conception of
freedom and its value.
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social movements Oakland. AK Press.
CHAPTER 3
Freedom
Marx has a positive concept of freedom as self-direction,1 rooted in an

account of humans’ distinctive powers of consciousness and the impor-
tance of realising them for human development. To make sense of this,
I will begin by sorting out what the idea of a human “nature” does and
doesn’t mean in (especially the later) Marx. With that in place, I move
on to his account of humans’ distinctive powers of consciousness and
their connection to freedom. I explain Marx’s concept of freedom as self-
direction or self-activity, how it differs from the neo-Roman/republican
concepts of freedom it’s sometimes confused with, and why Marx thinks
that freedom is important. Along the way, I will defend this concept of
freedom against common misconceptions and argue that Marx’s claims
about its value remain plausible.
The Idea of a Human Nature

There’s a large and varied debate on Marx’s thoughts about human
nature, virtually no part of which is uncontroversial, which I won’t
venture deeply into here. What I will do here is offer some brief points
1 This has long been the standard view, see inter alia Blackledge (2012), Sayers (2007,
2011), Swain (2019), and Tabak (2020).

Switzerland AG 2022
50 P. RAEKSTAD
about how Marx thinks about human species-being as related specifically

to his concept of freedom and his critique of capitalism.
As we saw in the previous chapter, Marx is a thoroughly contextual
thinker. Human beings have a wide variety of powers and needs, the
nature and content of which is shaped by their natural, social, and histor-
ical contexts in a myriad of different ways. In the Theses on Feuerbach,
Marx also explicitly rejects any kind of static and ahistorical concep-
tion of human essences that he identifies in thinkers like Feuerbach.2
According to Marx, thinking about the nature of human beings in terms
of some static, unchanging set of properties, features, and dispositions,
unaffected and unchanged by the contexts they develop within, renders
this “essence” something which “can be comprehended only as ‘genus’,
as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individ-
uals”.3 While Feuerbach wants to resolve the “religious essence into the
human essence”, Marx argues that “the human essence is no abstraction
inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the
social relations”.4
Of course, this does not mean that nothing is common among human
beings. For example, we’ve seen that Marx affirms that human beings feel
hunger under certain circumstances, and that human beings are social
by nature—although what we desire when hungry and the particular
forms that human sociality takes both vary contextually. Marx’s above-
quoted comments clearly rule out the idea of humans sharing some static
and unchanging properties, unaffected by our lived interactions with our
natural, social, and historical contexts. They do not, however, rule out
the idea that human beings have, by virtue of the kinds of material,
embodied animals that we are, certain inherent developmental potentials
and tendencies that distinguish us from other animals.
We must distinguish between two relevant senses of the terms that
Marx uses that variously get translated into “nature”, “essence” and
sometimes “being” in English.5 One sense of something’s “nature” is
what we might call its current, contingent nature. This refers to what
2 For more discussion of this, see Appendix.

3 Marx (1992, p. 423/IV:3, p. 21).
4 Marx (1992, p. 423/IV:3, p. 20–21).
5 The terms Marx uses here are Wesen (especially in the early writings) and Natur (e.g.
in the quote from Capital Volume I below). In the relevant texts, there seems to be no
real difference in how they’re used by Marx in the context of these discussions.
3 FREEDOM 51
anything happens to be like at any one slice of time—its size, shape, speed,
colour and shading, texture, reading abilities, preference for chocolate
chip cookies, etc. Marx would think of this through his lens of powers
and needs, such as our powers to read books or complete a computer
game and our needs to drink good coffee. Any such collection will be
highly contingent in nature; vary a great deal both within and between
any natural, social, and historical contexts; and likely change a great deal
over time in lots of different ways.
Another sense of “nature” refers to something much more limited,
namely to whatever makes a thing the kind of thing that it is. Accord-
ingly, in Capital Marx distinguishes between the nature shared by human
beings by virtue of being the kinds of animals we are, or “human nature
in general” and our contingent nature as shaped by our growth and
socialisation in our particular contexts, or “human nature as historically
modified in each epoch”.6 When, in the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes
that “[a]ll history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human
nature”,7 what he’s saying is that what human history, and in particular
historical change, consists in is the continuous transformation of our natu-
rally, socially, and historically configured sets of powers and needs. This is,
as we’ve seen, incompatible with the kind of static and ahistorical concep-
tion of an essential human nature that Marx attributes to Feuerbach.
However, it’s perfectly compatible with the idea that there is some such
thing as an essential human nature—provided that it’s of a different kind.
Indeed, it would be shocking if Marx didn’t think there are any inborn
differences between human beings and other animals. We’ve just seen
that Marx writes about the historical modification and transformation of
human nature. This logically presupposes that there must be a human
nature to modify. Just like (as Marx famously points out to Proudhon)
it’s logically impossible to commit theft in the absence of pre-existing
property, so too is it logically impossible to modify or transform a human
nature that doesn’t exist. The other side of this coin is that it’s only
6 Marx (1990, p. 759, footnote 51/II:6, p. 559, footnote 64). This distinction is
essentially the same as one of the ways of explaining the Hegelian distinction between
First Nature (e.g. the evolved potentials we’ve inherited from our biological evolution)
and Second Nature (the natures we develop on the basis of our First Nature, rooted in
our evolved powers of consciousness and the resulting forms of socially and historically
created contexts we develop within and are shaped by).
7 MECW 6, p. 192/I:6, p. 207.
52 P. RAEKSTAD
possible to explain why human beings are shaped by historical condi-

tions like class location on the basis of some idea of human nature. Why?
Because only some conception of the potentials and dispositions inherent
in human beings can explain how human beings are able to be affected
by those historical conditions—and in ways that differ from the way that
e.g. a rock, tree, or ant would be—and why those historical conditions
will tend to have certain predictable effects on human beings, like slavery
and other forms of unfreedom reliably harming us. Denying any partic-
ular nature to human beings would also commit Marx to ruling out any
possible explanation for why humans can do a wide variety of things that
other animals can’t, why humans are capable of so much greater plas-
ticity and variation across developmental contexts, and even why freedom
matters to us at all.
Fortunately, Marx has a theory of human nature that enables him to
say something about all of these things. On his view, what distinguishes
human beings in general from other animals is our distinctive powers of
consciousness.
Consciousness, Self-Direction, Freedom

Throughout his works, Marx consistently refers to distinctive human
powers of consciousness. These powers are linked to other important
concepts, like universality and freedom. They’re also associated with
humans’ greater individual and collective developmental plasticity and
with their greater individual and collective variation across different
natural, social, and historical contexts. I cannot examine the complexi-
ties of these two points in detail here.8 Instead, I will limit myself to
addressing the most important question it raises for our purposes: how, on
8 Some of the most interesting and challenging developments of this idea can be found
in Mészáros (1972, 1995, 2011). For some of the best commentary discussing all of these
aspects of Marx’s notion of species-being see Fromm (2004), Geras (1983), Hudis (2013),
Kain (1988, 1992), Kamenka (1969, 1972), Leopold (2007), Ollman (1976), Sayers
(2007, 2011), and Wood (2004). All of these, in various ways, expand upon the different
elements that I’ve only alluded to here, such as humans’ powers of consciousness, of
self-direction, their role and importance for human flourishing and happiness, the notion
of universality at play here, humans’ capacity for mutual recognition, humans’ greater
plasticity and contextual variation compared to animals, and the importance of human
artistry and creativity in labouring activity.
3 FREEDOM 53
the basis of the view of human powers and needs sketched in Chapter 2,
does Marx conceptualise the human species-being or species-nature?9
For Marx, species are distinguished by their powers. More precisely,
they’re distinguished by what I have termed their internal powers. The
internal powers the human species-being consists in are, on Marx’s
account, universal among human beings,10 restricted to human beings,
and distinctive of human beings as a species. A human being realises
their species-being/nature in any given activity if and only if these
species-specific internal powers are exercised in the performance of
that activity. Concerns about human self-direction and participation in
social/collective deliberation and decision-making go back as far as
Marx’s earliest philosophical and political writings.11 A turning point is
marked by the shift, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1844, to focus more specifically on human activity, especially on everyday
labour. Here he writes that “free conscious activity constitutes the species-
character of man” and that capitalism, because of the alienation it entails,
“tears away from him his species-life”.12
Marx describes the human species-being or nature in the following
way:
The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from
that activity; it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object of
his will and consciousness. (…) Conscious life activity directly distinguishes
man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a species-being.
(…) Only because of that is his activity free activity.13
He goes on to discuss further the distinction between human beings

and animals:
9 Note that these are two different English translations for the same German term in
Marx: Gattungswesen.
10 Barring pathology and exceptional circumstances, on which see below.
11 See this and the following chapter, as well as Hudis (2013, p. 37–55).
12 Marx (1992, p. 328–329/I:2, p. 240–241/369–370). Note that the original “him”
refers to the preceding masculine German noun der Mensch (the human being) which
makes the original sentence, unlike its English translation, semantically gender-neutral.
13 Marx (1992, p. 328/I:2, p. 240/369).
54 P. RAEKSTAD
It is true that animals also produce. They build nests and dwellings, like
the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc. But they produce only their own imme-
diate needs or those of their young; they produce one-sidedly, while man
produces universally; they produce only when immediate physical need
compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from
physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need…14
In other words, what sets human beings apart from other animals
is their internal power of conscious self-directed activity, or self-
direction/self-activity for short. Human beings are endowed with
consciousness, and this immediately sets their activities apart from those
of other animals. Consciousness enables human beings to set themselves
apart from their activity because it enables them to critically reflect on,
deliberate on, direct, and alter that activity as needed. It enables them
to produce universally, as opposed merely for the benefits of their own
and those close to them, and to produce even when free from immediate
physical needs—i.e. when not experiencing the push of simple, instinctual
impulses. Finally, these passages suggest (as I return to in Chapter 7), that
a particularly important realm of freedom is that of productive activities,
or labour, where humans use their consciousness to determine and realise
their own ends or purposes through their interaction with each other and
the rest of nature.
This is a view that stayed with Marx for the rest of his life. In Volume
I of Capital, for instance, he writes that:
We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human charac-

teristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver,
and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construc-
tion of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect
from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before
he constructs it in the wax. (…) Man not only effects a change of form in
the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht ] his own purposes in
those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determined the
mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate
his will to it. (…) This means close attention. The less he is attracted by
the nature of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished,
14 Marx (1992, p. 329/I:2, p. 241/369).

3 FREEDOM 55
and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and
mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be.15
Conscious self-directed activity is still, as this passage makes clear,

considered to be unique to, universal among, and distinctive of human
beings. Furthermore, the end of the passage cited echoes key points about
the damage wrought by alienation. The less one is attracted by the nature
and activity of one’s work, the less one enjoys it as the free or self-directed
“play” of mental and physical powers, the greater the exertion required to
perform it. However, this is not to say that work, absent alienation, will
be simply the “free play” of mental and physical powers. On the contrary,
Marx believes work will always require some sort of focus, attention to
detail, persistence in the face of obstacles, etc.16
An idea of human nature in terms of powers of consciousness is,
naturally, very different from the kind of static and ahistorical view that
Marx criticises Feuerbach for having. Like all other human powers, they
develop only through a process of growth and maturation on the part of
an organism in continuous interaction with its wider environment. They
exist and maintain themselves only in and through people’s continuous
processes of interaction with their natural, social, and historical contexts.
This in turn means that how our powers of consciousness develop, and
how they can be exercised and expressed, depend in crucial ways on
how our internal potentials interact with those circumstances. Marx’s idea
is therefore not that all members of homo sapiens have full powers of
consciousness—this would obviously be false. Rather, it’s that, in general,
and barring pathology and exceptional circumstances, the members of
homo sapiens, will, as a result of their inborn potentials tend to develop
certain powers of consciousness. The “universality” at work here is thus
far from the stricter, more metaphysical senses of the word, and closer
to the kinds of general claims made about species’ inherent potentials
and tendencies we find in most sensible claims about humans and other
animal species. We easily and correctly say that humans can see colours,
walk upright, and communicate through language, because we think that,
15 Marx (1990, p. 284/II: 6, p. 192–293). Compare this to Marx’s elaboration on the

above-cited remarks in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Cf. also Marx
(1991, p. 959/II:15, p. 795).
16 See also Marx (1993, p. 712/II.1.2, p. 589): “Labour cannot become play, as
Fourier would like…”.
56 P. RAEKSTAD
in general, and barring exceptional circumstances, the members of homo

sapiens, will, as a result of their inborn potentials, tend to grow and
develop these powers.17 For Marx, the main difference between these
other human powers and our powers of consciousness is that the latter is
distinctive of our species. As we will see in Parts II and III, Marx’s theo-
ries of alienation build on this by diagnosing how certain social conditions
thwart the exercise of this human power in important ways.
We can now understand why consciousness is at the root of Marx’s
explanation for our greater developmental plasticity and behavioural vari-
ation compared to other animals. Humans’ powers of consciousness make
us (more) able to reflect upon the environments we’re faced with, our
actions, our purposes or goals, and the results of our actions. They also
enable us to deliberately choose our own purposes, standards, and means
for attaining them in light of our perceived needs and interests, as well
as change our purposes, standards, and means in light of our perceived
needs and interests. Of course, both the materials available to us and the
internal powers that enable us to make use of them and the needs that
drive us to do so are shaped by, and so vary across, our relevant natural,
social, and historical contexts. In this way, humans’ distinctive powers of
consciousness are, for Marx, the reason why we are able to further develop
our powers of production and alter our social relations in ways that better
make use of these potentials—always in particular forms that are continu-
ously maintained through and shaped by our interactions with our human
and non-human environments. The idea that people’s conceptions of self,
society, and politics are shaped by their lived material conditions, is thus
not only compatible with, but built upon Marx’s conception of human
nature.
If Marx were writing today he’d likely formulate this differently in light
of recent advances in the human and other animal sciences. For one,
he’d likely articulate a more complex view of animal behaviour, which
includes an appreciation of the behavioural variation and plasticity that
we now know that many non-human animals are capable of. In connec-
tion with this, he’d likely speak of consciousness less in binary terms as
something an organism simply has or not, and more as something that
17 This might sound very Aristotelian, minus Aristotle’s sexism, ethnocentrism, and
peculiar doctrine of natural slavery. While I think that Aristotle’s influence on Marx is
undeniable, there are some important differences between their views here and in general,
for some of which see earlier on in this chapter and for others see the appendix.
3 FREEDOM 57
comes in degrees. Ideas of language and recursion would likely then play
a central role in explaining why, as far as we can tell at present, human
beings have greater cognitive capacities than other animals we’ve encoun-
tered so far. It’s not very fruitful to speculate about the exact forms
these modifications would take, but it is worth noting that, in the end,
they might well generate many of the same conclusions with respect to
humans’ greater powers of consciousness than other animals, along with
a connected commitment to the value of consciously self-directing our
activity.
Freedom as Self-Direction
For Marx, freedom consists in conscious self-direction. As we’ve just seen,
“[c]onscious life activity [that] directly distinguishes man from animal
life activity” and only “because of that is his activity free activity”.18 On
this view, a person is free in an activity if and only if they self-direct that
activity. This requires one to be able to determine one’s own purposes,
decide on the means to realise them, and control how the activity is
carried out. An inherently materialist conception of freedom, it rejects
any kind of metaphysical separation between thinking, willing, and the
rest of the world. Human capacities for freedom are created and continu-
ously reproduced by the material world and our knowledge of that world
further empowers us to direct our interactions with it, increasing our
freedom. On this view, the laws of nature don’t oppose our freedom,
they enable it.
Like all other powers, having and exercising the (full) power to self-
direct one’s activity requires the right combination of internal powers and
external conditions. The previous section showed that, for Marx, human
beings have the internal powers required to consciously self-direct their
activity. In this section, we look at some of the external conditions that
it requires. These conditions include the normal requirements for human
growth and survival, as well as the right kinds of social relations and level
of material production. Since human beings are social animals, many of
our activities will be collective in nature. For Marx, this is simply a fact
about human beings. If we accept this fact, a question presents itself: how
can we find ways of structuring our collective activities such that they are
18 Marx (1992, p. 328/I:2, p. 240/369).

58 P. RAEKSTAD
self-directed by all who are part of them, rather than directed by someone
or something else?
As the exercise of an internal power, freedom can be prevented in a
variety of ways. One way it can be prevented is by being subjected to
the will or arbitrary power of another person. Activities in which you
are subjected to the will or arbitrary power of another—like patriarchy,
slavery, or capitalist labour processes—subject you to the uncontrolled
power and thus direction of another person, which prevents you from
directing that activity yourself. Even if the power holders never exer-
cise their power, the fact of its existence hinders you from being able
to fully determine your own purposes and decide on your preferred
means for realising them in important ways, thus thwarting your poten-
tial self-direction. Another way that self-direction can be prevented is
by subjecting someone to certain socially generated, impersonal forms
of power which they cannot control, like the impersonal powers of capi-
talist competitive markets. When such impersonal powers similarly prevent
people from being able to fully determine their own purposes, decide on
their preferred means in important ways, and/or control their activities,
such forms of impersonal domination likewise prevent those subject to
them from directing their activities themselves, rendering them unfree.
Marx never explains what exactly the necessary and sufficient conditions
for impersonal powers counting as dominating are. However, the case of
impersonal domination he focuses on, capitalism’s competitive markets,
combines four very clear elements. They contain a socially generated form
of power, this power is not controlled by those subject to them, it does
not reduce to power wielded by identifiable individual power-holders,
and it undermines self-direction, e.g. by preventing people from fully
determining their own purposes. In Chapter 7, we will see how Marx
argues that capitalism features both personal and impersonal forms of
domination.
A third way in which people can be made unfree is through impositions
of natural necessity, as when Marx, in Volume III of Capital, writes that:
Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man,
the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in
a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being
dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expen-
diture of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their
human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm
3 FREEDOM 59
of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins

beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its
basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.19
This passage is tremendously important. While it clearly states that

collective self-management—in opposition to the blind power of compet-
itive markets or the personal power of capitalists—is necessary for human
freedom, it’s also argued to be insufficient. Why? Because there may still
remain a realm of natural necessity that thwarts self-direction. As we saw
in the preceding chapter, by necessity Marx means the requirements for
survival and healthy functioning, things that we need to secure to be able
to live decent lives—including, but not limited to, our basic necessities
for food, water, housing, clothes, and so on. If we have to work e.g.
a certain number of hours per day to secure our necessities in order to
avoid the unacceptable alternative of things like poverty, starvation, and
even death, we are, in effect, being forced to carry out certain actions.
Why? Because someone is forced or coerced to do something if and only
if they have no reasonable alternatives to doing it, and because alternatives
like poverty, starvation, death, and so on are not reasonable alternatives.
The fact that our historically conditioned natural circumstances20 force us
to act in certain ways implies that certain purposes are forced upon us, as
is a limited range of means for achieving them. This in turn reduces our
ability to (fully) self-direct those labouring activities, rendering us less free
than we otherwise would be. Not being socially constituted in the same
sense as feudal or capitalist relations of production are, it’s no form of
domination and, depending on circumstances, there may be little point in
bemoaning it. It is, however, an important feature of Marx’s ideas that the
development of the productive powers has not only enabled free socialist
relations, but also effectively reduced the pressures and constraints of
natural necessity, enabling an even greater realm of free production. This
is an important way in which, for Marx, the development of the produc-
tive powers/forces has enabled greater emancipation than has hitherto
been possible.21
19 Marx (1991, p. 959/II:15, p. 795).

20 See the discussion of how necessity is historically determined in the previous chapter.
21 For more on this, see Mészáros (2011). It should be noted that the “powers/forces”
here are two different translations for the same German term, Kräfte. The term Kraft is the
same term as the term Marx uses for “powers” in his discussions of human development,
60 P. RAEKSTAD
We can now see that Isaiah Berlin’s famous accusation that Marx’s
positive concept of freedom allows people to force you to be free is incor-
rect.22 Briefly put, Berlin’s argument is that positive concepts of freedom
like Marx’s involve living and/or acting in the right way. If this is the
case, it’s possible that somebody else knows better than you how you can
and should live and act in the correct, free ways, and it’s therefore also
possible for them to force you to live and act in the correct, free ways,
thereby forcing you to be free.23
There may be concepts of freedom that such an argument might apply
to, but Marx’s is not among them. For Marx, if you are being forced
to act or live in certain ways by someone or something else, then you
are no longer determining your own purposes and means and you are
thus rendered unfree. Berlin’s argument can be salvaged by adding the
premise that the right kind of institution (e.g. state, party, church, etc.)
can rightly be said to constitute a “real you”, in which case its actions and
directions would count as yours, so its directing you would now count as
a (now very different) kind of self-direction. There are two problems with
this. First, the work here is done by an extremely implausible premise that
few followers of freedom would accept, and its conclusion would follow
regardless of which concept of freedom one has. On a negative concept
of freedom as the absence of interference, for instance, if a state or party’s
actions count as your own, you’d only be interfered with by yourself, so
here too, once we add this premise, you would be forced to be free for
the very same reasons. In other words, what does the work here isn’t any
concept of freedom and its supposed risks, but rather a very peculiar and
implausible idea about selfhood. It thus completely fails as a critique of
Marx’s positive concept of freedom.24 At no point does Marx embrace
anything like such a conception of the self. The second problem with this
addition is that it’s not one that Marx ever makes and that it has no basis
whatsoever in any of his writings.25 It therefore cannot be accepted as a
which is why I prefer to speak of “powers of production” and “productive powers” from
here on.
22 Berlin (2002), in particular the essay “Two Concepts of Liberty”.
23 See Geuss (2005, p. 69).
24 As has been shown in Geuss (2005, p. 70).
25 It might be argued that this idea is implied when Marx points out that people only
develop and individuate themselves within society. While this may be part of where this
misinterpretation comes from, it’s certainly a mistake. Obviously, the fact that people grow
3 FREEDOM 61
plausible interpretation. In short, Berlin’s critique fails both as a critique

of a positive concept of freedom and as a critique of Marx.
It should now also be clear that interpreting Marx’s concept of
freedom simply in terms of not being subject to the will or arbitrary
power another is incorrect.26 This way of thinking about freedom—typi-
cally called the neo-Roman or republican concept of freedom—defines
freedom as “non-domination”, where domination is, in turn, defined as
being subject to the will or arbitrary power of another. The “other” in
question must be either an identifiable individual—like a monarch, slave
owner, or capitalist—or an institution unified enough that it’s sufficiently
like a person to be said to have a will—like a senate, government, or
corporation. Inherited from Roman thinkers, this concept of freedom was
common in Marx’s day, but increasingly faced problems trying to deal
with more diffuse and impersonal forms of power, like those inherent in
norms of gender and sexuality and the impersonal forms of domination
inherent in competitive market forces.27 These powers are socially gener-
ated, prevent those subject to them from fully determining their own
purposes and means, and are not controlled by those subject to them,
and so, according to Marx, they are rightly experienced as oppressive
and unfree. This is one reason why, as we will see in Chapter 7, Marx’s
diagnosis of capitalism repeatedly draws attention to the impersonal domi-
nation inherent in capitalist competitive markets and the necessity of
replacing them with democratic planning.
Marx writes of freedom explicitly in terms of self-activity, as being the
exercise of our powers for conscious self-direction. While this requires
not being subject to the will or arbitrary power of others, it is more
demanding. As we have seen, freedom as self-direction further requires
not being subjected to certain impersonal social powers that we cannot
control or even to certain kinds of force or coercion imposed by natural
up, are shaped by, and become the particular individuals they are only in and through
interaction with others within some society does not entail that the society one grows up
in equates or amounts to their selves, “true” or otherwise.
26 Roberts (2017, 2018).
27 Republican/neo-Roman concepts of freedom can, of course, account for how e.g.
internalised norms and impersonal relations contribute to and reinforce relations of
personal domination. What they cannot do without becoming positive theories is account
for how e.g. impersonal relations make people unfree in ways that don’t reduce to personal
relations of domination.
62 P. RAEKSTAD
necessity. These cannot adequately be captured by a concept of freedom

as simply not being subject to the will or arbitrary power of (identifi-
able) other individuals,28 because neither impersonal social powers nor
natural necessity reduce to certain identifiable individuals having power
over others. While impersonal social powers may force us to do things
we neither want nor need, preventing us from effectively deciding on
the means and purposes of our activities and controlling how we carry
them out, these powers don’t reduce to the power wielded by identifi-
able individuals. That is, after all, what makes them impersonal. While
the constraints of natural necessity may likewise thwart our ability to
self-direct our activities, these too don’t reduce to identifiable individ-
uals wielding power over others. Finally, while there is plenty of textual
evidence for the idea that Marx has a positive rather than a neo-
Roman/republican concept of freedom, I’ve found no positive evidence
for preferring the latter to the former.
One way of trying to salvage the idea that Marx has a neo-
Roman/republican concept of freedom is to claim that Marx has not one,
but two or three different concepts of freedom in his works and that he
uses only the neo-Roman/republican concept of freedom to criticise capi-
talism.29 The main problem with this argument is that is has no textual
basis and that it appears to be simply an ad hoc stipulation to explain away
the fact that everything that Marx does write about freedom supports a
positive interpretation.
Before moving on to a discussion of its value, it’s worth empha-
sising that Marx’s concept of freedom develops in the particular context
of working-class organisation and struggle for self-emancipation. The
ongoing development of his positive concept of freedom is thus part-
and-parcel of his contribution to the working class’s ongoing process of
self-development and consciousness-raising, serving to better enable the
diagnosis of the new (especially impersonal) forms of domination that
capitalism involves and better theorise how to overcome them—on which
28 Roberts (2017) attempts to cash our Marx’s analysis of impersonal domination in

terms of personal domination, but as I show in Chapter 7, Sect. (2), this doesn’t quite
fit Marx’s texts or ideas, whereas my positive account does. To make this passage easier
to read, I’ve opted to write of identifiable individuals in a broad way that includes both
individual persons and individual institutions that are unified enough to be considered to
have wills.
29 Roberts (2018).
3 FREEDOM 63
see Chapters 7 and 8. In this sense, his concept of freedom is arguably

a tool for better making sense of our lived experiences under capitalism,
better grasping the harmful forms of power that it entails, and in so doing
help enable us to replace it.30 This becomes even clearer when we move
on to one of the greatest strengths of Marx’s concept of freedom, namely
his account of why it’s valuable in the first place.
The Value of Freedom

To understand why Marx thinks that freedom is valuable, it’s first of all
important to have a basic idea of how it’s thwarted under capitalism
(which is more fully explored in Chapter 7). On my reading, Marx’s
theory of alienation31 is at heart an analysis of how capitalism thwarts
the exercise of humans’ internal power of conscious self-direction. He
distinguishes four kinds of alienation. Alienation from the product of
labour consists in the fact that, under capitalism, workers reproduce and
strengthen certain social structures that keep them in bondage. One
of the implications of these social structures is that one’s work and its
content are determined by factors outside and seemingly independent of
the workers themselves (alienation from labour). The fact that this occurs
in productive activity means that workers in such societies are alienated
from their internal power for conscious self-directed activity in a particu-
larly damaging way (alienation from species-being). And humans under
such conditions are alienated from other humans because the above-
mentioned forms of alienation entail, in a very specific way, the existence
of another role which must be filled, namely the role of the capitalist,
who comes to own the alienated products and labour as loci of power
over workers, and from whom workers are, therefore, alienated (alien-
ation from other human beings). If capitalism thwarts human freedom in
these ways, how is that bad from the point of view of human develop-
ment we have been discussing? Or, from the other side, what is the value
of freedom for Marx?
For Marx, freedom is valuable both because it’s a particularly impor-
tant aspect of human development in itself and because it benefits the
development of a wide range of other human powers. First, the exercise of
30 For more on this sort of understanding of concepts, see Raekstad and Gradin (2020).
31 Here I should point out that I agree with most commentators that Marx uses the
terms Entäusserung and Entfremdung largely, if not completely, synonymously, although
there is some scholarly disagreement on this issue which I cannot discuss here.
64 P. RAEKSTAD
our internal powers for conscious self-directed activity is valued as in itself

important for people to lead healthy and happy lives. As internal powers
which can become actualised, full powers under the right circumstances,
they are valued not merely as one aspect of human development—that
is, as an aspect of the development of human powers—but as a particu-
larly important mode of human development. Unlike the development of
other human powers, by developing the powers distinctive of the human
species Marx holds us to become fully human beings. What such a claim
is supposed to amount to is not fully explained, but it clearly involves,
at least inter alia, a particular importance or status being attached to the
development of these powers when compared to the others he mentions.
Conditions of alienation, in which the human species-being is not exer-
cised, estrange humans from their own powers and bodies; activity under
such conditions is an activity in which a person “does not confirm himself
in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does
not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and
ruins his mind”; and, Marx claims, workers feel neither as themselves
nor at home when labouring under such conditions.32 Under alienated
conditions, the worker “feels that he is acting freely only in his animal
functions – eating, drinking and procreating, or at most in his dwelling
and adornment – while in his human functions he is nothing more than
an animal”.33
In short, precluding the exercise or realisation of the human species-
being in human activity significantly devalues that activity and negatively
impacts people’s experience thereof, detrimentally affecting their lives and
happiness. This is not, for Marx, an inevitable condition for humankind,
and he therefore criticises past political economists for failing to distin-
guish between human labour in general (which need not be like this) and
labour under capitalism (which is).34 The former can be free, but only by
abolishing the latter.
In addition to this, enjoying freedom as self-direction also positively
impacts the development of many other human powers. For Marx,
humans being empowered to self-direct their activities is a case of a fertile
32 Marx (1992, p. 326/I:2, p. 238/367).

33 Marx (1992, p. 327/I:2, p. 239/367).
34 For example Marx (1993, pp. 610–615/II.1.2, pp. 498–502, and 1990, pp. 137–
138, footnote 16/II.6, p. 80).
3 FREEDOM 65
functioning, where the exercise or realisation of a power significantly

affects a range of others in a positive way. Under the alienated conditions
Marx diagnoses, “life activity, productive life itself appears to man only as
a means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to preserve physical exis-
tence”, making life activity a “mere means” for existence or survival.35
We have already seen why this is the case. Conditions of alienation, in
which humans’ internal power to engage in conscious self-directed activity
is prevented from being exercised, causes economic activity to lose its
intrinsic enjoyment and motivation. Consequently, instead of satisfying
intrinsic needs and enjoyments, work under capitalism becomes a mere
means to satisfy needs outside of itself—to preserve one’s life, wealth,
and so on.
These effects of alienated, unfree labour in turn detrimentally impact
the development of the human senses—both the familiar five and others.
The five senses, as well as “the so-called spiritual senses, the practical
senses (will, love, etc.) (…) all these come into being only through
their objects [by which I take Marx to mean the providers of their
requisite power-specific inputs], through humanized nature”.36 In other
words, these various human powers develop and flourish only through an
ongoing process of development in which human powers are exercised
to satisfy human needs—i.e. they require cultivation. But the cultivation
of the human senses—i.e. of these human powers—is corroded under
circumstances of alienation: “Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical
need has only a restricted sense”. Marx expands on this as follows:
For a man who is starving the human form of food does not exist, only
its abstract form exists; it could just as well be present in its crudest form,
and it would be hard to say how this way of eating differs from that of
animals. The man who is burdened with worries and needs has no sense
for the finest of plays; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial
value, and not the beauty and peculiar nature of the minerals; he lacks
a mineralogical sense; thus the objectification of the human essence, in a
theoretical as well as a practical respect, is necessary both in order to make
man’s senses human and to create an appropriate human sense for the whole
of the wealth of humanity and of nature.37

37 Marx (1992, pp. 353–354, I:2), ibid., emphases in the original.
66 P. RAEKSTAD
What Marx is saying here is that when humans engage in activities

which they cannot self-direct, these activities lose their intrinsic enjoyment
and motivation. As a result, people engage in them only if and when
they are necessary in order to satisfy some other, extrinsic, needs—e.g. to
prevent starvation or attain wealth. Under such circumstances, the human
senses—which include both the familiar five, as well as other receptive
internal powers—develop only in a basic and simplistic manner, failing to
develop as well as they otherwise would. Conditions of alienation prevent
the development of an appropriate human sense in that they prevent the
development of sensory internal powers in the unique ways that humans
are capable of (or would otherwise be capable of).
If this psychological picture is accurate, then alienated conditions of
labour are an instance of a corrosive disadvantage—where the absence of
one power negatively impacts a range of others. In this case, alienated
conditions prevent the internal power for engaging in conscious self-
directed activity from becoming a full power and from being exercised,
as a result of which the development of a range of other internal powers
is negatively impacted. By contrast, being able to exercise the internal
power of conscious self-direction positively impacts the development of
numerous other human powers.
There is one obvious worry about this: is the importance Marx
attributes to self-directed activity a plausible one? We can break this
down into a cluster of smaller sub-questions. Is the importance that Marx
attributes to self-directed activity for intrinsic enjoyment and motivation
plausible? Is the importance that Marx attributes to self-directed activity
really something that is universal among human beings, or merely the
erroneous universalisation of a culturally specific and restricted value? Is
the importance of self-directed activity restricted to human beings, and is
it really essentially linked with human consciousness as Marx believes it is?
All of these are at least in principle empirical questions in the sense that
empirical investigation and its results can bear on their plausibility. The
last question I leave aside as difficult to deal with properly here. However,
modern psychology does provide us with some insights that enable us
to say something about the former two questions—viz. the questions
about self-directed activity’s importance and about the universality of its
importance among human beings.
I shall now argue that the experimental findings associated with Self-
Determination Theory, henceforth SDT, provide some support for these
3 FREEDOM 67
two theses.38 SDT begins from the same basic conception of human
beings that Marx does: human beings are animals which are continu-
ously engaged in reciprocal interaction with their environments, activating
their powers in order to realise their needs, and in so doing giving rise to
new collections of powers and needs. The environments within which
these processes take place, for Marx as for SDT, can enable, preclude or
prevent, aid and nurture, or hinder and forestall the developing organ-
ism’s powers.39 SDT posits three universal human psycho-social needs:
competence, the feeling of mastery and being able to operate and act
effectively in one’s environment; relatedness, the need to interact with,
connect with, and care for others; and autonomy, which I get into
below.40 The concept of “needs” utilised by SDT is not, obviously, the
same as the one I am attributing to Marx. Instead, needs in SDT’s sense
are defined as “the innate psychological nutriments that are essential for
ongoing psychological growth, integrity, and well-being”.41 What SDT
here posits as “needs” are innate and universal. To the extent that they
are realised in human activity they greatly promote human development
and functioning and conversely to the extent that they are not realised in
such activities. In other words, the realisation of e.g. autonomy is taken
to positively impact the development of a wide range of human powers.
The importance of these ideas here is that some of their associated
experimental findings provide support for the importance that Marx
attributes to self-directed activity and for the claimed universality of this
importance. To make sense of this, we need to know what exactly SDT
means by a need for “autonomy”. According to SDT:
The need for autonomy describes the need of individuals to experience

self-endorsement and ownership of their actions—to be self-regulating in
the technical sense of that term. The opposite of autonomy is heteronomy,
38 See also Rækstad (2012).

39 For example Deci and Ryan (2002, p. 6), Ryan and Deci (2018, Part II) and
Vansteenkiste and Ryan (2013, p. 264).
40 This is a field that is very much still growing and developing. For an overview of
the general idea of need satisfaction and thwarting in SDT, see Ryan and Deci (2018).
For an overview of some current themes and debates, see Vansteenkiste et al. (2020).
41 Deci and Ryan (2000, p. 229), emphasis in the original removed.
68 P. RAEKSTAD
as when one acts out of internal or external pressures that are experienced
as controlling.…42
Thus, in SDT autonomy is defined in terms of experienced gover-

nance by the phenomenal self, i.e. as, in a certain sense, the experience or
feeling of self-direction. Marx, by contrast, is concerned first and foremost
with the fact of , or actual, self-direction. Nevertheless, the connec-
tion between self-direction and autonomy is intuitive and clear. Arguably,
one important way of people achieving the experience of self-direction is
by securing that their activity really is self-directed.43
We will now see how SDT supports both the thesis that self-directed
activity is of the importance that Marx attributes to it and the thesis
that the importance of self-direction is universal among human beings
in general. Recall that, on Marx’s account, thwarting the human species-
being in an activity significantly devalues that activity and negatively
impacts people’s experience thereof. Furthermore, to Marx the exercise of
our powers of self-direction impacts a range of other powers in a positive
way.
Beginning with the importance of self-directed activity, SDT holds that
what are called “controlling aspects” such as externally imposed impera-
tives, demands to fulfil a particular role, or requirements to perform a task
in order either to attain an external reward or avoid negative repercus-
sions tend to thwart people’s experience of autonomy and thereby crush
intrinsic motivation.44 Intrinsic motivation here refers to the motivation
of an activity being the enjoyment that the performance of that activity
itself generates—for example playing a game of lacrosse purely for the
enjoyment one finds in the process of playing it. By contrast, extrinsic
motivation is where an activity is performed for reasons external to that
activity—such as playing a game of lacrosse for the money needed to
42 Ryan and Deci (2018, p. 86); see also Ryan and Deci (2006, p. 1562). The detail
of their formulations sometimes vary subtly, but the core point about autonomy being
defined in terms of certain experiences is crucial.
43 Note that, despite some interesting historical connections, this should not be
confused with, e.g. Kant’s conception of autonomy as acting in accordance with the
laws laid down by reason.
44 See Ryan and Deci (2018, Ch. 6). This has even been confirmed on a neurolog-
ical level, see Murayama et al. (2010). For an overview of the neuroscience of intrinsic
motivation, see Di Domenico and Ryan (2017). For a brief overview of the undermining
effects of rewards, see Ryan and Deci (2018, pp. 145–147).
3 FREEDOM 69
put food on the table.45 ,46 Furthermore, empirical studies indicate that
securing autonomy in human activities consistently leads to improvements
in the experience of happiness, esteem, and general health and well-being.
By contrast, a lack of autonomy, and a greater degree of controlled moti-
vation—like actions being motivated solely by attaining money, power,
status, and so forth—over intrinsic motivation is associated with the
opposite of the aforementioned, e.g. with lack of esteem, as well as
with greater risks of physical and psychological ill-health and patholo-
gies, including depression, problems with social functioning, and even
lower productivity.47 These findings thus provide some support for the
nature of the importance Marx attributes to self-direction. They support
Marx’s general claim that self-direction is important for living healthier
and happier lives, for nurturing intrinsic enjoyment and motivation, and
for positively impacting the development of a range of valuable powers.
Let us move on to the question of the universality of the impor-
tance that Marx attributes to self-directed activity. An argument against
Marx’s position along these lines can easily be imagined: The impor-
tance that Marx attributes to self-directed activity merely reflects his
own cultural biases, the value he attributes to it is simply absent in
other human cultures and it is therefore plausible to suppose that the
importance of self-directed activity is not, pace Marx’s parochial presup-
positions, universal among human beings. Now, since the importance that
Marx attributes to self-directed activity is not dependent on the beliefs
that people have about the value of self-direction or their attempts to
attain it, it is in principle possible to test the universality of its impor-
tance empirically. The same can obviously be said for SDT’s conception
of autonomy. Just like we can test how human beings react by performing
essentially the same tasks under more or less autonomous conditions,
we can also run these tests in different human societies that either do
or do not value autonomy and see whether or not the same effects are
45 For SDT extrinsic motivation is a matter of degree and comes in a number of

different forms. By definition, SDT holds that all intrinsically motivated action is expe-
rienced as autonomous, while extrinsic motivations differ in their degrees of autonomy
(Ryan and Deci 2018, p. 14). We need not go into this here.
46 See Ryan (1995) and Ryan and Deci (2018, Ch. 8).
47 See e.g. Chen et al. (2015), Deci et al. (2001), Kuvaas (2009), and Vansteenkiste
et al. (2007). For more general overviews, see Ryan and Deci (2018, Ch. 10) and Ryan
and Deci (2020).
70 P. RAEKSTAD
observed. Such studies have been carried out, and they support the claim
that autonomy and its importance for human development is in fact
universal among human beings across cultures—including ones in which
autonomy is explicitly and widely valued and ones in which it is not.48
This too provides some support for Marx’s thesis that the importance of
self-direction for human development is in fact universal among human
beings.
In this chapter, we have seen how Marx develops a positive concept
of freedom as self-directed activity or self-activity. Under conditions
of unfreedom, he argues that the intrinsic motivation and enjoyment
inherent in a given activity is thwarted, and the development of numerous
and significant other human powers is corroded. Conversely, being able
to exercise these powers, realising human freedom, is valuable both as a
particularly important aspect of human development in itself and because
it furthers the development of a wide variety of other valuable powers.
With this understanding in place, we can now turn to consider how Marx
uses a concept of human freedom to critique first the state and capitalism
(Part II) in favour of democracy, and then more specifically capitalism
(Part III) in favour of socialism.
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PART II
Alienation and Democracy
Having discussed their normative components, I turn now to the two

critiques of capitalism that Marx develops in his two theories of alien-
ation and their corresponding visions of a free future: democracy and
socialism, respectively. I don’t want to put any great weight on the word
“theory” here. What I discuss in the following chapter as Marx’s “first
theory” of alienation, I call a theory for two reasons: it is part of an inter-
esting critique of the basic institutions of contemporary society that can
be found in Marx’s early works and it is clearly distinct from the later,
more detailed critique of capitalism that he develops from 1844 onwards,
that the latter develops from in interesting ways, both methodologically
and substantively. The chapters of Part II will show that the early Marx
had a theory of alienation distinct from the one he developed in the 1844
manuscripts1 ; that this theory is not centred solely on a critique of the
modern state, or Hegel’s conception thereof2 ; that this theory centred
on the suppressing of human species-powers principally by their being
subjected to external power and domination, rather than in any significant
way consisting in some sort of “split” between citizen and private person
distinctive of the modern civil society/state complex3 ; and that this in
1 Contra Colletti (1992), Lukács (1974), and Plamenatz (1975).

2 Contra Berki (1990), Breckman (1999), McGovern (1988), and Mészáros (1972).
Against this view, and for mine, see Draper (1977).
3 Contra Avineri (1968), Duquette (1989), Hudis (2013), McGovern (1988), and
Tucker (1970, 1972).
76 PART II: ALIENATION AND DEMOCRACY
turn means that this early account of alienation applies much wider than
merely to capitalist civil society and the state, but also e.g. to feudalism.4
The fact that Marx’s theory of alienation applies not just to the modern
state, but also to capitalist civil society, sets even the very early Marx apart
from a great deal of liberal and more moderate republican ideas.
There are both substantive and methodological reasons for dealing
with Marx’s early critique here. For one, the development of Marx’s
later theory of alienation and socialism in 1844 and beyond cannot
be understood in the absence of his earlier political theories. His later
theories developed from his earlier thoughts, retaining their core commit-
ments. For another, Marx’s approach to, or method of, political theory
changes in important ways over the period during which Marx develops
from a radical democrat to a socialist, but, critically, both approaches are
instances of Marx developing a realist political theory on the basis of the
normative commitments canvassed in Part I. Despite its importance, the
relation between these two critiques of capitalist society has not received
sufficient attention and is not well-understood.
Consequently, Part II has three goals in relation to Part III. Firstly,
together they demonstrate how Marx developed a radical realist political
theory based on a commitment to human development in two distinct
ways. Secondly, they show that and how a theory of this kind rightly
changes in response to further descriptive knowledge. The basic structure
of many of Marx’s normative commitments, his views on human nature
and society, and so on, remain very similar from his first critique to the
second. Marx’s deeper investigations into the nature of capitalism and its
alienation, through his study of political economy, leads him to develop
his vision further into a form of socialism. At the same time, and this is my
third point, we can see that his conception of democracy remains central
to his vision of a future society both genealogically and ideologically. His
notion of democracy retains ideological centrality because the vision he
outlines in some of his earliest writings remains an essential component
of his later vision of socialism. It retains genealogical centrality because it
is this vision that, along with its underlying normative components, is the
key to understanding the development of Marx as a socialist thinker.
4 Although these points have not all been noted and fully explicated together, some
authors do come close, esp. McLellan (1970, 1971).
PART II: ALIENATION AND DEMOCRACY 77
In the early democratic writings, Marx’s realist critique is “realisation-

oriented”, in that it consists in comparing competing achievable alterna-
tives in terms of their social realisations. Thus, Chapter 4 offers an account
of Marx’s first theory of alienation as a diagnosis of the unfreedom of the
capitalist economy and of the modern state, while Chapter 5 turns to his
corresponding vision of a free alternative, democracy. Note that democ-
racy, in Marx’s sense, is not simply a form of the state or polity. Rather,
it is a form of social organisation which encompasses both polity and
economy, and which entails doing away with a separate state apparatus
altogether. As an alternative to capitalism and the modern state, Marx
argues that democracy is able to realise freedom, thus better enabling
human development and flourishing.
Finally, in Chapter 6, I discuss Marx’s critical search for an agent
capable of bringing about his institutional alternative, without which his
proposed democracy would not be achievable. What does it mean for
something to be “achievable” in this context?5 First of all, such an alter-
native has to be possible, by which I mean that it is able to survive and
maintain itself over time in light of certain basic facts about human nature,
planetary conditions, and so on. It must also be “viable”, by which I
mean that the proposal in question is both possible and would generate
roughly the consequences its proponents claim, and that it does not
generate negative effects which would overwhelmingly outweigh these
positive ones. Finally, an alternative must be “achievable”, meaning that
it fulfils the following necessary and jointly sufficient conditions: (i) that
it is viable; (ii) that there is a factor, process, or agent A; (iii) in context or
kind of context c; (iv) such that, in c, A can bring about the alternative in
question. The early critique of capitalism and the state that Marx develops
in his first theory of alienation is realisation-oriented in that it focuses on
the comparative assessment of competing achievable (in the sense of (i)-
(iv)) alternatives. Thus, the modern state is critiqued in favour of socialism
on the grounds that the latter is a superior achievable alternative.6
5 This builds on Wright (2010, esp. pp. 20–9).

6 These requirements reveal intuitively appealing points-of-entry for criticism. A theory
of this kind can be criticised for being impossible, e.g. because it is not compatible with
basic facts about human nature. It can be criticised for being possible but not viable,
insofar as the alternative proposed will either not bring about the desired effects its
proponents claim that it will, or that it will bring about negative side-effects which would
overwhelmingly outweigh any effective benefits in other areas. And it can be criticised for
78 PART II: ALIENATION AND DEMOCRACY
Marx’s recommended vision must be not only possible, but also achiev-
able under the conditions of contemporary capitalist societies. This is why
his search for a viable form of revolutionary agency, to be discussed in
Chapter 6, becomes so crucial. It is also why, having discovered the revo-
lutionary agent in capitalism, his investigations of the nature and effects
of capitalism shifts so greatly with his adoption of the “Standpoint of the
Proletariat”.7
being unachievable, despite perhaps being both possible and viable, in the sense that there
is no agent in our current context which can bring about the alternative in question. For
democracy to be an achievable alternative it must not only be possible in light of basic
planetary conditions, human nature, and other basic facts about the world we inhabit
and plausibly manage to do what its proponents claim without too many negative side-
effects. There must also be a political agent (or combination thereof) that can introduce
democracy in or from the context within which it’s being proposed.
7 Cf. Part III of “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in Lukács
(1974), and Löwy (2005). Note that Lukacs, unlike Löwy, seems to miss the fact and
timing of this vital shift in Marx’s thinking.
CHAPTER 4
The First Theory of Alienation
The earliest uses of one of Marx’s two main terms for alienation (Entfrem-
dung), occur not in dedicated discussions of capitalism, but, more broadly
and rather sparsely—and with virtually no explication. This being said,
it seems to be focused on forms of socially generated powers seemingly
external to and independent of those who create them, which then come
back to dominate and oppress their creators. It also invokes connections
with freedom and subordination; empowerment and disempowerment;
thoughts on the causes and ways of overcoming religious delusions; as
well as with powers unique to, universal among, and distinctive of human
beings as a species. In this chapter, I unpack these ideas by looking at
Marx’s views on the development of capitalist society out of feudalism,
his argument that both feudalism and capitalism are alienating, and his
diagnosis of how both the capitalist state and the economy are alienated
and unfree.
Let’s begin with Marx’s claim that feudal society of the Middle Ages
constituted a perfection of Entfremdung. Marx writes that the feudal
“political constitution was the constitution of private property, but only
because the constitution of property was political”.1 In other words, the
basic nature of feudal society, according to Marx, is a result of the nature
1 Marx (1992, p. 90/I:2, p. 33).

Switzerland AG 2022
80 P. RAEKSTAD
of a particular form of private property. Private property here denotes first

and foremost the kinds of property that confer significant social power,
like property in land, cattle, workshops, factories, and other means of
production, rather than mere personal property in things like clothes and
toothbrushes. In the case of feudalism, this especially means private prop-
erty in land. But if the nature of feudal society was the result of the
feudal form of private property, this was, Marx claims, only so because
the control over such property was, by its very nature in this form of
society, a political thing.
In other words, there was no separation between polity and economy
under feudalism, between the political state and civil society, a point
to which Marx returns throughout the early notes. Thus, in feudalism
according to Marx, the forms of economic control over productive
resources were at the same time directly forms of political and legal power.
He elaborates on this point as follows:
In the Middle Ages there were serfs, feudal property, trade guilds,
scholastic corporations, etc. That is to say, in the Middle Ages property,
trade, society and man were political; the material content of the state was
defined by its form; every sphere of private property had a political char-
acter, or was a political sphere, in other words politics was characteristic
of the different spheres of private life. (…) In the Middle Ages the life of
the people was identical with the life of the state [i.e. political life]. Man
was the real principle of the state, but man was not free. Hence there was
a democracy of unfreedom, a perfected system of alienation. The abstract
reflected antithesis of this is to be found only in the modern world. The
Middle Ages were an age of real dualism; the modern world is the age of
abstract dualism.2
This quotation will require some unpacking. To begin, the term “state”
(der Staat) here refers to political life, but, I contend, not to political
life in the sense of concerns to do with the polity per se, but in terms
2 Ibid, square brackets in Colletti. Translation of “Entfremdung” has been modified

from “estrangement” to “alienation”, since I believe that Marx uses the two terms inter-
changeably and basically synonymously – a fact which is worth conveying for my purposes
throughout this book. This assumption is naturally a contested one, but is the subject of
broad (though not complete) consensus in the literature. I do not here have the space
to defend this assumption; instead, I will modify the translations for the term as required
and note in the relevant footnotes which German term has been translated from which
original English translation.
4 THE FIRST THEORY OF ALIENATION 81
of the general public concern. I believe that Marx’s use of the term
“der Staat” here is his translation of “res publica”, which means the
“public thing”, or public concerns or affairs. This is a reading that sits
well both with the letter to Ruge in 1842, where Marx discusses his
work on a critique of Hegel and complains that res publica is “quite
untranslatable into German”.3 It is further supported by Marx’s use of
the term throughout his journalism of 1842–1843 where it is used in the
sense I have outlined.4 Correspondingly, Marx contrasts, inter alia, the
law of a state for its citizens to the law of one party or faction against
another,5 and distinguishes between a “state” and things like the “state
organ” (Staatsorgan),6 “government” (Regierung),7 or “state adminis-
tration” (Staatsverwaltung).8 Lastly, reading “state” as a translation of res
publica denoting public concerns or affairs is confirmed by Marx’s explicit
definition of “the state” as the matter of general concern: “the state is the
‘matter of general concern’, and in reality by ‘matters of general concern’
we mean the state”.9
Clarifying this definition of “the state” allows us to see what Marx
means when he writes that the material content of “the state” was defined
by its form, and that every sphere of private life had a political char-
acter. All of this simply means that the social relations and institutions
that make up the social structure of feudal society were defined by the
legal forms that recognised, defined, and maintained them. Consequently,
every sphere of a person’s life was formally and politically recognised as
the kind of thing that it was. Social roles like serfs, freemen, noblemen,
guild apprentices, guild masters, and so on, were all subject to formal,
3 MECW 1, p. 383/III:1, p. 22. The point Marx is making here is notoriously unclear,
but is likely a political one, possibly expressing exasperation with German thinkers, in
particular Hegel, the value of republican ideas and institutions, or perhaps even that
censorship made it impossible to translate res publica into the German Republik (see
Hunt 1974, p. 31).
4 For particularly good examples of this not referred to below, see I:1, p. 153, 156,
and 276–7.
5 I:1, p. 108.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid, p. 164, and p. 285.
8 I:1, p. 124. For some discussion of this particular point, see Chitty (2006).
9 Marx (1992, p. 187/I:2, p. 127).
82 P. RAEKSTAD
though often distinct, kinds of legal recognition and enforcement. More-

over, different aspects of a person’s life were not only recognised by
systems of law, but by different systems of law: as a member of a free city
one fell under the city’s laws and legal codes; as subjects of a monarch
one fell under the monarch’s laws and tribunals; as members of a reli-
gion one fell under religious laws and courts; as guild members under the
guild’s rules and bylaws, etc.
Each major aspect of a person’s life, in being recognised and defined
in these ways, had therefore a political character. There was no distinct
political constitution separate from these other social relations and insti-
tutions.
The later parts of the above-cited passage will become clearer once we
look at more of Marx’s discussion:
In the original models of monarchy, democracy and aristocracy there was

at first no political constitution as distinct from the real, material state and
the other aspects of the life of the people. The political state did not yet
appear as the form of the material state. Either the res publica was the real
private concern of the citizens, their real content [as among the Greeks]
(…) Or else the political state was nothing but the private caprice of a
single individual so that, as in Asiatic despotism, the political state was as
much a slave as the material state. The modern state differs from such
states with a substantive unity between people and state (…) in (…) that
the constitution itself develops a particular reality alongside the real life of
the people and that the political state has become the constitution of the
rest of the state.10
What Marx is saying here is that in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and
so on, the human being was the principle of the state in the sense that
people’s day-to-day material lives were identical with their political lives.
Either the state was the public concern of the people, or it was the
concern merely of a minority (either a group or an individual) and those
who did not participate were not, in Marx’s terminology, members of
the state (=the public concern) at all. In either case, those who partici-
pated actively in social decision-making controlled social life (relatively)
transparently.
10 Marx (1992, p. 90–1/ I:2, p. 33–4).

What would it mean to be a proper part of the state in this sense

of public concern? Firstly, we note, “[d]eliberation and decision are the
means by which the state becomes effective as a real concern”.11 If
someone is a part of the state, then:
it is obvious that their very social existence already constitutes their real
participation in it. (…) To be a conscious part of a thing means to take
part of it and to take part in it consciously. Without this consciousness the
member of the state would be an animal.12
In short, to be a member of a state in Marx’s sense means that one is a

conscious participant in society’s deliberation and decision-making. This
conscious participation in social life is also connected with the distinction
between humans and animals. Without being able to exercise or realise
our species-specific powers of conscious participation and deliberation in
social decision-making we are rendered less than fully human, insofar as
we are not able to exercise the powers universal among, distinctive of, and
unique to our species.
This constitutes the core of Marx’s conception of alienation:
socially generated powers—of monarchs, feudal overlords, capitalists, and
others—that come to dominate and oppress (at least some of) those who
produce and reproduce them, thus thwarting the latter’s freedom.
Accordingly, the Middle Ages constituted a perfection of alienation
in the sense that it perfected a system of exclusion of (almost all of)
the people from any exercise of their human powers of conscious self-
direction in societal affairs. Without venturing into detail about Marx’s
conception of freedom at this point, we can say that feudalism constitutes
a “democracy of unfreedom” due to the fact that, in such a society, in
principle every person is subject to the power of another—only, perhaps,
excluding the supreme monarchs (although one might argue that even
the king or queen is, in principle, subject to the will of a deity). This
subjection to externally imposed power, in turn, entails that subjects are
denied their self-direction and thus unfree.13 What, then, of the capitalist
state and civil society?
11 Marx (1992, p. 187/I:2, p. 127).

12 Ibid both. Emphases in the original.
13 This comes across, albeit indirectly, in the Rheinische Zeitung articles on the freedom
of the press, I:1, p. 121–69. Freedom is further identified as the essence of man in I:1,
84 P. RAEKSTAD
As we saw above, the modern world develops the separation between

a polity outside of, and at least formally distinct from, material economic
life. This process of abstraction of the polity from civil society or the
economy, begun under absolute monarchy and then perfected by the
French Revolution, has transformed the estates (Stände), the previous
locus of social organisation, into social classes devoid of juridical and polit-
ical recognition and enforcement. This has “accomplished the separation
of political life and civil society”.14
Expanding on this, Marx writes that modern civil society, i.e. the
capitalist economy15 :
is distinguished from that which preceded it by the fact that civil society
does not sustain the individual as a member of a community, as a
communal being [Gemeinwesen]. On the contrary, whether an individual
remains in a class or not depends partly on his work, partly on chance.
The class itself is now no more than a superficial determination of the
individual, for it is neither implicit in his work, nor does it present itself
to him as an objective community, organized according to established laws
and standing in a fixed relationship to him. It is rather the case that he
has no real relation to his substantive activity, to his real class. (…) (The
civil society of the present is the principle of individualism carried to its
logical conclusion. Individual existence is the ultimate goal; activity, work
content, etc. are only means).16
p. 143. For a beautiful connection between freedom, democracy, modern Christianity,

and mere animal existence, see III:1, p. 48–53.
14 Marx (1992, p. 146/I:2, p. 89).
15 It must be borne in mind that the term “civil society” (bürgerliche Gesellschaft)
among German thinkers such as Marx and Hegel is significantly different from the ways
in which that English term is used today. Today “civil society” is commonly used to refer
to organisations and movements outside of both the proper capitalist economy and the
state structure, such as athletic associations, NGOs, popular movements, etc. “Bürgerliche
Gesellschaft”, however, was employed by 19th Century German thinkers as a translation of
the term “civil society” employed, in particular, by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such
as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, etc., where the term referred either to the (variable)
economic base of a society (hence Ferguson’s “Essay on the History of Civil Society”), or,
more narrowly, to the economic base of specifically commercial – i.e. capitalist – society,
whilst also continuing an earlier usage of “civil society” as opposed to “natural society”.
Marx makes the connection between civil society and the economy, as the object of
study of political economy, in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy.
16 Marx (1992, p. 147/I:2, p. 90).
What Marx seems to be saying here is that the advent of capitalism

breaks up various traditional forms of community—whether alienating or
not—and separates out an economic sphere characterised by a kind of
isolation and atomism. Earlier divisions between such concrete communi-
ties are abolished in law and broken up in reality. This, in turn, leaves an
economy where one’s labour, position, and so on are, at least to a much
greater extent, merely the effect of a combination of individual endeavour
and fortune of circumstances and events. Since socio-economic existence,
and the social divisions a modern economy entails, are no longer directly
acknowledged, shaped, and regulated by law and the other aspects of the
formal political system, they lose their political character and thus their
aforementioned “real dualism”.
This is not at all to say that economic life is, or must be, unregulated
per se in such a society. All it means is that a person’s position within a
web of social relations, and the subsequent ways in which that person may
or may not be able to interact with other members, live their lives when
outside of e.g. a workplace, and how they might move around from one
position to another (e.g. from an employed worker to an independent
craftsman to a small manufacturer) are not themselves necessarily explic-
itly recognised, defined, and enforced by legal/political means. There are
no doubt exceptions to the claim Marx is making here, but the existence
of exceptional cases should not blind us to the broad accuracy of his
assertions.
Now, let us return to the issue of the split between the political
state/polity and civil society (i.e. the economy), and the atomism of the
latter. Recall that, according to Marx, one’s material life, is an essentially
social or collective thing, defined by the social relations and structures
within and through which it is lived. Insofar as one’s material or day-to-
day life in large part is one’s working life, this atomisation of an economic
sphere entails that people’s economic life becomes, to them, merely a
matter of satisfying one’s own individual needs. One’s concrete activity,
work, content, etc. thus becomes only the means for securing purely indi-
vidual ends or purposes. As Marx writes, the “atomism into which civil
society is plunged by its political actions” is a necessary consequence of
the fact that the “community” or “communistic entity” within “which
the individual exists, civil society, is separated from the state”.17
17 Marx (1992, p. 145/I:2, p. 90).

86 P. RAEKSTAD
By the same token, a capitalist society separates out a polity distinct

from, and in opposition to, the economy. In contrast to the atomised and
anti-social rat-race a person finds themselves in qua member of a capitalist
economy (a.k.a. bourgeois civil society), in this abstracted political sphere
“he is the imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty, he is divested
of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality”.18 This
appearance is, of course, illusory, and this, in turn, generates Christianity
in its modern form:
In the so-called Christian state it is alienation [Entfremdung ] which carries

weight, and not man himself . The only man who carries weight, the king,
is specifically distinct from other men…19
We see here why it is that people are alienated in a modern state or

polity: human beings themselves carry no weight within it, they do not
participate in any meaningful way when it comes to its deliberation and
decision-making on public affairs or concerns. Instead, only the monarch
has such powers,20 and that person is explicitly distinct from all others.
For Marx, this has profound implications for the forms of consciousness
that people develop in capitalist society, in particular our political and
religious ideas.
Right after discussing the alienated nature of capitalism, Marx writes
that:
The members of the political state are religious because of the dualism
between individual life and species-life, between the life of civil society and
political life. They are religious inasmuch as man considers political life,
which is far removed from his actual individuality, to be his true life and
inasmuch as religion is here the spirit of civil society and the expression of
the separation and distance of man from man.21
18 Marx (1992, p. 220/ I:2, p. 149). Brackets in the original.

19 Marx (1992, p. 225/I:2, pp. 151–152). Translation of “Entfremdung” modified
from “estrangement” to “alienation”.
20 Note that I here use the words “powers” and “forces” interchangeably when
discussing what Marx refers to as “Kräfte”; I use two different English words here solely
for stylistic reasons.
21 Marx (1992, p. 225/I:2, p. 151–2). Translation of “Entfremdung” modified from
“estrangement” to “alienation”.
Here, Marx is claiming that both of these kinds of consciousness—both

the modern political one and that of the modern Christian religion—
are merely illusory constructions. However, these illusions are in no way
random; nor are they mere compensations or false attempts at alleviating
general human fears and ignorance, or a reflected perfection of an ahistor-
ical human nature—as for Feuerbach and many other Young Hegelians.
Rather, they are constructions reflecting, and actively responding to, the
specific social conditions of the modern world with its atomised economy
and really abstracted/separated polity. For Marx, it is only in a democracy,
where the communal spirit of e.g. religion is realised, that people will no
longer be alienated. As a result, the need for such fictitious sovereign
communities will disappear, and so too will these systematic delusions
themselves.
Whereas the system of feudal estates “separates man from his universal
essence” and thereby “transforms him into an animal that is identical
with its own immediate determinate nature”—thus constituting a merely
“animal history of mankind, its zoology”—modern society makes the
“opposite mistake”, it “isolates the objective essence of man, treating it
as something purely external and material. It does not treat the content
of man as his true reality”.22 The “content” in question here concerns the
social or material content of human beings, namely their participation in
a nexus of social/communal relations and institutions within and through
which their lives are lived. Whilst feudal society subjugates and dominates
all its subjects, modern society, i.e. a capitalist economy and the modern
state, abstracts (i.e. separates) the latter from the former.
Further, in its modes of consciousness modern society treats produc-
tion and reproduction as something merely external and material. More
precisely, in modern societies the systems of thought and belief that
develop about humanity, human life, etc. do so from the points of view
of the Christian religion and/or of the political sphere. As a result of this,
they tend to conceptualise production (e.g. of basic goods and services)
and reproduction (e.g. the making, maintaining, and rearing of children;
cooking, cleaning, and maintaining an otherwise liveable home; and so
on) as merely something external to the nature of human life and society,
as nothing more than a necessary precondition of little further conse-
quence. Since, however, this is what constitutes the lived, concrete nature
22 Marx (1992 p. 148/I:2, p. 90). My brackets.

88 P. RAEKSTAD
of humanity, inasmuch as it is what constitutes its day-to-day life, the

modern age, due to the fact that everyday economic life is viewed solely as
something external and merely material, fails to treat this objective nature
of humans as their true reality.
The contradiction here is not one merely between modern forms of
consciousness and the realities of economic life. Instead, it’s a contra-
diction between these forms of consciousness and a merely political —in
the sense of focusing solely on the modern, abstracted polity—political
practice on the one hand, and the realities of the economic existence in
modern civil society on the other. It is in this sense that the modern age
is the age of “abstract dualism” mentioned above: The modern age is the
age of a dualism of the political and the economic spheres where one is
abstracted from the other.
This, in turn, causes a split and contradiction within the members of
such societies:
The perfected political state is by its nature the species-life of man in opposi-
tion to his material life. All the presuppositions of this egoistic life continue
to exist outside the sphere of the state in civil society… Where the political
state has attained its full degree of development man leads a double life, a
life in heaven and a life on earth, not only in his mind, in his consciousness,
but in reality. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself
as a communal being, and in civil society, where he is active as a private
individual, regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and
becomes a plaything of alien powers.23
Notwithstanding the political and religious delusions Marx has already

outlined, capitalism and its abstracted polity are alienating in that, first of
all, they destroy any kind of conscious community or collective organi-
sation of economic life. Secondly, in the economic sphere one not only
debases oneself to a mere means, comes to see others, and collective asso-
ciation in general, as mere means for advancing one’s own interests, and
so forth, one also, crucially, becomes a “plaything of alien powers”.24
Why is this so according to the early Marx?
23 Marx (1992, p. 220/I:2, pp. 148–149).

24 Ibid. both.
People in capitalist societies are unable to exercise or express their

internal species-powers for conscious self-direction, and more specifi-
cally in deliberation and decision-making on their social existence. This
is because any collective entities that people might do so through are
politically eliminated from the (capitalist) economic sphere, and because
this sphere furthermore subjects persons to the whims and impositions
of social powers that they cannot control. Since this realm, and the alien
powers it imposes, are also outside the scope of political decision-making,
due to the latter’s restriction to matters of polity, no merely political
republic (a.k.a. no merely political state), and therefore no merely political
solution, can overcome alienation.
By contrast, alienation can be overcome only by making the economy
subject to the conscious, collective deliberation and decision-making of
(all of) the people. Only this would remove the atomisation of civil
society, render it the object of the public concern, and eliminate its alien
powers and imperatives. This, in turn, entails eliminating the abstraction
of the political state from its economic foundations.
Already as a radical democrat, then, Marx is beginning to diagnose
how people subjected to capitalist social relations become playthings of
alien powers and reject the capitalist separation between economic and
political spheres. This distinguishes him from many liberals and republi-
cans, past and present, who do neither. Note that this is not a question
of subjecting the economy to the rule of a separate government, or a
question of government action not being constricted by property rights.
Rather, it’s a question of removing the separation between economic and
political spheres altogether. This in turn drives Marx to develop a vision
of democracy that’s significantly more radical than is typically recognised.
In this chapter, we have seen that Marx argues that both the capitalist
economy and the modern state are alienating, by virtue of the fact that
people are subjected to socially generated powers which prevent them
from consciously participating in, and directing, their public concerns or
affairs. In so doing, I have shown that the early Marx did in fact have
a theory of alienation distinct from the one he developed in the 1844
manuscripts; that this theory is not centred solely on a critique of the
modern state or Hegel’s conception thereof; that this theory centred
on the suppressing of human species-powers principally by their being
subjected to external power and domination, rather than in any signifi-
cant way consisting in some sort of “split” between citizen and private
person distinctive of the modern civil society/state complex; and that
90 P. RAEKSTAD
this, in turn, means that this early account of alienation applies much
wider than merely to capitalist civil society and the state, but also e.g. to
feudalism. Having an understanding of the critical diagnosis of modern
society that the early Marx develops, I now proceed to the cure he
proposes: democracy.
References
Secondary
Chitty, A. (2006). The basis of the state in the Marx of 1842. In Moggach (Ed.),
pp. 220–241.
CHAPTER 5
Democracy
For the early Marx, the solution to the alienation and unfreedom of
capitalism and the modern state is democracy. To show why, I will first
briefly explain some of the ideological background for Marx’s radical
ideas, before turning to his conception of democracy and his discussion
of its most important requirements—like freedom of the press and over-
coming the split between polity and economy. We will then see how Marx
proposes democracy to replace both the modern state and capitalism.
In so doing, the early democratic Marx develops a notion of democracy
that’s much more emancipatory and ambitious than many republicans of
his day and prefigures his socialism to come.
Marx’s positive political programme as a radical democrat seems to
have been well-established before he developed his first theory of alien-
ation. The latter really develops in his 1843 notebooks on Hegel1 and is
then more fully elaborated in On the Jewish Question. However, there is
solid evidence in Marx’s notes, earliest letters, his doctoral dissertation, his
early journalism, and from the radical company he kept while at univer-
sity, that he fits a mould of ideas often associated with the more radical
enlightenment and republican thinkers all the way through to the Young
1 “Entfremdung” does make sporadic appearances in earlier writings, like his doctoral
dissertation. However, these appearances seem to fall short of the developed theories of
alienation found from 1843 onwards.

Switzerland AG 2022
92 P. RAEKSTAD
Hegelians he associated with. These include commitments to substance

monism and atheism; to a secular set of values; to ideas of democracy
and/or republics; to freedom and equality before the law2 ; to freedoms of
speech, press, association, and conviction; and to the complete secularisa-
tion of government and the law. Many of these ideas were well-established
among the Young Hegelians that Marx associated with during and after
his studies, who sought to draw on the best insights of the philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and continue the historical process of
emancipation they thought was under way by negating current restrictions
on freedom. Consider Ludwig Feuerbach, most famous for his critiques
of Christianity. While often presented as basically apolitical, he was in
fact politically involved in clandestine student organisations, democratic
republicanism, interested in feminism, and even joined the German Social
Democratic Party two years before his death, thus fitting this mould as
well as the more obviously political figures such as Ruge and Bauer.3
While the Young Hegelians’ early emphasis was on religious delusions
and oppression, Marx, for reasons we saw in the preceding chapter, came
to focus much more on social and economic struggles. Documenting
this is beyond the scope of this chapter—and has been done elsewhere—
but it is worth noting that Marx had a clear and strong set of political
commitments before he worked out his two critiques of capitalism.
Nevertheless, the early Marx presents democracy as the solution to
alienation—just as socialism is from 1844 onwards—and it’s in this
context that it will be examined here. Marx holds that, in contrast to
all other political forms, in “a democracy the constitution, the law, i.e.
the political state, is itself only a self-determination of the people and a
determinate content of the people”.4 Its “formal ” principle is therefore
identical with its “substantive” principle.5 In other words, the institution
that claims to rule for and on behalf of the community of individuals
really does so. How? By virtue of the fact that its actions reflect the
expressed wishes of the people who are subject to it as an appropriate and
transparent consequence of the conscious participation of those people
2 While Marx agrees with equality before the law, it’s worth noting that he explicitly
rejects equality as a useful political value, e.g. in Critique of the Gotha Programme.
3 See Leopold (2007, pp. 204–205).
4 Marx (1992, p. 89/I:2, p. 32).
5 Marx (1992, p. 88/I:2, p. 31).
5 DEMOCRACY 93
in its deliberation and decision-making. This conception of democracy is

humanist in the sense that it both conceives of human beings6 as, and
makes it the case that human beings are, the one and only subject of the
political process; thus “democracy proceeds from man and conceives of
the state [= the public concern] as objectified man”.7
This conception of democracy is closely related to that of other radical
democrats like Spinoza,8 and consists of the participation of all in the
deliberation and decision-making on the affairs of the state in the sense
of the public concern—i.e. in the subjection of all social activity to the
collective rule of its participants. Furthermore, this vision of democracy
expresses a return to “the organic community typified by the city-states
of Antiquity [, as such Marx] (…) distinguishes between ‘democracy’ and
the ‘political republic’”.9
What Marx calls the social or “communistic essence” of society is
thereby re-appropriated by all of the people. The various social forces
created by, and inherent in, human society are no longer wielded by alien
powers external and opposed to that of the vast majority of the popula-
tion. Instead, these social powers are taken over by the body of the people,
subjected to their rule, and thereby transformed into powers under their
own command.
6 Note that the term Marx uses in these kinds of statements, der Mensch (literally the
human being, almost always translated as “man”), is gender-neutral, unlike its English or
French counterparts.
7 Marx (1992, p. 87/I:2, p. 31), cf. McLellan (1970, p. 150).
8 Marx’s notes on Spinoza’s works in IV:1, p. 233–276 should be mentioned here,
along with the fact that Marx was, throughout his life, an avowed fan of many
radical enlightenment writers such as Diderot. The way he discusses democracy is very
close to the one that can be found in his notes on Spinoza’s Tractatus, see IV:1, p. 240–
241 (785). Linking Marx to Spinoza has a long pedigree including Engels, Plekhanov,
Althusser, and Negri, who tend to emphasise the importance of Spinoza’s materialism.
Linking Marx’s ideas to more specifically to Spinoza’s ideas on democracy is also far
from rare, see e.g. Abensour (2004), Balibar (2008), Igoin (1977), Kouvelakis (2003),
and Matheron (1977). The connection between Marx and Spinoza himself should not,
however, be overstated, as Marx clearly criticises Spinoza’s philosophy in The Holy Family
and The German Ideology as a kind of metaphysics he believes to be rendered irrelevant
by later forms of materialism. It goes without saying that his concept of freedom is also
stamped by Spinozist influence.
9 Colletti (1992, p. 41), though I reject his indication of any significant Rousseauan
influence. See also Katz (1994).
94 P. RAEKSTAD
We must note, however, that Marx’s conception of democracy is largely

one of what I shall call institutional substance rather than of institu-
tional form. By institutional form I mean the concrete rules or procedures
according to which an institution is organised. In contrast, by institutional
substance I mean the content that a given institutional form produces,
realises, or achieves. Institutional substances, in this sense, are multiply
realisable. A genuinely direct democracy, for instance, may be realised
through the instantiation of a number of distinct institutional forms
or procedures, such as simple majority voting, supermajority voting, or
strict consensus decision-making. On the other hand, any given institu-
tional form may fail to realise in one context the institutional substance
that it realises in another one. For example, while ancient Athens and
(hypothetical) ancient Coruscant may have largely identical institutional
forms—same constitution, rules, laws, decision-making procedures, etc.—
the latter may have substantially different institutional substance owing
to e.g. an extreme inequality of wealth giving rise to buying and selling
of votes, thereby subverting the potential for genuine direct democracy
which is actualised in Athens. In the sense of institutional political forms,
Athens and (hypothetical) Coruscant may, indeed, be largely identical;
but the addition of one further factor makes it the case that the substance
of their respective polities differs significantly.
A distinction between institutional form and institutional substance is
always a contextual one. If we are interested in e.g. whether a group
is democratic, it makes sense to consider democracy as the institutional
substance and different decision-making procedures as the institutional
forms which may or may not—and may or may not to various degrees—
realise this institutional substance. But we may, by contrast, be interested
in a different question concerning the same group; for instance, whether
the group’s decision-making procedure works by consensus or not—or,
if it does operate by consensus, then which forms or procedures bring
this about. In one case, the consensus decision-making procedure might
take place in the absence of any explicit formal rules and without any
specialised functions. In another case, it might involve official functions
like facilitators, timekeepers, and vibe watchers; it might involve a rigorous
four-step (or more) process; it might or might not utilise a range of hand
signals; and so on. The distinction between the institutional substances on
the one hand, and the institutional forms which may or may not realise
them on the other, is thus contextually determined: it is determined
5 DEMOCRACY 95
by the things we are interested in investigating (democracy; consensus

decision-making), and the questions we wish to ask about them.
When, rarely, Marx sets out an institutional vision, it’s almost always10
one of institutional substance rather than of institutional form. Above all,
this is because the question he is interested in is what a fundamentally
new and better kind of society would have to be like. More proxi-
mately, when it comes to his early theory of alienation and democracy,
he is concerned with what kind of basic social organisation—however
realised—can be expected to eliminate alienation. He thus specifies what
human society needs to be like in order to be considered a democracy
(or, later, socialism) and fulfil its institutional promise, but he does not
provide a specification of the more specific institutional forms through
which this is to be instituted. His vision of democracy in terms of insti-
tutional substance at this stage includes, strictly speaking, only the vision
of subjecting every major aspect of social life to participatory democratic
control.
Having said this about the primary focus on institutional substance,
Marx’s notes do offer some reflections on the necessary and possible insti-
tutional forms it may have. First of all, as I will come back to below,
Marx’s vision of democracy continues the Young Hegelian and radical
enlightenment strand of secularisation not just of political institutions,
but of thought and life tout court. From his discussion of the United
States and engagement with Bauer in On the Jewish Question, it is clear
that he supports the secularisation of all major social institutions, while
going further to assert that humanity must be freed from religious delu-
sions in general. This is a project which can only be brought about by
removing the social bases which give rise to it, which Marx believes can
only occur in a democracy.
Secondly, although Marx is aware of the potential problems involved in
representation or delegation,11 he does not view it as inherently suspect:
The question is not whether civil society should exercise legislative power
through deputies or through all people as individuals. What is crucial is
the extension and greatest possible universalization of the vote, i.e. of both
active and passive suffrage…
10 Leopold (2007) discusses some rare exceptions.

11 For example I:2, p. 133. Compare this with I:1, p. 285.
96 P. RAEKSTAD
[T]he vote is the immediate, direct, not merely representative but actually
existing relation of civil society to the political state. (…) Only when civil
society has achieved unrestricted active and passive suffrage has it really
raised itself to the point of abstraction from itself, to the political existence
which constitutes its true, universal, essential existence.12
In other words, what is essential for Marx is not a question of direct

or representative democratic forms, but the extension of voting rights as
a means to the substantial extension of really democratic participation.13
This brings me to the third point, namely that both here and in his
discussion of democracy what is at stake is the full political participa-
tion of all adult persons. At no point are exceptions made along lines
of class, race, religion, gender, nationality, or anything else—though his
lack of writing on many of these issues, e.g. women’s suffrage, makes his
exact views at this time hard to pin down. This separates Marx from many
liberals and more moderate republicans, who often explicitly excluded
e.g. the working classes (including slaves and servants), women, people
of colour, and so on from participation in their idealised republics.
Fourthly, Marx thinks of democracy not just in terms of participatory
decision-making, but also in deliberative terms. Certain particular free-
doms—especially freedom of the press—are considered absolutely vital for
any free and democratic society. This is demonstrated strongly in the early
Rheinische Zeitung articles on the freedom of the press.14 Here Marx
criticises all legal restrictions on press freedom as being merely veiled
assertions of one faction against another; harshly rejects the arguments put
forward by its proponents in the Prussia of his day; and forcefully asserts
the broad theses that censorship laws pervert the press as an institution,
has disastrous consequences for a society’s spirit, and is fundamentally
incompatible with a society’s freedom, independence, and political matu-
rity. He writes, for example, that “in order to combat freedom of the press,
the thesis of the permanent immaturity of the human race has to be
12 Marx (1992, p. 191/I:2, p. 130). I will show below how this extension of political
suffrage will, Marx believes, result in the introduction of true democracy.
13 In the passage cited Marx is, of course, discussing the perfection of the political
state and not of a democratic society—though he believes the former will bring about the
latter.
14 I:1, p. 121–169. See also some of the discussions on the ban of the Leipziger
Allgemeinen Zeitung in I:1, p. 291–293, and 328–333, as well as, in a slightly different
context, I:1, p. 313–318. See also Hardt (2000).
5 DEMOCRACY 97
defended” and that if “the immaturity of the human race is the mystical
ground for opposing freedom of the press, then the censorship at any rate
is a highly reasonable means against the maturity of the human race”.15
Importantly, these ideas are spelled out in terms that refer back to his
commitment to human development. Marx thus writes that:
What undergoes development is imperfect. Development ends only with

death. Hence it would be truly consistent to kill man in order to free him
from this state of imperfection. That at least is what the speaker concludes
in order to kill freedom of the press.16
On the positive side, Marx claims that freedom of the press is a posi-
tive good qua its embodiment of the idea of freedom; that a free press
has a value distinct from, and independent of, that of its particular prod-
ucts; that it is essential for securing criticism of, and rational and collective
deliberation on, political actors and actions; and that it is vital for over-
coming mystification in social and political life. Furthermore, he criticises
the Preussische Staats-Zeitung specifically for, inter alia, its conception of
its audience as merely passive receptacles to be mastered by the command-
ments of great works and national media. In so doing, Marx claims, the
newspaper reveals the medieval foundations hiding behind its modern
rhetoric17 —a statement which sits well with his conception of feudalism
as perfected domination, subjugation, and alienation discussed above.
Fifth, unlike modern republics, democracy for Marx does not involve
an essential contradiction between private and particular interests on the
one hand and general ones on the other, because no separate economic
sphere is excluded from communal rule.18 Since there is no separate
economic sphere, Marx’s vision of democracy is distinct from a merely
political democratic republic, which upholds such a split. Accordingly,
Marx criticises the debates between monarchies and republics for still
remaining a “conflict within the framework of the abstract state” (Marx
1992, p. 89/I:2, p. 32). In so doing, Marx could not be clearer that
his vision of democracy goes beyond simply transforming political states
15 MECW 1: 153/I:1, p. 141.

16 Ibid. both.
17 I:1, p. 123–124.
18 See e.g. Marx (1992, p. 145–147/I:2, pp. 90–91; p. 220/I:2, pp. 148–149).
98 P. RAEKSTAD
into democratic republics. However, he does think that the political state,
once “perfected” by the introduction of universal suffrage, will neverthe-
less serve to bring about full democracy. Thus “the perfection of this
abstraction is also its transcendence”.19 He expands on this as follows:
By really establishing its political existence as its authentic existence, civil

society ensures that its civil existence, in so far as it is distinct from its polit-
ical existence, is inessential. And with the demise of the one, the other, its
opposite, collapses also. Therefore, electoral reform in the abstract political
state is the equivalent to a demand for its dissolution [Auflösung] and this
in turn implies the dissolution of civil society.20
What Marx seems to be saying here is that by allowing all the members
of a society to participate in the political process—i.e. by allowing all
members of the economy also to become real, participating parts of the
political state—the existence of these two spheres, qua distinct social
spheres, is dissolved. This can mean one of two things. Either it can mean
that simply extending political participation to all persons implies, in a
logical sense, that the two spheres are no longer distinct because they
now have all the same real members. Or it can mean that the extension
of political participation will suffice to bring it about that the economy
becomes subjected to democratic control, as a result of which the sepa-
ration between state and civil society is dissolved by the fact that they
now both become, where they previously were not, subjected to demo-
cratic control. The former reading holds that the extension of universal
suffrage logically entails the elimination of any civil society/state separa-
tion, whilst the latter reading holds that universal suffrage will suffice to
bring it about that this separation is overcome by the democratic polity
taking over control over the economy and subjecting it to democratic
rule.
In the former interpretation, the extension of voting rights is viewed as
constituting democracy; in the latter interpretation, it is seen as something
which will bring about democracy. I believe the latter reading is to be
preferred for the following reasons:
19 Marx (1992, p. 191/I:2, p. 130).

20 Marx (1992, p. 191/I:2, p. 130–131).
5 DEMOCRACY 99
1. Marx’s distinction between a perfected, but still merely political

republic and democracy proper is hard to sustain on the first reading,
where democracy seems to consist in nothing more than the exten-
sion of membership in the merely political republic. Obviously, this
is not the case on the latter reading.
2. Marx sees democracy as eliminating the split persons are subject
to under present conditions between being a “private person” and
being a “citizen”. The role of a “citizen” involves being, and
thinking of oneself as, a member of a species and a community, as
a person committed to others’ and general interests as well as one’s
own, conceiving as other as ends in themselves as well, and so forth.
The role of being a “private person”, however, involves being, and
thinking of oneself as, a person who lives as an atomised individual,
who has only egoistic particular interests, who sees other persons
and social existence in general as mere means for achieving one’s
own selfish ends, etc.21 On the first (logical) reading it is very hard
to see how persons do not in fact live two kinds of lives—one in
the economy, one in the polity—with all of the different and poten-
tially conflicting norms, motivations, imperatives, practices, and so
on that Marx critically diagnoses. Bringing all of society under full
democratic control, however, seems perfectly able to do so insofar as
there is now only one set of institutions through which social delib-
eration and decision-making occurs. This is what the second reading
entails, as a result of which it should be preferred.
3. Finally, Marx’s concern with alienation at this stage includes, as I
have shown, the alien powers imposed by the separate sphere of civil
society. Only the subjection of this sphere to full democratic control
will suffice to overcome this. In the second reading it is clear how
this would happen: universal suffrage will bring about the subjection
of the economy to democratic authority. On the first reading, this
is not the case, since merely extending suffrage does not, by itself,
subject the economy and its alien powers to any kind of democratic
control. Consequently, the second reading, which affirms that the
economic sphere must and will be subjected to democratic power,
must be preferred to the first reading, which does not.22
21 Marx (1992, p. 220/I:2, p. 148–149).

22 It is likely that Marx is strongly influenced by his reading of ancient history here,
particularly the history of ancient Athens. We might doubt whether the pathway he
100 P. RAEKSTAD
We are now in a position to see how democracy will overcome capitalist

alienation and dissolve its associated religious and political delusions. A
democracy overcomes alienation simply by being a democracy. Alienation,
in this early theory, consists in human beings being subjected to the social
powers they create and which have become powers seemingly external to
and independent of their creators—whether in the hands of a king, the
nobility, or the impersonal forces of a capitalist economy. These powers
then come back to dominate the people that created them, thwarting
the exercise and expression of their human species-powers of conscious
deliberation and decision-making in public affairs, thus rendering them
unfree. Since democracy consists in subjecting every major aspect of social
life to the conscious, collective deliberation and decision-making of all of
its participants, there are no such external, uncontrolled social powers or
forces to which people are subjected. As such, a democracy is a form of
human society which allows the human species-powers to be exercised
and expressed, as a result of which it is unalienated and free.
The creation of a properly democratic society thus entails the over-
coming of alienation. Marx sums this up as follows:
Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself
and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life,
his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has
recognized and organized his forces propres as social forces so that social
force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only
then will human emancipation be completed.23
The overcoming of alienation entails, for Marx, the supersession of

religion, and the overcoming of the kind of alienation of modern civil
society and the state entails the supersession of modern Christianity by
way realizing its “spirit” in the real, secular world:
proposes is really a plausible one for contemporary societies. In doing so, however, we
must bear in mind both that Marx’s highly optimistic expectations to universal suffrage
seemed plausible to him in light of the history he was drawing on. Lastly, we should point
out that something like this path to revolution—i.e. full social reconstruction beginning
with the implementation of universal suffrage within the modern state—is revised after,
and in response to, the experiences of the Paris Commune in 1871, as he very explicitly
discusses both in The Civil War in France and in the 1872 Preface to the Communist
Manifesto.
23 Marx (1992, p. 234/I:2, p. 162–163).
5 DEMOCRACY 101
The religious spirit can be realized only in so far as that stage in the devel-
opment of the human spirit of which it is the religious expression emerges
and constitutes itself in its secular form. This happens in the democratic
state. Not Christianity but the human foundation of Christianity is the
foundation of this state…
The sovereignty of man – but of man as an alien being distinct from
actual man – is the fantasy, the dream, the postulate of Christianity, whereas
in democracy it is a present and material reality, a secular maxim.24
Here I take Marx to mean that a democracy brings about the

“sovereignty of man” in the secular, i.e. real and material, world by
eliminating the domination and subjugation of human beings by socially
generated powers which they cannot control. Being the masters of
their own social existence, the members of a democracy are no longer
impelled to believe in unfounded illusions to give them a false feeling of
sovereignty. Furthermore, as we have already seen, a democracy institutes
the collective self-rule of all of its participants, thereby bringing about
the real brotherhood of humanity, in contrast to the atomised existence
one experiences in a capitalist economy. With the replacement of this
atomised form of material life, and the corresponding elimination of the
polity/economy split, the local conditions which give rise to Christianity
in its modern form disappear as well. This will, Marx believes, result in
the falling away of religion in general, and modern Christianity in partic-
ular, from personal and public life, since the conditions that give rise to
them will have been removed.
In this chapter, we have seen that the early Marx proposes democracy
to cure the alienation of modern society and why this vision is much more
radical than is commonly understood, involving inter alia democratising
the economy and even doing away with the modern polity/economy split
altogether. Implementing this cure requires an agent capable of, and inter-
ested in, replacing capitalist society with a democracy. The next chapter
shows how this brought Marx to the proletariat as a revolutionary subject
and with it the greatest turning point of his political thought.
24 Marx (1992, p. 225–226/I:2, p. 151–152).

102 P. RAEKSTAD
References
Primary
Secondary
Abensour, M. (2004). La Démocratie contre l’État: Marx et le moment machi-
avélien (2nd ed.). Éditions du Félin.
Balibar, E. (2008). Spinoza and politics. Verso.
pp. 99–104.
Hardt, H. (2000). Communication is freedom: Karl Marx on press freedom and
censorship. Javnost—The Public, 7 (4), 85–100.
Igoin, A. (1977). De l’ellipse de la théorie politique de Spinoza chez le jeune
Marx. Cahiers Spinoza, 1, 213–228.
Katz, C. (1994). The socialist polis: Antiquity and socialism in Marx’s thought.
The Review of Politics, 56(2), 237–260.
Kouvelakis, S. (2003). Philosophy and revolution: From Kant to Marx. Verso.
Matheron, A. (1977). Le Traité théologico-politique lu par le jeune Marx. Cahiers
Spinoza, 1, 159–212.
CHAPTER 6
From Realisation-Oriented to Agent-Centred

Political Theory
Two related shifts in Marx’s work occur in the latter half of 1843 and the
beginning of 1844, both of which turn on the proletariat. Both are also
the outcome of a longer developmental process Marx went through
during the years 1842–1844 and must be understood in that context.
That process begins with Marx’s early journalistic discovery of the impor-
tance of underlying social and economic relations to political and legal
conflicts. It moves on through historical analyses, critiques of Hegel and
others to the formulation of his first theory of alienation along with its
proposed cure in democracy. It takes a decisive step, in A Contribution to
the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction, with his identifi-
cation of the proletariat as the revolutionary class. This leads Marx further
into political economy, socialist literature, and becoming acquainted with
working-class organisations. The first shift that occurs is one of theoret-
ical focus. Marx’s political theory goes from being principally focused on
a diagnosis and critique of modern society to becoming a diagnosis and
critique of capitalist society from the perspective of the proletarian class.
Consequently, he shifts from one kind of realist approach to another, from

Switzerland AG 2022
104 P. RAEKSTAD
a realisation-oriented to an agent-centred one.1 Accordingly, his perspec-

tive shifts to focus much more on the real forces for change that capitalism
generates. The second is a shift of theoretical content. Marx’s diagnosis of
capitalist unfreedom is much further developed in a new theory of alien-
ation, as does his conception of a free society to cure it in his vision of
socialism.
This chapter will summarise this sequence of events insofar as they are
important for the development of Marx’s political theory, culminating
in the new perspective from which Marx develops his second theory of
alienation. The chapters in Part III will then show how Marx uses this
approach to develop his more dedicated, socialist critique of capitalism.
In his famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy Marx mentions the embarrassment he experienced when, as the
editor of the Rheinische Zeitung from 1842 to early 1843, he was faced
with the Rhenish Landtag’s discussions of the laws against the theft of
wood and on the division of landed property, the condition of the Moselle
peasantry, and the debates on free trade and protective tariffs.2 He writes
that:
In the year 1842-3, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found

myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known
as material interests. The deliberations of the Rhenish Landtag on forest
thefts and the division of landed property; the official polemic started
by Herr von Schaper, then Oberpräsident of the Rhine Province, against
the Rheinische Zeitung about the condition of the Moselle peasantry, and
finally the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the
first instance to turn my attention to economic questions. (…) The first
work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was a critical
re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law; the introduction to
this work being published in the Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbiicher issued
in Paris in 1844. My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal
relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by them-
selves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human
mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions
of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and
1 Shortly after coming up with this term, I discovered that it has already been employed
to denote realist approaches to political theory in Geuss (2010, p. 46). By contrast, my
usage of the term denotes one specific class of possible realist approaches.
2 See. I:1, pp. 199–236, and 296–327.
6 FROM REALISATION-ORIENTED TO AGENT-CENTRED … 105
French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term ‘civil
society’; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in
political economy. The study of this, which I began in Paris, I continued in
Brussels, where I moved owing to an expulsion order issued by M. Guizot.
The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became
the guiding principle of my studies can be summarized as follows. In the
social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite rela-
tions, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production
appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces
of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes
the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a
legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms
of social consciousness…3
This is a claim which Engels, in his letter R. Fischer dated the 15 April
1893, corroborates in even stronger terms, writing that he heard Marx
say that it was specifically the debates on the laws against theft of wood
which shifted his focus from purely political questions to economic ones,
thereby ultimately turning him towards socialism. This spurred Marx, as
he himself points out, to a critical examination of Hegel in his 1843 notes.
As Part II has shown, the diagnosis of capitalism and the state that Marx
develops there is partly economic, in that it briefly discusses the alien
powers that capitalism imposes on people and its exclusion from conscious
control, in addition to his critique of the modern state as alienating. Marx
also offers an envisioned cure, democracy, which he believes can overcome
this alienation.
However, if such a cure is to be instituted, democracy must not just
be possible and viable; it must also be an achievable alternative in modern
societies. Recall that this means: (i) that it is viable; (ii) that there is a
factor, process or agent A; (iii) in context or kind of context c; (iv) such
that, in c, A can bring about the alternative in question. Marx already
believes that: (i’) democracy is a viable institutional alternative to capitalist
civil society and the state. His commitment to introducing democracy to
cure the ills of contemporary society therefore naturally leads Marx to a
concern with (ii)–(iv). He reflects that:
3 Marx (1992, p. 425/II:2, p. 100).

106 P. RAEKSTAD
Clearly the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons,

and material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory also
becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses…
The point is that revolutions need a passive element, a material basis.
Theory is realized in a people only in so far as it is a realization of the
people’s needs. (…) It is not enough that thought should strive to realize
itself; reality must itself strive towards thought.4
The first sentences express, I think, the following line of thought:

Philosophical criticism is no substitute for concrete action when it comes
to bringing about social change. Social change must be brought about
by a “material force”, i.e. by some causally efficacious factor, process, or
agent. Criticism, or critical political theory, can, however, become such
a causally efficacious “material force” only if it can succeed in sufficiently
influencing the actions of a large enough body of people, causing them to
act in the ways needed to bring about revolutionary social change. Such
a body of people is the “material basis” of a critical political theory.
Marx moves on to claim that a critical political theory must become
the realisation of people’s needs. Recall that our discussion in Chapter 2
established that in Marx “needs” means drives or strivings. This applies
here too. As such, the claim that a theory is only realised in a people when
it becomes the realisation of their needs means that a theory is realised
only if and when it contains and expresses the real needs—i.e. the real
drives or strivings—of the people it addresses. If a theory can succeed in
expressing the real needs of the people, then it can make reality itself strive
towards thought, in the sense that a real material force strives towards the
goal or direction expressed in the theory. Put differently, such a political
theory must succeed in directing a body of people so that they bring
about (at least some of) what the theory advocates or seeks to promote.
The link between these two components is intuitive. Revolutions
require material force to bring about a change from one kind of basic
social structure to another. A political theory can become such a material
force only if it has an adequate group of people acting in accordance with
it—which Marx here calls the theory’s passive or material element. For
a theory to be able to do this, it must somehow articulate, express, and
appeal to the drives or strivings which the people it is intended to influ-
ence already are subject to. If the theory is able to do so, people’s drives
4 Marx (1992, pp. 251–252/I:2, pp. 177–178).

or strivings can be altered, modified, or re-directed in a way that accords

with the goal or direction contained within the theory. This would mean
that the theory has become a material force. If it can manage to do this,
the theory satisfies not only (i), but also (ii)–(iv), providing an achievable
alternative to what it rejects. By doing so, “[c]riticism has plucked the
imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to
bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but so that he shall throw
off the chain and pluck the living flower”.5
Marx’s search for a revolutionary agent predates these more explicit
reflections. Already in his earlier notes on Hegel, he discusses the estate
of direct labour consisting of propertyless workers, an estate which lacks
any position or privilege in society and which has some special kind of
importance for the other estates. In a letter to Ruge in May 1843,6 Marx
rejects the former’s pessimism about social change on the grounds that
modern society—i.e. the capitalist economy and the state—is generating
a layer of suffering, oppressed, but thinking human beings, the existence
of which is incompatible with the continuation of modern society. This
layer and its revolutionary potential are, furthermore, seen in terms of
class struggle with roots in the economic sphere.
However, the first articulation of the working class as a revolu-
tionary agent, along with the word “proletariat” denoting this class,
comes later. It makes its appearance after the passages discussed above
in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Intro-
duction—composed and written from mid-October to December 1843.
Here the proletariat is singled out as revolutionary class due, in part, to
its “radical chains”. It is a class generated in modern civil society; it lacks
titles, privileges, or substantial standing or influence in modern society;
it is impoverished; and it can only emancipate itself by at the same time
emancipating all of society. This is because the requirements of the prole-
tariat’s emancipation—overthrowing the capitalist economy and the state
in favour of democracy—imply the emancipation not only of the members
of this class, but the emancipation of all the other members of society as
well. Marx goes on to write that:
5 Marx (1992, p. 244/I:2, p. 177).

6 III:1, pp. 48–53, esp. pp. 52–53.
108 P. RAEKSTAD
The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible is libera-

tion from the point of view of that theory which declares man to be
the supreme being for man. (…) The emancipation of the German is the
emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart
the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence
[Aufhebung ] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself
without the realization [Verwirklichung ] of philosophy.7
This largely reiterates elements we discussed above, but with one

crucial amendment: the revolutionary agent is identified as the prole-
tariat. Realising the recommendations of “philosophy” (or critique, or
a critical political theory, etc.) requires abolishing the proletariat as the
class most subject to suffering and alienation in the contemporary world.
This abolition requires that the recommendations of philosophy—namely
democracy—replace the capitalist economy and the state. The proletariat
is defined in terms of the real movement of social struggle, of which it
is (the most important) part. This movement itself contains within it,
implicitly, the direction it tends towards, namely the “dissolution” of
modern civil society/capitalism and the state in favour of a democracy.
Consequently, the proletariat, as the class striving for democratic revo-
lution, is defined as the “dissolution of [modern] society as a particular
class”.8
Having pinpointed an agent for his political theory, Marx has argued:
(ii’) that there is a class, namely the proletariat; (iii’) in and generated by
modern society; (iv’) such that, in modern society, the proletarian class
really can bring about democracy. This means that his realisation-oriented
political theory satisfies not only (i), but (ii)–(iv) as well, presenting
democracy as an achievable alternative to capitalism. I will later discuss
Marx’s thoughts on how the political theorist should relate their work to
this agent and its ongoing struggles.
For now, I want only to indicate how his discovery of the proletariat as
the revolutionary agent changes the direction of Marx’s research. Before I
do so, however, a brief biographical recapitulation is in order. The journey
that began with Marx’s journalistic “embarrassment” in 1842 led him to
take a much closer look at modern society, consisting as it does of modern
civil society and the state. He went on to formulate a severe diagnosis of
7 Marx (1992, p. 257/I:2, p. 183).

8 Marx (1992, p. 256/I:2, p. 182).
its ills in his first theory of alienation, envisioned an alternative to replace

it—democracy—and finally discovered the agent to bring this vision into
being, the proletariat. This line of inquiry led him to investigate the
conditions of the modern capitalist economy as such. Renewing his inves-
tigations, Marx now wants to understand how the capitalist economy and
the alien powers it imposes function in detail, how this economy gener-
ates different and conflicting classes and class interests, the effects the
capitalist economy has on the proletariat, and what would be required for
the proletarian struggle to be victorious. All of this led Marx to his study
of political economy and to his making contact with the socialist move-
ment of his day. This time, however, Marx’s theoretical focus has shifted.
His early theory of alienation is formulated as a general critical political
theory of society, democracy proposed as its cure, and only thereafter does
his search begin for an agent to introduce it. Now he instead begins from
a conception of the nature of capitalism and the social forces it generates,
and proceeds to develop a diagnosis and cure on that basis.
Marx now develops what I call an “agent-centred” approach to polit-
ical theorising, by which I mean that it fulfils the following necessary and
jointly sufficient criteria:
1. An agent-centred political theory starts from a descriptive account

of a particular context or a kind of context c.
2. From this descriptive account, it draws a conception of the social
forces that c generates, be they factors, processes, or agents of
whatever kind.
3. The available factors, processes, or agents available in c constrain
such political theory in the sense that only types of alternatives which
really can be brought about by one or more of the available factors,
processes, or agents are open for political theorising, whether these
alternatives are ones of policy, legislation, economic and political
institutions, or whatever. More precisely, alternatives must be:
(a) viable, in the sense of both being possible in the sense of being
able to survive and maintain themselves over time in light of
certain basic facts about human nature, planetary conditions,
and so on, and being able, at least in principle, to generate the
consequences its proponents claim without generating negative
effects which outweigh these positive ones;
110 P. RAEKSTAD
(b) there must be at least one factor, process, or agent, or combina-

tion thereof, F;
(c) in context or kind of context c;
(d) such that, in or from c, F really can bring about the alternative
in question.
4. Within the bounds of these constraints, such a political theory
develops a conception of at least two or more alternatives within
or from c, at least one of which is recommended over at least one
of the others in terms of the social realisations it generates, or can
reasonably be expected to generate.
5. The available factors, processes or agents available in c also positively
determine the form and content of the advocacy of the political
theorist in that such advocacy must:
(a) seek to address itself (successfully) to an agent, A;
(b) in a suitable manner, i.e. by some suitable means;
(c) such that A will act appropriately (and/or not inappropriately),
in light of the other factors, processes, and agents F, in or from
c, to bring about the alternative in question.
In short, agent-centred political theory invites us to begin from an
understanding of a kind of politics and its context—e.g. capitalist society.
This should include not just the institutions, norms, values, and so on
that it contains, but also the social forces that are generated by and part
of it—e.g. the developmental tendencies of capitalist free markets, of capi-
talist and working classes and class struggle, etc. An understanding of
a form of politics and the social forces that are part of it allows us to
imagine various ways in which it will develop, e.g. if the working class
wins the class struggle against capitalism. A political theorist can then
develop theories that help to guide their preferred agents, within the rele-
vant context, in ways that help empower those agents to bring about the
preferred forms of development—e.g. the self-emancipatory struggle of
the working classes culminating in a socialist revolution. Evidently, this
approach remains staunchly realist, insofar as it starts from a conception
of what real politics is like and seeks to improve the actions of some of
the agents involved therein. Indeed, while Marx’s agent-centred approach
ends up being rather different than what he has been doing previously,
it’s worth pointing out that bringing about the right social realisations
remains central. It thus makes sense to see the shift to agent-centred polit-
ical theory as developing a more sophisticated form of realisation-oriented
realism, rather than something entirely separate from it.
The proletariat, on Marx’s view, is a revolutionary subject, in my sense,
in that it is both the principal factor, process, or agent proposed to bring
about socialism and the agent Marx’s theory needs to appeal to for this
to succeed. The principal factors, processes, or agents he thinks will bring
about his desired alternative is therefore the same as the agent he seeks to
influence. In other agent-centred thinkers, the two can come apart. For
instance, Adam Smith sees the capitalist economy as the factor or process
that will bring about the greater freedom and improved living conditions
for workers, while appealing to the agency of beneficent legislators to put
the right laws and policies in place to allow this to occur.9
An agent-centred approach differs from a merely realisation-oriented
one in a number of respects. Perhaps the most important of these is
that an agent-centred approach insists, as per (1) and (2), on the greater
importance of first attaining an adequate understanding of the context the
theorist is located and acting within. This understanding, in turn, yields
the knowledge the theorist requires concerning the means available for
any possible political action in the relevant context and of the restric-
tions they are under. Only after such an understanding has been attained
does the agent-centred theorist move on to examine which alternatives
are available for political theorising. Having examined these alternatives,
and recommended one or more alternatives over one or more others, an
agent-centred theorist moves on to the question of how best to bring
this or these about. Of the relevant social forces a society generates, the
theorist must address themselves to at least one viable agent that can
act appropriately in the manner required to bring about the theorist’s
preferred alternative. This forms the basis for some of Marx and Engels’
critiques of other socialists. For example, in the Communist Manifesto,
Marx and Engels criticise the utopian socialists for failing to ground their
approach in an accurate understanding of capitalism and its class struggle.
Because they don’t recognise that proletarian class struggle is necessary to
bring about socialism, they try appealing to a wealthy and powerful agent
that cannot be relied upon to do so, namely the capitalist class, and in so
9 Raekstad (2020 and forthcoming).

112 P. RAEKSTAD
doing (by trying to avoid class struggle and successfully appeal to capital-
ists) end up undermining the only social agency (working class struggle)
that can.
In this chapter, we have seen how Marx’s search for an agent of social
change leads him to identify the proletariat as a revolutionary subject,
and how that changes his approach to political theory from a realisation-
oriented one to an agent-centred one. Before moving on, I will stop
to note the most important effects that this shift had on Marx’s work,
namely the further development of Marx’s critical theory of capitalism.
Once re-examined from this new methodological perspective, along with
his newly added insights from political economy and the socialist move-
ment of his day,10 Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism develops into a new and
much more extensive theory of alienation. Alongside this, he also develops
a new conception of the cure it requires, namely socialism. Building on
this more developed critique of capitalism, Marx further shifts his views
on how political theorists ought to relate themselves to, and interact with,
the social forces and agents of their society. The chapters in Part III will
thus reconstruct this new theory of alienation along with its proposed
cure in socialism, as well as his views on how theorists should act and
relate themselves to the agents they seek to address.
References
Primary
Engels, F., & Henderson, W. O. (Ed. and Intro.). (1967). Engels: Selected
writings. Penguin.
Secondary
10 In this regard, Marx notes mentions the importance of English, French, and German
socialist works, singling out Moses Hess’s writings, those of Wilhelm Weitling, and
Friedrich Engels’ Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (in Engels, 1967, pp. 148–
176) among the latter as especially influential, see Marx (1992, pp. 280–282/I:2,
pp. 325–326). Hess’ Über das Geldwesen is particularly interesting for its connections
with Marx’s work of the period 1844–5.
Raekstad, P. (2020). Adam Smith: Radical neo-roman and moderate realist.

Raekstad, P. (Forthcoming). The model of the legislator: Political theory, policy,
and realist utopianism. Contemporary Political Theory.
PART III
Alienation: The Unfreedom of Capitalism
With his agent-centred approach to political theorising in place, Marx

develops a much more detailed diagnosis of capitalism in his new theory
of alienation, along with a new conception of its cure: socialism. This goes
on to re-shape his practice as a political theorist.
The chapters of Part III show a number of things. First, they show how
Marx develops and utilises an agent-centred, and thus another kind of
realist, critique of capitalism. Second, they argue that this critique remains
defensible in light of some of the findings in the human sciences—espe-
cially against the objections levelled by Max Weber and Friedrich Hayek.
Naturally, I do not attempt to show that Marx’s critique of capitalism is
correct on all points or defend it against all possible objections that might
be offered against it. That bar is much higher and lies beyond the scope
of this work.
Third, these chapters complete my demonstration that Marx’s norma-
tive commitments to human development and freedom carry over into
his later critique of capitalism. Here we will see how Marx uses his posi-
tive theory of freedom to develop a diagnosis of how capitalism involves
relations of both personal and impersonal forms of domination. He
formulates a vision of socialism tailored to eliminating them by not only
democratising workplaces, but also abolishing the hierarchical division
of labour, replacing competitive markets with democratic planning, and
distributing according to need. This continues to challenge contemporary
debates about the requirements of free economic institutions.
116 PART III: ALIENATION: THE UNFREEDOM OF CAPITALISM
In light of these goals, the chapter breakdown of Part III is as follows.

In Chapter 7, I lay out my interpretation of Marx’s diagnosis of capi-
talism in what I call his second theory of alienation. At the core of this
theory of alienation is an analysis of how capitalist relations of produc-
tion thwart human freedom in the sense of self-directed activity. I thus
argue that alienation is not, at heart, about a particular kind of feeling or
experience, loss of meaning, anomie, and so forth; call this the subjec-
tivist reading.1 Rather, on the objectivist reading I favour, alienation
diagnoses a state of affairs in which people socially generate certain
powers which come to dominate them. More specifically, his later theory
of alienation explains how, under capitalism, people generate forms of
personal domination (of workers by capitalists and managers) and imper-
sonal domination (by capitalist social relations themselves, over all who
are subject to them). Marx distinguishes between four kinds of alienation:
alienation from product; alienation from productive activity; alienation
from species-being; and alienation from others. The discussion below
will go through each of them in turn, paying specific attention to the
connections between them—connections which are often overlooked or
downplayed. Just like the first theory of alienation discussed in Chapter 4,
the second theory of alienation is fundamentally an analysis of how the
structures and relations of modern society thwart human freedom.
With Marx’s diagnosis in place, Chapter 8 moves on to his notion of
its cure: socialism. Since the diagnosis of modern society has changed
with Marx’s increased understanding of political economy, so too must
his conception of its remedy. I show that Marx’s commitment to radical
democracy is retained in his vision of socialism; what changes is the addi-
tion of further, specifically economic, components in response to the
challenges pointed to in his new theory of alienation. Thus, a future
socialist society must be a full participatory democracy—including free-
doms of speech, press, association, etc. Furthermore, socialism must also
feature a democratically planned economy; abolish capitalism’s hierar-
chical division of labour; and give to each according to their needs, while
allowing them to contribute according to ability.
1 This should not be confused with (other) discussion of “subjective” versus “objective”.
It’s thus not about e.g. subjective versus objective conditions for revolution or whether
conscious awareness or ideas are involved in it (since obviously ideas are necessary for
social relations with generalised commodity exchange, like capitalism), or about whether
it is in some sense “real” or merely imagined.
PART III: ALIENATION: THE UNFREEDOM OF CAPITALISM 117
Finally, Chapter 9 will reconstruct Marx’s evolving understanding of

the role of the theorist within his scheme of an agent-centred political
theory. The role of the theorist, on Marx’s view, is not only to provide a
diagnosis and cure for capitalism; it is also to present these to the revo-
lutionary subject that his theory pinpoints in such a way that it, qua
social force, becomes better able to bring about the real movement from
the condition diagnosed to the cure envisioned. Part of this will involve
showing how Marx’s critique of capitalism is not only compatible with,
but a core component of, his later views on the revolutionary contra-
dictions of capitalism, and is thus entirely consistent with his views on
what is often called dialectical and historical materialism. The chapter also
explains why Marx begins to de-emphasise the more normative sides of
theorising capitalism and why we have reason to pay more attention to
them. With all these components in place, we will be able to have a
complete understanding of how Marx develops a radical realist critique
of capitalism which remains compelling and defensible today.
CHAPTER 7
Alienation and Unfreedom
Marx’s second theory of alienation is an analysis of how capitalism

thwarts freedom. The basic view I present in this chapter goes as follows:
Alienation from the product of labour consists in the fact that, under
capitalism, workers and capitalists reproduce and strengthen (by accu-
mulation) certain social structures that keep them in bondage to the
impersonal powers of capitalist social relations. One of the implications of
these social structures is that workers’ work and its content, its purposes,
means, and execution, are determined by factors outside and seemingly
independent of workers themselves, i.e. by social powers that they cannot
control (alienation from labour). This means that workers in such societies
are further alienated from their species-specific powers of consciousness in
a particularly strong and significant way (alienation from species-being).
Finally, workers under such conditions are alienated from (certain) other
people, because the above-mentioned forms of alienation entail the exis-
tence of capitalists, who own the alienated products as loci of power
over workers, thus wielding socially generated power over workers which
workers cannot control. As a result, workers are dominated by and alien-
ated from them (alienation from others). After some general comments
about my interpretation of Marx’s theory of alienation, I discuss each of

Switzerland AG 2022
120 P. RAEKSTAD
these aspects in turn, showing that and how they’re connected to each
other. In so doing, we will see how Marx diagnoses both the personal
and impersonal forms of domination and unfreedom inherent in capitalist
social relations in ways that we would do well to pay more attention to.
The Nature of Alienation

Let’s note a few things about this view from the outset. For one, it centres
on a diagnosis of how humans under capitalism are prevented from self-
directing their activities. In contrast to Marx’s first theory of alienation, it
focuses on capitalism specifically. However, this is not to say that much of
the analysis cannot also be brought to bear on other forms of society. The
broad idea of alienation as socially generated powers that return to domi-
nate and control their creators applies, in principle, to all forms of social
domination, like the power wielded by feudal lords or state bureaucrats
over their subjects. Marx recognises this, e.g. when in 1844 he writes of
“feudal landed property” as “land which has been alienated from man and
now confronts him in the shape of a handful of great lords”1 and that in
“feudal landownership we already find the domination of the earth as of
an alien power over men”.2 Notwithstanding this, the theory of alien-
ation that Marx dedicates himself to from 1844 onwards is designed to
describe and criticise capitalism. As such, one cannot simply transpose
parts of this second theory of alienation into a critique of other forms of
society without due modifications, explaining the specific mechanics of,
e.g. alienation in feudalism or central planning.
Another point worth noting is that, on this account, none of the four
kinds of alienation I discuss focus on a person’s experience or feeling of
being alienated from anything. This does not mean that the affective
or experiential aspects of alienation are uninteresting or insignificant. Far
from it; people’s experience of disempowerment and disconnection from
their productive lives, co-workers, and wider society are natural concomi-
tants to life under capitalism, which are moments of both interest and
importance, some of which my discussion below will bring out. However,
it does mean that I explicitly reject the subjectivist strain of psychologistic
or affective readings which take Marx’s (second) theory of alienation to
1 Marx (1992, pp. 317–318/I:2, p. 359), translation modified.

2 Marx (1992, p. 318/I:2, p. 359).
7 ALIENATION AND UNFREEDOM 121
be fundamentally concerned with the experiences of disempowerment,

disconnection, separation, anomie, loss of meaning, sadness, confusion,
lack of experiences of self-realisation, problems of identity, etc., which life
under capitalism may or may not generate.3 Marx certainly does discuss
some of these elements, but they are the consequences or implications of
some part or aspect of the alienation he diagnoses, not its constituents. I
thus place myself among the objectivist strain of commentators on Marx’s
(second) theory of alienation, who take it to be something which does
not consist in beliefs, feelings, or attitudes. Instead, they take the (second)
theory of alienation fundamentally to be a description of a condition or
a state of affairs, which is what it is independently of the beliefs, feelings,
or attitudes anyone may or may not have as a result of what it describes.4
Moreover, I will argue that alienation from product, often misconstrued
even among other objectivist readings, is a central piece of the puzzle.
A third point I would like to draw attention to is that my anal-
ysis shows that the different kinds of alienation Marx distinguishes are
not only closely interlinked; they also build upon one another in intu-
itive and enlightening ways. I thus reject Kamenka’s claim that “Marx’s
‘proof’ that man’s alienation from his species is implied by his alienation
from the product of his labour (…) consists of nothing more solid than
(…) metaphorical transitions”.5 On the contrary, I think Marx is entirely
correct about his own view when he writes in the Economic and Philo-
sophical Manuscripts of 1844 that he aims, and is able coherently,6 to
grasp:
3 Including, inter alia, Avineri (1968), Bronfenbrenner (1973), parts of Jaeggi (2005)
and Schacht (1971), Swain (2012, 2019), and Wood (2004).
4 Including, inter alia, Allen (2011), Arthur (1986), Holloway (1997, 2010), Gray
(1986), Hudis (2013), Israel (1971), other parts of Jaeggi (2005), Schacht (1971),
Leopold (2007), Lukács (1974), Mészáros (1972), Musto (2010), Ollman (1976),
Padgett (2007), Postone (1996), Sayers (2011), Swain (2012, 2019), Tabak (2012),
Walliman (1981), and Wolff (1992, 2003). Note that Swain (2012, 2019) appears in
both camps, since his view is a hybrid of the two.
5 Kamenka (1972, p. 77).
6 By “coherent” here I mean not just negatively coherent in the sense of logical consis-
tency, but also in the further positive sense which Kamenka denies, namely in the sense of
there being comprehensible and plausible (in their own terms) links between the different
kinds of alienation Marx distinguishes and discusses.
122 P. RAEKSTAD
The essential connection between private property, greed, the separation of

labour, capital and landed property, exchange and competition, value and
the devaluation [Entwerthung] of man, monopoly and competition, etc. –
the connection between this entire system of alienation [Entfremdung] and
the money system.7
With these basics in order, we can now turn to the oft-neglected,

but crucial, first kind of alienation Marx discusses in his second theory:
alienation from product.
Alienation from Product

Alienation from the product of labour consists in the fact that, in capitalist
production, workers and capitalists reproduce and strengthen (by accu-
mulation) the capitalist social relations that impersonally dominate them.
To see why, let us begin where Marx does, with the claim of impover-
ishment: “The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the
more his production increases in power and extent”.8 We must wait till
the end of this section to see precisely what Marx means by this—just as in
Marx’s original we have to wait until the end of the discussion of the first
kind of alienation. My explanation begins by recognising an immeasurably
important feature of labour, namely that:
Labour not only produces commodities; it also produces itself and the
workers as a commodity and it does so in the same proportion in which it
produces commodities in general.9
In other words, the labour process produces not only goods and
services; it also produces and reproduces the network of social relations
within and through which it takes place. Capitalist labour processes don’t
just make goods and services—though that’s one thing they do. They also
continuously produce and reproduce the capitalist social relations that
these labour processes are part of.
7 Marx (1992, p. 323/I:2, pp. 235/364), translation of Entfremdung modified from

“estrangement” to “alienation”, The erroneous “Entwertung” in Colletti’s square brackets
replaced by Marx’s original “Entwerthung”.
8 Marx (1992, p. 323/I:2, pp. 325/364).
9 Marx (1992, p. 324/I:2, pp. 235/364).
Under capitalism, the social relations that workers reproduce in and

through production come to dominate them, rendering them unfree.
Marx writes that “the object labour produces (…) stands opposed to it
as something alien, as a power independent of the producer”.10 The real-
isation of labour in its production of an object “appears as (…) loss of
and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alien-
ation [Entäusserung]”.11 The object becomes “alien to him, and begins
to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life which he has
bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien”.12 The more
the worker produces under such conditions, Marx claims, “the more he
falls under the domination of his product, of capital”.13 In summarising
the discussion of this later on, Marx writes that this is alienation of prac-
tical human activity under the aspect of “the relationship of the worker
to the product of labour, as an alien object that has power over him”.14
Let’s break this down, beginning with the worker’s loss of object. Wage
labour under capitalism produces and reproduces both various goods and
services and the capitalist social relations within and through which this
production occurs. This includes producing and reproducing the labour
involved as a specific kind of commodity, namely as wage labour. Wage
labour, under capitalism, occurs in such a way that the wage labourers
own and control neither the materials they work on nor the objects they
produce. Consequently, the object produced is something external to the
labourers.
To understand how this lost object comes to confront labourers as an
alien and hostile power, we must begin by noting two ways in which all
labour is dependent on the external world. First of all, all work or labour
requires materials on which to work, “in which it is active and from which
and by means of which it produces”.15 Secondly, all work or labour also
requires, for obvious reasons, “the means of physical subsistence of the
10 Marx (1992, p. 324/I:2, pp. 236/364–365).

11 Marx (1992, p. 324/I:2, pp. 235/365). Translation of Entfremdung to “estrange-
ment” retained for aesthetic reasons.
12 Marx (1992, p. 324/I:2, pp. 235/365).
13 Marx (1992, p. 324/I:2, pp. 236/365, my emphases).
14 Marx (1992, p. 327/I:2, pp. 238/368).
15 Marx (1992, p. 325/I:2, pp. 237/365).
124 P. RAEKSTAD
worker”.16 Without materials to work on, labour which requires materials

cannot take place. Without the means of subsistence for labourers, there
can be no (human) work or labour over time. Marx goes on to write that:
In these two respects, then, the worker becomes a slave of his object; first
in that he receives an object of labour, i.e. he receives work, and secondly in
that he receives means of subsistence. Firstly, then, so that he can exist as a
worker, and secondly as a physical subject. The culmination of this slavery is
that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject
and only as a physical subject that he is a worker.17
The meaning of the first two sentences is sufficiently understood from

what has just been said above. The last one is the crucial and new one.
Under capitalism, workers produce products which they do not own,
both means of production and consumable commodities; and these are
owned by capitalists. To survive, workers need access to consumable
commodities, and to gain access to consumable commodities they need
the means by which to gain such access. Under capitalism, workers are
collectively excluded from productive property/means of production, as
a result of which the only way they can attain the means by which they
can gain access to consumable commodities is by receiving a wage for
working on the productive property of capitalists. Marx returns to this
throughout his later political economy, including in Volume I of Capital,
which talks of the workers being “free” in the double sense that “he can
dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other
hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of them, he is
free of all the objects needed for the realization [Verwirklichung ] of his
labour-power”.18
By taking part in such a working relation, workers further produce
and reproduce capitalist relations of production, along with the products
which become their bearers; i.e. they produce commodities and capital.
Both of these are owned by capitalists, not by the workers themselves. In
so doing, workers also reproduce themselves in one particular role within
those relations, namely in the role of workers. Workers can thus main-
tain themselves physically only as workers in the sense that the only way
16 Marx (1992, p. 325/I:2, pp. 237/366).

17 Marx (1992, p. 325/I:2, pp. 237/366).
18 Marx (1990, p. 272–3/II:6, p. 185).
they can survive at a decent level is by reproducing capitalist relations

of production and themselves as workers within that relation—otherwise
sinking into poverty and destitution.19 In this way, it is only by being
workers—i.e. working for some capitalist—that workers can maintain
themselves as physical subjects.20
The effects of this are apparent in the levels of inequality continually
seen under capitalism, where it is plain that the gains in terms of produc-
tive powers are astounding, without the vast majority of the population
necessarily benefiting from them much:
Political economy conceals the alienation in the nature of labour by ignoring

the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production. It is
true that labour produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation
for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces
beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labour by machines, but
it casts some workers back into barbarous forms of labour and turns others
into mere machines. It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and
cretinism for the worker.21
Workers are thus forced, by capitalist property relations, into working

for some (but no one particular) capitalist. This coercion is just as real
as threats of physical punishment—threats of poverty, destitution, and
starvation, along with the often-accompanying feelings of shame, guilt,
and isolation. We say that someone is forced or coerced to do something
if and only if they have no reasonable alternatives to doing it. Clearly,
being rendered homeless, malnourished, and/or otherwise impoverished
is no reasonable alternative. So, while the force of material compulsion
to subject ourselves to the domination of capitalist overlords is very real
19 For more on this, see I:2, pp. 189–207 and 327–51. Note that this argument, as it
appears in Marx, originally speaks of survival at all, i.e. of minimal physical subsistence.
However, as his more considered passages in published works such as Volume I of Capital
bear witness to, and in the interests of more charitable interpretation in light of certain
minimum welfare provisions currently available in welfare states (though less and less
so), we are justified in modifying the premise to securing a minimally decent level of
subsistence, in part determined by contextual moral and historical factors (as Marx calls
them).
20 The final clause of the last cited sentence is very tricky, and less important in this
context. Consequently, I leave it aside for the time being.
21 Marx (1992, pp. 325–326/I:2, pp. 237/366), translation of “Entfremdung”
modified from “estrangement” to “alienation”.
126 P. RAEKSTAD
indeed, it is also distinct from the simpler, violently physical, and perhaps
more easily perceivable forms of coercion which prevail under, e.g. slavery.
This kind of capitalist coercion is made possible only by the fact that
a class of capitalists control the products of the labour process—both
means of production and consumable commodities. If workers were not
excluded from the consumable commodities they produce, they would
not need to receive wages from someone or something else in order
to gain access to those commodities. If capitalists did not monopolise
society’s productive property, workers would have no need to work for
capitalists. They could simply set up their own small farms and businesses,
a network of cooperatives, a collection of communes, or any number of
other configurations to meet their needs themselves.22
Failing to notice this has led to some hilarious misadventures on the
part of individual capitalists:
A Mr Peel (…) took with him from England to the Swan River district of
Western Australia means of subsistence and of production to the amount
of £50,000. This Mr Peel even had the foresight to bring besides, 300
persons of the working class, men, women and children. Once he arrived
at his destination, ‘Mr Peel was left without a servant to make his bed
or fetch him water from the river.’ Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for
everything except the export of English relations of production to Swan
River!23
Mr. Peel had not neglected any purely physical items necessary
for successful capitalist production—consumable commodities, means of
production, and workers to utilise them. The source of Mr. Peel’s error,
according to Marx, lies in the fact that once these items are moved out
of the context of capitalist social relations they cease to function as they
do under the capitalism of his native England. In Western Australia, the
would-be workers were faced with alternative consumable commodities
and/or means of production which they could access. In other words,
they were no longer excluded, as a class, from productive property. They
were thus no longer under any material compulsion to work. In the
22 See, e.g., Kropotkin (2013).

23 Marx (1990, p. 932–3/II:6, p. 685). While the first French edition and the Penguin
translation have “3,000” persons, both the German original and Marx’s source, E. G.
Wakefield’s England and America. A comparison of the social and political state of both
nations, have the number at “300”, so I’ve corrected the quote accordingly.
absence of such force, these workers were able to choose to use their
labour-power to enrich themselves rather than Mr Peel, the capitalist.
To many liberals, the exclusion of workers from the means of produc-
tion and forcing them to work for capitalists seems natural and inevitable.
In reality, these conditions are the product of violent state intervention
and enforcement at the behest of the ruling classes both within and
(through imperialism and colonialism) outside of the imperial core. Marx
writes:
Of course, the pretensions of capital in its embryonic state, in its state of

becoming, when it cannot yet use the sheer force of economic relations to
secure its right to absorb a sufficient quantity of surplus-labour, but must
be aided by the power of the state – its pretensions in this situation appear
to be very modest in comparison with the concessions it has to make,
complainingly and willingly in its adult condition. Centuries are required
before the ’free’ worker, owing to the greater development of the capitalist
mode of production, makes a voluntary agreement, i.e. is compelled by
social conditions to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for
labour, in return for the price of his customary means of subsistence, to
sell his birthright for a mess of pottage.24
Expanding on this, the later chapters of Volume I of Capital discuss

various forms of state primitive accumulation, with Marx writing that
these methods “all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and
organized force of society”, to hasten the shift to capitalism and shorten
the transition. In this regard, he concludes, “[f]orce is the midwife of
every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic
power”.25
What Mr. Peel failed to realise, and what so many (other) colonisers
recognised, is that capital is a social relation. Products of labour, the
“means of production and subsistence”, Marx points out, “while they
remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital”; they only
become capital when they become “means of exploitation of, and there-
fore domination over, the worker”.26 Products become the means for
24 Marx (1990, p. 382/II:6, p. 274). For more thorough accounts, see Kropotkin
(1997, 2013) and Polanyi (2001).
25 Marx (1990, pp. 915–916/II:6, p. 674).
26 Marx (1990, p. 933/II:6, p. 685).
128 P. RAEKSTAD
such things only when they are the bearers of certain social relations
between persons and they become the bearers of such relations only
if and when there is a class of people which is systematically excluded
from them. The same point is made in Theories of Surplus Value, where
Marx writes that “[c]apital is productive of value only as a relation,
in so far as it is a coercive force on wage labour, compelling it to
perform surplus-labour” and that it “only produces value as the power
of labour’s own material conditions over labour when these are alienated
from labour”.27 In other words, the production of value in the capitalist
mode of production presupposes workers’ exclusion from the product of
labour—in particular the means of production and necessary consumable
commodities—because this is what forces workers to work for capitalists.
Moving the discussion to Capital brings me to an important point:
the fact that what Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1844 calls alienation from product is retained, minus the terminology, at
the heart of Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism throughout all of his subse-
quent works. Indeed, it’s in the later writings on political economy that
Marx most precisely articulates not only how capitalism forces workers
into dominating labour relations, but also how the impersonal powers
inherent in capitalist social relations themselves dominate those who are
subject to them. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels point out that
“[i]n history up to the present it is certainly likewise an empirical fact that
separate individuals have (…) become more and more enslaved under a
power alien to them”, which has “become more and more enormous
and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market ”.28 Among
many other places, Marx returns to point out that people under capitalism
are dominated by impersonal social relations in Volume 1 of Capital,
where he distinguishes between “the power of landed property, based on
personal relations of domination and servitude” on the one hand, and,
on the other hand, the “power of money [under capitalism], which is
impersonal”, going on to quote the French proverb “L’argent n’a pas de
maître” /“money has no master”.29
27 Marx (1969, p. 93/II:3.2, p. 384).

28 MECW 5, p. 51/I:5, pp. 41–42.
29 Marx (1990, p. 247, footnote 1/II:6, p. 165).
While as we will see below, workers are certainly dominated by capital-

ists,30 they are also dominated by capitalist social relations as such. Marx is
clear that “capital is not a thing, it is a definite social relation of produc-
tion pertaining to a particular historical social formation”.31 He is also
clear that capitalist social relations dominate capitalists as well, writing
that “the capitalist is just as enslaved by the relationships of capitalism
as is his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in a quite different manner”.32
Even in Capital Volume I, this is explicitly conceptualised in terms of
inter alia workers being subjected to the power of their products, where
Marx writes of capitalism as “a mode of production in which the worker
exists to satisfy the need of the existing values for valorization” instead
of one where such “wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for
development”, and argues that just “as man is governed, in religion, by
the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed
by the products of his own hand”.33
Here Marx is repeatedly drawing attention to the distinctive impersonal
domination of capitalism. Under capitalism, “the relation of producers to
the means of production, and of appropriators to the means of appro-
priation, as well as their relation to each other, is mediated, indeed
constituted, by the market”, more specifically by the kinds of competitive
markets we see under capitalism.34 These markets aren’t merely devices of
exchange or allocation. Rather, they regulate social production in general
in ways that subject everyone involved to its own purposes, in particular
the imperative of profit maximisation and whatever means are necessary
to achieve it.
The powers inherent in these competitive markets are dominating and
alienating. Like all social powers, they emerge out of the interaction of
individual human beings. Just as the power of monarchs and slave owners
emerge from the continuous interactions of people reproducing the right
kinds of social relations (and persist only as long as those relations do),
so too the powers of competitive markets emerge out of the interactions
of people under capitalism. But unlike, e.g. the power of feudal lords,
30 For Marx’s discussion of this, see the following section.

31 Marx (1991, p. 953/II:15, p. 789).
32 Marx (1990, p. 990/II:4.1, p. 65).
33 Marx (1990, p. 772/II:6, pp. 567–568).
34 Wood (2002, p. 85).
130 P. RAEKSTAD
the dominating power of capitalist social relations is distinctly impersonal,

because it is not wielded or controlled by identifiable persons or suffi-
ciently unified institutions (like states or churches). Nevertheless, Marx
explicitly invokes the language of domination and subjugation to express
how these powers make those subject to them alienated and unfree.
Importantly, Marx’s concept of impersonal domination doesn’t reduce
to relations of personal domination, e.g. to the arbitrary power of multi-
tudes of consumers in the marketplace, whose preferences cannot be
contested.35 This is for three main reasons. First, this sort of idea doesn’t
fit anything that Marx seems to have written. If Marx wanted to argue
that consumers dominate workers (and capitalists) in these ways, he could
easily have expressed this in terms of familiar concepts of personal domi-
nation, rather than repeatedly insisting on the distinctively impersonal
forms of domination exercised by capitalist social relations themselves.
Second, it misconstrues what the dominator is here according to Marx,
who consistently pinpoints not consumers, but the social relations of
capitalism, as what dominates workers and capitalists in these cases.
Thirdly, this interpretation neglects some of Marx’s most interesting and
important developments as a theorist: his positive concept of freedom as
self-direction and its power to diagnose the impersonal forms of domina-
tion and unfreedom people are subject to under capitalism. If we instead
try to spell out such diffuse, impersonal forms of domination and do
them justice, then it’s not clear how that can be made to fit into the
box of domination as not being subject to the will or arbitrary power
of another, precisely because there’s no individual person or sufficiently
unified institution that can rightly be said to be the dominator here.36
This is an important way in which Marx builds on earlier analyses
of capitalist unfreedom. Marx agrees with the labour republicans of the
early 1800s37 that capitalists dominate workers in the workplace and that,
as we saw above, capitalist property relations force workers to subject
themselves to the rule of some capitalist.38 (The latter is today labelled
“structural domination” and should not be confused with what Marx and
35 Roberts (2017, pp. 99–101).

36 As far as I know, this dilemma was first pointed out in Raekstad (2017) and has
been widely made by this point.
37 Gourevitch (2015).
38 See Gourevitch (2015, pp. 106–116).
I call impersonal domination.) Marx adds to this an analysis of how the

social relations of capitalism themselves dominate not only workers, but
both capitalists and workers impersonally. As we will see in the following
sections and in the discussion of the division of labour in Chapter 8, capi-
talist social relations include relations of personal domination of workers
by capitalists and managers. Why, then, is the addition of impersonal
domination important?
The impersonal domination of capitalism’s competitive markets is
essential for understanding the dynamics of capitalism and the conditions
for freeing us from them. First, it entails that proposals for economic
emancipation through democratising workplaces, like those of the labour
republicans and many contemporary market socialists, are insufficient,39
because they retain the impersonal domination of competitive markets.
If Marx is right, workers in these societies would remain impersonally
dominated and thus unfree. Second, it’s important for making sense of
some of the most important dynamics in capitalist societies. It’s compet-
itive markets that drive capitalists to do things like increase workers’
oppression, forcing down wages and conditions, or causing the ecolog-
ical devastation that is undermining the very conditions for human life
on this planet—regardless of what they might otherwise want or prefer.
Why? According to Marx, capitalism’s competitive markets force capital-
ists to do anything they can to maximise profits—effectively imposing
certain purposes and means upon them. If they don’t, they’ll risk getting
out-competed and either going bankrupt or being bought up by their less
scrupulous, and more successful, competitors. While Marx long focused
on how this harms workers as human beings, his later writings came also
to emphasise its harms to the environment. Thus he explicitly points out
how “[c]apitalist production (…) only develops the techniques and the
degree of combination of the social process of production by simultane-
ously undermining the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the
worker”.40 These are two reasons why, as we’ll see in Chapter 8, Marx
thinks that a free future society must replace competitive markets with a
democratic form of planning.
39 González-Ricoy (2014), Gourevitch (2015), Schweickart (1996), and White (2011).

40 Marx (1990, p. 638/II:6, p. 477). For this, see Saito (2017), who further points
out that this can be considered an additional contradiction of capitalism.
132 P. RAEKSTAD
In sum, the first kind of alienation, alienation from product, consists in

the fact that, under capitalism, workers are alienated from the products of
their labour because these are the bearers of certain social relations. These
relations constitute a coercive power which imposes certain ends and
means on those subject to them and which those subject to them cannot
control, with tendencies and imperatives independent of, and potentially
opposed to, anything the sum of individuals living within may or may not
desire or wish for. As such, these relations constitute an alien power over
and above the sum of individuals subject to them. Under capitalism, it is
part and parcel of the nature of the relations workers’ products are the
bearers of that they are not owned or under the control of the workers
themselves, but under the control of the capitalists under whom they
are produced. This means that the only way workers can gain access to
consumable commodities is by exchanging money (or some other suit-
able commodity) for them, and this is only possible for them to attain by
working for a capital, i.e. for a capitalist. In so doing, workers enter into
a labour process in which they produce products bearing capitalist social
relations, thereby reproducing the capitalist social relations that dominate
them and reproducing themselves as workers.
Furthermore, we have seen that capital accepts such a deal—i.e. hires a
worker—only on the condition that the labour-power it hires is sufficient
for successful accumulation41 such that the capital can grow continuously
and in competition with others. The growth in material wealth which
capital is thus constantly bringing about goes, so far as possible from the
capitalist’s side, into increasing the magnitude of capital and the material
wealth accruing to the capitalist. Insofar as this is the case, workers not
only maintain the capitalist relations of production which dominate them,
they further strengthen these relations insofar as they are, by accumula-
tion, continually increasing the amount, concentration, and centralisation
of capital. This capital, and its continual increase, constitutes an alien
power outside of and independent of them, which in turn comes to domi-
nate their working lives more narrowly, as well as the economy as a whole,
and through that people’s wider social existence.
Now Marx asks:
41 I fully intend to stay away from the complexities of Marx’s economic theories,
including issues regarding the labour theory of value, surplus labour, profits, etc.
How could the product of the worker’s activity confront him as some-
thing alien if it were not for the fact that in the act of production he
was alienating himself from himself? So if the product of labour is alien-
ation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity,
the activity of alienation. The alienation of the object of labour merely
summarizes the alienation, the alienation in the activity of labour itself.42
This passage is tricky, but I think it expresses the following line of

thought. It only makes sense that one is alienated from the products of
labour if one is also alienated in the act of producing them. In other
words, it only makes sense that one ends up not having power over the
objects one produces if it is also the case that one lacks power over the
process that produces them. If one really controlled the act of produc-
tion in toto, how could this not include also ending up with control
over its resulting products (barring exceptional things like theft and mili-
tary conquest)? If the thing we produce is something which we not only
do not have power over, but also ends up exerting power over us—qua
the social relations it is the bearer of—then the activity of production
must be an activity over which we come not to have power (alienation
of activity), and it must be an activity which, on a social scale, comes
to generate such disempowerment (the activity of alienation). The alien-
ation of the product we create merely “summarizes” the alienation of the
labour process in that it is the produced product, the coming-together
at the end, of a process of reproducing and strengthening capitalist rela-
tions of production, of which those products are the bearers. It’s perhaps
worth noting, in passing, that this too is a point Marx repeats, explic-
itly using the language of alienation and giving oneself up to an alien
power, in later works on political economy.43 This is the logical connec-
tion between alienation from the products of labour and alienation from
the labour process. Let us now move on to the latter.
42 Marx (1992, p. 326/I:2, pp. 238/367). Translation of “Entfremdung” and “ent-

fremden” modified from “estrangement” and “estranged” to “alienation” and “alienated”.
43 See, e.g., Marx (1993, p. 307/II:1.1, p. 226) and Marx (1993, p. 488/II.1.2,
p. 392).
134 P. RAEKSTAD
Alienation from the Labour Process

According to Marx, there are three main aspects of alienation from the
labour process: (i) the work becomes something external to the workers,
something not part of their essential being; (ii) it becomes forced or invol-
untary labour in some sense; and (iii) the workers’ activity belongs to
another. I will elucidate each of these in turn before coming back to the
relationship between alienation from products and alienation from the
labour process.
Firstly:
the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e. does not belong to his
essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but
denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental
and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence the
worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working he
does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at
home when he is working.44
Recall Marx’s conception of human development and of the human

species-being consisting of an internal power for conscious self-direction.
When workers are forced to labour under social relations where their
activity is directed not by themselves, but by powers and imperatives
they cannot control and that are seemingly external to them, that labour
becomes something external to workers. Since it belongs to workers’
essential being—as human beings—that they have an internal power for
conscious self-direction, and since its exercise is thwarted when humans’
activities become subject to these kinds of powers, labour under such
conditions does not belong to workers’ essential (human) being or nature.
Secondly:
[The worker’s] labour is therefore not voluntary but forced, it is forced

labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to
satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the
fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists it is shunned
like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is
a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification.45
44 Marx (1992, p. 326/I:2, pp. 238/367).

45 Marx (1992, p. 326/I:2, pp. 238/367).
Since alienated labour prevents the exercise of our powers for conscious
self-direction, it becomes undesirable. Nevertheless, it is something
workers are materially coerced into doing, rendering it involuntary or
forced labour. Such labour is not the satisfaction of a need: the labour
itself does not satisfy any particular drive on the part of the worker.
Instead, the labour becomes merely a means to satisfy needs outside of
itself—needs for basic survival and financial security, for example. The
alien character of this labour, the sense in which the labour is something
workers are forced to do because of their social subjection to external
powers and imperatives, is verified, Marx claims, by the fact that as soon as
such compulsion disappears, the work itself is avoided as much as possible.
Third and finally:
the external character of labour for the worker is demonstrated by the fact
that it belongs not to him but to another, and that in it he belongs not
to himself but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of
the human imagination, the human brain and the human heart detaches
itself from the individual and reappears as the alien activity of a god or of
a devil, so the activity of the worker is not his self-activity. It belongs to
another, it is a loss of self.46
Work under capitalism is sold like any other commodity; and in that
sense, and for that reason, it can be described as belonging to another
for as long as it lasts. Human practical activity, in an alienated economy,
is not workers’ own self-activity in and through which they employ
their powers to fulfil their needs intrinsic to the process, and in turn
develop and increase their individual and collective powers. Instead, it
is a process through which workers do not satisfy any intrinsic needs—
only extrinsic ones—and through which they generate certain powers over
which they have no control, which impose a variety of external purposes
and imperatives and thus come to dominate and control them.
Insofar as these powers are nothing more than workers’ own powers,
and insofar as they are outside of workers’ control and subjects them to
its purposes and imperatives, workers’ activity under capitalism is not their
46 Marx (1992, pp. 326–327/I:2, pp. 238–239/367). Translation of “Selbstthätigkeit”

modified from “own spontaneous activity” to “self-activity” since it is (a) more accurate,
(b) clearer with respect to my purposes and avoids potential misreadings of inserted
new words which Marx doesn’t use. Furthermore, Colletti’s translation replaces this key
concept in the original German with a few different and less accurate English phrases,
with the effect that this key concept of Marx’s tends to disappear in his translations.
136 P. RAEKSTAD
self-activity, it is a loss of self, a loss of their own powers. Consequently,

the relationship of the worker “to the act of production within labour” is
not just a relationship between a worker and “his own activity as some-
thing which is alien and does not belong to him”; it is also “power as
impotence, procreation as emasculation, the worker’s own physical and
mental energy, his personal life (…) directed against himself, which is
independent of him and does not belong to him”.47
Throughout his later works, Marx continues to emphasise the alien-
ated and unfree labour processes inherent in capitalism. For example, in
the Grundrisse, he talks of how capitalist production, the “working-out
of the human content (…), this universal objectification as total alien-
ation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of
the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end”.48 In his Results of
the Immediate Process of Production, he writes about how the “supremacy
and subordination in the process of production supplant an earlier state of
independence, to be found, for example, in all self-sustaining peasants”.49
Finally, in Volume I of Capital, Marx writes of how, under capitalism,
the “work of directing, superintending and adjusting becomes one of
the functions of capital” and that “[a]s a specific function of capital, the
directing function acquires its own special characteristics”.50 As a result,
for workers under capitalism it’s “the act of the capital that brings them
together and maintains them in that situation” and so the “interconnec-
tion between their various labours confronts them, in the realm of ideas,
as a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and, in practice, as his authority, as
the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to
his purpose”.51 He thus describes the capitalist division of labour as one
that “implies the undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, who
are merely the members of a total mechanism which belongs to him”.52
In other words, Marx’s later works repeat all three components of alien-
ation from the labour process: (i) the work becomes something external
to the workers, something not part of their essential being; (ii) it becomes
47 Marx (1992, p. 327/I:2, pp. 239/368).

48 Marx (1993, p. 488/II.1.2, p. 392).
49 Marx (1990, p. 1028/II:4.1, p. 99).
50 Marx (1990, p. 449/ II: 6, p. 327).
51 Marx (1990, p. 450/II: 6, p. 328).
52 Ibid., 476–7/II: 6, p. 350–1.
forced or involuntary labour in some sense; and (iii) the workers’ activity
belongs to another.
Not only does Marx retain this analysis in his later works; he deepens
it to explore the relations of domination and unfreedom that characterise
capitalist labour processes and develops a striking analysis of capitalism’s
hierarchical division of labour. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels
had clearly derided the separation between mental and manual labour, and
the relations of domination and authority that it’s part and parcel of. But
it’s only in later works of political economy that Marx begins to explore
this in a more fine-grained way that arguably prefigures later Marxist and
anarchist discussions of the forms of power and privilege operating not
just between owners and workers, but between a small elite of highly
powerful and privileged managers and workers as well.
In Volume I of Capital, he writes that:
If capitalist direction is thus twofold in content, owing to the twofold

nature of the process of production which has to be directed - on the
one hand a social labour process for the creation of a product, and on the
other hand capital’s process of valorization - in form it is purely despotic.
As co-operation extends its scale, this despotism develops the forms that
are peculiar to it. Just as at first the capitalist is relieved from actual labour
as soon as his capital has reached that minimum amount with which capi-
talist production, properly speaking, first begins, so now he hands over
the work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workers and
groups of workers to a special kind of wage-labourer. An industrial army of
workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, offi-
cers (managers) and N.C.O.s (foremen, overseers), who command during
the labour process in the name of capital. The work of supervision becomes
their established and exclusive function. When comparing the mode of
production of isolated peasants or independent artisans with the plantation
economy which rests on slavery, political economists count this labour of
superintendence as part of the faux frais de production. But when consid-
ering the capitalist mode of production they on the contrary identify the
function of direction which arises out of the nature of the communal
labour process with the function of direction which is made necessary by
the capitalist and therefore antagonistic character of that process. It is not
because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary,
he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist.53
53 Marx (1990, p. 450/II: 6, pp. 328–329).

138 P. RAEKSTAD
To begin, the capitalist labour process is “purely despotic” in nature

because it’s a process that initially is under the power of a single person,
the capitalist, who directs and controls the labour of all workers who
are part of it, thus making them unfree. As the forms of capitalist
labour processes further extend and develop—e.g. from smaller-scale
manufacturing into factory production—capitalists develop more specific
social-relational forms or structures that are tailored to maintaining, rein-
forcing, and reproducing workers’ unfreedom. The power to direct and
control the labour process is delegated to an elite of managers, who take
on a part of the capitalist’s power and in return achieve a degree of control
over their own and others’ labour and the means of production, as well
as more broadly greater power, wealth, and privilege, without themselves
owning the means of production. This layer is often called the “Coordi-
nator Class” among later Marxist and anarchist thinkers,54 and it’s striking
that Marx is so early in identifying some of the dynamics that give rise to
this more fine-grained economic differentiation in capitalism even before
the expansions in management seen during the following century.55
We should note three things about this analysis. First, as we see at
the end of the quote, such oppressive managerial relations are inherent
and necessary only to certain kinds of unfree labour processes, specifically
those where workers’ activities must be controlled in rather detailed ways.
54 For discussions of this concept, see Walker (1979) and Wright (1980). This concept
should not be confused with the much broader and less coherent idea of a “Professional-
Managerial Class”, which, unlike the Coordinator Class, is not precisely defined in terms
of a particular set of relations with respect to the means of production.
55 It’s perhaps worth pointing out that Marx is often, wrongly, accused of thinking that
there are only two classes under capitalism. This has no basis in fact. For one, throughout
his later works discussing history and politics—like the Communist Manifesto, The 18 th
Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Civil War in France—there’s a much larger
number of classes identified in capitalism alone, and though he does think that, at the
time, society is getting polarised into two main camps, he also clearly says that there are
several classes in each camp, not that there are, or ever will be, only two. For obvious
reasons, this also means that the idea that Marx takes a view of class so narrow-minded
as being based only in property ownership, rather than in social-relational positions, is
ruled out. On the other hand, the fact that Volume I of Capital only focuses on two
main classes is the obvious result of it zooming in only on certain very particular parts of
the social relations of capitalism. It does not follow from that that real-existing capitalist
societies only have two classes (and as is clear from Marx’s other writings, he doesn’t
think this), for the same reasons that zooming in on a few laws of physics explaining how
gravity works (in abstraction from, e.g. friction, air resistance, lift, and so on) doesn’t
mean that, or that those physicists think that, birds can’t fly.
Accordingly, they are not taken to be inherent to the requirements of

large-scale social organisation or to the complexities of industrial organ-
isation or any idea of a technologically advanced society.56 Second, the
reason why Marx thinks that many capitalist political economists make
the mistake of thinking that oppressive capitalist management practices
are necessary to production in general is, as the end of the passage points
out, that they conflate the requirements of organising collective labour
utilising certain means of production in general, with organising collec-
tive labour under capitalist relations of production more specifically. Third,
he thinks that these ways of managing the labour processes are inher-
ently hierarchical, dominating, and unfree, because they involve capitalists
and managers having socially generated power to direct and control the
labour process, without the workers subject to it being able to control
that power. This is one of the important reasons why Marx’s vision of
socialism demands an end to the hierarchical division of labour, which I
explore in the next chapter.
Following Marx, we should not understand alienation from product
and alienation from the process of production as wholly separate things.
We must especially resist the temptation of thinking about alienation from
product merely as experiencing or perceiving the physical items we make,
and about alienation from the labour process merely as being or feeling
disempowered in our labouring activities. We must instead think of them
the way Marx tells us to: as two fundamental aspects of one and the same
thing, namely as two aspects of alienation from practical human activity,
in this case the activity of labour.57 On this more dialectical view, alien-
ation from products and alienation from the labour process are simply
56 In 1872, Engels writes a text called On Authority that is sometimes argued to conflict
with this. I can’t get into the details of the text or its arguments here, especially because
the wording of On Authority requires careful attention to detail and is often misleading
to those who don’t know the exact debates within the socialist movement it’s responding
to. Engels’ text is primarily about large-scale organisation requiring binding decisions and
the importance of delegation, which many later organisations and movements set up by
anarchists and syndicalist did feature. Engels can be interpreted in a number of different
ways here, including as making a general point about certain anarchists’ doubts about how
the First International should be structured or as straw-manning a more general rejection
of top-down modes of organisation that Marx, anarchists, and many left Marxists share.
Either way, we have seen that Marx’s views on this are clear from his writings.
57 Marx (1992, p. 327/I:2, pp. 239/368).
140 P. RAEKSTAD
two aspects of our productive economic activities under capitalism. Alien-

ation from product is the very real subjection and domination which
our products—i.e. as both consumable commodities and as capital—exert
over us through the social relations they are the bearers of. Alienation
from the labour process likewise consists in the very real subjection and
domination exerted over us, this time not from the point of view of the
objects (including their dominating social-relational properties), but from
the point of view of the labour processes through which these objects
are produced and reproduced. In this conception, it makes perfect sense
to say that the (alienation from) product is a “résumé” of (alienation
from) the labour process. The former are the finished bearers of the social
relations which the latter produces and reproduces, and they are both
essential aspects of alienated practical activity, i.e. of human economic
activity under the rule of capital.
This section has said nothing about why any of this is supposed to be
a bad thing for Marx; that was discussed in Part I. Above all, the harms
that are pinpointed here are not first and foremost to do with the paltry
distribution of society’s wealth to the working class—although this is
mentioned with unmistakeable opprobrium. Unlike any particular distri-
bution of wealth, the normatively problematic aspect of capitalism that
these two components of Marx’s diagnosis discuss is an intrinsic feature of
capitalism as an economic system: the way in which it, by its very nature,
imposes an evitable system of personal and impersonal domination. In
so doing, it thwarts our freedom, with all the negative concomitants this
entails for our experiences of our economic lives and for our development
of a variety of other powers. Thus, the components of Marx’s theory of
alienation we have surveyed up until now show how capitalism thwarts
freedom and thereby human development.
One of the criticisms that might be offered against this position is the
following. At least in many Western countries it seems to be the case that
many people in fact are motivated to work for other reasons than merely
the monetary reward they get for doing so. The reasons for this may vary:
a sense of duty to one’s co-workers or workplace; a feeling of self-worth
one gets from successfully carrying out a job; some measure of enjoyment
in the actual work itself, and so on. In light of this, it might be argued,
the picture Marx paints of the alienated wage labourer might once have
been correct but is now out-dated. It is possible to go further than this
and to claim that with the growth of technology we can expect work to
become more and more fulfilling and rewarding for workers, and that
Marx’s picture either is or soon will be surpassed thanks to the benefits

of technological progress. This latter argument has no significant empir-
ical support, and actual studies of these new and supposed wonderfully
creative sectors, such as information technology, debunk it.58 The former
view, however, has some support and deserves attention.
The first point we should make in Marx’s defence is that the objec-
tion springs only from a very limited data-set restricted to a small portion
of the working class in the contemporary capitalist world-system, and,
moreover, a particularly privileged part of the world’s working class in an
exceptionally privileged geographical, social, and historical location. To
generalise from such a small segment of the working class and their lives
to the rest of it is as unrepresentative as deriving strong conclusions about
universal human nature from the study of only urban middle-class Amer-
ican college students—a well-known source of errors in psychological
research.59 There is, as far as I know, no research suggesting that anything
similar is found among the vast sectors of the world’s less uniquely priv-
ileged working class and there are no encouraging signs to suggest that
their situation is likely to become more like that of the more privileged
ones any time soon.
The second thing I would like to point out is that even workers in
uniquely privileged sectors and locations are likely to suffer from the
adverse effects that conditions of alienation imply, with its numerous
negative implications for intrinsic enjoyment, motivation, and general
prospects for human development. Although Marx’s descriptions are
damning, there is no reason not to think that the damage wrought by
conditions of alienation cannot come in degrees. Workers in uniquely
privileged situations might then suffer less than others like the ones Marx
was describing; in fact, they might even suffer so much less that they really
are able to find some measure of intrinsic enjoyment and motivation in
their work. None of this entails, however, that the conditions of alien-
ation these workers suffer do not significantly thwart their freedom, that
this is significantly detrimental to the intrinsic enjoyment and motivation
they might otherwise find in their work, and/or that this significantly
damages the prospects for human development workers might otherwise
enjoy were they not alienated.
58 See Huws (2003, 2014).

59 See esp. Henrich et al. (2010).
142 P. RAEKSTAD
Another point one might raise against Marx’s account is that with the
advent of the modern welfare state the old material coercion that once
forced people to work for capitalists has disappeared—either in part or in
whole. Since modern welfare states enable people to survive and repro-
duce, at some minimal level, without working, it simply is no longer the
case that workers have no other choice to satisfy their most basic needs
by going to work for capital. It is hard to see how such an objection is
not either deeply mistaken about Marx’s account or either overly opti-
mistic or pessimistic (depending on the attitude one takes towards it)
about the nature and generosity of modern welfare states. On the one
hand, material coercion in Marx should probably not be read as limited
merely to threats of things like thirsting or starving to death. Arguably,
beggars could survive even in Marx’s day without a job; at least some
of the old and sick could as well from minimal support systems avail-
able in families or local communities (including church aid of various
kinds); and so forth. A decent standard of living is the sort of thing
which varies considerably with natural, social, and historical contexts, a
fact of which Marx was well aware. Modern welfare states do provide
their citizens with a certain minimum; the fact that this is so in the more
privileged countries of the world is in large part thanks to the successes of
social movements of the last centuries. Historically speaking, however,
they have been highly limited responses to such movements. Further-
more, they tend to be rolled back and coercively re-shaped in order to
eliminate, as far as possible, any negative impacts it might have in terms
of reducing the material coercion to labour under capital.60 Briefly put,
modern welfare states do provide significant benefits for workers, but they
are far from sufficiently generous, all things considered, to reliably secure
workers from coercion to labour over time.
Furthermore, it is far from clear that the level of benefits that modern
welfare states provide in fact succeeds in eliminating the material coercion
workers experience to work under the yoke of capital. Even the most
privileged welfare states in the Nordic countries fail to provide their poor
with what is considered to be an acceptably high standard of living for
themselves and their children, considering the requirements for decent life
in those countries, and this is well-known among those affected. There is
no reason to suspect that these kinds of conditions will be better in any
60 Piven and Cloward (1993) and Wahl (2011).

other part of the world. The objection, then, fails. It is not the case that
modern welfare states are sufficiently generous to remove the material
coercion to work for capital (or, in mixed economies, the state) both
because it is not clear that the benefits they provide are sufficiently high,
stable, and free from restrictions and coercion to work and because it
is not clear that the benefits provided are high enough in light of the
naturally, socially, and historically mediated requirements for a decent life
in the societies in question. With that objection behind us, let us move
on to some of the further two kinds of alienation that Marx discusses.
Alienation from Species-Being

Much ink has been spilled trying to come to grips with Marx’s under-
standing of alienation from species-being,61 most of which, as mentioned
above, must be left aside here. In my view, the main critical thrust of
Marx’s second theory of alienation lies in the diagnosis presented in
the first two kinds of alienation, which is where I have had to focus.
In Part I, I explained what the internal power that Marx’s notion of
species-being or nature consists in and its location and role within Marx’s
commitment to human development. Here, I will briefly expand upon
this and explain how capitalism’s alienation from product and from the
process of production results in workers (also) being alienated from their
species-being.
According to Marx, the first two kinds of alienation result in people
under capitalism becoming alienated from themselves in their active func-
tion, as well as from their species, because people become alienated from
their species-life, which capitalism turns into a mere means for individual
life in its alienated form.62 Recall that, for Marx, the human species-being
or nature consists in an internal power of conscious self-direction, and that
this internal power is realised or exercised if and only if it is employed to
direct human activity. Only in so doing do human beings become free.
Marx writes that:
61 See Fromm (2004), Geras (1983), Hudis (2013), Kain (1988, 1992), Kamenka
(1969, 1972), Leopold (2007), Mészáros (1972), Ollman (1976), Sayers (2007, 2011),
and Wood (2004). See also section (C) of Appendix 1.
62 Marx (1992, p. 328/I:2, p. 369/240).
144 P. RAEKSTAD
Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness.
(…) [Man] is a conscious being, i.e. his own life is an object for him,
only because he is a species-being. Only because of that is his activity free
activity. Alienated labour reverses the relationship so that man, just because
he is a conscious being, makes his life activity, his being [Wesen], a mere
means for his existence.63
To understand the significance of this, we must remember that, for

Marx, it is above all in working on the natural world through production
that human beings succeed or fail at realising or exercising their species-
powers:
Such production is his active species-life. Through it nature appears as his

work and his reality. The object of labour is therefore the objectification of
the species-life of man… In tearing away the object of his production from
man, alienated labour therefore tears away from him his species-life, his true
species-objectivity…64
Marx’s point here is that it’s above all in production that humans live
their collective species-lives. It’s in our characteristic (conscious) forms of
productive activity that we distinguish ourselves from the rest of nature
and come to realise ourselves within that nature. In other words, produc-
tion is what constitutes human species-life in general. I thus agree with
Sean Sayers that, for Marx (at least from 1844 onwards) “work is the
fundamental and central activity in human life”65 and a “fundamental part
of the human process of self-development”66 and with Mehmet Tabak
that “objective activity (production, labor, etc.) is the essential human
characteristic responsible for the concretization of human essence in and
through nature”.67
Now, recall what workers are alienated from when they are alienated
from their objects: they are alienated not from physical things as such, but
63 Marx (1992, p. 328/I:2, pp. 369/240–241), translation of “entfremdete” modified

from “estranged” to “alienated”.
64 Marx (1992, p. 329/I:2, pp. 370/241), translation of “entfremdete” modified from
“estranged” to “alienated”.
65 Sayers (2011, p. 14).
66 Ibid., p. 21.
67 Tabak (2012, p. 4).
from the social relations which the objects they produce are the bearers
of. As we’ve seen in the discussion of the first two kinds of alienation
above, Marx argues that alienation from productive activity is entailed,
in a very specific sense, by the alienation from products seen under capi-
talism. On Marx’s view, this productive activity is the “fundamental and
central activity in human life”,68 which he calls the “objectification of the
species-life of man”.69 If alienation from product entails the alienation
from productive activity, and if productive activity can truly be said to
amount to humans’ species-life in general, then alienation from product
can also be said to entail the alienation from human species-life in general.
This explains how, on Marx’s view, alienation results in the “tearing
away” of humans’ species-life, but in what sense does alienation make
human life activity—their being—into a mere means for their existence?
As we have seen above, Marx argues that alienated labour thwarts the
intrinsic enjoyment that workers’ productive activity might otherwise
contain. Because of this, people engage in productive activity only for
purely extrinsic ends, such as maintaining one’s physical existence. If
alienated production thus inevitably results in one’s productive activity
becoming a mere means for extrinsic ends, and if production can be said
to amount to one’s species-life in general, then it follows that alienated
production can be said to inevitably result in making human species-life
and activity in general a mere means for securing one’s extrinsic ends,
such as one’s continued existence.
The argument I have just sketched provides a valuable reply to a
possible counter-argument to Marx’s critique of capitalism. It might be
argued that even though conditions of alienation in a capitalist economy
do thwart certain human powers for conscious self-directed activity, there
are—at least in some very privileged countries—many opportunities to
exercise such powers in other realms of human life and endeavour. We can
use such powers in the formation, execution, and revision of our plans of
life; we can use such powers in the enjoyment of our leisure time; we can
use, perhaps, some of them in political activities; we can exercise them in
areas of civil society such as directly democratic propaganda organisations;
and so on.
68 Sayers (2011, p. 14).

69 Marx (1992, p. 329/I:2, pp. 370/241).
146 P. RAEKSTAD
The retort that Marx’s analysis of alienation from species-being allows

him to make here is that the problem of alienation is not only that certain
highly important human species-powers are thwarted in capitalist produc-
tion. It is also that thwarting these powers in human productive activity
amounts to thwarting these important human powers in general, making
alienation from production particularly detrimental both in terms of the
realisation or exercise of the powers they thwart and in terms of their
effects for impeding human development more broadly. This point makes
a lot of sense when we recall that humans’ species-powers are exercised
through activity, along with the plausible and widely accepted premise
that the internal aspects of the process of human development are shaped
first and foremost by people’s everyday activities and their demands.70
When we exclude sleeping, productive activity is perhaps the kind of
activity that working human beings spend more of their lives doing than
any other. It thus makes sense to attribute to it the unique importance
which, e.g. Adam Smith does when he writes that “the understandings of
the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employ-
ments”.71 There are other reasons we might want to assign productive
interchange with nature a particularly important place as well. Produc-
tive interchange of some sort is universal across human societies. It is a
precondition for the reproduction of any sort of human society over time.
It has been with us for as long as our species has existed. We might there-
fore suppose that we are in some way particularly well-suited for it and
that our species-specific powers have a special role in this regard. And we
might think that activities of production provide especially salient oppor-
tunities for the exercise, actualisation, and development of various human
70 It was widely accepted at least among the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as
Adam Smith, see for instance Berry (1997, Ch. 4).
71 Smith (1976, pp. 781–782). Note that by “understandings” here Smith does not
mean merely our cognitive grasp of things, but the development of our wider cognitive
and moral virtues. For more on this, see Raekstad (2016, 2020a). In the latter, I made
this case as part of a reconstruction of Adam Smith’s shift from focusing on freedom
and independence in the polity to freedom and independence in the workplace, which he
does in ways that I argue prefigure later labour republican ideas (on which see Gourevitch,
2015). Note that by 1844 Marx was well-acquainted with both sets of ideas. Finally, I
want to point out that one of the limitations of this view, which Marx inherits, is its
relative neglect of the relations and processes structing much of the lived activities of so
many women at the time, and still, involved in unpaid reproductive labour, an oversight
that later generations of Marxist feminists have rightly worked to remedy. I cannot explore
this further, but for an excellent place to start see Bhattacharya (2017).
powers, and those of our species-being in particular. Finally, we should

also note that workers are not very likely to be able to take advantage
of many of the abstract possibilities for unalienated activity, as a result of
the fact that they are too exhausted and drained from the long time they
spend during unfree, alienated, as well as otherwise exhausting mental
and manual labour. As a result, even if the abstract possibility is there,
the length and severity of the effects of alienated production would still
prevent it from constituting a real possibility for them.
For any single one or combination of these reasons it makes sense
to think that, if our powers of self-direction are thwarted in productive
activity, the realisation or exercise of them is being thwarted in a particu-
larly significant way. It thus also makes sense to say that under conditions
of alienation from product and from productive activity, people can be
said to be alienated from their species-essence or species-being in general.
Consequently, the damage alienation does both in terms of the realisa-
tion or exercise of humans’ species-powers, and in terms of the wider
effects this has on impeding human development, cannot be adequately
alternatively expressed or compensated for in other domains or activities.
Alienation from Others

Finally, Marx believes that to the extent that human beings under capi-
talism are alienated from their (social) products, productive activity, and
species-being, they are also alienated from other humans, if only because
the above are forms by which people are alienated from one another. He
writes that “[a]n immediate consequence of man’s alienation from the
product of his labour, his life activity, his species-being, is the alienation
of man from man”.72 What does Marx mean by this? In which sense does
the already-examined alienation from product, activity, and species-being
bring about or entail the alienation of some human beings from others?
Briefly put, it consists in this: the production and reproduction of capi-
talist economic relations involves alienation from product as a necessary
component, and alienation from productive economic activity as a neces-
sary aspect or implication thereof. But these forms of alienation depend
on more than merely workers and the peculiar forms of alienation they
are under, such as the full panoply of capitalist economic relations. One
72 Marx (1992, pp. 329–330/I:2, pp. 242/370), translation of “Entfremdung”

modified from “estrangement” to “alienation”.
148 P. RAEKSTAD
of the necessary components of such a relation is the capitalist, since it is

the capitalist who is the immediate possessor of the products of labour and
under whom the capitalist labour process must take place. Consequently,
workers’ alienation from their products and productive activity requires
a capitalist. Since capitalists are the owners and wielders of capital, and
capital constitutes a locus of power which comes to dominate and control
workers’ lives, the capitalist accordingly comes to appear as the locus of
such power. Put differently, since owning capital grants capitalists power
over workers that workers cannot control, the capitalist rightly comes
to be seen as an agent of domination. Since in reality these are powers
produced and reproduced by workers themselves, and since the capital-
ists who possess and (to some extent) control these powers use them to
impose their ends, means, and control over workers’ productive activities,
the conditions of alienation we have just sketched entail the existence of
capitalists from whom workers are alienated. Let’s look at what Marx says.
Having started with an analysis of the concept and economic fact of
the worker’s alienation from product and from activity, Marx asks the
following question: if the “product of labour is alien to me and confronts
me as an alien power, to whom does it then belong”?73 Clearly it does
not belong to the gods. We might say that buildings belong to them or
that something was done in their service, but they never controlled any
process of production. The alien product and labour must belong to a
person, a human being, and since this cannot be the worker it must be
someone else: “If the product of labour does not belong to the worker,
and if it confronts him as an alien power, this is only possible because it
belongs to a man other than the worker”.74 If the worker:
regards the product of his labour, (...) as an alien, hostile, and powerful
object which is independent of him, then his relationship to that object is
such that another man – alien, hostile, powerful and independent of him –
is its master. If he relates to his own activity as unfree activity, he relates to
it as activity in the service, under the rule, coercion and yoke of another
man.75
73 Marx (1992, p. 330/I:2, pp. 242/371).

74 Marx (1992, p. 330/I:2, pp. 243/371).
75 Marx (1992, p. 331/I:2, pp. 243/371–372).
This is not merely a matter of the worker’s perceptions; it’s a necessary

aspect of capitalist relations of production, and thus a necessary condition
for the ongoing alienation from products and from productive activity
that such relations entail.
In sum, alienation from product and from productive activity requires
capitalists who are the owners of the products and the more proxi-
mate controllers of the productive activity that workers are alienated
from. Insofar as capitalists within such relations come to control work-
ers’ activity, they dominate workers and make them unfree. In this way
workers come to be alienated from the other human beings that are
capitalists.
Marx writes that:
[T]hrough alienated labour man not only produces his relationship to the
object and to the act of production as to alien and hostile powers; he also
produces the relationship in which other men stand to his production and
product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just
as he creates his own production as a loss of reality, a punishment, and
his own product as a loss, a product which does not belong to him, so
he creates the domination of the non-producer over production and its
product…76
(…)
Thus through estranged, alienated labour the worker creates the rela-
tionship of another man, who is alien to labour and stands outside it, to
that labour. The relation of the worker to labour creates the relation of the
capitalist (…) to that labour. Private property [of the means of production
in its capitalist form] is therefore the product, result and necessary conse-
quence of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature
and to himself.
Private property thus derives from an analysis of the concept of alienated
labour…77
The process of production that produces products from which workers

are alienated also reproduces the relation of workers with capitalists
who control their labour and its products. By analysing the nature of
76 Marx (1992, p. 331/I:2, pp. 243–244/372). Translation of “entfremdete Arbeit”

modified from “estranged” to “alienated” labour.
77 Marx (1992, pp. 331–332/I:2, pp. 244/372). Translation of “Entfremdung” as
“Estrangement” kept for purely for aesthetic reasons.
150 P. RAEKSTAD
the process of production under capitalism, Marx has, as he proudly

proclaims, derived private property, by which he here means the private
property of the capitalist in the means of production. Alienated labour
therefore presupposes capital, and vice versa; they are both necessary
components of the process of reproduction of the very same capitalist
social relations.78 In the sense that properly understanding one of them
requires that we also understand the other—since they are mutually impli-
cated in a structured process that they are both necessary components
of—the one can be said to derive from an analysis of the other, and vice
versa. Saying that both the capitalist process of production and capitalist
private property in the means of production are components of the same
ongoing set of social relations and that either can, in this specific sense,
be derived from the other is not, however, to say that they are of equal
importance or significance, either to Marx’s project or in general. As his
subsequent work shows, Marx thinks that the understanding of capitalism
must above all be sought in its process of production.
Alienation from others is vital to Marx’s account of the driving forces
of socialist revolution. In the Holy Family, Marx and Engels write that:
The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same
human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strength-
ened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power
and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels annihi-
lated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of
an inhuman existence…
Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conser-
vative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the
action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating
it…
When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute
side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite.
Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines
it, private property.79
78 This process of argument is evidently a deeply Hegelian one that he also essentially
follows both in the introduction to the Grundrisse and in the construction of Capital. I
shall not discuss it further here since it would take us far off topic.
79 MECW 4, p. 36/MEGA I:3, p. 206.
1
As we can see, Marx thinks that while workers and capitalists are both
subject to the alienation of capitalist social relations, their resulting social
situation and experiences are very different. Workers are disempowered,
unfree, and experience their lives and activities as such, and as a result
they will seek to overthrow these oppressive social relations with free
ones. By contrast, capitalists feel empowered and in control by virtue of
their relational positions of greater power, wealth, and privilege vis-à-vis
workers. Consequently, they will seek to preserve these relations of alien-
ation and unfreedom against the actions of workers. Just like it’s fruitless
to appeal to the moral sense of our oppressors, Marx thinks it is fruit-
less to appeal to those in positions of great power, wealth, and privilege
to grant us emancipation.80 If capitalists succeed, capitalism remains. If
workers succeed, capitalism is overthrown, and since overthrowing capi-
talism entails abolishing capitalist social relations, the positions defined by
these relations, like worker and capitalist, will be abolished as well. As we
will see in Chapter 9, this plays an important role in Marx’s later thoughts
on the revolutionary contradictions of capitalism.
Before moving on to a discussion of Marx’s conception of a cure for
capitalism, it’s worth summarising the diagnosis his second theory of
alienation pioneered. I have argued that Marx’s second theory of alien-
ation is a diagnosis of the ways, in which capitalism, by its (relational)
nature, thwarts human freedom. It does so by describing how, under capi-
talism, workers in the process of production produce and reproduce the
social relations which keep them in bondage at the same time as they
produce the products which are their bearers. This also involves a process
of production from which workers are alienated, which in turn entails
that workers are alienated from their (human) species-being. Finally, the
production and reproduction of capitalist social relations also requires the
production and reproduction not only of workers as workers, but also of
some other people as capitalists, from whom those workers are alienated.
We have thus traced the nature and origins of the four kinds of alien-
ation Marx discusses in his second theory of alienation: alienation from
product; alienation from labour process; alienation from species-being;
and alienation from others. We have also seen that the basic components
of this second theory of alienation are retained throughout Marx’s later
works all the way through Capital. In Chapter 9, we will even see that
80 This becomes an important part of his critique of the utopian socialists, see the
Communist Manifesto.
152 P. RAEKSTAD
it forms the core of one of Marx’s most enduring tenets, that capitalism
is characterised by two revolutionary contradictions: between the powers
and relations of production and between workers and capitalists. With an
understanding of Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism’s ills, it’s time to turn to
remedy that he proposes: socialism.
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CHAPTER 8
The Socialist Alternative
As the previous chapters have shown, Marx’s emphasis on human freedom

and overcoming alienation remains central throughout his earlier and
later works. So too does the importance of freedoms of press etc.,1
an awareness of both a necessity for some sort of delegation and its
potential pitfalls,2 and a commitment to radical democracy beyond the
modern state.3 However, based on his new understanding of capitalist
unfreedom diagnosed in his second theory of alienation he adds three new
components. Socialism, or what Marx calls communism, will additionally
feature a democratically planned economy, eliminate the capitalist division
1 In fact, as late as 1851 Marx re-published his articles defending freedom of the press
without changes. See Draper (1977, p. 59). For more discussion on Marx and Engels’
views on freedom of the press, see also Hunt (1974, 1984).
2 For more on this, see especially Marx’s discussion of the Paris Commune in The Civil
War in France.
3 It’s perhaps worth parenthetically noting that a number of things that might seem
anti-democratic to contemporary liberals are in fact just the opposite. For instance, in his
text on “The Constitution of the French Republic”, Marx writes of “the old constitu-
tional folly. The condition of a ‘free government’ is not the division, but the UNITY
of power. The machinery of government cannot be too simple. It is always the craft
of knaves to make it complicated and mysterious” (MECW 10, p. 570/I:10, p. 540).
Talk of “UNITY of power” may seem anti-democratic to contemporary liberals, but

Switzerland AG 2022
156 P. RAEKSTAD
of labour, and distribute according to need.4 These components of a free

socialist society all represent ways in which Marx continues to challenge
discussions about a free alternative to capitalism. After discussing each
component of Marx’s socialism in turn, I finish the chapter by defending
it against two of its most important and insightful critics: Max Weber and
Friedrich Hayek.
Socialism as Emancipation
The fundamental goal of replacing capitalism with a free society remains
throughout Marx’s works from 1844 onwards. In the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx writes that “free conscious
activity constitutes the species-character of man”5 then socialism is “the
true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the
complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e. human, being…”.6
It thus constitutes “the genuine resolution of the conflict between man
and nature, and between man and man… It is the solution of the riddle
of history and knows itself to be the solution”.7
Footnote 3 continued
the reality is just the opposite. Recall that the doctrine of the separation of powers is in e.g.
Montesquieu (1998), to the US Founding Fathers (Hamilton et al., 2003) and beyond,
designed not to achieve democracy, but rather to divide political rule between different
powers, limiting the democratic element to one of them and ensuring the others are more
monarchical and aristocratic. In other words, the standard doctrine of the separation of
powers is an explicitly anti-democratic idea used to deliberately prevent democracy. Marx’s
opposition to this doctrine is thus in reality a radically democratic move in opposition
to the anti-democratic tenets of liberalism, past and present. I think it says something
important about how subject to liberal ideology we are that we keep confusing anti-
democratic liberal ideas with the very essence of democratic governance.
4 For more detailed discussion, see Ollman (1977), Campbell (2011), and Hudis
(2013).
5 Marx (1992, p. 328/I:2, pp. 240/369).
6 Marx (1992, p. 348/I:2, pp. 263/389).
7 Marx (1992, p. 348, pp. 263/389).
8 THE SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE 157
Later, Marx and Engels write that “things have now come to such a
pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of produc-
tive powers, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard
their very existence”.8 They go on to write that:
Only at this stage [i.e. of communist/socialist society] does self-activity

coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of
individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limi-
tations. The transformation of labour into self-activity corresponds to the
transformation of the previously limited intercourse into the intercourse of
individuals as such. With the appropriation of the total productive powers
by the united individuals, private property comes to an end.9
In other words, socialist society will be the first to fully realise human
freedom as self-direction, which in turn enables greater development
among the united individuals. Under these conditions, we will see that in
“the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through
their association”.10 As Marx points out in the Grundrisse, socialism
enables and generates “[u]niversally developed individuals, whose social
relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence
also subordinated to their own communal control”.11 This includes social
ownership of the means of production, i.e. ownership and control by the
associated producers themselves, rather than by states or capitalists.12
By restoring full communal control over the social relations that
determine their lives, socialism restores the full range of modern social
and individual powers to the collective self-rule of its participants.
8 MECW 5, p. 87/I:5, p. 111. Here too I have modified the translation of “productive
forces” to “productive powers”.
9 MECW 5, p. 88/I:5, pp. 113–114. Here too I have modified the translation of
“productive forces” to “productive powers”.
10 MECW 5, p. 78/I:5, p. 96.
11 Marx (1993, p. 162/II.1.1, p. 91), square brackets in the translation.
12 The misunderstanding that socialism amounts to state ownership is nowhere to
be found in Marx or Engels. In response to this misunderstanding developing, Engels
ridicules the idea e.g. in a note added to the 1892 edition of Socialism, Utopian and
Scientific. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx even argues against states funding
workers’ cooperatives, arguing that socialist cooperation “has nothing in common with
establishing co-operative societies with state aid!” and that cooperatives under capitalism
“are only of value if they are independent creations of the workers and not creatures of
the government or the bourgeoisie” (Marx 1996, p. 221/I:25, p. 20).
158 P. RAEKSTAD
In so doing, it enables them realise their powers for conscious self-

direction. Since human social life and its conditions of operation are
now controlled completely by the collected social individuals themselves,
they can develop their powers and needs freely and universally in accor-
dance with any precepts or measuring rods they themselves choose.
Achieving this requires socialism to feature participatory planning, ending
the hierarchical division of labour, and distributing according to need.
Participatory Planning
In order to prevent the personal domination of lords and capitalists,
as well as the impersonal domination of competitive markets, socialism
must be organised through some sort of participatory democratic plan-
ning. In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels write of socialism as a
“society [that] regulates the general production”,13 and of the need for
the associated producers to collectively appropriate the totality of soci-
ety’s productive powers. Later in the Grundrisse, Marx writes of “[f]ree
individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on
the subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social
wealth”.14 Nothing, Marx writes, could be more “absurd than to postu-
late the control by the united individuals of their total production, on
the basis of exchange value, of money”.15 Generalised exchange of the
products of labour, and market organisation of social wealth and activity,
“stands in antithesis” to the “free exchange among individuals who are
associated on the basis of common appropriation and control of the means
of production”,16 because these kinds of “private exchange create[s]
world trade” and so this particular form of “private independence creates
complete dependence on the so-called world market”.17
In other words, socialist planning must replace capitalist-type markets,
because retaining them would keep workers subject to the dependence
13 MECW 5, p. 47/I:5, p. 34.

14 Marx (1993, p. 158/II.1.1, p. 91).
15 Marx (1993, p. 159/II.1.1, p. 91).
16 Marx (1993, p. 159/II.1.1, pp. 91–92).
17 Marx (1993, p. 159/II.1.1, p. 92).
or domination18 of the world market. According to Marx, retaining

competitive markets between worker-owned firms would retain the kind
of impersonal domination that both capitalists and workers are subjected
to under capitalism. This entails not only workers’ continuing unfreedom,
but also the life-threatening pathologies of competitive markets in terms
of ecological destruction—more important today than ever before. In
Chapter 7, we saw that this continues to pose a challenge to proposals
for a free future society that wish to retain competitive markets even
with (more) worker-controlled firms, like those put forward by market
socialists and various republicans.19
The solution can only be participatory democratic planning.
Thus, in Capital Marx asks us to “imagine, for a change, an association
of free men, working with the means of production held in common,
and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-
awareness as one single social labour force” and regulating labour time
“in accordance with a definite social plan”, while maintaining the correct
relations between “the different functions of labour and the various needs
of the associations”. In such a situation, he writes, the “social relations of
the individual producers, both towards their labour and the products of
their labour, are here transparent in their simplicity, in production as well
as in distribution”.20 Thus, “[w]hen the worker co-operates in a planned
way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops
the capabilities of his species”.21
Of course, planned production will still be subject to certain natural
and technical conditions and restrictions, most notably the determination
of time and the necessity of organising labour among different branches
of production. Marx explains that:
18 Dependence and domination are generally used interchangeably. The German term
Marx uses here is Abhängigkeit, which can be translated into either. The translation in
question chooses to translate this and its complementary term as dependence and inde-
pendence, respectively, and which retains Marx’s play on Abhängigkeit/Unabhängigkeit
in the passage, and I’ve chosen not to modify this for the same reason.
19 For one famous example of Marx doing this explicitly, see his critique of Lassallean
proposals for economic reform in Critique of the Gotha Programme.
20 Marx (1990, pp. 171–172/II:6, p. 109).
21 Marx (1990, p. 447/II:6, p. 326).
160 P. RAEKSTAD
On the basis of communal production, the determination of time remains,

of course, essential. The less time the society requires to produce wheat,
cattle, etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or mental.
Just as in the case of an individual, the multiplicity of its development,
its enjoyment and its activity depends on the economization of time.
Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society
likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve
a production adequate to its overall needs; just as the individual has to
distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper
proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Thus,
economy of time, along with the planned distribution of labour time among
the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis
of communal production.22
Importantly, the planning Marx advocates is by workers themselves

through an association of free people planning and acting in “full self-
awareness”. It is thus (a) carried out by workers themselves, which (b)
enables them to attain conscious self-direction over the distribution of
labour time in social production, and (c) enables them to attain conscious
self-direction over production as a whole, enabling their entire produc-
tive activity to become their own individual and collective self-activity.
Marx is therefore not advocating a system of planning where a separate
board or elite of managers plans on behalf of workers. Such forms of
planning—often called central planning and common e.g. in large capi-
talist corporations—are mediated not through the conscious control of
workers themselves, but by a separate organ that workers cannot control
and whose power they are subjected to. Such systems retain personal rela-
tions of domination and servitude, so we should not be surprised that
Marx never advocated such a thing.23
22 Marx (1993, pp. 172–173/II.1.1, pp. 103–104), emphases are my own.

23 Note that this is unaffected by optimistic assessments of the powers and potentials
of modern technology like powerful computers (Cockshott & Cottrell, 1993; Phillips &
Rozworski, 2019). Current advocates of central planning make a number of important
points about how it’s prevalent in successful capitalist corporations, about how modern
computing power can make all kinds of planning more efficient, and about the value of
planning compared to market competition. What they do not do, however, is say anything
about the question that Marx focuses on: the question of social power and freedom.
Modern computers and technology more broadly can be used to either empower central
planners or to enable planning by workers themselves. To empower workers, new tech-
nologies must be part of a system of social relations that enable the associated producers
When we speak of planning, we should distinguish between two things.

On the one hand, there’s the question of workers’ councils planning,
organising, and overseeing the operations of their own workplace.24 On
the other hand, there’s the question of how a large number of workplaces
coordinate their activities together and interact to carry out production,
reproduction, and allocation. The citations above make clear that for
Marx both of these forms of planning are necessary for the kind of socialist
planning that he envisages. However, in terms of assessing the plausibility
of democratic planning of various sorts, these two questions should be
distinguished. The plausibility of any system of participatory democratic
planning both within and between workplaces is intimately tied up with
two other questions: the Weberian question of whether bureaucracy has
become a necessary feature of the modern world and the related question
of technical divisions of labour.
The Hierarchical Division of Labour

In addition to being democratically structured and planned, Marx thinks
that socialism must abolish the division of labour seen under capitalism.
In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels write that:
the division of labour offers us the first example of the fact that, as long
as man remains in naturally evolved society, that is, as long as a cleavage
exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, there-
fore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed
becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of
being controlled by him. For as soon as the division of labour comes into
being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced
upon him and from which he cannot escape.25
Note the explicit discussion of the division of labour in terms of alien

power and domination. The social division that Marx objects to is thus
not about the subdivision of tasks per se. Rather, it’s about people being
to take advantage of them. To do that, they must be part of a system of participatory

democratic planning rather than subjected to the impersonal domination of competitive
markets or the personal domination of bosses and managers. Central planning presup-
poses exactly the kind of hierarchical division of labour between managers and workers
that capitalism develops and that we’ve seen Marx criticise in the previous chapter and
that, as the next sections shows, Marx argues that socialism must do away with.
24 See Braverman (1998).
25 MECW 5, p. 47/I:5, p. 34.
162 P. RAEKSTAD
forced into particular social roles or spheres, being hindered from leaving
them, and how this leads to people being subjected to alien powers that
dominate them, making them unfree. Delving further into the political
economy of capitalism naturally deepens this analysis.
Perhaps the most extensive collection of Marx’s discussion on the divi-
sion of labour, and the necessity of its overcoming under socialism, is to
be found in Volume I of Capital, where three distinct but related issues
are broached: (a) the hierarchical division of labour and of labour’s organ-
isation within workplaces; (b) the division of labour seen under capitalism
(especially in factory production); and (c) the necessity of overcoming
both of these in a future socialist society. My discussion will move through
all three, respectively.
According to Marx, the advent of capitalist manufacture “not
only subjects the previously independent worker to the discipline and
command of capital, but creates in addition a hierarchical structure
amongst the workers themselves ”.26 We saw in the previous chapter how
Marx argues that as capitalist cooperation “extends its scale, this despo-
tism develops the forms that are peculiar to it”, by capitalists devolving
“the work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workers and
groups of workers to” to a dedicated apparatus of managers comparing
the “industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist” to
real armies.27
Thus, “in the society where the capitalist mode of production prevails,
anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in the manufac-
turing division of labour mutually condition each other”.28 The effects
this has on relations of power and domination between workers and
capitalists are clear-cut:
Division of labour within the workshop implies the undisputed authority of

the capitalist over men, who are merely the members of a total mechanism
which belongs to him.29
26 Marx (1990, p. 481/II:6, p. 354), my emphasis.

27 Marx (1990, p. 450/II: 6, p. 328).
28 Marx (1990, p. 477/II:6, p. 351).
29 Ibid., pp. 476–477/II: 6, pp. 350–321.
In addition to this structural division of labour between workers and

a more powerful and privileged layer of managers, manufacture further
divides up workers’ labour into a number of small, specialised tasks,
confining workers to a tiny range of operations. This division of labour
“converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity by furthering his partic-
ular skill as in a forcing-house, through the suppression of a whole
world of productive drives and inclinations”.30 Although this increases
the totality of social productive powers, it does so only under the aegis of
capital, strengthening its power over the people it commands. It thus both
increases “the socially productive power of labour for the benefit of capi-
tal” by “crippling the individual worker” and “produces new conditions
for the domination of capital over labour”.31
Factory production extends and exacerbates all of this. Here we have
“a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are
incorporated into it as living appendages”.32
The separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from

manual labour, and the transformation of those faculties into powers exer-
cised by capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed
by large-scale industry erected on the foundation of machinery. (…) The
technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instru-
ments of labour, and the peculiar composition of the working group,
(…) gives rise to a barrack-like discipline, which is elaborated into a
complete system in the factory, and brings the previously mentioned labour
of the superintendence to its fullest development, thereby dividing the
workers into manual workers and overseers, into the private soldiers and
the N.C.O.s of an industrial army.33
Here too Marx stresses not only the hierarchical division of labour, but
also its effects on workers’ development:
Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same
time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates
every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity. Even
30 Ibid., p. 481, II: 6, pp. 354–355.

31 Ibid., p. 486/II: 6, pp. 358–359.
32 Ibid., p. 548/II: 6, p. 410.
33 Ibid., p. 549/II: 6, pp. 410–411.
164 P. RAEKSTAD
the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of torture, since the

machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the
work itself of all content.34
Summarising this discussion, most of which takes place in Part IV of

Volume I of Capital, he writes:
We saw in Part IV (…) that within the capitalist system all methods for
raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of
the individual worker; that all means for the development of production
undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination
and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment
of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine,
they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment;
they alienate [entfremden] from him the intellectual potentialities of the
labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated into it as
an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works,
subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful
for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time… But all
methods for the production surplus-value are at the same time methods of
accumulation… Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the
same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, igno-
rance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on
the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.35
This passage touches on a large number of elements previously

discussed, but for now let us note that it encapsulates the two main crit-
ical points Marx develops with regard to the nature of the division of
labour under capitalism as it developed through manufacture to the
factory system. First, the hierarchical division between mental and phys-
ical labour and between workers and a middle layer of managers that plan,
control, manage, and oversee the labour process, thereby securing the
domination and exploitation of workers for capital. Second, the restriction
of workers’ labour processes to minute and specialised tasks, thwarting
their human development, both physical and mental. Note that simply
removing managers while retaining subordination to capital cannot solve
these problems, since even though e.g. systems of piece work may reduce
34 Ibid., p. 548/II: 6, p. 410.

35 Marx (1990, p. 798-9/II:6, p. 587-8).
managerial oversight, they remain a “hierarchically organized system of

exploitation and oppression”.36
According to Marx, the solution is to eliminate the hierarchical division
of labour altogether. He and Engels write that the “transformation (…)
of personal powers into material powers (…) can only be abolished by
the individuals again subjecting these material powers to themselves and
abolishing the division of labour”37 and that socialist individuals must
therefore “no longer [be] subject to the division of labour”.38 In contrast
to previous forms of society, under socialism,
where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become
accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general
production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and
another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear
cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without
ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.39
As he reiterates in the Grundrisse, there will of course still be a

“planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of
production”,40 but, unlike under capitalism, workers under socialism will
not be bound and restricted to one activity only, as part of a fixed social
structure in which they are compelled to participate either by the force of
ruling elites or by the force of material need.
Finally, in Volume I of Capital, Marx argues that:
Th[e] possibility of varying labour [developed by capitalism] must become

a general law of social production, and the existing relations must be
adapted to permit its realization in practice. That monstrosity, the dispos-
able working population held in reserve, in misery, for the changing
requirements of capitalist exploitation, must be replaced by the individual
man who is absolutely available for the different kinds of labour required
36 Marx (1990, p. 695/II: 6, p. 514).

37 MECW 5, p. 78/I:5, p. 95—note that the verb that’s been translated to “abol-
ish” here is “aufheben”, which is a technical Hegelian term that can both mean to
abolish/eliminate and to raise up to a higher level. The translational choice here seems
overall correct to me.
38 MECW 5, p. 88/I:5, p. 114.
39 MECW 5, p. 47/I:5, pp. 34–35.
40 Marx (1993, p. 173/II.1.1, p. 104).
166 P. RAEKSTAD
of him; the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of

one specialized social function, must be replaced by the totally developed
individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of
activity he takes up in turn.41
None of this means an end to modern industry and technology or

to the subdivision of tasks in the service of minimising necessary labour
time. What it does entail is an end to the exclusion of workers from mental
and conceptual tasks, from the planning, management, and overseeing of
their individual and collective labour, and allowing their work-week (or
year) to consist of any number of specific tasks both within and between
industries—subject, of course, to the individual and collective needs of
their society, and to their abilities. This would mean that, as G. A. Cohen
puts it, “a person does not give himself up to one activity only”; “he
does not relate to any of his several activities as to a role in a fixed social
structure”; and “what he does is” at least generally speaking, “something
he wishes to do”.42
More precisely, Marx is arguing that socialism must (i) eliminate
people’s confinement to particular occupations, (ii) eliminate the split
between a ruling elite who do all the planning, managing, and overseeing
of labour and those who are subject to their power, and (iii) allow people’s
labouring activities to consist, in principle, of any combination they indi-
vidually and collectively determine, subject to their abilities and society’s
needs. This in turn will result in (iv) occupational identities falling away
as meaningful social categories altogether.
We can now see how Marx’s vision of socialism further challenges a
number of current workplace republican proposals for economic freedom.
Typically these proposals emphasise, among other things, strengthening
exit rights43 and replacing capitalist firms with worker-owned firms.44
The same goes for one of the most influential socialist models today,
market socialism, which likewise emphasises worker-owned firms within
41 Marx (1990, p. 618/II:6, p. 466).

42 Cohen (2001, p. 133).
43 Anderson, Hsieh (2012, 2008).
44 González-Ricoy (2014) and Gourevitch (2015).
the context of competitive markets with little to no changes in the divi-

sion of labour.45 While both aim at economic emancipation, they do so
without demanding the elimination of hierarchical divisions of labour.
For Marx, such models cannot secure economic emancipation. First,
managers under such systems almost always retain a great deal of uncon-
trolled power over workers. They monopolise and control important
information. They decide which tasks are to be performed, how they
are performed, and who by. And they evaluate performance, meting
out rewards and punishments. These are all ways in which they have
power over workers, which workers themselves cannot control. Simply
being able to vote on managers and boards of directors has proven
ineffective at preventing this. Even in a formally democratic work-
place, in any process of deliberation and decision-making regarding the
affairs of that workplace this layer of bureaucrats tends to become the
only people with sufficient information, knowledge, and competence
to contribute to many vital issues. This renders everyone else in that
workplace dependent on them both for their input and goodwill in
deliberation and decision-making and for securing the continued smooth
operation of the workplace. Over time, this power imbalance under-
mines any potential for genuine worker self-management. This problem
has been noted numerous times throughout the last century, including
in market socialist societies such as in Yugoslavia and among numerous
cooperatives and recuperated factories which failed to take this issue
into consideration. It’s also a well-known problem in larger cooperatives,
such as the famous Mondragón cooperative. Despite formally democratic
decision-making structures, lower wage inequality, and absence of capi-
talist owners, Mondragón features the very same relations of personal
domination between workers and managers as familiar capitalist firms
do.46 This supports Marx’s insight that replacing capitalism with a free
economy requires not just formal workers’ control over workplaces, but
also abolishing the hierarchical division of labour.
45 See e.g. Schweickart (1996). Such models are more detailed than I can adequately
describe here, including models of banking, taxation, investment, and interaction with
familiar types of state institutions.
46 Kasmir (1996, 2018).
168 P. RAEKSTAD
Distributing According to Need

Finally, Marx also believes that socialism requires a criterion for a fully
human scheme of remuneration: “from each according to his abilities, to
each according to his needs!”47 This last element enters Marx’s writings
less as an important component either in its own right or for the purposes
of securing the collective appropriation and self-rule of the totality of our
social powers. A version of it first appears with some brief discussion in the
German Ideology and pops up sporadically throughout later works. In fact,
compared to many other socialists and much of contemporary political
theory, Marx seems strikingly uninterested in devising, comparing, and
evaluating principles of distribution for any present or future society. I
don’t think we should be surprised by this in light of Marx’s consistent
focus on questions of power, especially questions concerning the structure
and presuppositions for collective deliberation and decision-making. It is
not clear that anything specific flows from an answer to the question of
how to organise a free society to the distinct (though not unconnected)
issue of which principles a free society should then go on to distribute
everyday consumable goods and services according to. Moreover, whereas
we might be able to say something sensible about how a future society
should be organised in order to help guide action in the present towards
such social change, it’s not clear that the same can be said about principles
for distributing everyday consumable goods and services. Indeed, in the
Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx argues that “it was an overall
mistake” of the Lassalleans “to make an issue of so-called distribution and
to make it the focus of attention”,48 in part due to the fact that principles
of distribution result from the relations of production. Throughout his
life he consistently rejected moralised conceptions of the labour theory of
value and both critiques of capitalism and arguments for socialism based
thereon.
Nevertheless, Marx advocates distribution according to need as the
one most appropriate to a socialist society. In Critique of the Gotha
Programme, he writes that:
In a higher phase of communist society, after the subjection of individ-

uals to the division of labour, and thereby the antithesis between mental
47 Marx (1996, p. 215/I:25, p. 15).

48 Marx (1996, p. 215/I:25, p. 15).
and physical labour, has disappeared; after labour has become not merely
a means to live but the foremost need in life; after the multifarious devel-
opment of individuals has grown along with their productive powers, and
all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can
the limited horizon of bourgeois right be wholly transcended, and society
can inscribe on its banner: from each according to his abilities, to each
according to his needs!49
In other words, need is argued to be the principle of distribution

appropriate to socialist relations of production. Rather than simply being
about distributing what is produced, we should understand the satisfac-
tion of real social needs—individual and collective—as driving economic
production. Socialist production is therefore driven by the satisfaction
of real human needs, developed and determined by people themselves,
rather than by ruling elites or impersonal market forces. In such a society
“the form of a directly communal activity and a directly communal
consumption (…) occur wherever that direct expression of sociality
[Gesellschaftlichkeit] springs from the essential nature of the content of
the activity and is appropriate to the nature of the consumption”.50
Whereas under capitalism, “I have produced for myself and not for
you, just as you have produced for yourself and not for me” because “our
production is not man’s production for man as a man, i.e., it is not social
production”,51 under socialism, Marx writes that:
(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”;
(3) “I would have been for you the mediator between you and the
species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you
49 Marx (1996, pp. 214–215/I:25, p. 15).

50 Marx (1996, p. 350/I:2, pp. 267/391).
51 MECW 3, p. 225/IV:2, p. 462.
170 P. RAEKSTAD
yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a

necessary part of yourself”; and
(4) “In the individual expression of my life I would have directly
created your expression of your life, and therefore in my indi-
vidual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true
nature, my human nature, my communal nature.52
So, under socialist relations of production, we not only realise our

freedom through our activities and so enjoy them more fully. We also
enjoy our productive activities as actions that help to satisfy real human
needs. This helps us to take joy in the good that we’re doing, in others’
enjoyment of our activities and their products, and in our own nature as
social beings who are part of such a society.
However, when socialist relations are first introduced, people will
previously have been socialised under capitalism and internalised capitalist
norms. As a result, they will not initially distribute according to need, but
according to labour. Marx grew to recognise that the majority of socialists
around him thought—in his view erroneously—that goods and services
should be distributed according to labour under socialism. He thought
they did this because they’d internalised the norms of capitalism—after all
“[r]ight can never be higher than the economic form of society and the
cultural development which is conditioned by it”.53 And he thought that
this flaw was both unavoidable and would likely persist for some time “in
the first phase of socialist society when it has just emerged from capi-
talist society after a long and painful birth”.54 In such a society, “just as
it emerges from capitalist society, hence in every respect - economically,
morally, intellectually - as it comes forth from the womb, it is stamped
with the birthmarks of the old society”,55 people will likely distribute
according to labour.
This is not because distributing according to labour is appropriate
to socialism—quite the opposite. It’s because distributing according to
labour is a natural outgrowth of capitalism—a moral and ideological
imprint of capitalist social relations—which those who introduce socialism
52 MECW 3, p. 228/IV:2, p. 465.

53 Marx (1996, p. 214/I:25, p. 15).
54 Marx (1996, p. 214/I:25, p. 15).
55 Marx (1996, p. 213/I:25, p. 13).
will still, unfortunately, have internalised. In time, however, as the effects

of new, socialist relations are felt, people’s conceptions of the appropriate
principles of distribution will change. Thus, Marx writes that:
Within a co-operatively organised society based on common ownership in

the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products;
nor does the labour expended on the products appear any more as the
value of these products, one of the material properties that they possess,
because now in contrast to capitalist society, the labour of individuals will
no longer be a constituent part of the total labour in a roundabout way,
but will be part of it directly. The term ’return from labour’, which is
useless even today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all semblance of
meaning.56
As the new socialist relations of production take effect, distributing

according to labour loses all the meaning it once seemed to have and the
form of distribution appropriate to these new social relations, according
to need, will blossom forth.
For Marx, these different phases are in no way different modes or
relations of production. Dividing the phases of socialism into two sepa-
rate stages, two separate modes of production, is a later invention by
other Marxists, most prominently Lenin in The State and Revolution.
While Lenin’s discussion is much more legally focused and less fleshed-
out than many seem to think, many later Leninists distinguish very firmly
between a stage of “socialism” (with a single-party state, state owner-
ship of the means of production, centrally planned economy, distribution
according to labour, and so on) and a stage of “communism” (a fully free,
stateless society, social (not state) ownership, worker self-organisation,
distribution according to need, etc.). This was never Marx’s view, and
the reconstruction above makes it clear why.
Marx instead speaks of two phases of the very same relations of produc-
tion. The first describes how workers, still negatively impacted by the
moral and ideological effects of capitalist relations, distribute when they
first introduce socialist relations. The second describes how they come to
distribute once these new, free socialist relations have made themselves
felt. If these two phases of socialism are instead conceptualised as separate
56 Marx (1996, 213/I:25, p. 13).

172 P. RAEKSTAD
modes or relations of production, we would completely lose Marx’s expla-

nation for why the first phase adopts distribution according to labour.
This is not because it’s appropriate to that stage, but because it’s an
unfortunate vestige of capitalism. We would also lose his explanation for
the shift from the first to the second phase of socialism, which is due to
the effects of new, free socialist relations of production on distributive
norms. In other words, for Marx the society that replaces capitalism is a
fully free socialist society that, once its new social relations take full effect,
distributes according to need. This discussion raises a host of questions
about what the transition to a socialist society would look like, e.g. about
how to relate to state power, Marx’s ideas of a democratic dictatorship of
the proletariat, and the two different models of transition offered in the
Communist Manifesto and The Civil War in France. Though interesting,
I must leave these for later work.
We have seen that Marx’s conception of socialism can be understood as
a further development of his vision of democracy. Socialism contains and
furthers all the elements to be found in the initial vision of democracy,
adding three further components in light of the diagnosis of the ills of
modern society that Marx discusses in his second theory of alienation.
These three additions are the specification that the economy as a whole
must be participatory democratically planned, that the modern division
of labour must be done away with, and that people distribute according
to need. Marx makes these additions in order to develop a vision of a
socialist society intended to realise the same basic commitment to freedom
and human development that his conception of democracy attempted to.
Universal human emancipation and participatory democracy remain at the
heart of Marx’s vision of socialism. Having explored this, I turn now to
consider two of the most prominent critiques of this project: Max Weber
and Friedrich Hayek.
Weber: Socialism Contra

Bureaucratic Domination
Let us now consider an important objection to Marx’s vision developed
by Max Weber. The argument turns on the relations between contempo-
rary industry and technology on the one hand, and the extent to which
the elimination of a certain kind of stratification of power, control, and
decision-making are compatible with it on the other. Weber’s argument
is specifically directed against the thoughts expressed in the Commu-

nist Manifesto and against syndicalism, claiming that de facto rule by
an elite bureaucracy is necessary for a contemporary (as of the early
twentieth century) industrial and technological economy: “The modern
economy cannot be managed in any other way”,57 due to “the necessity
for long years of specialist training, for constantly increasing specialisation
and for management by specialist officials trained in this way”.58 This
“inescapable universal bureaucratisation”59 is due (1) “partly to purely
technical considerations, to the nature of modern means of operation”,
and (2) “partly simply to the greater efficiency of this kind of human
cooperation: to the development of ‘discipline’, the discipline of the army,
office, workshop and business”.60 Weber constantly keeps in mind the
import of this claim in his lecture on socialism, which I have been quoting
from. Since modern technology necessitates a bureaucracy running the
labour process (and other processes of state, the army, etc.), and this
bureaucracy and its power will always prevent workers from having mean-
ingful control over the means of production, alienation in the sense I have
described it above is impossible to overcome.
Clearly, this supposed need for bureaucratic power and control would
render Marx’s socialism impossible, since it entails that everyone cannot
collectively control the economy—or, for that matter, any other modern
large-scale institution. If this is the case, it risks seriously undermining
Marx’s critique of capitalism, because it implies that we either have to
give up collective control over all of society by the associated producers
or give up on modern industry and technology. The former route is prob-
lematic for methodological reasons. If bureaucratic power and control
are unavoidable, then capitalism cannot be criticised on Marx’s grounds
for being an inferior feasible alternative compared to socialism, since
socialism too would share this defect. If, on the other hand, we choose
to give up on modern industry and technology, then the comparative
assessment between capitalism and socialism becomes much more prob-
lematic. If socialism requires us to give up the immense productive powers
57 Weber (1994, p. 279).

58 Weber (1994, p. 279).
59 Weber (1994, p. 279).
60 Weber (1994, p. 281).
174 P. RAEKSTAD
of modern industry and technology, how plausible is it to think that it will

compare favourably to capitalism, all things considered?
Defusing this sort of objection requires discussing the precise forms
through which Marx’s vision can be brought about, which will be able to
show how it is possible to instantiate Marx’s socialism without generating
the claimed harms. There are a handful of different proposals for what a
society broadly like the one Marx describes might look like, but the one I
favour and will consider here is the model of Participatory Economics—
ParEcon—developed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel.
Participatory Economics is a model of some of the institutional forms
that can instantiate much of Marx’s vision of socialism.61 The model has
four main components. First, it consists of a federated network of work-
ers’ and community/consumers’ councils. Every workplace is run by one
or more workers’ councils, each of around 25–50 members. In these
councils, each member is supposed to have roughly equal powers and
responsibilities. Both workers’ and consumers’ councils federate upwards
such that, for example, each lower-level council sends one representative
to a higher-level council, each in turn consisting of 25–50 such represen-
tatives, and so on until the national or international level is reached. The
exact number of people in each such council, and the number of levels of
such councils, will naturally vary according to any number of factors to
do with population, geography, etc. Workers’ councils are responsible for
the day-to-day operations of the production process, and the workplace
in general, as well as being responsible for participating in the formation
and implementation of the democratic plan of production. Consumers’
councils will federate not according to workplaces, but according to
where you live. These, together with the workers’ councils, participate
in formulating the participatory democratic plans, and are responsible for
determining and overseeing relevant public goods and services on relevant
levels (things like parks, hospitals, roads, etc.).
Apart from a network of workers’ and consumers’ councils, partici-
patory economics has three main components: a new way of organising
society’s division of labour, called Balanced Jobs; a model of democratic
61 For discussion of this model, see Albert (2003), Albert and Hahnel (1978, 1991,
1999), Hahnel (2005, 2012) and Raekstad (2011, 2013). These are also often called “Bal-
anced Job Complexes” rather than “Balanced Jobs”. I follow Hahnel (2012) in preferring
the latter term, for no other reason than that it’s less bulky and conveys its meaning just
as well.
planning, called Participatory Planning; and a criterion of remunera-

tion, according to effort and sacrifice. The last component—remuneration
according to effort and sacrifice, rather than according to needs—differs
from Marx’s. Since I also think that this component is much less impor-
tant than the others, because it deals not with critical issues of power and
how to structure deliberation and decision-making but rather on which
principles some of these should be done in accordance with, and because
it is not important for replying to criticisms of Marx’s vision of socialism,
I will leave this last component aside for discussion here.
The first port of call is replying to Weber’s contention that modern
industry and technology make a de facto rule by a distinct layer of
bureaucrats unavoidable for future societies. Naturally, in the case of a
socialist revolution in the sense Marx envisages, it would be naïve to
think that things to do with the organisation of workplaces technologi-
cally, spatially, and organisationally would remain the same. Furthermore,
many workplaces simply do not require managers with specialist technical
competence. In fact, many modern managers come straight from business
and management schools and possess less technical knowledge about the
workplaces they go into than their workers.
Following István Mészáros,62 we should also note that Weber just
seems to assume that production would cease to function, or at least
cease to function well, without bureaucratic management, on the basis
of nothing more than a thought experiment. If we hold a certain hierar-
chical division of labour within some institution constant and remove the
personnel at the top, then production will cease to function (properly).
Even if we accept this line of reasoning, it does not support the very
different thesis that fulfilling the functions of that institution is impos-
sible without someone on the top of a hierarchical division of labour.
Why? Since neither Marx nor the syndicalists Weber is criticising assumes,
or needs to assume, that the hierarchical division of labour is to be held
constant. Quite the contrary: They hold that the social structure should
be changed such that there are no hierarchies of that kind, and therefore
nobody at the top of them. The fact that removing people from the top
of a hierarchical organisation results in chaos for an organisation of that
kind—if this really is the case—does not give us reason to think that an
62 Mészáros (1986).
176 P. RAEKSTAD
institution structured in a different way cannot perform the functions that

the hierarchically structured one can just as well or even better.
On the other hand, in order to challenge Weber’s argument at its
strongest, I will be ignoring these important considerations and focus
purely on the case of factory-type industrial production which typically
does feature a layer of managers. I will also further assume, for the
sake of meeting Weber’s argument in its strongest possible form, that
these managers really do possess critical technical knowledge which other
current workers in the same workplace or industry at least generally lack
(even though this is often demonstrably false).
One specific proposal for addressing just this issue is the idea of
Balanced Jobs. Balanced Jobs are a specific way of organising the distri-
bution of tasks within a workplace to ensure that all the members of
that workplace can participate properly in their workplace’s deliberation
and decision-making, as well as develop and flourish as human beings.
Balanced Jobs are designed to do this by ensuring two things. First, that
everyone in a workplace does both some of the more challenging and
rewarding work, as well as some of the heavier and more boring work.
This is to ensure that all individuals are strengthened and developed rather
than just a few at everyone else’s expense. Secondly, that tasks and respon-
sibilities that involve critical knowledge and competence about the way
that workplace operates are distributed evenly between those who work
there. This is to prevent just the kind of hierarchical division of labour
between a separate privileged managers and other workers.63
The best argument for Balanced Jobs being possible is the fact that
they have actually been implemented in a variety of cooperatives. Some
of these are very small indeed, but others are larger. Furthermore, in some
cases the balancing has taken some very demanding forms—consider-
ably more demanding than balancing work would be in a normal factory.
The “Mondragon Bookshop and Coffeehouse” in Canada, for instance,
has succeeded in rotating every single task involved in running a book-
shop, restaurant, and coffee bar among all of its members. There are also
encouraging historical examples of larger-scale plants experimenting with
breaking up the division of labour.64
63 Apart from the other books on ParEcon already mentioned, see the essays collected
in Walker (1979) and also Wright (1980).
64 See Ness and Azzellini (2011).
A Weberian reply to this might run as follows. Fair enough, it is indeed

possible to eliminate a distinct bureaucracy within workplaces, but it is still
not ultimately feasible to do so in the context of modern industry and
technology, due to the detrimental effects this would have on efficiency.
This claim is sometimes further bolstered by the idea that education is
required for certain tasks, which is costly. Ensuring that only a small
minority receives such specialised education would therefore be more
efficient than an alternative one, at least all other things being equal.
The first thing we should point out against this retort is that argu-
ments like it are almost always given with no real supporting evidence
whatsoever. What this essentially amounts to is a thinker coming up with
something that, if it were true, would support the thing they want to
defend, and then strongly asserting that it is true, inevitable, etc. Absent
further supporting evidence—which Weber does not provide—there’s not
much reason to believe that it’s plausible.
The second thing we should point out is the importance of the all
other things being equal assumption. Even if we accept the argument as it
stands, there are likely to be countervailing factors affecting the efficiency
of workplaces that are worker self-managed. For example, there are work-
ers’ cooperatives that are significantly more productive than comparable
capitalist firms and worker participation has been found to positively
impact efficiency even in capitalist firms. Synthesising over two decades of
research on cooperatives in Western Europe, the US, and Latin America,
a recent study found that “[w]orker cooperatives are more productive
than conventional businesses, with staff working “better and smarter”
and production organised more efficiently”, while often being larger and
not necessarily less capital-intensive than conventional capitalist firms.65
Famously, a US Department of Health, Welfare and Education study
in 1973 concluded its report into the effects of worker participation
by stating that “in no instance of which we have evidence has a major
effort to increase employee participation resulted in a long-term decline
of productivity”.66
Two possible explanations for this include the psychological finding
that higher autonomy leads to greater productivity and the idea that
65 Pérotin, 2018, p. 3. For an older review of relevant literature, see Levine and Tyson
(1990) and for two metastudies, see Doucouliagos, 1995 and Doucouliagos, 1997.
66 Quoted in Schweikart (1996, p. 100).
178 P. RAEKSTAD
workers in workplaces have a lot of knowledge and competence of various

kinds which they can contribute and implement under various systems of
worker management, but not when subject to capitalist or state-imposed
managers. A variety of empirical research on human motivation shows
satisfying human needs of autonomy as the feeling of self-direction,
connectedness, and competence is associated with greater productivity
and better results, as well as more intrinsic motivation. Today’s capi-
talist workplaces, by contrast, are much more built around providing
extrinsic motivations like rewarding for good results or punishing for
failure in various ways. One major downside of this is that adding extrinsic
motivation is not only much weaker than intrinsic motivation, it also
demonstrably decreases intrinsic motivation—which explains why e.g.
praising school-children for good results makes them learn less well, or
fining parents for picking their kids up from kindergarten late actually
increases lateness. By better being able to satisfy these needs and so
supporting intrinsic motivation, it’s reasonable to suppose that, all other
things being equal, more democratic workplaces would see major forces
of increased productivity and so efficiency.
Even under familiar forms of capitalism, there is empirical evidence
that gives us reason to doubt Weber’s view. In the late 1950s, the Tavi-
stock Institute did a comparative study of methods of work organisation
in British coal mines, described as follows:
This study concerns a group of miners who came together to evolve a

new way of working together, planning the type of change they wanted
to put through, and testing it in practice. The new type of work organisa-
tion which has come to be known in the industry as composite working,
has in recent years emerged spontaneously in a number of different pits
in the north-west Durham coal field. Its roots go back to an earlier
tradition which had been almost completely displaced in the course of
the last century by the introduction of work techniques based on task
segmentation, differential status and payment, and extrinsic hierarchical
control.67
This new type of work organisation, dubbed “composite work organi-

zation”:
67 Herbst (1962, p. 3).

may be described as one in which the group takes over complete respon-
sibility for the total cycle of operations involved in mining the coal-face.
No member of the group has a fixed work role. Instead, the men deploy
themselves, depending on the requirements of the on-going group task.
Within the limits of technological and safety requirements they are free to
evolve their own way of organising and carrying out their task. They are
not subject to any external authority in this respect, nor is there within the
group itself any member who takes over a formal directive leadership func-
tion. Whereas in conventional long-wall working the coal-getting task is
split into four to eight separate work roles, carried out by different teams,
each paid at a different rate, in the composite group members are no longer
paid directly for any of the tasks carried out. The all-in wage agreement
is, instead, based on the negotiated price per ton of coal produced by the
team. The income obtained is divided equally among team members.68
In other words, this method of work organisation largely does away

with the hierarchical division between mental and manual labour—even
while retaining overall capitalist control. How did this affect productivity?
Another report on the same case states that the experiment demonstrates
“the ability of quite large primary work groups of 40–50 members to
act as self-regulating, self-developing social organisms able to maintain
themselves in a steady state of high productivity”.69
Similar findings were made in a comparative study of the production of
The Ferguson Tractor by the Standard Motor Company in Coventry in
the UK and Detroit in the US, respectively, leading up to and during
1956. Seymour Melman writes that “our attention was attracted to this
firm in 1950 following the observation that it was paying the highest
wages in the automobile industry and at the same time was operating
manufacturing plants that were, by all odds, among the most efficient in
the industry”.70 Melman writes that:
In this firm we will show that at the same time: thousands of workers
operated virtually without supervision as conventionally understood, and
at high productivity; the highest wage in British industry was paid;
high quality products were produced at acceptable prices in extensively
mechanised plants; the management conducted its affairs at unusually
68 Herbst (1962, p. 4).

69 Trist et al. (1963, p. Xiii).
70 Melman (1958, p. 11).
180 P. RAEKSTAD
low costs; also, organised workers had a substantial role in production

decision-making.71
It was found that “high levels of productivity have been attained

with methods of production organization and decision-making that
include extensive activity by workers, operating a decision-process of their
own”.72 The implications on productivity are clear:
High levels of rapid growth in industrial productivity can be achieved

when industrial workers as well as management do decision-making on
production. This implies that unilateral decision-making by hierarchical
management groups is not a necessary condition for operation of industrial
plants at high productivity levels.73
As a result, “[c]hanges in the ways of worker and management

decision-making are explicable in terms of the interior mechanisms of
particular decision systems, rather than as effects of the methods of
production themselves”.74 This, Melman writes, “demonstrate[s] the
possibility of managing large and highly mechanized industrial plants
by methods that are not part of the preferred doctrine of ‘modern’
management”.75
In response to this, it might be argued—again without a shred of
supporting evidence—that retaining good productivity without capital-
ism’s hierarchical division of labour is feasible only so long as these
remain within a sufficiently competitive market system. In other words,
while such different divisions of labour are, contra Weber, compat-
ible with modern industry and technology, they are so only in the
contexts of competitive markets with the impersonal domination they
imply, and not in a planned system of the kind that Marx’s socialism
and Participatory Economics require. What we need to respond to this
are findings specifically about the effects of workers’ self-management
on productivity that are (at least to some meaningful degree) insulated
from the pressures of competitive markets. Here too there is evidence
71 Melman (1958, p. 5).

72 Melman (1958, p. 5).
73 Melman (1958, p. 4).
74 Ibid., p. 5.
75 Melman (1958, p. 9).
supporting the Marxian view. A study of state-owned, co-determined

production units in the Venezuelan economy conducted in 2009, found
that workers mentioned that learning “collective management and organ-
isation” helped “in reducing the rigid division between intellectual
and manual labour found in traditional capitalist firms”, which led to
“decreased tension and conflict in the workplace” and “helped to increase
productivity”.76 In one instance, due to a government reorganisation,
a tomato processing plant was suddenly and unexpectedly left without
a coordinator for six months. What happened? The workers effectively
took over management and planning themselves, and the plant promptly
increased its production from a maximum of 90,000 to 150,000 kgs of
tomatoes processed per month.77
Put together, these findings suggest three things: Firstly, they show
that it seems to be feasible for at least some contemporary workplaces
with modern industry and technology (more so than those Weber was
discussing) to organise production without bureaucratic control over the
labour process. Note that the claim is not that abolishing the hierar-
chical division of labour will have no negative impacts on productivity as
commonly construed. Rather, it is only that there are cases where bureau-
cratic management, as construed by Weber, has been replaced without the
effects that Weber predicted occurring. This shows that the claimed neces-
sity of universal bureaucratisation is incorrect. Secondly, they show that
this can lead to overall increases in even standard measures of produc-
tivity and that these increases can appear within a short period of time
and without a great deal of further re-structuring, other kinds of reor-
ganisation, or new technology. Thirdly, they show that there can be a real
drive for this from workers themselves.
This suffices to challenge the Weberian objection, insofar as they show
that bureaucratic management does not seem to be universally necessary
for production using modern technology. Nevertheless, I think we would
be missing out on something important if we simply left the argument
here. Our foregoing argument has accepted another important premise
which is usually left unexamined: the premise that efficiency is a single,
value-neutral concept. By value-neutral I don’t mean it is not something
76 Larrabure (2013, p. 188–9.)

77 Larrabure (2013, p. 188–9).
182 P. RAEKSTAD
which may or may not be valued, but that it is, or is taken to be, some-
thing which is neutral with respect to other evaluative commitments like
freedom and human development. This premise is false. Efficiency is often
construed as the value-neutral comparison between the costs and bene-
fits of various inputs and outputs, where one solution is more efficient
than another if and only if it has a higher benefit-cost ratio. The very
conceptual possibility of imagining such a ratio—ignoring the practical
issues of assigning sensible values and using them—presupposes that we
have some way of reducing the many qualitatively different inputs and
outputs in question to some single quantitative measure; and usually this
measure is taken to be that of monetary value as determined by a real or
hypothetical capitalist marketplace.
It also ignores the vital question that determines the outcome of any
cost-benefit analysis, namely deciding what to count as costs and what to
count as benefits. Based on what they considered to be costs and bene-
fits, the Nazis considered gas chambers to be highly efficient (compared
to alternatives like shooting and throat-cutting). Based on what they
consider to be costs and benefits, the roughly 100 corporations that are
responsible for around 71% of CO2 emissions prefer to keep destroying
the conditions for human and other animal life on our planet (which they
don’t have to pay for) than bearing the much more minor costs of swap-
ping energy sources (which they do have to pay for).78 Any decent person
would make very different assessments, primarily on the basis of what to
count as costs and what to count as benefits.
The general point here is that efficiency estimates depend entirely on
what we count as costs and benefits, and this is often ignored by critics of
socialism. Goods that Marx and many others hold to be important—such
as freedom and human development—are often excluded from such esti-
mates entirely.79 This is important, because some things which are costly
in terms of money and time can also be considered as valuable in them-
selves once we consider human development as a valuable factor. Higher
78 It might be pointed out that a number of these corporations are owned by some
state or other, but this is irrelevant to the point being made here, which is about efficiency
judgments.
79 There have been efforts to develop things like the Human Development Index as
an alternative to GDP, but this is a different kind of thing altogether from considering
inputs and outputs in a process of production.
levels of education, for instance, while they cost money and may not—
although this has been challenged—lead to more objects being produced
per person, also entail a greater development of human powers. If we
consider this to be a valuable output, then it is by no means obvious that
the greater time required for educating more people yields a lower total
benefit-cost ratio all other things being equal. In other words, what counts
as efficient or not is completely dependent on what we choose to assign
value to when we estimate the costs and benefits of inputs and outputs.
This is a point that any critical discussion of Max’s critique of capitalism
must take into consideration.
Let me make one final point about the division of labour under
socialism as Marx conceives of it. If a socialist society can feasibly solve
the issue of the structural division of labour, along with being structured
by a network of federated councils organising a participatory democratic
form of planning, then there is no principled obstacle to spreading indi-
viduals’ labours across different workplaces. Again, this does not mean
that anyone can do whatever they like. It only means that society will
now be able to, consistent with its various priorities and the powers and
capacities of its members, arrange production in such a way that people
who want to, and can, work in various branches or workplaces can do
so without additional social hindrances. Having discussed the arguments
against replacing the hierarchical division of labour, I turn now to Hayek’s
challenge to planning.
Participatory Planning and Hayek’s Challenge

We have now come to the related question of whether a democratic form
of social planning is feasible. For workplaces, the answer is simple. There
are and have been a number of cooperatives and recuperated businesses,
a handful of which implement Balanced Jobs, and they’ve generally been
able to function well. Democratic planning within workers’ councils on
the level of individual workplaces exists and has existed, so it’s trivially
possible. What can we say about the further question regarding the possi-
bility of planning an entire economy democratically, especially in light of
the traditional story we’re told about how our only options are markets
or authoritarian central planning? Obviously, it is impossible to go into
any considerable detail on this issue here, but by drawing on the model
184 P. RAEKSTAD
of Participatory Planning I can make a few points which, I think, convinc-

ingly establish the feasibility of participatory democratic planning of a
kind which Marx would approve of.80
The participants in a participatory planning process are workers’ coun-
cils, consumers’ councils, and something called Iteration Facilitation
Boards, or IFBs. IFBs help the planning process by suggesting “indica-
tive prices” which translate a person’s work rate—the collected estimate
of the quantity and quality of their work’s effort and sacrifice—into goods
and services. They do not, however, make any actual planning decisions,
make any decisions about anyone’s consumption, or set rates of exchange
of any kind. As such, the “indicative prices” they set to ease the planning
process are not prices at all either in Marx’s technical sense or in the lay
senses of “prices”. Briefly put, the planning process is supposed to work
roughly as follows:
1. The IFBs estimate the different social costs of various goods and
services, taking into account the resources they require, materials,
work inputs, as well as things like damages or benefits to people,
society, and the environment. These will be based on last year’s plan,
and will mostly be minor modifications to take into account new
developments.
2. Workers’ councils meet to suggest what they want their workplace to
produce, and what they want to request in order to get this done.
Consumers’ councils meet to collate their individual consumption
proposals, and to decide which public goods and services they want
to request. These too are based on modifications of last year’s plan,
and are suggestions formulated by the individuals and councils who
would be carrying them out.
3. In light of this new information, the IFBs calculate the excess supply
and demand for all goods and services, labour, investment, and
natural resources, and modify their estimates based on what people
and councils say they want to consume and produce.
4. Workers’ and consumers’ councils and federations then send in
revised proposals until they deliver one which the other councils
in their group can accept, and so on upwards until a final plan is
reached.
80 For another interesting model, see Devine (1988).

5. Plans will include necessary margins for the flexibility and revision
that people will obviously require throughout the year.
6. In accordance with the plan that is reached, workplaces will be
assigned a limited quantity of consumption rights based on their
collected work rates. These are then distributed among individual
workers in accordance with the specific work rates of the individual
tasks that they perform, e.g. monthly or bi-monthly.
This is not, and does not aim to be, a complete account of the planning
model, nor will I attempt a proper defence of it here. A few key points
from the literature are, however, worth noting. First, all meetings here
happen within councils, not between them. Proposals are formulated by
individuals and councils themselves, and finally have to be accepted by the
other individuals and councils within their group. None of this requires
anyone else to go into the details of anyone’s proposals. All they have to
do is look at the relation between the collected costs and benefits of the
proposals and vote yes or no. If someone makes an exceptional request,
they may have to justify it, or risk having it rejected. Nobody in this model
has any interest in voting against someone else’s proposal unless it is very
unbalanced and deemed to be unjustified, since there are no gains to be
had from doing so.
The most important thing, however, is that it is only the individuals
and councils involved who themselves make their own activity proposals.
Other councils and federations only get to either accept or reject these
proposals. Robin Hahnel stresses the importance of this:
When worker councils make proposals they are asking permission to use
particular parts of the productive resources that belong to everyone. In
effect their proposals say: “If the rest of you—with whom we are engaged
in a cooperative division of labor -- agree to allow us to use productive
resources belonging to all of us as inputs, then we promise to deliver the
following goods and services as outputs for others to use.” When consumer
councils make proposals they are asking permission to consume goods and
services whose production entails social costs. In effect their proposals say:
“We believe the effort ratings we received from our co-workers together
with allowances members of households have been granted indicate that
we deserve the right to consume goods and services whose production
entails an equivalent level of social costs.”
The planning procedure is designed to make it clear when a worker
council production proposal is inefficient and when a neighbourhood
186 P. RAEKSTAD
consumption council proposal is unfair, and allows other worker and

consumer councils to deny approval for proposals when they seem to
be inefficient or unfair. But initial self-activity proposals and all revisions
of proposals are entirely up to each worker and consumer council itself. In
other words, if a worker council production proposal or neighborhood council
consumption proposal is disapproved the council that made the proposal revises
its own proposal for submission in the next round of the planning procedure.
This aspect of the participatory planning procedure distinguishes it from all
other planning models and is crucial if workers and consumers are going to
enjoy meaningful self-management.81
On the traditional microeconomic assumptions and mathematical

modelling traditionally adduced to demonstrate the efficiency of free
markets over central planning, the model of ParEcon has been shown
to likely be more efficient and hence superior.82 There is also ongoing
computer-based modelling testing the model, and preliminary results are
reported to be very encouraging.83
From its existence, coherence, and formal promise, it is at least clear
that this model gives us a reason to reject any purely theoretical claims
that participatory democratic planning is impossible in principle. This
gives us an answer to the claimed formal impossibility of democratic plan-
ning, but feasibility is about much more than this, which brings us to
Friedrich Hayek’s critique of planning.
Hayek’s critique of planning targets central planning and turns on
a claim about human beings’ irredeemable epistemological limitations.
Human beings’ knowledge, he claims, is both imperfect and dispersed
among many different individuals, and there’s no possibility of ever being
able to centralise it into a single (human) mind. Thus, no individual
planner will be able to take all the necessary and relevant information
into account when formulating economic plans and prices for an entire
society. Markets, on the other hand, are, through their pricing mecha-
nism and the information it transmits to firms and consumers, able to
collate and transmit a large amount of such relevant information. Because
of this, any prices and plans set by centralised planners will, inevitably,
be based on, and transmit, less and less reliable information than market
81 Hahnel (2012, p. 95–6), my emphasis.

82 For the relevant detail, see Albert and Hahnel (1991); see also Hahnel (2021).
83 Hahnel, Robin, personal communication and Hahnel (2021).
pricing and firms’ individual planning based thereon would, inevitably

rendering it comparatively inferior to capitalist markets.84 If this argument
applies also to the kinds of de-centralised democratic planning modelled
in Participatory Economics, our model faces a serious challenge which is
not answered by its formal coherence and promise, since Hayek’s argu-
ment asserts that the models’ informational inputs would be dramatically
inferior to what they would have to be for it to function comparatively
well. This is an important challenge for feasibility not because it would
show that planning would be impossible (which it doesn’t), but because it
argues that it’s likely to carry other unacceptable costs and consequences
which make it unviable as an alternative to capitalism.
The most important point I want to make against this is that Hayek’s
argument targets the possibility of fulfilling a certain kind of epistemic
role that the planning model in ParEcon doesn’t have or need. ParEcon
does not require that any single individual or board determine a society’s
prices and economic plan. Instead, it involves individuals formulating their
own plans, to be accepted or rejected by their peers, and then compiling
these in their lowest-level workers’ and consumers’ councils. These coun-
cils then add the relevant collective goods etc. that they propose; these
are then accepted or rejected by the peers within the wider federation
(with any revisions made by a council or individual themselves); these
are collated into the plan of a higher-level council; and this procedure
continues until the final stage is reached. There is a mechanism to simu-
late the informational role of prices to ease this process, but these have
no binding force, don’t set rates of exchange of any kind (unlike prices in
capitalist societies), and are based on the self-activity proposals of workers
and consumers and their councils, with none of the perverse incentives
that plague forms of central planning. Now, this is not a complete account
of the planning model, nor a defence of it—either of those is beyond our
scope here. Rather, it is a (very) brief summary of the flow of information
that shows that proposals and plans are all made by individual persons and
councils themselves and then collated upwards in such a way that there is
no place or need for a single person or council to hold all the informa-
tion relevant to determining prices and planning. Consequently, Hayek’s
argument cannot be used as a criticism of Participatory Economics. Since
this is one form that a bottom-up planned society that Marx calls socialism
84 Hayek (1945, 1960, 1973, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1988), cf. also Gamble (1996, ch. 3;
2006).
188 P. RAEKSTAD
might take, Hayek’s argument also cannot be used as a criticism of Marx’s

vision of socialism in general—although it might well challenge some of
the other institutional forms that such a vision could take.
The other point I would like to make on the issue of feasibility is an
empirical one. It turns on the premise that forms of democratic plan-
ning have existed on societal scales well beyond individual workplaces,
and that these have fared rather well in comparison to the capitalisms
they have replaced. Remember that the contention of critics like Hayek
is not that planning will be imperfect and problematic, but that it will be
comparatively worse than capitalism. From this perspective, there are two
reasons to doubt the accuracy of Hayek’s claim with respect to partici-
patory democratic planning vs. the type of markets that typify capitalism:
one from the perspective of the former; the other from the ecological
implications of the latter.
First, we have historical examples which, though none of them imple-
mented a form of participatory planning, provide limited support for
it. Perhaps the most prominent is revolutionary Spain in the 1930s.
Although revolutionary Spain didn’t implement full society-wide plan-
ning, and the details of how it worked out are, like all historical
experiments with social change, varied and contradictory, the available
evidence suggests that the shift towards workers self-rule, federation, and
more forms of bottom-up planning were successful and efficient, as well
as much freer, than the society they replaced.85
Second, Hayek’s argument for the comparative efficiency of capitalist-
type markets relies on tacit assumptions about what we can and should
value. All judgments of efficiency ultimately come down to assessing rela-
tionships between costs and benefits, and so in turn depend entirely on
what we choose to count as benefits and costs. As I pointed out above
with respect to Weber, this means that certain things like securing human
emancipation, facilitating human development and flourishing, and not
destroying the climate and undermining the conditions for human life on
our planet are important things to factor in. Unfortunately, they typi-
cally aren’t in competitive market exchanges, and this leads to major
inefficiencies that Hayek and many other defenders of capitalism fail to
consider.
85 On Spain, see e.g. part II of “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” in Chomsky

(1969, esp. p. 88–92), Broué and Témime (2008), Leval (2018), Mintz (2013) and
Peirats (2011, 2012a, 2012b).
This becomes apparent once we consider how capitalism’s competitive

markets ignore a wide range of real social costs to human and non-human
life. It is well-known and recognised that competitive markets externalise
benefits and costs that are not borne directly by the buyer and seller in
a transaction.86 When some large powerful corporation sells private jets
to billionaires, torture equipment to a dictatorship, or arms to the Amer-
ican Empire, a wide variety of real social costs to human beings and the
environment are completely left out—e.g. the millions who are dying
and seem likely to die from capitalism’s destruction of our biosphere.
Of course, they also ignore the myriad harms done to the workers who
make these things. In fact, reducing workers’ freedom and working condi-
tions often appear as positive ways of reducing labour costs for capitalists.
Competitive markets not only incentivise buyers and sellers to ignore
these real social costs, they also, as we saw in Chapter 7, force capital-
ists to ignore them in the service of profit maximisation. As a result, firms
are made to produce too much of goods with negative social externalities
(e.g. private jets and yachts) and too few goods with positive social exter-
nalities (like high-quality public transport). Firms that try to take into
account a broader range of harms and benefits are, in time, outcompeted
by those that don’t. This is not because what they’re doing is impos-
sible or contrary to human nature. Rather, the reason firms cannot take
these vital considerations into account is because doing so is incompat-
ible with the social structures of capitalism and their inherent dynamics
of impersonal domination.
A particularly important aspect of this is of course capitalism’s inherent
tendency for growth. The slogan that infinite growth on a finite planet is
impossible is both true and devastating. Economic growth reliably leads
to growing throughputs in matter and energy, which in turn brings with
it growing pollution, including emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse
gases.87 Note that this is a general claim, not a strictly universal one,
so the argument that growing pollution isn’t strictly inevitable is irrele-
vant. It’s not strictly inevitable that ignoring a pandemic in a major urban
centre will lead to lots of people dying, but it generally and predictably
will. In both cases, it would be ridiculous to ignore the problem. These
86 For more on everything discussed in this paragraph, see Hahnel (2015, 2021).
87 See the discussion and sources in Foster, Clark and York (2010, Ch. 5) and Schröder
and Storm (2020).
190 P. RAEKSTAD
problems can’t be solved by e.g. increasing market access or lowering

entry costs, since, these do nothing to reduce the impersonal domination
of capitalism and its destructive dynamics. Nor can they be adequately
solved by government regulation. The variety and complexity of the
ecological challenges we face, and the enduring incentives for corpora-
tions to ignore, hide, and downplay the harms they cause, as well as work
around any attempts at regulation, leave such solutions, though vital in
the short term, inadequate in the long run. Of course, governments could
take over and direct firms themselves, but this just would be introducing
a form of planning.
Once we recognise this, the Hayekian critique of Marx loses all force.
It is not reasonable to suppose that, once we take a sufficiently broad
view of the relevant costs and benefits, in particular concerns about how
capitalism is systematically destroying the planet, the kinds of markets
that Hayek prefers are likely to be more efficient than any form of plan-
ning, which has the ability to take these concerns into account.88 If we
think that short-term profit-making while destroying our planet and the
continued conditions for human life is efficient, while saving the planet,
achieving emancipation, and enhancing human development is not, we
simply don’t have a good conception of efficiency. This Hayekian critique
of Marx’s vision of socialism is therefore unviable.
In this chapter, we have seen how Marx expands his vision of what
a free future society must be like. Based on the diagnosis of capital-
ism’s personal and impersonal forms of domination articulated in his
second theory of alienation, he argues that a free socialist society must
be fully democratic, feature participatory planning, replace the hierar-
chical division of labour, and distribute according to need. We saw how
this continues to challenge contemporary proposals for free economic
institutions and corrected a couple of still-prevalent errors in Marx inter-
pretation. I finished by defending it against the objections of two of its
most important critics: Max Weber and Friedrich Hayek.
It’s now time to move on to the next chapter, which deals with Marx’s
conception of his own activities vis-à-vis the agent he holds will bring
about a socialist revolution—i.e. his views on the practice of the theorist.
This raises two interrelated questions. One is about how the diagnosis
of capitalist unfreedom is connected to the driving forces or motivations
88 For details on this in the case of Participatory Economics, see Hahnel (2005).
for socialist revolution as encapsulated in his views on the contradictions

between the powers and relations and production and between workers
and capitalists. The other is about how Marx understands the connec-
tion between theorising and the revolutionary movement. With these last
pieces of the puzzle in place we will be able to survey the reconstructed
totality of Marx’s critique of capitalism.
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CHAPTER 9
Radical Theory and Revolutionary Practice
Having laid out the diagnosis of capitalism Marx presents in his second
theory of alienation and the socialist cure he proposes to it, three ques-
tions immediately present themselves. First, what was the role that this
critique was to play within his agent-centred approach to political theory?
Secondly, why does Marx, in post-1844 works, continue to emphasise
and expand greatly on some aspects of alienation (especially alienation
from product and alienation from others), while emphasising its more
normatively laden aspects less? One answer is that Marx simply abandons
alienation and its concerns altogether. This answer cannot be satisfactory,
because as we’ve seen all four kinds of alienation reappear throughout
Marx’s later discussions of capitalism and feed into his vision of socialism.
This leads us to the third question: what role, if any, does the theory of
alienation come to play in Marx’s later thoughts on human society and
social change? I will answer each of these questions in turn, emphasising
that Marx’s critique of capitalism forms the core of the two revolutionary
contradictions of capitalism he does the most to pinpoint in his later
works: between the powers and relations of production and between
workers and capitalists. This is why Marx keeps returning to the ways
in which capitalism thwarts freedom and human development. With this
done, I will briefly argue that the reasons Marx seems to have had for
thinking that the more normatively laden aspects of his diagnosis were

Switzerland AG 2022
196 P. RAEKSTAD
unimportant are partly mistaken. On the basis of his own methodological

commitments, there is therefore good reason to pay more attention to
these ideas today.
Revolutionary Midwives
and the Birth of the Future
The agent-centred position Marx developed in the latter parts of 1843,
which formed the basis for the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
of 1844, underwent a significant change during 1844–1845, moving
away from a perspective which saw ideas as the active element in social
change. On the view that Marx adopts during the writing of the 1844
manuscripts, such ideas would be formulated in some critical political
theory and find their (passive) material basis in an agent capable of real-
ising its recommendations. During 1844–1845, this changes to a view
where the proletariat is seen as much more active, an agent which can and
will tend to generate the powers, needs, and consciousness it requires to
bring about a process of socialist revolution.
Accordingly, Marx adopts the maieutic or obstetric conception of the
practice of the theorist. Present capitalist society is in the process of (at
least potentially) giving birth to that of the future through the active
agency of the working-class movement. The task of the theorist, like that
of the midwife, is to help this process unfold and achieve some sort of
successful result—e.g. a process of giving birth resulting in a healthy new-
born child, or a process of social struggle on the part of the proletariat
resulting in a successful transition to a socialist society. It’s hard to pin
down all of the decisive factors of this shift, but they almost certainly
include his enduring contacts with French communist/socialist workers’
organisations, interactions with thinkers like Moses Hess and Friedrich
Engels, and, crucially, the revolt by the Silesian weavers. Michael Löwy
has summed this development up as follows:
Between the weavers’ revolt (June 1844) and the Theses on Feuerbach
(about March 1845), the process of formation of the Marxist Weltan-
schauung was completed. This was the great ideological turning point in
the evolution of the young Marx. The Silesian rising, together with the
communist movement he encountered in Paris, faced him concretely with
the problem of the revolutionary praxis of the proletarian masses. In the
Vorwärts article, Marx discovers the proletariat as the active element in
9 RADICAL THEORY AND REVOLUTIONARY PRACTICE 197
emancipation, but he does not yet draw the philosophical conclusions from
this discovery. A few weeks later, he sketches, in The Holy Family, a first
attempt at a theoretical solution of the problem. He believes he can grasp
revolutionary activity—which is evidently outside the Young Hegelians’
world of thought—through the categories of the French materialism of
the eighteenth century. Soon, however, he perceives that the revolutionary
praxis of the masses cannot be fitted into the narrow framework of the
“theory of circumstances”: this is his break with “the old materialism”,
which at once spreads to all levels. The Theses on Feuerbach expose the
“practical essence” of history and of social life, of “sensuousness” and
of theory, of the relations of men with nature and among themselves,
and, finally, outline a coherent set of ideas, a significant global structure:
the philosophy of praxis, the general theoretical foundation for the idea of
revolutionary self-emancipation of the proletariat.1
This is later accompanied by a critique of the authoritarian approaches

to theorising he identifies in enlightenment, utopian socialist, and Feuer-
bachian materialist works2 —and that, as we saw in Chapter 6, Marx
himself endorsed while a radical democrat. The simplistic “old materialist”
view that we can change human beings and society simply by following
the right educators or leaders forgets that “it is essential to educate the
educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two
parts, one of which is superior to society”, something Marx clearly thinks
is nonsensical.3
Marx finds the source of this mistake in the old materialism’s “stand-
point” of civil society; by contrast, “the standpoint of the new is
human society, or social humanity”.4 Marx’s alternative approach builds
on the belief that “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances
1 Löwy (2005, p. 109).

2 The connection between the philosophy of Feuerbach’s materialism and French and
English socialism, in particular Robert Owen’s, is made explicit in The Holy Family
(MECW 4, p. 124–32/MEGA1 I:3, pp. 300–309, see also Engels’ discussion of the
role of Feuerbach in their development in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical
German Philosophy). For this critique applied to utopian socialists, see the Communist
Manifesto.
3 Marx (1992, p. 422/IV:3, p. 20).
4 Ibid., p. 423/IV:3, p. 21.
198 P. RAEKSTAD
and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and ratio-

nally understood only as revolutionary practice”.5 Accordingly, there can
be no enlightened intellectuals standing above society, developing and
bestowing the right ideas upon the masses. Nor can any elite organisa-
tion wielding the immortal principles of some radical theory take power
and give freedom to the people. The only way to secure universal human
emancipation is through struggles for self-emancipation that develop our
powers, needs, and consciousness for ourselves—this is why “the emanci-
pation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes
themselves”.6
According to Marx, the old materialist approaches fail to do justice to
the nature of human conscious powers and ideas; the ways they change
and respond to different natural, social, and historical contexts; and their
role in changing society. He thus argues that Feuerbach doesn’t see the
experienced world as a “historical product, the result of the activity of
a whole succession of generations (…) developing its industry and its
intercourse, and modifying its social system according to the changed
needs”.7 These ideas grew out Marx’s reflections not only on the activity
of socialist workers, but also out of the ideas in the Economic and Philo-
sophical Manuscripts of 1844 that prefigured them, e.g. when Marx writes
that “[i]ndustry is the real historical relationship of nature”, that it has
“transformed human life all the more practically through industry and
has prepared the conditions for human emancipation”.8
In this way, Marx’s growing emphasis on both the lived experiences
of workers under capitalism and on the importance of changing social
relations in response to human needs that Marx embarked upon in devel-
oping his theory of alienation led him to overhaul his outlook. Far from
rejecting his theory of alienation, this new outlook is premised on the
centrality of the relations of production and the implications thereof for
thinking about human beings, society, and social change more broadly.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Marx’s discussion of the revolutionary
contradictions of capitalism.
5 Ibid., p. 422/IV:3, p. 20.

6 MESW 2, p. 19/I:20, p. 13.
7 MECW 5, p. 39/I:5, p. 20.
8 Marx (1992, p. 355/I:2, pp. 272/396).
Alienation and the Revolutionary

Contradictions of Capitalism
Marx consistently identifies two key revolutionary contradictions of capi-
talism: the contradiction between the powers and relations of production
and the contradiction between workers and capitalists.9 He writes that:
These various conditions [the natural, social and historical conditions under
which individuals interact, especially the relations of production], which
appear first as conditions of self-activity, later as fetters upon it, form in the
whole development of history a coherent series of forms of intercourse, the
coherence of which consists in this: an earlier form of intercourse, which
has become a fetter, is replaced by a new one corresponding to the more
developed productive powers and, hence, to the advanced mode of the
self-activity of individuals—a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is
then replaced by another. Since these conditions correspond at every stage
to the simultaneous development of the productive powers, their history is
at the same time the history of the evolving productive powers taken over
by each new generation, and is therefore the history of the development
of the powers of the individuals themselves.10
These contradictions between productive powers on the one hand, and

forms of social intercourse on the other, are claimed to be the source of
“all collisions in history”.11 Similarly, in his Preface to A Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy, Marx famously wrote that at “a certain
stage of development, the material productive powers of society come into
conflict with the existing relations of production… From forms of devel-
opment of the productive powers these relations turn into their fetters.
9 Of course, Marx talks about a number of other contradictions of capitalism, e.g. in

his analyses of its various crisis tendencies. However, it is well-known that he never argues
that these are the driving forces of socialist revolution (on their own), on which see
Lebowitz (2020, Ch. 4).
10 MECW 5, p. 82/I:5, pp. 103–4. I have modified the translation of “Kräfte” from
“forces” to “powers” so that it’s more in line with how this term is translated throughout
this book and in other contexts. This preserves the important conceptual link to its role
in Marx’s discussion of human development and the important conceptual link between
“powers” in general and “productive powers” in particular.
11 MECW 5, p. 74/I:5, p. 90.
200 P. RAEKSTAD
Then begins an era of revolution”.12 This is at once one of Marx’s most

important and most misunderstood ideas, and can only be properly under-
stood by careful attention to the precise nature of the conflict between the
powers of production and the relations of production.
We’ll shortly see how these play out in Marx’s later writings, but a
pre-emptive summary will be helpful. The contradiction between powers
and relations of production consists in the fact that, on the one hand,
capitalism’s development of the powers of production has made socialism
possible, and with it universal human emancipation and greater human
development, while, on the other hand, capitalism’s inherent social rela-
tions prevent workers from realising those potentials. The theory of
alienation from the product of labour, from productive activity, and from
species-being is Marx’s diagnosis of how capitalist social relations do the
latter. Building on this, the contradiction between workers and capitalists
is provided by alienation from others. Capitalist social relations neces-
sarily include at least two classes—workers and capitalists. Proletarians are
rendered inherently unfree by the social relations that define capitalism;
experience their condition as one of domination, oppression, impover-
ishment, and misery relative to the potentials they rightly perceive to be
available; and so become interested in, and driven to, fight to improve
their conditions in the short term and replace unfree capitalist relations
with free, socialist relations in the long term. At the same, capitalist social
relations also entail a class of capitalists. They have a great deal of wealth,
power, and privilege, and hence feel empowered and at ease in their situa-
tion,13 and so will struggle to maintain capitalism and prevent a transition
to socialism. Note that this is not simply an effect of capitalists having
certain goods or amounts of money, but due to their structural rela-
tions of power, which the former may or may not (but typically do) flow
from. As such, the contradiction between workers and capitalists springs
from the power relations of capitalism, not from their more contingent
distributive effects.
12 Marx (1992, pp. 425–426/II:2, pp. 100–1). Here too I have modified the
translation from “forces” to “powers”, for the aforementioned reasons.
13 MECW 4, p. 36/MEGA I:3, p. 206.
1
Let’s see how this plays out in Volume I of Capital, where Marx
writes14 :
This expropriation is accomplished through the action of the immanent

laws of capitalist production itself, through the centralization of capitals.
One capitalist always strikes down many others. Hand in hand with this
centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, other
developments take place on an ever-increasing scale, such as the growth
of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical
application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil, the transforma-
tion of the means of labour into forms in which they can only be used in
common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the
means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of
all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of
the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constant
decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize
all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery,
oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there
also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in
numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the
capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter
upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under
it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of
labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capi-
talist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist
private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.15
Earlier on in the same work, Marx writes that;
As the number of the co-operating workers increases, so too does their

resistance to the domination of capital, and, necessarily, the pressure put
on by capital to overcome this resistance. (…) Similarly, as the means of
production extend, the necessity increases for some effective control over
the proper application of them, because they confront the wage-labourer
as the property of another [fremdes Eigentum].16
14 For reasons of time and space, I’ve restricted the sources discussed below to Volume
I of Capital only, but the same claims can be found throughout his published and
unpublished works until the end of Marx’s life.
15 Marx (1990, p. 929/II: 6, p. 682).
16 Marx (1990, p. 449/II:8, p. 329).
202 P. RAEKSTAD
There’s a lot going on here, all of which, I will show, builds upon
Marx’s critique of capitalism, in particular the theory of alienation. By
productive powers, Marx means the collected real possibilities that a given
human society has for producing things (in the broadest possible sense)
to satisfy human needs. This includes all forms of land, machinery, labour,
technology, levels of scientific achievement, and even forms of social
organisation or intercourse. By forms of social intercourse, Marx means
the relational structures within and through which human beings work
on and with one another and the natural world to secure the produc-
tion and reproduction of their societies—including, but not limited to,
economic production. The totality of the available means for satisfying
human needs, as expressed in the idea of a society’s productive powers,
both restrict and enable changes in these relational structures.
Powers and relations of production come into contradiction when and
only when the totality of productive powers available enables a much
greater development of human powers—including, but not limited to,
powers of production—than is possible within the constraints of the
current relations of production. As we’ve seen, Marx thinks that capi-
talism has developed the powers of production—especially the kinds of
machinery, technology, and socialised forms of production—in ways that
have made socialism possible—not just in societies that have gone through
this process, but any society thereafter.17 He also thinks that our ability
to make full use of these powers is fettered by the continued existence of
capitalist relations of production. The contradiction between the powers
and relations of production thus consists in the fact that the same capi-
talist social relations both enable human emancipation (by developing the
powers of production in the right ways) and prevent human emancipation
(until they are abolished/replaced by socialist ones).
A real movement towards socialism begins, Marx believes, when this
contradiction has developed. Ironically, by developing the powers of
production in ways that enrich themselves, capitalists spur “the creation
of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real
17 That is, to any society thereafter that can acquire them. Marx clearly points out in
both his letter to Vera Zasulich and in the 1872 preface to the Communist Manifesto that
it is not necessary for each society to first reach the stage of capitalism before transitioning
to socialism, only that capitalism must have evolved in some society and developed the
means of production. In fact, in both places he argues the exact opposite, that e.g. Russia
may be able to transition to socialism without first introducing capitalism.
basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free devel-
opment of every individual forms the ruling principle”.18 Capitalism has
also brought workers together into collective workplaces; improved their
means of communication and thus organisation; and unified them under
common interests against the dominating social relations of capitalism.
As a result, workers also come to perceive the powers of production that
are available, the potentials for emancipation and further human devel-
opment they entail, and how the personal and impersonal domination of
capitalism prevents them from realising these potentials.
This explains why, in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, Marx writes that “[m]ankind thus inevitably sets itself
only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always
show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions
for its solution are already present or at least in the course of forma-
tion”.19 Applied to socialist revolution, the point here is that it’s only
when the material conditions for socialism have developed that the poten-
tial inherent in them can be perceived. It’s only when these potentials are
perceived that we can begin to ask questions about how we can change
relations of production to better take advantage of the potentials we’re
aware of. And it’s only when we do that that we can form a revolutionary
movement seeking to realise these potentials by replacing the relations of
production.
It’s clear how this results in the contradiction between workers and
capitalists. Capitalists, being in a position of greater power, wealth, and
privilege, will fight to retain their position, which in turn entails that they
work to maintain capitalism and suppress any attempted socialist revo-
lution. Workers not only experience their situation as alienated, unfree,
and impoverished. They also rightly perceive that the development of the
powers of production has made it possible to change these conditions,
replacing the unfree capitalist relations with free socialist ones that better
enable their development and flourishing—hence Marx’s point in Volume
I of Capital that capitalism uses workers “to satisfy the need of the existing
values for valorization” instead of employing its resources to “satisfy the
worker’s own need for development”.20 In other words, workers’ need
18 Marx (1990, p. 739/II:6, p. 543).

19 Marx (1992, p. 426/II:2, p. 101).
20 Marx (1990, p. 772/II:6, p. 567).
204 P. RAEKSTAD
for development, for expanding their powers to do and to be, leads them
to develop an interest in replacing capitalism with socialism. Note that
for Marx, as he writes in the Grundrisse, even “private interest is itself
already a socially determined interest, which can be achieved only within
the conditions laid down by society and with the means provided by soci-
ety”, as a result of which “its content, as well as the form and means of its
realization, is given by social conditions”.21 In this way, workers’ interest
in socialist revolution is rooted in the contrast between the emancipatory
potentials capitalism has enabled and how its alienating, dominating, and
unfree social relations prevent workers from taking advantage of them.22
The contradiction between workers and capitalists consists in the fact that
the same conditions, the same social relations of capitalism, generate both
a social force interested in and seeking to replace capitalism with socialism
and a social force interested in and seeking to retain capitalism and prevent
socialism.
Where Chapter 7 showed that Marx retains all the ideas expressed in
his four kinds of alienation throughout his later works, here we have seen
that they form the core of his understanding of the revolutionary contra-
dictions of capitalism. If [c]ommunism is “the real movement which
abolishes the present state of things”, the theory of alienation and the
revolutionary contradictions of capitalism explain how the “conditions of
this movement result from the premises now in existence”.23
There’s thus no incompatibility between Marx’s theory of alienation
and his later theories of society and social change. Quite the contrary: the
theory of alienation essentially grows into his understanding of capital-
ism’s contradictions as the basis for socialist revolution. Alienation thus
21 Marx (1993, p. 156/II.1.1, p. 89).

22 Though often identified only with the later Marx, the earliest prefigurations of these
ideas can, as I pointed out above, be found as early as the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844. Here Marx writes that “[i]ndustry is the real historical relationship
of nature, and hence of natural science, to man” and that it has “transformed human
life all the more practically through industry and has prepared the conditions for human
emancipation”, even though, at the same time “immediate effect was to complete the
process of dehumanization” (Marx 1992, p. 355/I:2, pp. 272/396). As you’d expect from
my reading, he rapidly moves on to talk about how if this is “conceived as the exoteric
revelation of man’s essential powers, the human essence of nature or the natural essence
of man can also be understood” (ibid., both) and to discuss the meaning of freedom in
connection to consciousness (Marx 1992, pp. 355–356/I:2, pp. 272–273/396–397).
23 MECW 5, p. 49/I:5, p. 37.
remains the core of Marx’s diagnosis of the revolutionary contradictions

of capitalism, providing the basis for his understanding of how capitalism
both generates the real movement for proletarian self-emancipation and
imposes obstacles thereto.
The Revolutionary Theorist as Midwife

If the proletariat is the class which is already beginning to actively put the
wheels of socialist revolution in motion, then the role of the theorist is
not, as Marx wrote in 1843, to develop the philosophy or critique which
will provide its active head, since no such thing is needed. The proletariat
is already politically active and developing its own needs, powers, and
consciousness.
What the theorist should do instead is help this active process of
consciousness-raising and self-emancipation along. Some things will be
relevant for this and others will not. A proper understanding of the nature
of capitalism—its tendencies and laws of motion—and of how it domi-
nates and subjugates the working class will no doubt be vital. So too
will an understanding of capitalism’s class structure and its contradictory
character—revealing its inherently historical character and potential for
revolutionary transformation. One part of this will involve critiquing and
overcoming what Marx calls “Commodity Fetishism”: the phenomenon
by which the social characteristics that certain objects have by virtue of
their role in capitalist social relations (being commodities, money, capital)
are misperceived as natural properties inhering in the objects them-
selves.24 By revealing the socially generated and in key ways contingent
character of these properties, Marx’s political economy helps to unmask
the real nature of capitalism and empower workers to overthrow it.
A correct understanding of capitalism’s political economy is impor-
tant for overthrowing it in a number of more specific ways as well. For
instance, a central early debate Marx had with other socialists centres on
what is often called the Iron Law of Wages. Briefly put, the Iron Law of
Wages refers to the idea that workers’ real wages inevitably tend towards
the bare minimum required for survival and/or reproduction. If this is
correct, then organising the working class to fight for reforms—e.g. for
better real wages and working conditions—in the present in order to
24 See esp. Heinrich (2012, Ch. 3, section 8 and Ch. 10).

206 P. RAEKSTAD
build a revolutionary socialist movement is unviable. Why? Because if the

Iron Law of Wages holds, then no lasting improvements to real wages
is possible, and this means that so too is fighting for lasting piecemeal
wage increases under capitalism. Thus, no such process can be expected
to build a revolutionary movement in the long run. We can thus see
why Marx turned to focus on political economy: it was vital for helping
the proletariat to raise its consciousness and stake out a viable socialist
strategy. Politically speaking, Marx’s purpose for writing Capital was to
make reading it pointless.
But if Marx retains his theory of alienation, why does he emphasise
its more normative aspects less in later works? I think it is because he
thinks that it is unhelpful, compared to the other things a theorist could
be doing, to keep developing and putting forth these normatively laden
components. The task of agent-centred political theorists is not to develop
normatively laden political theory for its own sake, but to help influence
political agents in ways that help them bring about the alternative(s) the
theorists support. The first and fourth kinds of alienation have obvious
virtues in this regard. The fourth kind is important for a wide variety
of practical issues. If capitalists wield capital, are empowered by it and
dominate and exploit workers by means of it, it is obvious that it is in
their interests to retain capitalism, why they can be relied upon to defend
it as an economic system, why they cannot be accepted as important
powers within proletarian organisations (as funders, leaders, etc.), and so
on. The first kind of alienation is important because it lays out how, and
in which ways, capitalism dominates, oppresses, and subjugates workers.
In so doing, one can see how certain proposed solutions to the problems
inherent in capitalism, such as a return to small-scale craft production,
will be ineffective in the long run: they will only modify capitalist social
relations in minor and temporary ways; and over time capitalism, with all
its vices, will inevitably reappear. In a sense, we can understand a great
deal of Marx’s later political economy as fleshing out the first kind of
alienation.
Marx seems to think otherwise about further developing and empha-
sising the second and third kinds of capitalist alienation—alienation from
the process of production and from species-being. Arguably, workers
already know that capitalists dominate and oppress them, and this can
easily be confirmed by looking at the theory produced by workers them-
selves at the time. Perhaps they don’t need an additional argument to
the effect that this is indeed so or to the effect that its vices are partic-
ularly harmful for their freedom and human development. The second
and third kinds of alienation thus seem less valuable for helping to guide
working-class movements in ways that better enable them to carry out
socialist revolution, so there’s little value in harping on about them. While
“[p]hilosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the
point is to change it”.25
This hinges on the efficacy of normative argumentation for motivating
and guiding political agents. Marx de-emphasises the second and third
kinds of alienation because he believes them not to be very useful contri-
butions that a theorist can make to the struggle to replace capitalism
with socialism. What use could these more normative aspects of Marx’s
thought have for the kind of agent-centred realism that Marx advocates?
One major virtue of returning to Marx’s ideas about freedom, its value,
and its obstruction by capitalism, is that they are at least in principle
amenable to empirical testing. It is in principle possible to try to discover
whether human beings have some powers of conscious self-directed
activity; whether or not conscious self-directed activity is important and
significant for the development of human beings; whether or not capi-
talist and other labour processes do thwart conscious self-direction; and
whether or not labour processes are particularly important, for whichever
reasons, in this regard. Marx is a realist, and his arguments are consciously
highly descriptive in character. At no point does he try to retreat from
the descriptive and contingent to the necessary and normative in order to
insulate his normative political thought from possible refutation. This is
important, because it makes it possible to gather various kinds of evidence
which we can use to either accept or reject his argument for good reasons.
If conscious self-directed activity turns out not to be important for human
development, then we should not, in Marx’s view, value it. Explicit atten-
tion to the nature and value of self-directed activity can enable us to
gather evidence either for or against Marx’s central contention that capi-
talism thwarts human development, supporting or undermining his claims
for good reasons. But what positive purpose could this have for the agency
of the existing working-class struggle that Marx intends to address?
A focus on Marx’s conception of freedom as self-direction, its impor-
tance, and its thwarting by capitalist domination, can contribute to
25 Marx (1992, p. 423/IV:3, p. 21).

208 P. RAEKSTAD
working-class political agency for at least three reasons. It can help to

focus that agent’s conception on what capitalist unfreedom consists in
and why it matters; guide theoretical and practical efforts to replace capi-
talism; and play an important motivational role to the participants in
revolutionary struggle.
Firstly, it’s no doubt important to diagnose how capitalism generates
certain kinds of domination and unfreedom; but it’s also important to
understand what this unfreedom consists of and why it matters. The latter
helps us to organise our thoughts about which problems are important,
which problems are more important than others, and why they are so.
For instance, from the discussion of the second and third kinds of alien-
ation it is clear that and why, the relations of production are so important
for human freedom. That discussion likewise makes it clear why these
relations are more important than many others, e.g. one’s leisure pursuits.
Secondly, this focus on the nature of the problem of capitalist
unfreedom and its importance should further aid us in thinking about
how to overcome its causes, both theoretically and practically. The focus
on self-directing the labour process can help us both discuss the neces-
sary kinds of institutional substance we need for a free society. It can also
help guide the institutional forms which we try to institute, since it allows
us a reasonably well-specified criterion—one among others—according to
which we can formulate and evaluate proposals for institutional forms and
assess their foreseeable consequences and implications.
Thirdly, attending to the nature of proletarian unfreedom under
capitalism can play an important motivational role for participants in revo-
lutionary struggle. One component of social struggle is, and has always
been, normative argumentation, minimally for purposes of justification
and legitimation, but also for wider purposes of motivating groups and
individuals. The frequent use of, and changes in, normative arguments
in all kinds of social struggles bears witness to this. We see it in argu-
ments from justice, freedom, protagonism, and self-management among
contemporary Latin American movements; in anarchist, syndicalist, and
democratic confederalist movements from values of freedom, equality, and
mutual aid; in feminist movements from principles of equality, justice, and
the elimination of hierarchies and oppression; and many more besides.
These are more than mere rhetorical appeals, they have a very real motive
force, and some effort in articulating, reforming, and arguing from such
normative notions can be a useful contribution to the social struggle itself.
By focusing less on these issues in his published works, Marx succeeded

in doing a great deal of very valuable work with regard to developing
his economics, particular historical analyses, journalism, and so forth—
all of which was important and rightly influential. However, neglecting
its normative aspects not only led to a great deal of confusion among
later Marxists, including leading many of his followers to look to other,
and inferior, normative views, such as moralist Kantian theory. From the
perspective of a Marxian agent-centred realism, this can be viewed as a
distraction which has been harmful in terms of wasting a great deal of
time, energy, and intelligence of a fairly large number of highly capable
people. It has also led to a diversion of focus to issues which are more
amenable to being dealt with by such inferior approaches, rather than the
more important and practical concerns that a realist approach to polit-
ical theory deals with much better.26 It also means that those who have
made and sought to act upon various kinds of normative appeals and
arguments within proletarian movements have not had the benefit of
Marx’s thoughts on the subject. If we take such arguments to be influen-
tial within movements and believe that normative arguments can play an
important motivational role, then re-emphasising these aspects of Marx’s
thought might make a useful contribution to the actions of the potentially
revolutionary subject that his thought is organised around.
Finally, re-emphasising the normatively laden aspects of Marx’s critique
of capitalism can help motivate revolutionary activity. One of the things
that hinders people from engaging in revolutionary struggle is arguments
against replacing capitalist with socialist economic institution. Insofar as
reconstructing and defending Marx’s critique of capitalism allows us to
respond to and disarm some of these arguments, we can expect it to play
this additional motivational role too. Take the following very simplistic
argument as an example: Freedom requires private and personal property;
socialism does away with private property. Therefore, socialism makes
everyone less free (or, even if it only makes some less free, it makes them
less free with no corresponding increase in freedom for anyone else). It
might seem unconvincing to many, and it is definitely presented here in
an overly simplistic form, but similar kinds of arguments are advanced
by right-libertarians and their followers, especially in less formal polit-
ical debates. Note, however, that the distinction Marx and Engels make
26 See Raekstad (2015).

210 P. RAEKSTAD
between personal and private property in the Communist Manifesto will

not work to answer this objection; a good answer requires recourse to an
explicit conception of freedom.
Marx’s notion of self-directed activity can furnish the basis for a very
straightforward answer to this kind of argument. Private property is not
necessary for the conscious self-direction of human activities and there-
fore not necessary for human freedom. For example, a factory or farm in
which all productive activity is jointly consciously self-directed by those
who work there need not be formally owned by anyone. Someone might
object to this that some individual or person would have to own the land
or factory in order for any systematic use and production to take place
on it. Such an argument obviously neglects the fact that what we term
“property” is a historically contingent set of social practices, which vary
a great deal across human history and human societies, many of which
organised complex forms of agriculture, horticulture, and herding with
nothing like the kinds of systems of private property in land that many
modern thinkers take for granted. In any case, refuting arguments such
as these requires some appeal to normative concepts, such as Marx’s
concept of freedom. Given that these arguments are convincing to at
least some workers, being able to refute them is another valuable way
in which re-emphasising the normative aspects of Marx’s theory of alien-
ation can contribute to the actions of the potentially revolutionary subject
or agent Marx is concerned with, causing them to e.g. support or less
oppose revolutionary practices.
I have summarised the shift in Marx’s methodology from 1843 and
the part of 1844 during which he wrote the Economic and Philosoph-
ical Manuscripts of 1844 to the view he lays out in the 1845–6 German
Ideology onwards. In so doing, I have shown how Marx moved towards
an understanding of the proletariat as an active revolutionary subject
and with that formulated a critique of earlier revolutionary theorists
and modified his own approach to theorising. Complementing this, I
have shown how the theory of alienation not only continues (as we saw
throughout Chapter 7) to appear throughout his later works, but that
it even forms the core of his mature account of capitalism’s two main
revolutionary contradictions, between productive powers/relations and
between workers/capitalists. Although all four kinds of alienation reap-
pear throughout his later works, Marx dedicates much more time and
energy to exploring and expanding upon its more descriptive aspects.
I’ve argued that one of the main reasons he does so is that he no
longer thinks they are as important contributions to the revolutionary

movement. Against this, I have argued that these normative elements of
the theory of alienation can indeed play a useful role for three reasons:
they can help focus that subject or agent’s conception of what capitalist
unfreedom consists in and why it matters; they can help to guide theoret-
ical and practical contributions to capitalism’s replacement; and they can
play an important motivational role to the participants in revolutionary
struggle.
References
Primary
Heinrich, M. (2012). An introduction to the three volumes of Karl Marx’s capital.
Marx, K., Livingstone, R. (trans), Benton, G. (trans) & Colletti, L. (intro.).
Löwy, M. (2005). The theory of revolution in the young Marx. Haymarket Books.
CHAPTER 10
Towards a New World
I have shown that Marx’s political theory was realist in nature, that it
presents a critique of capitalism for thwarting human freedom and thereby
human development, and that this critique remains defensible in light of
the findings of the contemporary human sciences. After a brief recap, I
will here offer some pointers on how Marx’s critique of capitalism remains
important for opening up new and important avenues in theorising both
the expanding ills of capitalism and the necessities of emancipation.
Part I laid out Marx’s rich and neglected theory of human devel-
opment in terms of powers and needs, and showed how he uses it to
articulate a positive concept of freedom as self-direction. On this view,
freedom is valuable both in itself as the realisation of a particularly impor-
tant human power and for positively impacting a wide range of other
human powers.
Next, Part II detailed Marx’s first critique of modern society, showing
one of the ways in which he critiques both capitalism and the state for
thwarting human freedom and thereby human development. There we
saw that Marx advocates a radical idea of democracy to replace capi-
talism and the state in ways that go beyond merely democratic states
and prefigure his later socialist ideas. The discussion of Marx’s shift from
a realisation-oriented to an agent-centred approach to political theory
explained not only how Marx’s approach to political theory differs in the

Switzerland AG 2022
214 P. RAEKSTAD
two theories of alienation, but also how added descriptive content rightly
altered his realist method of political theorising.
Building on this, Part III reconstructed the second theory of alien-
ation as a diagnosis of specifically how capitalism thwarts human freedom
and thereby human development, his expanded conception of its cure
in socialism, and, finally, his conception of the (correct or best) practice
of the theorist. There we saw his theory of alienation being employed
to diagnose capitalism’s interconnected forms of personal and impersonal
domination and how he recommends a socialism to cure it that includes
the full democratisation of social life, replacing competitive markets with
democratic planning, abolishing the hierarchical division of labour, and
distributing according to need. Finally, we saw how this theory not only
is retained throughout Marx’s later works, including Capital, but also
constitutes the core of his analysis of capitalism’s revolutionary contradic-
tions. While Marx turned to focus more on the descriptive side of this
critique, I’ve argued that we have good reason to revive it today. Now,
what does this do for contemporary political theory and practice?
This contributes to contemporary methodological debates in political
theory by showing two detailed ways in which a critical political theory
was developed along realist lines. Despite the growing interest in realism
in recent years, there has been little work that can compare to the radical
critical endeavour of thinkers like Marx. The work of such thinkers has
played an important role in influencing recent human history, so their
approaches to the subject deserve considerable attention in their own
right. There is also good reason to think that political theorists who wish
to influence real politics today would do well to understand the methods
and approaches which have proven effective in the past—whether they
wish to follow them or not.
One way this can be done would be to open up a research programme
that seeks to do realist political theory in an empirically well-informed
and interdisciplinary way. This could draw on recent advances in history,
anthropology, archaeology, and psychology, as well as the sociology of
social movements and on the ideas of non-Western forms of political
theorising. Such a programme could explore our foundational polit-
ical concepts, values, and commitments, including through forms of
genealogy and ideology critique; it could use these lessons to assess the
relations and institutions we are subject to; it could develop models of
future relations and institutions and strategies for reaching them; and it
10 TOWARDS A NEW WORLD 215
could help to provide us with some general orientation in navigating the

world we face.
There are a variety of other ways in which Marx’s diagnosis of the
ills of capitalism can contribute to political theory, of which I will briefly
mention three. One is how it can account for the kinds of power exerted
over people in contemporary financial capitalism. It’s often difficult to
understand the nature of the powers wielded by today’s financialised capi-
talism over individuals and institutions. The power of financial markets
inheres not in single individuals (like kings, emperors, or popes) or specific
decision-making bodies or organisations (like parliaments, senates, or
trade organisations). Although the powers of individuals, bodies, and
organisations remain real and important components of financialised
capitalism, the powers wielded by financial markets themselves are not
controlled by any of them. This raises major conceptual challenges,
including: when people and institutions are subjected to the power of
financial capitalism, what if anything, is it that has power over them and
how does it render them unfree? Marx’s thought provides us with a place
to start to answer these questions. What has power over people under
contemporary financial capitalism is still the socially constituted capitalist
social relations which come to constitute a power outside and seemingly
independent of those subject to them, and which control their economic
lives and institutions. By controlling people’s economic lives, these social
relations render people unfree by thwarting their powers for consciously
self-directing their own activity. Just as Marx’s theory of alienation was
only the starting-point for his research into political economy, so too this
provides only the starting point for an analysis and critique of contem-
porary financialised capitalism—its precise powers and laws of motion
require much further specific investigations, which some Marx-influenced
thinkers have already begun.1 What is clear, however, is that no matter
how much more complicated contemporary financialised capitalism has
become, it remains subject to the critical diagnosis offered by Marx’s
theory of alienation.
In addition to this, Marx’s critique of capitalism remains useful for
diagnosing the lived reality of many people worldwide. Oddly, Marx’s
thought is sometimes thought passé for its focus and reliance on the
industrial working class, which many argue no longer reflects the lived
1 For example Foster and Magdoff (2009), Foster and McChesney (2012), and Harvey
(2011, 2015).
216 P. RAEKSTAD
experiences of most people. There are many things wrong with this
critique, but the main problem is that it’s wrong in both of the main ways
that it needs to be right. First, as Immanuel Ness points out, from 1980
to 2007 the standard industrially defined working class has actually grown
“from 1.9 billion to 3.1 billion workers—far more working people than at
any time in the history of capitalism”, mostly in the Global South and in
large part in “response to the restructuring of financial capital”.2 He goes
on to argue that “Marx’s depiction of an alienated and estranged work-
force in the nineteenth century can be applied to the condition of workers
in the Global South today”,3 including living in the margins of major
cities, lacking many citizenship and residency rights with resulting lack
of access to public services, thorough-going casualisation and precarity,
and much more. Furthermore, the Marxist proletariat was always defined
not in terms of any industrial character, but in terms of its social rela-
tions. It therefore includes service sector workers just as much as it does
factory workers, and their conditions, whether in the Global North or the
Global South, remain alienated and unfree. From the perspective of global
humanity, Marx’s critique of capitalism has never been more relevant.
The diagnosis of impersonal forms of domination can also help us make
sense of the subtle forms of power involved in a variety of current high-
technology transformations our capitalism is undergoing. New dynamics
of surveillance capitalism, the rule of algorithms in managing platform
workers and other office workers, and the subtle forms of manipulation
exercised by automated systems in various different ways all demand a
more sophisticated way of thinking about freedom than current liberals,
or their concepts of freedom, can provide. Marx’s concept of freedom as
self-direction, and his understanding that it can be undermined by either
personal or impersonal forms of domination, can provide a starting point
for understanding how many of these new socio-technical systems exercise
power over those subject to them regardless of whether they’re controlled
by particular nefarious bosses or not.
Perhaps most importantly, Marx’s critique also leaves us with a number
of resources for thinking about human emancipation in more positive
terms. Indeed, nothing could be more obvious than the growing impor-
tance of Marx to movements fighting for universal emancipation. A
2 Ness (2016, p. 14).

3 Ness (2016, p. 183).
proper understanding of what his political theory consists in, the vision
of a future it includes, and the nature of the critique it levels against
capitalism, can provide such movements with a greater understanding of
what it is that they’re up against, which institutions need replacement or
reform, and how one might go about doing so.
First, a renewed understanding of Marx’s critique should help us to
re-frame how we think about Marx’s work as fundamentally a project of
universal human emancipation through intersectional working-class self-
emancipation. For Marx, this entails the democratisation of all aspects of
social life. We’ve seen that for Marx, this requires replacing both capi-
talism and the state with a network of bottom-up democratic councils,
restoring the powers of society to the collective control of the totality
of its participants. He also argues that such a socialist society must
be organised through participatory democratic planning; replace capital-
ism’s hierarchical division of labour; and distribute goods and services
according to need, while members will contribute according to ability.
I’ve also argued that these commitments call us to think about which
specific institutional forms they can be realised through. How exactly
can we go about participatory democratic planning on large, medium,
and small scales? How can we reorganise the division of labour in ways
that best serve the free self-development of all? And how do we make
distribution according to need a concrete reality? These questions should
be central to thinking about the socialist alternative to capitalism going
forwards.
Second, this should be accompanied by an honest and ruthless criticism
of proposed alternatives to capitalism that fail to address the forms of
unfreedom Marx discusses. Contemporary academics, even many who call
themselves socialists, tend to favour either some renewed form of social
democracy or a form of market socialism. The problem with these models
is that neither of them can seriously address Marx’s diagnoses of the forms
of domination between managers and workers, embodied in the division
between mental and manual labour; the impersonal forms of domination
entailed by the kinds of competitive markets they include; or the latter’s
inherent dynamics of ecological devastation. A renewed socialism cannot
settle for such half-measures, nor can anyone who wants our species to
survive.
Third, Marx’s focus on democratisation and his theory of human devel-
opment can inform the way we think about social change and especially
collective emancipation. If capitalism is alienating and a socialist society
218 P. RAEKSTAD
is its unalienated cure, any transition to socialism requires a process of

de-alienation. Marx’s theory of human development gives us the nuts
and bolts needed to make sense of this process. Introducing free socialist
institutions presupposes revolutionaries who have developed the need to
realise these institutions and the powers and consciousness that enable
them to do so. How, given that we are starting from a capitalist society,
can we develop people with the powers, needs, and consciousness neces-
sary for them to take us to a free socialist society? Like socialism itself,
the revolutionary subjectivity required for bringing it about is not some-
thing that can be handed down by some benevolent leaders or secret
revolutionary elite—as for the Lassalleans that Marx opposed. Socialism
can only be introduced by the working classes themselves within their
mass organisations which will lead both the resistance to capitalism and
the transition beyond it.
It follows from this that those committed to replacing capitalism with
socialism should pay very close attention to the social relations within our
organisations and movements, especially the ways in which they structure
deliberation and decision-making. The best way to ensure the develop-
ment of the revolutionary subjectivity required for a free socialist society
is for the structures and relations within organisations of struggle and
transition to reflect those of the socialist society aimed at. Arguably, only
experience of and experiments with these things will help participants
teach themselves how to live and organise social life in these ways, develop
a need for doing so, and becoming conscious of what such society is
and entails. This connects to both past and present debates about prefig-
urative politics, a question which is increasingly debated both in the
academy and a plethora of popular movements, by both Marxists and
non-Marxists alike.4 Marx’s theory of human development can be put to
work in thinking about how to structure deliberation, decision-making,
and wider culture within anti-capitalist organisations and movements, by
being used to assess the impacts of these things on developing partici-
pants’ powers, needs, and consciousness. Do we structure organisations
in ways that enable and promote the free or self-directed activity of all of
their participants? Are our organisations really collectively self-governed
by all of their members? Does power within them really and consistently
4 For example Dixon (2014), Gordon (2018), Raekstad (2018), Raekstad and Gradin
(2020), Swain (2019b), and van de Sande (2015).
flow from the bottom up, rather than from the top down? Do our move-
ments and organisations develop their participants’ powers, needs, and
consciousness in the ways required for them to replace capitalism and the
state with a free socialist society, if and when the opportunity arises? This
demands not only that we more systematically begin to study the forms
and substance of prefigurative politics, but also that we work to bring
together the best parts of different socialist traditions that have worked
much more on these questions than many Marxist theorists.5 In my view
this demands that we develop a non-sectarian, new synthesis of the best
parts of Marxist, anarchist, decolonial, antiracist, feminist, and syndicalist
ideas.
These questions and more are being asked and beginning to be
answered by a plethora of organisations and movements worldwide.
Through them, Marx’s thought is once again a living element in polit-
ical struggles, and one which we’re beginning to understand better than
was possible before. If this is correct, then it seems that philosophy is
again becoming a material force in social and political struggles—a force
not only for understanding the world, but also for changing it.
References
Secondary
Foster, J. B., & Magdoff, F. (2009). The great financial crisis: Causes and
consequences. Monthly Review Press.
Foster, J. B., & McChesney, R. (2012). The endless crisis: How monopoly-finance
capital produces stagnation and upheaval from the USA to China. Monthly
Review Press.
Gordon, U. (2018). Prefigurative politics between ethical practice and absent
promise. Political Studies, 66(2), 521–537.
Harvey, D. (2011). The enigma of capital: And the crises of capitalism (2nd ed.).
Harvey, D. (2015). Seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism (Reprint
ed.). Oxford University Press.
Ness, I. (2016). Southern insurgency: The coming of the global working class. Pluto
Press.
5 Raekstad and Gradin (2020).

220 P. RAEKSTAD
Polity Press.
Raekstad, P. (2018). Revolutionary practice and prefigurative politics: A clarifica-
tion and defence. Constellations, 25(3), 359–372.
Swain, D. (2019a). None so fit to break the chains: Marx’s ethics of self-
Swain, D. (2019b). Not not but not yet: Present and future in prefigurative
Van de Sande, M. (2015). Fighting with tools: Prefiguration and radical politics
in the twenty-first century. Rethinking Marxism, 27 (2), 177–194.
Appendix: A Brief Overview
of the (Other) Principal
Interpretations of Marx’s Normative
Commitments
Different interpreters disagree not only about the nature of Marx’s

critique of capitalism, but also about the normative components that this
critique builds on. The contemporary literature contains a large number
of positions on these two questions. Some believe that Marx’s critique
rests on human development and/or freedom; others that it builds on
certain principles of distributive justice that are violated by exploitation;
while others believe his critique is based on an ethical view of human
nature. This appendix will provide a brief overview of the other prin-
cipal approaches to understanding the normative components of Marx’s
critique of capitalism and why I think they should be rejected as plau-
sible readings of Marx. After laying out some necessary terminology, I
will examine and reject four main alternatives to the one I’ve explained
and defended in Part I of this book. First (A), there is the “amoralist”
position, advocated especially by Allen Wood, according to which Marx
does not appeal to straightforwardly ethical principles at all, but rather, if
anything, to some other kinds of general-purpose wants, needs, or inter-
ests. Secondly (B), there is what is often called the “moralist” reading,
advocated by commentators such as G. A. Cohen and Norman Geras,
according to which Marx is committed to some number of ethical princi-
ples like a theory of justice, or ethical ideals such as freedom, community,
etc., and capitalism is criticised for violating or failing to live up to the
evaluative terms in question. Thirdly (C), there is the approach that
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 221
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
222 APPENDIX: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE (OTHER) PRINCIPAL …
understands Marx’s critique of capitalism as one based on an ethical ideal

of human nature—often cashed out in terms of an (at least partially)
ethical ideal of human species-essence. Fourthly (D), there is a kind of
internal critique which begins from the normative principles or ideals
developed within a given society, in terms of which that society justifies
things like its own existence (either in part or in toto), its various insti-
tutions, policies, actions, etc. This society is then critiqued for failing to
follow, live up to, or realise its own principles or ideals.1 I shall outline
each of these positions in turn, arguing that they all fail to do justice
to what Marx himself says—and/or needs to say—about the normative
components of his political theory as embodied in his critique of capi-
talism, from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 all the
way through to the Grundrisse and Capital.
Before I move on, however, two preliminary points are in order. First,
my discussion will leave aside the numerous details and variations involved
in the separate cottage-industry on “Marx and Justice”. Strictly speaking,
any appeal to a Marxian critique of capitalism founded on a notion of
justice necessarily implies a prior conception of the normative elements
of that critique and their status2 —either a moralist position or the first
kind of internal critique—which I will reject in (B) and (D), respec-
tively, as a result of which this subsequent concern is rendered moot. For
another, the following overview is not meant to provide a detailed survey
of all the different writers and arguments within the “Marx and Morality”
debates. Many individual writers have highly complex views which inter-
pret, combine, and hybridise Marx’s many and varied normatively charged
statements about capitalism in a number of different ways. In light of this
fact, the reconstructive purpose of this appendix, and the further fact that
I believe these individual positions to build mostly on erroneous norma-
tive components anyway, their additional details are not strictly relevant
here. It would thus make little sense to examine them all in detail. To do
so adequately would, moreover, require much more time and space than
is presently available. Instead, I first aim to summarise the four main kinds
of normative foundations Marx’s critique(s) or capitalism can be said to
1 Unfortunately, there are interesting commentators on this issue that fall outside of
this typology, such as MacIntyre (2009), Martin (2008), and Blackledge (2012). Their
positions are too unique, and require a much too detailed and lengthy treatment than it
is possible to provide here.
2 See for instance Geras (1985, p. 47).
APPENDIX: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE (OTHER) PRINCIPAL … 223
rest on which are not my own, in their most plausible formulations, and
briefly present the reasons why I find them to be implausible.
It is difficult to get a simple overview of the state of the discussion
concerning the normative components of Marx’s theory, partly because
many of the various participants proceed from very different ethical and
political assumptions, and partly because the participants use different,
and sometimes inconsistent, terminology. Different writers read Marx’s
critique in terms of concepts such as the “normative”, the “ethical”, the
“moral”, the “amoral”, and many more, and they often do not take care
to use these in the same way, or to clarify or compare their uses to those of
other writers. In light of this fact, I will begin my discussion by outlining
the terminology it will employ. In this way, my account of the different
positions and their vocabularies can be made commensurable, hopefully
rendering the subsequent discussion more comprehensible.
The word “normative” employed can be taken in a few different
ways. “Normative” here does not simply mean something being of, or
pertaining to, a norm. Nor does it mean a separate kind of thing distinct
from, and necessarily opposed to, the descriptive tout court. To use the
term in this way would be implicitly to commit Marx to a substantive kind
of meta-ethical dualism which I do not believe he holds. “Normative” is,
however, used to denote that aspect of a theory—Marx’s or others’—
which deals with all matters concerning what’s good or bad, better or
worse, and how, very broadly speaking, things should or ought to be. This
includes the realm of concerns about ethical rules and norms, conceptions
of the good life, etc., but also other realms such as the correct or incor-
rect use of language, aesthetics, considerations to do with rationality and
reasonableness, and so on. For the purposes of this appendix, the “nor-
mative” and the evaluative will be used synonymously to denote this class
of considerations.
There is a common way of thinking about the “normative” which
contrasts it with the “descriptive” in such a way that the two are wholly
separate categories. I leave aside the question of whether or not this is a
correct or a useful way of thinking about things, noting only that this is
not how the term “normative” will be employed here. For one, there is
no reason whatsoever to believe Marx adhered to a dualism of this kind
and for another, there are a number of things which fall within the scope
of the normative as just construed which are clearly also descriptive enti-
ties. For example, it is perfectly possible to hold up an existing society
or individual as an ideal of ethical, aesthetic, or rational perfection (e.g.
Socrates, Jesus, Muhammad) and then proceed to evaluate all others in

comparison to that ideal. Such a postulated ideal would then be both a
descriptive entity and a normative one. The same is even clearer with
the correct or incorrect uses of words and grammatical constructions.
It is a matter of descriptive fact that at least some such things are not
permitted or acceptable—like, in English, using the word “cat” to refer
to an ocean. The word “normative”, then, is here not used to distinguish
some elements of Marx’s thought from the descriptive tout court, but to
distinguish these former kinds of components of his theories—whatever
we take them to be—from these theories’ merely descriptive components,
such as Marx’s accounts of how the capitalist economy works as a matter
of fact.
The “normative”, however, should be distinguished from the narrower
concept of the “ethical”. “Ethical” is here used to denote that which
belongs to the more traditional—yet still broadly construed—scope of
inquiry into a more limited set of values, including the realms of ethical
rules and norms; conceptions of the good life; conceptions of human
growth, development, and flourishing; questions about the good, the
right, and the just; as well as other concerns about individual and collec-
tive ends. I am unable to formulate a clear distinction between the ethical
and the normative in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. I
can, however, point to a number of things which fall within the scope
of the latter, but outside that of the former. The realm of the ethical
does not, unlike that of the normative, include certain distinct kinds of
concerns such as concerns of a purely aesthetic nature or of the correct
and incorrect uses of language. Thus, a concern with the injustice of U.S.
foreign policy is an ethical and therefore also a normative concern, while
correcting someone’s erroneous spelling or clearly incorrect utterances of
the word “literally” is a normative matter, but not an ethical one.3
This still broad sense of the “ethical” can be contrasted with the even
narrower realm of “morality”. In what follows, “morality” will refer to
matters of individual and collective action and decision-making relative
3 This example may be controversial, insofar as it abstracts away from the harms caused
to listeners upon experiencing the horror of “literally” used in the sense of figura-
tively+emphasis. Insofar as the action of doing so causes harm, it would indeed fall under
the category of the ethical as well.
to ethical rules or norms4 of whatever kind. A concern to live one’s

life without violating another person’s human rights or without violating
the ten commandments is thus a moral concern (and therefore also an
ethical and a normative one), while a person’s attempt at achieving what
they take to be a good human life (assuming this consists not merely in
following a set of prescribed ethical rules and norms) is an ethical concern,
but not necessarily a moral one.
The ethical rules and norms in question can be thought of in a
number of different ways. In the following, ethical rules and norms
will be approached, understood, or conceived of either “concretely” and
“contextually” or “abstractly” and “ahistorically”. Here a “concrete” and
“contextual” understanding of a concept or an ethical rule or norm is
one which proceeds, or attempts to proceed, from how a concept, rule,
or norm functions in a certain context (in a particular group, for a partic-
ular slice of time, etc.), how it is or is not acted upon within that context,
and how it is formulated and deliberated upon in that context. This kind
of approach then proceeds to develop an account of the concept, rule, or
norm from this starting point.
In contrast to the emphasis on the practical embeddedness of the terms
under analysis found in the contextual approach, an “abstract” under-
standing proceeds, or attempts to proceed, from a general definition
or description of a concept, rule, or norm rather than its practical use
within one or more particular contexts. In contrast to the importance
attributed to the historical location, change, and variability emphasised in
a contextual approach, an “ahistorical” understanding of concepts, rules,
and norms is one which proceeds, or attempts to proceed,5 in an abstract
way to analyse and utilise these without regard for their historical loca-
tion, function, and change over time. It is, at least in principle, possible to
analyse concepts concretely while taking an ahistorical approach to their
4 I write “ethical” rules and norms to distinguish those rules and norms which are
ethical from those rules and norms that are purely pragmatic conventions, rules of
aesthetics (e.g. rules of musical composition), and so on.
5 If one believes, as I do, that everything formulated by a human being is significantly
sensitive to, and in part dependent on, the context within which it is formulated, then
there can be no such thing as an abstract formulation of the kind shortly to be discussed,
only attempts at doing so which are doomed to fail. In order to simplify the discussion, I
term those approaches which attempt to proceed abstractly in the above sense as “abstract”
approaches—even though, if I and its other critics are correct in the basic premise of its
factual impossibility, there is, strictly speaking, no such thing.
study, or to seek to analyse concepts abstractly but to understand them

historically. However, as far as our discussion below is concerned it must
be borne in mind that the concrete and contextual on the one hand, and
the abstract and ahistorical on the other, tend to come together as part of
a package. This is particularly evident in the theorists discussed in sections
(A) and (B) of this appendix. Ethical rules and norms are not, however,
the only things that can be concrete, contextual, abstract, and/or ahis-
torical in these senses; so too can principles, ideals, notions of right and
justice, etc.
It should now be clear that, on the account just given, everything
moral is also ethical, but not vice versa, and that everything ethical is also
normative, but not vice versa. In other words, the normative contains the
ethical and much more besides, and the ethical contains the moral and, at
least potentially, much more besides. None of these things are necessarily
distinct from the descriptive, factual, and empirical in that they lack any
such content, but they are distinct from the merely descriptive, factual,
and empirical.
The preceding discussion about the normative, the ethical, and the
moral has shifted from one about the realms or domains of these cate-
gories to the entities which appear within them—to wit, ethical rules and
norms, and how these are thought of and with. It will thus be instruc-
tive, before moving on, to say something about the terms I will be using
to denote some of these entities, namely what “principles” and “ideals”
are taken to be. A “principle” can mean many different things, but here
it will be taken to mean a standard of, or rule or norm for, individual
or collective action and decision-making. Principles may be ethical—“do
not steal”—or non-ethical—“don’t eat the yellow snow”, “don’t annoy
the big men with sharp bits of metal”—in nature. Ethical rules and norms
are thus all principles of a particular kind, but not all principles are ethical.
An “ideal”, on the other hand, is here a conception of, or standard for,
perfection, an instance of perfection—say, a perfect human being or a
perfect society—or an instance of either of the former serving as a goal
which a person or society ought, in some sense, to strive towards.
With some basic terminology in order, I can now proceed to the
available views on the normative components of Marx’s critique of
capitalism.
(A) The Amoralist Reading

There are two principal versions of the “amoralist” reading of the norma-
tive components of Marx’s critique of capitalism. According to the
simple version of amoralism, Marx’s work has no ethical—and perhaps
no normative—content whatsoever. The details of this claim can be
cashed out in different ways. One way of cashing out the details of a
simple amoralist position, which we find in writers such as Plekhanov and
Bukharin, is the orthodox view that Marx appeals only to the desires,
needs, and interests of the working class, and should not burden itself
with anything beyond understanding and perhaps manipulating “merely”
superstructural elements such as justice and morality6 in the interests of
satisfying these desires, needs, and interests. We may presume that the
latter is fairly clear insofar as it involves the claims that morality, and
ethics more widely, are largely, if not completely, epiphenomenal vis-à-
vis the economic base; that such concerns play no important role in any
of Marx’s thought; and that it is irrelevant, if not potentially distracting
and therefore pernicious, to revolutionary practise to pursue them.
An amoralist position and critique of capitalism can appeal only
to people’s individual or group desires, preferences, and/or interests,
without employing or requiring any specifically ethical content. For
instance, one does not need things like moral principles to tell someone
standing at the edge of a cliff not to take another step forward. At most
it is sufficient to point out that doing so would get one killed, with
an implicit premise about how such an outcome is undesirable and/or
contrary to one’s interests. Similarly, demonstrating that capitalism fetters
the development of productive powers and results in avoidable evils for
the proletariat, in conjunction with an assertion of a viable and more satis-
factory alternative, can, at least in principle, suffice to convince them that
capitalism is somehow inadequate and thereby motivate them to organise
to replace it.7
6 E.g. Bukharin (1925), Hodges (1964, 1966), Leiter (2015), and Plekhanov (1898).
The names cited make it obvious why this position is labelled an “orthodox” one.
7 There is another version of simple amoralism developed by Tucker (1970, 1972)
which argues that the extremely partisan nature of Marx’s quasi-religious world-view
supposedly rules out any genuinely ethical or moral components. Since this is no longer
accepted by virtually anyone, I leave discussion of it aside for our purposes here.
Such simple amoralist positions were, however, challenged by the

discovery of, and in particular by later commentary on, Marx’s early writ-
ings of 1844, which prompted readings of Marx on which he held a
normative conception of human nature,8 was involved in a project of re-
defining man from which different sets of moral principles derive,9 and
others. Although the early amoralists correctly note the absence of a fully
developed and articulated normative theory in much of Marx’s work, his
rejection of any notions of right and justice, and his subsequent harsh
criticism of other thinkers who attempt to base a rejection or critique of
capitalism thereon, they nevertheless run into a series of problems.
One of the major weaknesses of simple amoralist interpretations, which
in fact has gone on to plague many of the subsequent debates on Marx,
morality, and justice, is the tendency to conflate and collapse concep-
tions of morality, of right and justice, of ethics, and of normativity in
general. An absence or rejection of either or both of the former does not,
and certainly need not, entail the absence or rejection of either of the
latter two. By conflating and collapsing any and all notions of norma-
tivity, ethics, morality, right, and justice in such a way that they form
a single undifferentiated “blob”, early amoralists were able to support
their conclusions by utilising a couple of quotations of Marx repudi-
ating one or more of these (especially right or justice, but also morality),
explaining their nature and emergence wholly in terms of the contexts
within which they arose and subsequently sustain themselves, and there-
after arguing that all normative considerations worthy of the name are
unnecessary (because revolutionaries can appeal to workers’ wants and
needs just as easily, if not easier), undesirable (because work in ethics will
both divert attention and energy from real revolutionary activities and risk
perverting the enterprise itself, insofar as the capitalist mode of produc-
tion succeeds in adversely influencing it), and contrary to the teachings of
Marx. However, the evidence adduced by those attempting to argue that
Marx altogether rejected any normative or ethical position from which
to critique capitalism, especially among the early amoralists, amounts
only to support the much weaker claim that he rejects the much more
restricted normative positions founded on conceptions of right, justice,
and morality.
8 E.g. Fromm (2004).

9 Allen (1974).
In addition to this significant underdetermination of simple amoralism

in Marx’s work, this family of readings also runs into a number of other
problems. One of these is that the diagnoses and subsequent critiques
of capitalism that Marx offers in his early writings—e.g. the early Hegel
critiques, On the Jewish Question, and the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844—clearly have a normative, in fact an ethical, founda-
tion and focus, with notions of freedom, self-direction, and human devel-
opment playing important roles. Furthermore, as we’ve seen throughout
Parts I and III of this book, explicit commitments to human development
and freedom, and critically diagnosing how capitalism restricts freedom
and human development relative to the achievable alternative of socialism,
reappear throughout Marx’s later works, including Capital. The early
development and later persistence of these normatively laden concepts
in Marx’s later work render any simple amoralist position highly implau-
sible. Consequently, we should look for any other available alternative
before giving in to such a conclusion.
Despite the problems which beset these simpler forms of amoralism,
it has been ably argued that a more sophisticated version of it would
be able to meet the above challenges while articulating an interesting
thesis consistent with a viable interpretation of Marx’s writings. The
strongest sophisticated amoralist reading of Marx has been articulated
by Allen Wood. According to Wood’s sophisticated amoralism, Marx’s
critique of capitalism can be grounded in supposedly non-ethical10 goods
such as “self-actualization, security, physical health, comfort, community,
freedom”.11 Wood argues that although Marx is clearly opposed to capi-
talism for its failures to provide these goods for the proletariat, he “never
claims that these goods ought to be provided to people because they
have the right to them, or because justice (or some other moral norm)
10 Wood and others use the term “non-moral” here, leaving it unclear what “moral”
means in this particular context. In our terms outlined above, however, it seems clear that
what these writers term “non-moral” is what I would term non-ethical.
11 Wood (2004, p. 129). This view was developed by Wood (1972a, 1972b, 1979,
2004). A sufficiently similar position reading Marx in amoralistic terms is that of Acton
(1955) and Miller (1983, 1984). Relatedly, Buchanan (1982) reads needs in the sense of
undistorted preferences, although he would probably reject identifying Marx’s position as
“amoral”.
demands it”.12 Wood adds to this an analysis of Marx’s explicit rejec-

tion of morality and theories of justice, asserting their status as ideologies
limited in relevance to, as well as critically restricted by, the forms of
society within which they develop. As a result of the distinction between
ethical and non-ethical goods, Wood claims that, despite his explicit rejec-
tion of criticisms of capitalism in terms of morality, right, and justice,
Marx is nevertheless able to provide a viable evaluative foundation on
which to base a critique of capitalism.
Wood’s account of Marx’s critique of justice can be summarised as
follows:
(1) Principles of justice are conceived of in terms of their function

within a given mode of production, i.e. in terms of whether or
not, and the extent to which, they “fit” it; thus
(2) such principles are not abstract and ahistorical ones in terms of
which actions, institutions, and so on, are evaluated, but instead
they are standards generated within, and, at least in part, by
a mode of production in terms of which various social actions
and interactions within that mode of production are subsequently
evaluated;
(3) Marx followed Hegel in rejecting a formal conception of justice
supposedly generated by, or deducible from, abstract forms or
universal principles, as a result of which;
(4) the justice of institutions’ acts does not depend on their conse-
quences, but, as mentioned in (1), on their functional relationship
with and within a given mode of production.
In short, Wood holds that Marx viewed notions of right (Recht )

and justice (Gerechtigkeit ) in politico-juridical terms, i.e. as normatively
laden rules governing and regulating individual and social actions and
interactions, which may or may not be adequately embodied in the insti-
tutions—particularly the legal institutions—of the societies within which
they arise. Since the demands on individual and social actions and interac-
tions vary signifcantly across different contexts—especially across different
modes of production—so too must the rules according to which they are
12 Wood (2004, p. 129).

best regulated. As such, modern private property laws and normal13 wage
labour exchanges are just in capitalist societies because they constitute,
regulate, and/or reinforce a well-functioning aspect of capitalist soci-
eties; in a hunter-gatherer society, by contrast, they would likely be both
pointless and harmful.14
Moving on from right and justice to morality, Wood argues that since
what we normally call everyday morality is similarly concerned with regu-
lating and directing the actions and interactions of individuals and groups
within and only within the context of a given mode of production—stipu-
lating what we should do in certain situations, banning certain courses of
action or ways of treating others, and so on—it follows that these notions
are completely unsuited to making recommendations of one such mode
of production over another. Furthermore, Wood argues, a shift from one
mode of production to another—e.g. by means of social revolution—
likely entails that the rules (morality, right, justice, law) of the former
mode of production must not only change, but also be violated in the
very act of change itself. Not only can a revolutionary critique of capi-
talism not base itself on such notions, it plausibly has to violate them in
order even to get off the ground.15
As a reading of Marx, Wood’s sophisticated amoralist position has some
major virtues. First, it can explain Marx’s own silence on the subject of
justice, both distributive and commutative, in his critical discussions of
capitalism. Secondly, it can make sense of Marx’s repeated insistence that
13 “Normal” in the sense that they do not involve what are taken to be untoward
elements such as direct coercion, slave-like contracts or contractual conditions, do not
involve illicit transfers such as bribes, etc.
14 There is of course another, merely descriptive, sense in which the terms “right”
and “justice” are used by others and, occasionally, by Marx himself. This is the purely
descriptive sense in which a given legal system, state, or whatever, recognises or upholds
certain principles as people’s rights or certain arrangements as being just simply as a
matter of fact. There is, in other words, a sense in which a principle X can be a principle
of justice in a given kind of society because it is one which is well-suited to the proper
functioning of that society and thus ought to be implemented and adhered to in some
way, and a distinct sense in which X can be a principle of justice in a given society in
that it simply is a principle which as a matter of fact is adhered to in that society. Wood’s
sophisticated amoralist reading holds that Marx discusses politico-juridical terms in both
senses—though Marx himself, especially in his earlier writings, is often far from clear about
when he is employing these terms in their normative or in the merely descriptive senses.
15 Wood (1972b).
capitalist exchanges and distributions16 are in fact just (within a capitalist

mode of production). For instance, in Volume I of Capital Marx writes
that the normal capitalist purchase of labour-power to produce surplus
value is “by no means an injustice towards the seller”,17 i.e. the labourer.
Thirdly, it readily accounts for his criticism of theorists who do in fact
attack capitalism on the basis of its alleged injustices. Also in Volume
I of Capital, Marx explicitly rejects Proudhon’s creation of an “ideal of
justice” from the “juridical relations that correspond to the production
of commodities” and his attempting to turn this ideal back upon itself
to reform “the actual production of commodities, and the corresponding
legal system, in accordance with this ideal”,18 and in the Critique of the
Gotha Programme he harshly criticises Lasalleans for employing a notion
of the just proceeds of labour:
What is a ‘just’ distribution?

Don’t the bourgeoisie claim that the present distribution is ‘just’? And
on the basis of the present mode of production, isn’t it in fact the only
‘just’ distribution? (…) Don’t sectarian socialists have the most varied ideas
about ‘just’ distribution?19
He goes on to argue that “it was an overall mistake” of the Lassalleans

“to make an issue of so-called distribution and to make it the focus of
attention”.20
But if Marx does not rest his critique of capitalism on the foundations
of right and justice, and if he must rest his critique of capitalism on some-
thing, what is it? Having already rejected readings attributing to Marx a
normative conception of human nature,21 Wood turns instead to what
he terms “non-moral”—in our terminology non-ethical—values. Now,
some of these supposedly non-ethical values can plausibly be described
as such. Things like the preservation of self and essential institutions,
stability, efficiency, and productivity may be valued for moral or ethical
16 The legalistic conception of justice and the distributive conception of justice are
often not clearly delineated in this literature.
17 Marx (1990, p. 301/II:6, p. 207).
18 Marx (1990, p. 178n2/ II:6, p. 114).
19 Marx (1996, p. 211/I:25, p. 12).
20 Marx (1996, p. 215/I:25, p. 15).
21 See Wood (1972a).
reasons, but it is also equally clear that they can be valued for purely
amoral reasons—that is, by appeal only to someone’s desires, preferences,
and interests. So far so good. However, Marx’s critique of capitalism rests
on, and Wood’s account consequently includes, many other concepts—
concepts like freedom and human development—which do not, or at
least not immediately, appear to have the same structure. Wood’s early
comments on this are too vague to be of any use, initially amounting
simply to a claim that the normative foundations for Marx’s critique lie
in the developing desires and needs of the proletariat which are satisfiable
by the means of production, but are fettered by capitalistic relations of
production.22 The reason this account is too vague to be useful is that it
fails to specify any distinction between putatively ethical and non-ethical
goods which can account for why the more contentious goods Wood
discusses are bona fide instances of non-ethical goods.
Wood’s later account23 does much better and provides a fuller distinc-
tion according to which ethical—what he calls “moral”—goods are those
things we value or want because our conscience or moral law tells us to,
whereas non-ethical goods are things we value because they satisfy our
own conceptions about our wants, needs, or the good life. On this view,
Marx criticises capitalism because it “frustrates many important nonmoral
[in our terminology non-ethical] goods: self-actualization, security, phys-
ical health, comfort, community, freedom”, but he “never claims that
these goods ought to be provided to people because they have the right
to them, or because justice (or some other moral norm) demands it”.24
But how do we make sense of the idea of non-ethical goods? If
the critique of capitalism in terms of freedom, self-direction, etc., is
cashed out in terms of one kind of ethics versus an ethics centred on
notions of right and justice, then it either becomes a moralist or internal-
critique position—depending on how the principles or ideals for action
are conceived. On the other hand, the non-ethical goods in question
could be derived in some way from a normative conception of human
nature or a notion of human development, but neither of these preserves
an interesting distinction between an amoralist position and these other
22 Wood (1972b).
23 I.e. Wood (2004), but some less developed discussion is also to be found in Wood
(1979).
24 Wood (2004, p. 129).
two kinds. If, however, these options are to be avoided, as Wood wants,
then we must ask whether or not it is possible to make sense of his distinc-
tion in a way which manages to preserve an interestingly non-ethical
character of the goods involved, while at the same time being able to
ground a critique of capitalism.
The best way I believe that Wood’s conception of non-ethical goods
can be re-cast is by formulating the notion of non-ethical goods in
terms of objective interests. If we define a person’s objective interests as
the wants or preferences they would have under conditions of perfect
(complete and correct) information, perfect clarity of cognition, and
under ideal conditions of reflection and deliberation, then non-ethical
goods can be conceived as those general-purpose goods which everybody
would want under such (and perhaps also under less strict) conditions.
This construal allows us both to preserve the “amoral” character of the
goods in question—they are clearly normative, not obviously ethical, and
certainly not moral—while at the same time managing to make sense of
that category of goods as something valuable, on the basis of which a
critique of social relations and institutions may be mounted. On such a
construal, Marx’s critique of capitalism would appeal specifically to the
objective interests of the proletariat, in the sense of giving one or more
arguments for it being in their objective interests, qua members of the
proletarian class, to overthrow capitalism.
This last point raises an obvious question: Why should others who are
not proletarians care about such a critique of capitalism? Consider one
of the more straightforward cases of a non-ethical good, efficiency, and
consider two possible forms of society, S1 and S2 , that differ only in that
S1 is more efficient than S2 , and that the benefits of this greater effi-
ciency accrue entirely to the proletariat—all things remaining equal for
non-proletarians. In such a case, why should or might non-proletarians,
like Marx himself, care? This is a complicated question to answer, but we
can mention the three most obvious lines of reply an amoralist like Wood
might make. First, he might argue that this is a relatively unimportant
issue. Since proletarians are by far the majority of society, and since their
interests can be appealed to in a straightforward way that is all that is
needed for Marx’s critique to be able to motivate a revolutionary change,
and that’s all that it attempts and needs to do.
A second line of reply could argue that even though Marx’s critique of
capitalism appeals only to non-ethical goods, non-proletarians may well
have good ethical reasons to care about the non-ethical goods of proletar-
ians. For instance, a wealthy capitalist might, in principle, care about the
individual well-being and preference-satisfaction of proletarians because
they adhere to certain ethical commitments which they believe require it
of them. They may, for instance, be a utilitarian of some sort, committed
to whichever social, economic, and political institutions maximise overall
utility and believe that capitalism does a worse job than socialism would
of providing proletarians with non-moral goods essential to maximising
(their) utility. As a result, a capitalist utilitarian of this sort might come
to adhere to socialist revolution on moral grounds, based on its short-
comings with respect to providing non-moral goods to the proletariat. In
this case, Marx’s critique of capitalism, despite appealing only to the non-
ethical objective interests of the proletariat, would nevertheless be able to
appeal indirectly to non-proletarians via their ethical commitments. Obvi-
ously, this could also very well happen for proletarians. They too could
find Marx’s amoralist critique of capitalism appealing not just by reflecting
on their own objective interests, but also indirectly because their ethical
commitments require that they care about the relevant non-ethical goods
and/or their effects, e.g. on utility.
A third possible line of reply would be that non-proletarians could
be brought to care about Marx’s critique of capitalism through various
kinds of non-ethical concerns about the non-ethical goods available to
the proletariat, for instance through simple sentiment (e.g. an emotional
reaction of compassion or concern) or through strategic instrumental
thinking (e.g. through thinking the proletariat’s well-being is essential for
carrying out victorious military campaigns in the future, and thus, indi-
rectly, for one’s own future well-being), but this reply is likely to be far
less interesting or satisfactory to most Marxists, so I won’t elaborate on
it further.
These replies can be expanded in a number of different ways, but there
is insufficient space to do so here. All I’ve attempted to show with them
is that reading Marx as basing his critique of capitalism on non-ethical
goods such as the objective interests of the proletariat—as amoralists such
as Wood do—is not inherently contradictory or ridiculous, and that it still
leaves space to argue for additional ethical or moral considerations to play
a role among both proletarians and non-proletarians.25
25 As we see in Chapter 9, Marx doubts at least some of the efficacy of these things,
but that is a distinct issue.
It is by no means clear, however, that Wood’s distinction between

ethical and non-ethical goods can find enough support in Marx’s works.
The distinction between ethical and non-ethical goods is not one that
Marx ever makes. Nor is it clear that he relies on, or takes himself to
rely on, any such distinction between normative categories—assuming we
may call non-ethical goods normative in the weak sense outlined above.
In Wood’s defence it should be said that such a distinction at least can
make sense of Marx’s own numerous statements against notions of right,
justice, etc. (see above), while at the same time providing a fairly clear
and interesting manner in which Marx’s criticisms of capitalism can be
cashed out in a plausibly non-ethical sense. As far as rational reconstruc-
tion goes, then, this may be a necessary, and therefore in some minimal
sense justified, way to proceed.
In line with this, Wood’s account in general makes an important point
I wish to preserve, namely Marx’s own insistence on appealing to the
wants and needs of the proletariat rather than getting bogged down in
more abstract normative questions. Marx is concerned with social revo-
lution, he believes that the best way of doing so is by direct appeal to
the wants and interests of the working class as revolutionary agent, as a
result of which his explicit focus—especially in his mature works intended
for a potentially revolutionary audience—is on such appeals. If we thus
distinguish the strategic reasons for Marx’s largely non-moral criticisms
of capitalism from the actual normative components his rejection and
critique in fact rest upon, then we can preserve the value of this insight
without rendering Marx’s thought non-ethical in the strict sense of being
devoid of ethical content. As far as Wood’s reading goes, however, such
a position would no longer be amoral—that is, non-ethical—in any inter-
esting sense. Wood could, as I do, reject the notion that Marx’s critique of
capitalism rests on any notion of morality, right, or justice as construed by
moralist commentators (see section (B) of this appendix below), but there
is no interesting sense in which such normative content, once accepted,
can still be considered non-ethical; it necessarily invokes something of
ethical force or value beyond mere wants and interests.
Furthermore, as I argue throughout this book (especially Part I),
there is a clear focus in Marx’s work on certain concerns—i.e. concerns
with human development, from which concerns with freedom as self-
direction derive—from 1844 and all the way through to his latest works.
As I show in Chapters 7 and 8, these components continue to play key
roles throughout Marx’s mature discussions of capitalism and its envi-

sioned cure of socialism. The typical and most plausibly non-ethical goods
that Wood mentions, such as health, security, efficiency, and so on, are
simply not among them. These other needs (health, security, etc.) are,
of course, important to any plausible conception of human development.
Pace Wood’s amoralism, however, they do not play the critical role of
providing the normative components for either of Marx’s two theories
of alienation. Wood, though he notes the connections between Marx’s
evaluative concerns and his theories of alienation,26 is unable to come to
grips with them. True to the limitations of his amoralism, Wood reads
alienation principally in terms of workers’ desires for a “sense of mean-
ing” and “self-worth”, which are thwarted by their not being able to meet
their needs for self-actualisation and self-development, in turn necessary
consequences of capitalism.27 Since a sense of meaning and self-worth are
things that (so the claim goes) everyone wants, or would want under the
right ideal circumstances, such a view coheres with an amoralist reading.
Unfortunately for Wood’s thesis, it has no positive textual basis in Marx’s
writings.
If, for pragmatic reasons, we limit ourselves to the four main compo-
nents of Marx’s critique of capitalism that reappear throughout his
writings on political economy, his four kinds of alienation, the prob-
lems with Wood’s reading are immediately apparent. Of the four kinds
of alienation that Marx discusses—from (social-relational) product, from
the labour process, from one’s species-being, and from others28 —the first
and third have nothing to do with consciousness at all and the fourth
is about relations with other human beings. If we grant that alienation
from the labour process is a result of alienation from the social-relational
product, we still lack anything like an adequate account of how the latter
two kinds fit into the picture. Alienation from the labour process is an
important point, but there is no reason to believe that it is best or most
plausibly explicable in terms of feelings of meaning and self-worth. To
Marx, alienation is a category of objective states of affairs, not of psycho-
logical experiences. Of course, the experiences of these states of affairs will
be experiences of alienation, and, as we have seen in Chapter 3, they are
26 See Wood (2004, esp. ch. 4).

27 Ibid., p. 23.
28 See Chapter 7.
clearly not enjoyable, but these are the inherent results and implications
of conditions of alienation, not what alienation consists in. In defending
Wood, we could allow that the various forms of alienation Marx discusses
are general-purpose obstacles to attaining other things everyone wants or
would want because of their corrosive impacts on things like freedom,
solidarity, community, and so on, which in fact seems to be Wood’s posi-
tion. This, however, leads us back to the initial criticism, which was that
the key underlying concerns of Marx’s theories of alienation are not prop-
erly accounted for by such an appeal to an unconnected multiplicity of bad
things.
In summary, then, simple amoralism is rejected due to the fallacious
account it entails about the nature and development of Marx’s theories
and the fact that there is at least one more plausible account available.
Sophisticated amoralism, however, succeeds in capturing some of Marx’s
insights and beliefs about the nature of right, justice, and so on, as well
as his views on revolutionary theoretical advocacy—principally by appeal
to wants and interests rather than the articulation and application of
abstract ethical principles and theories. However, this position too should
be rejected. It cannot make sense of the clear persistence of different and
seemingly unrelated normative concerns in Marx’s writings and it cannot
give a satisfactory account of the linchpin of Marx’s life work developed
in his second theory of alienation, which, as I show in Part I, rests on
other normative commitments.
(B) The Moralist Reading

It is easy to forget that the moralist readings of Marx29 in fact arose from
a critique and rejection of the amoralist positions widespread among many
Marxist and non-Marxist commentators. The simple form of amoralism
held basically that Marx’s theories had, or was supposed to have, no
genuine ethical components whatsoever. Relatedly, the sophisticated
29 This paradigmatically includes both the category of writers who view Marx as crit-
icising capitalism for its injustice, such as Arneson (1981), Cohen (1981, 1983, 1989),
DeGoyler (1992), Elster (1983, 1985), Geras (1985, 1992), Green (1983), Husami
(1978), Nielsen (1988), Riley (1983), Ryan (1980), van de Veer (1973), van der Linden
(1984), and Young (1978, 1981), as well as others such as Allen’s (1974) utilitarian
reading and Gregor’s (1968) interpretation in terms of nomic redefinition of man from
which different sets of abstract ethical principles follow, and other readings in terms of
(moral) principles of freedom, individuality, etc.
amoralism developed by Wood held that Marx’s critique of capitalism

rests on two legs: first the rejection of traditional morality couched in
terms of right and justice; instead, secondly, building on the suppos-
edly non-ethical values of freedom, emancipation, community, and so on.
In contrast to these, a moralist position is one of a family of positions
which hold that Marx’s critique of capitalism rests on one or more of the
following:
(1) One or a set of abstract and ahistorical principles—whether princi-

ples of justice or otherwise—delimiting or determining what ought
to, or what may or what may not, be done to a person by other
individuals and/or by social institutions. The principles in question
may include maxims like “people have a right to the full proceeds
from their labour-power”, “it is wrong to steal from others”,
“exploitation is wrong”, and so on, where these are construed
as ethical principles rather than, say, mere descriptions of reigning
legal or customary rules and norms.
(2) One or a set of abstract principles specifying the necessary and/or
sufficient criteria for a society to have a certain ethical status
(“decent”, “just”, “well-ordered”, and so on), and according to
which social relations, structures and institutions, and/or constitu-
tional, and legal arrangements are to be ordered and/or reformed.
(3) One or a set of abstract and ahistorical principles specifying goals
for individuals and/or societies which they ought to act in order to
bring about or realise to the greatest extent possible, such as “one
should maximise overall utility”, but also other abstract principles
or ideals of freedom, autonomy, community, etc.
Examples of such approaches abound in contemporary political theory,

e.g. Nozick’s postulation of natural “rights” as the foundations for his
political thought (1),30 Rawls’ two principles of justice specifying the
conditions for a just society (2),31 and Cohen’s ideal of community (3).32
If Marx is supposed to have held something like a moralist position, we
30 See Nozick (1974).

31 See Rawls (1999, 2001, 2005). Note the absence of “ahistorical” here, since Rawls’
principles of justice are not ahistorical in the required sense.
32 Cohen (2008, 2009), cf. Vrousalis (2010, 2012).
would expect him to first articulate, presumably with some clarity, the
abstract principles on which his critique of capitalism was based, demon-
strate how capitalism both fails and is likely to keep failing to meet them,
and critique capitalism in one way or another on those grounds. It is
therefore absolutely vital for a moralist reading that it can demonstrate
either that Marx had, or that he must have had, some principles of the
required kind that he in fact uses in a critique of capitalism. I will argue
that no such principles are to be found.
Before moving on, we should note that the normative principles in (1),
(2), and (3) above are held, on moralist readings of Marx, to be abstract
and ahistorical in nature, and thus not properly subject to variance across
different natural, social, and historical contexts. By this I mean that the
contextual variance in question is believed to be in some way ethically
legitimate or salutary. If, on the contrary, one holds the view that the prin-
ciples in terms of which Marx critiques capitalism are of such a nature that
they rightly vary across different contexts, then one’s position collapses
into a variant of internal critique. Why? Because the first kind of internal
critique discussed in (D) below is one which draws its principles from a
particular context, in terms of which actions, institutions, etc. within that
context are then critiqued. On such an account, capitalism is critiqued in
terms of the principles which arise in capitalist societies and in terms of
which those societies tend to legitimate themselves. If the principles in
question properly vary across contexts as a result of being generated only
within and in part by such contexts, then they are, in a sense, principles
internal to that context (or range of relevantly similar contexts). A critique
in terms of such internal principles can then, logically, be one of two
kinds. Either an action, institution, or whatnot can be critiqued in terms
of principles external to the context in which that action, institution, or
whatnot appears—external critique—or it can be critiqued in terms of
principles internal to that context or range of contexts—internal critique.
It is hard to see how an external critique of capitalism in this sense can
make any sense of Marx’s work. It seems wildly implausible to suppose
that any of the principles in question are not valued in the context of capi-
talist societies and there is no clear way that such a critique, in light of the
global spread of capitalism, can serve to bring about any change in human
societies—a concern central to Marx’s work. Since external critique in this
sense is completely implausible, an internal critique is the only coherent
alternative. As such, if the normative foundations of Marx’s critique of
capitalism along the lines of the kinds of principles in (1), (2), and (3)
are to avoid collapsing into a variant of internal critique, they must be

analysed and formulated abstractly and ahistorically.
Of the three kinds of principles mentioned above, the vast majority
of moralist readings of Marx fall into one of two camps. Either they are
readers, such as Cohen and Geras, who accept the proposition that Marx
had a theory of justice, in terms of which he rejected capitalism. In this
case the principles in question will be abstract and ahistorical principles
of kinds (1) and (2) above. This is often coupled with a reconstructed
theory of exploitation as the centre-point of Marx’s critique of capitalism,
according to which capital appropriation violates the principles of justice
in question.33 In the other camp are readers who believe that Marx rested
his rejection of capitalism not on a theory of right, justice, etc., but in
terms of ethical principles or ideals of freedom, emancipation, community,
and so on. I will briefly discuss each variant in turn. In my view, the best
and most exhaustive list of arguments for the justice-theoretical reading
of Marx is that provided by Norman Geras,34 who admirably synthesises,
clarifies, and adds to those of many other justice-theorists. I cannot do
these arguments full justice in an overview such as this, but I can and will
provide a brief outline of each of them, followed by a brief outline of why
I find them to be ultimately unconvincing as arguments establishing that
Marx had, and/or must have had, a theory of justice (understood as one
or more abstract and ahistorical ethical principles) on which he based his
critique of capitalism. Geras’ arguments can be summarised as follows:
33 I should perhaps note that I take my rejection of all alternative ethical components—
especially those based on ethical principle of various kinds—also to give good grounds for
rejecting the idea that Marx’s theory of “exploitation” is an ethical critique of capitalism.
Any remotely plausible textual interpretation of this idea as one with ethical content must
presuppose one or another of these alternative conceptions of Marx’s ethical views, all of
which I argue we have good reason to reject. I should also point out that Marx never says
he is doing anything at all ethical with his theory of exploitation, that given the actual
definition of exploitation and its rate in his economics it can only occur in capitalist society
(since it presupposes the production of value, which is the hallmark of capitalism), that
he explicitly points out that capitalist exchange is not unjust in Capital, and that Marx
consistently says he does not mean anything ethically loaded by it—and, as we have seen,
he criticises those who, like Proudhon and the Lasalleans, attempt to critique capitalism
on these grounds (e.g. in the Critique of the Gotha Programme). The reader will note
that these points have been discussed in section (A) of this appendix, as important aspects
of the amoralist position that, unlike its analysis of Marx’s critique of capitalism, I wish to
preserve (both because they’re correct interpretations of Marx and because I find them
compelling).
34 Especially Geras (1985).
(i) Justice consists, in some sense, in the exchange of equivalents.

Under capitalism this seems to be the case in the sphere of
exchange, but is not in fact so in the sphere of production, where
surplus value is extracted. Prima facie, this seems a good basis on
which to believe that capitalism is unjust.35
(ii) Although Marx claims that capitalism is not unjust, he never-
theless uses terms such as “theft”, “plunder”, and “robbery”
to describe the capitalist appropriation of surplus value, thereby
implicitly employing a language of injustice.
(iii) “From what Marx says about capitalist robbery”, Geras argues
that “we can infer a commitment to independent and transcen-
dent [I take this to mean at least abstract and ahistorical –
otherwise I am unsure what ‘independent and transcendent’ is
supposed to mean here] standards of justice, and further evidence
of the same thing is provided by his way of characterizing the
two principles of distribution that he anticipates for post-capitalist
society”.36
(iv) Marx’s seemingly relativist statements about right and justice are
not in fact relativist, but realist, expressing his awareness of the
different prospects for realising or meeting these principles in
different historical contexts. When Marx speaks of “higher stan-
dards” of right in socialist societies, he must implicitly be relying
on some kind of abstract and ahistorical criteria in terms of which
these supposedly higher standards are evaluated.
(v) There is nothing reformist or necessarily in conflict with Marx’s
thought about a focus on distribution as such, only about those
cases where this is not accompanied by an understanding and
critique of the relations of production from which such distri-
butions flow.
(vi) Although Marx finds it unimportant, there is nothing inherently
anti-revolutionary, from a Marxian point of view, about criticising
capitalism on the basis of right or justice, and such criticism can
happily work alongside other, amoral, critiques and appeals.
35 The relevant consideration must be in the sphere of capitalist production, not

exchange, since Marx repeatedly writes—and justice-theorists acknowledge that he repeat-
edly and coherently writes—that capitalist exchange is an exchange of equals and is not
unjust.
36 Geras (1985, p. 85).
(vii) Right and justice cannot rightly be categorised as merely juridical

principles; minimally, Geras argues, right and justice can also be
distributive principles.37 Merely juridical principles and concep-
tions of right and justice Marx does criticise.38 It is also possible
to have, and in fact Marx must have had, in order to mount a
critique of capitalism at all, some kind of abstract and ahistor-
ical principles of right or justice in terms of which different social
arrangements can be evaluated.
(viii) That is what, for instance, the principle “from each according
to his abilities, to each according to his needs”39 amounts to: a
principle of distributive justice.
(ix) Claims that Marx rests his critique on ethical principles of
freedom, community, emancipation, and so on, instead of a
proper theory of justice, rely on an inconsistent usage of texts
whereby a distinction is made between one kind of ethics and
another, which is not to be found in any of Marx’s works. “Marx
does, of course, condemn capitalism for its unfreedom, oppres-
sion, coercion, but so does he in substance condemn it for its
injustice. And just as, conversely, he does indeed identify princi-
ples of justice that are internal to and functional for the capitalist
mode of production, so also does he identify conceptions of
freedom and of self-development historically relative in exactly
the same way”.40 To pick one such category over another is arbi-
trary and unjustified as far as Marx’s own texts are concerned. It
should thus be rejected.
(x) To the amoralist counter-argument that Marx himself repeat-
edly repudiates any notion of a critique of capitalism founded
on justice, it was suggested by Cohen,41 and repeated by many
others since, that Marx both genuinely believed that he did not
37 Recall that Wood’s (1972a, 1972b, 2004), and some others’, early work, to which
Geras’ arguments are in part responses, tended to conflate these two distinct kinds of
concerns. This point is largely a rejection of that conflation.
38 Marx also rejected distributive principles, to which moralists generally reply with
points (viii) and (x) below.
39 Marx (1996, p. 215/I:25, 15).
40 Geras (1985, p. 62).
41 Cohen (1983).
have a theory of justice and that he nevertheless did in fact have

a theory of justice upon which his critique of capitalism rests.42
I will now examine each of these arguments, point by point. Point

(x) is simply an ad hoc stipulation to account for the painfully obvious
fact that the reading of the justice-theorists flatly contradicts every single
explicit statement on the matter that Marx himself ever made—some of
which have been cited above in section (A) of this appendix. (I consider it
unnecessary to supply further quotations to back this up, since absolutely
everyone in these debates agrees on this point.) Given Marx’s impres-
sive intellectual feats, absence of obvious cognitive pathologies, etc., this
alone gives us good reason to look for any other available reading before
accepting an interpretation with this implication.
The remaining points seem to construct a strong case, at least prima
facie, but closer inspection reveals that this is not in fact so. Point (i) is
not directly about Marx, and there is no independent reason to believe he
either held it or that it did significant work in any of his thinking about
the normative status of capitalism per se. Demonstrating that the value
the labourer receives is less than the value their labour creates is impor-
tant to Marx’s economics in that it allows him to explain the origin of
surplus value and thereby the origin of profits. However, he never uses
this point to criticise capitalism, he certainly never says he is doing any
such thing, and the only argument otherwise proceeds from the norma-
tively laden descriptions of this process of appropriation which will be
dealt with below. Similarly, points (v) and (vi) add nothing by way of
positive argumentation for the justice-theorist. Point (iv) makes some-
thing like a plausible claim, but a justice-theoretical conclusion does not
necessarily follow. Its argument for abstract and ahistorical “criteria” of
assessment is equally consistent with numerous other alternative kinds of
standards or criteria, including an ethics based on a normative notion of
human nature or an evaluative metric of human development. Conse-
quently, it too does no meaningful work for the justice-theorist in this
42 These points summarise in particular the excellent work in Geras (1985). It should
be noted that (x), unlike the others, is not formulated by Geras as a proposition in the
defence of the justice-theoretical interpretation. Instead, it is defended as the only viable
way of reconciling Marx’s explicit statements with what he takes to be the overwhelming
case made for that interpretation by points (i)–(ix).
context. And this has further implications for the consideration of points
(vii) and (viii).
Starting with (vii), there is no reason to assume that right and justice
cannot be categorised in merely politico-juridical terms. In fact, there is
a good argument for saying, as amoralists like Wood do, that this was
precisely how those terms were understood by Marx. On this reading,
when Marx criticises politico-juridical conceptions of right and justice he
was criticising precisely what he understood “justice” in general to be.
As far as reconstructing what Marx took himself to be doing, then, the
justice-theoretical claim Geras makes in (vii) has no force unless it can
demonstrate that Marx in fact held a conception of justice which goes
beyond merely politico-juridical concerns. Such a demonstration remains
outstanding. Naturally, our concepts of right and justice may differ from
Marx’s, in which case one can argue that Marx held something which we
would, and he would not, recognise as falling under the terms of right
and justice. If this is indeed the case, then the weight of the argument
falls on whether (ii) and (iii) enables the justice-theorist to excavate such
a principle or set thereof. I shall shortly argue that they do not.
Moving on to (viii), it seems correct to say that “from each according
to his ability, to each according to his needs” can rightly be called a
principle of distributive justice—or at least a principle of distribution—
in the sense that it is an abstract principle which is supposed to guide the
distribution of goods and services in a society. There is, however, no inde-
pendent reason to believe that this in any way conflicts with the amoralist
reading43 of principles of distribution, along with other principles guiding
and constraining the interactions between groups and individuals, as
appropriate or not only to certain contexts and not others, and therefore
good/bad or better/worse only relative to those contexts. When Marx
mentions this distributive maxim, it is in the context of describing socialist
society, and this maxim is offered precisely as the one most appropriate to
that kind of society (for more on which see Chapter 8). There is no inde-
pendent reason to believe that this distributive maxim is a stand-alone,
abstract, and ahistorical principle of justice by which capitalism is judged
and found wanting by Marx. If anything, it is part of a package—socialist
society—which is held, as a whole, to be superior to capitalism. Because
the distributive principle in question only appears as part of this wider
43 Again, see Wood (1972a, 1972b, 2004).

package which is valued as a totality, it is unable to do the independent

normative work of recommending one such package over the other that
a justice-theorist like Geras wants it to do. It can of course be recom-
mended in terms of other evaluative criteria, but that entails giving up
any justificatory force it would have had as an independent principle of
distributive justice.
This is further bolstered by the fact that the supposed distributive
maxim does not appear in any of Marx’s early works in which he first
develops his ideas on socialism and its normative foundations, such as the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Notes on James Mill, and
The Holy Family. It is discussed, briefly, in the German Ideology, but only
from the point of view of socialism, not in any discussion of capitalism.
If the principle in question were of real importance to Marx’s critique of
capitalism, we would certainly expect it to be discussed in that context,
which it never is, and to do some significant work in Marx’s thought on
capitalism, which it never seems to do. On the other hand, notions of
human species-being and human development appear numerous times,
receive at least some significant discussion, and definitely seem to do
important work for Marx both in the early writings and in his later works
when discussing capitalism, shown in Part I. These are therefore much
better candidates for the normative components of Marx’s critique of
capitalism
As concerns (ix), the first point to make is that such a distinc-
tion between principles of justice and other principles is, pace Geras,
not arbitrary. Given Marx’s explicit, repeated, and consistent rejection
of founding a critique of capitalism on right, justice, or distributive
concerns—a point recognised, incidentally, by justice-theorists, along with
all the other participants in these debates—this distinction allows those
who believe that Marx appeals to some kind of normative principles to
distinguish one category of such principles which is not subject to the crit-
icisms that Marx levels against those of morality, right, and justice. The
distinction between principles of justice and other ethical principles can
be considered arbitrary only if we already hold that there is an extremely
good reason to believe that Marx has and/or needs principles of justice
in the first place. As such, this claim too rests entirely on the arguments
for the justice-theoretical view that Geras presents in (ii) and (iii). If their
case is not entirely watertight, then (ix) is simply false, since a distinc-
tion along the lines proposed provides one way in which we can account
both for Marx’s normative commitments and his rejection of morality,
right, and justice. Since it is now clear that (ii) and (iii) must shoulder
the entire burden of Geras’ justice-theoretical interpretation, it is to these
that I now turn.
If the foregoing is correct, then Geras’ entire remaining case for
supposing that Marx had some principle(s) or a theory of justice rests
on nothing more than the claim that the language of “theft”, “robbery”,
etc., that he employs must imply a prior conception of justice which is
violated by the capitalist appropriation of surplus value. Since the distribu-
tive maxim mentioned in (iii) has already been dealt with, I shall focus
now on this sole remaining argument. It can be presented in syllogistic
form as follows:
(a) Descriptions in terms of “robbery”, “theft”, “plunder”, etc.,

presuppose some principle(s) or theory of justice, the stipulations
of which are violated by the object, process, or whatever that is
described in this manner.
(b) Marx describes capitalist appropriation of surplus value using terms
like “robbery”, “theft”, “plunder”, etc.
Therefore:
(c) Marx presupposes, or must presuppose, some principle(s) or theory
of justice.
There are at least three reasons to be suspicious of (c) which should

motivate a rejection of one or both of its premises. No principle of the
required sort is ever formulated by Marx (cf. the discussion of (viii)
above); there is no consensus among justice-theorists about what prin-
ciples are required for the critical work to which Marx is supposed to be
putting them; and, as we have seen in section (A) above, Marx himself
repeatedly denies having any such principles, and criticises those who
do repeatedly, consistently, and vociferously. Given his clarity and consis-
tency on this point, it would be extremely implausible to think that Marx
managed to be so completely wrong about his own view as to both have
such a theory and keep thinking that he doesn’t.
Since (b) is incontrovertible, those who, like me, wish to reject (c) must
find something wrong with (a). Numerous arguments have been offered
in favour of rejecting or explaining away (a), many of which fail.44 The
44 The most thorough treatment available are those of Geras (1985, pp. 65–69; 1992).
strongest reasons why I believe (a) should be rejected are the following.
First, using the descriptive cognates mentioned need not be taken to
presuppose a principle of justice being violated. Rather than necessarily
relying on an antecedent conception of justice of a very particular kind,
Marx may be read as engaging in an attempt to reform existing concep-
tions and/or usages of “theft” and its cognates in line with what he takes
to be their core meanings and centres of normative force, in order in
turn to help reform popular judgements about the nature of capitalist
appropriation for political purposes. The core meanings in question may
consist in, for instance, that in both capitalist appropriation and in more
familiar cases of theft, something is being appropriated from someone
else without their acceptance, that in (at least some of instances of) both
cases something is being so appropriated without the “losers’” awareness
and knowledge, and so on. By shifting the way in which this kind of
normatively laden language is used, certain actions and processes which
are normally thought of as morally salutary per definitionem—such as the
everyday purchase of labour-power in a capitalist economy—now come
to be described in terms which are more negatively laden. Even if no
new facts are added, such a shift in how these concepts are used may
nevertheless help bring about a change in the way the process of capi-
talist appropriation is thought of and evaluated—one which better suits
the political needs and interests of the proletariat qua revolutionary class.
Another possible interpretation of the relevant passages—again, at
least as well-founded as Geras’ justice-theoretical reading thereof—is
that by describing the process of capitalist appropriation in terms of
unequal exchange, theft, plunder, and so on, Marx is re-describing a
familiar process—a description buttressed by his economic theory and
its problem-solving power (e.g. its ability to explain the origin of profits
under equal exchange, or its ability to explain the possibility of economic
crises)—in a new way such that certain elements which were previously
obscured or unknown now come to be illuminated. These elements turn
out in fact to be the opposite of what they look like—viz. what looked
like free and equal exchange is shown in fact to be coerced and unequal
exchange and thus, in some sense, “theft”, “robbery”, etc.—and this in
turn causes, or at least is supposed to cause, the addressees to change their
conceptions and assessments of the object(s) of this re-description. In this
case no new concepts need to be added and no familiar concepts need to
shift either their meanings or their general usage. Instead, what changes
here is the way in which a familiar process is described or re-described as

a matter of fact.
Whereas the first alternative interpretation just outlined was concerned
with the reform of the terms of a language (or at least of their usage), the
second alternative interpretation first and foremost concerns the cognitive
grasp of the process in question through its re-description. In the latter
case, new descriptive knowledge is added which, in some way, leads to
a subversion of how a familiar process is thought of—with downstream
effects on how that process must now be evaluated. It remains an entirely
open question whether the terms or concepts used in this re-description
are, strictly speaking, accurately applied, and whether or not these terms
should be reformed in light of the new light shone upon the process of
capitalist appropriation. In the former case, by contrast, it need not be
the case that any further descriptive knowledge of the nature of capitalist
appropriation has been revealed; the question is purely one of whether
the terms in question could or should legitimately be shifted in meaning
and/or use. The two are not by any means exclusive: Marx may well have
been attempting both to illuminate the nature of capitalism and simul-
taneously to reform the relevant normatively laden language in a unified
manner, thereby reforming both our cognitive grasp of capitalist appro-
priation and the normatively laden language in terms of which we think
about, reflect on, and deliberate upon it.
It seems clear that both of the proposed alternative readings proceed
from the premise that Marx’s practise concerning, and perhaps also his
conception of, language, or at least of language-use, is a different one
from that implied by premise (a) of Geras’ justice-theoretical argument
above. Geras’ justice-theoretical premise (a) seems to rely on, at least inter
alia, the assumption that “theft” and its cognates necessarily presuppose a
violation of some principle of justice,45 that this principle must have some
clear, coherent, and determinate content, and that this clear, coherent,
and determinate content must be specified antecedently to its applica-
tion—whether by a theorist or by lay users. Geras’ justice-theoretical
premise (a), then, holds that only with a principle of justice specified
antecedently such that it has clear, coherent, and determinate content
could Marx have been able to characterise capitalist appropriation in terms
45 I shall henceforth stick to the singular for the sake of simplicity.

of “theft” and its cognates. I shall henceforth call this conception of

language and language-use the “justice-theoretical conception”.
There are at least four reasons to doubt that Marx’s practice with
regard to concepts and their usage was of the kind that Geras presup-
poses, or needs to presuppose, for premise (a). Firstly, there is no direct
evidence in Marx’s writings or elsewhere to suggest that he adhered
to, or took himself to adhere to, the justice-theoretical conception of
language and language-use. Secondly, Marx’s practice with regard to
the concepts he uses to describe and evaluate capitalism is hard to
square with the strictures of the justice-theoretical conception of language
and its use. For instance, Marx’s usages of the terms for “alienation”
(Entäusserung and Entfremdung) simply do not have any one single,
clear, coherent, and determinate meaning in their various appearances
throughout Marx’s oeuvre. This is particularly clear in the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, where he distinguishes between four
distinct kinds of “alienation”. Although they are connected in important
ways, there is, as we saw in Chapter 7, no one single, clear, coherent, and
determinate meaning that they all share. Admittedly, this is an unusu-
ally dramatic instance, but it is not the only one. In the interests of
reconstructing Marx’s theories and their presuppositions in the most plau-
sible manner possible, this consideration militates against reading Marx
in terms of the justice-theoretical conception of language and language-
use that Geras presupposes, in favour of a more fluid, open-ended, and
pragmatic one more in line with the alternative readings I have proposed.
Thirdly, the justice-theoretical view of language and language-use that
Geras relies on does not seem to cohere as well with Marx’s theory
of practice, or with his general conception of the connections between
concepts, modes of thought, and their natural, social, and historical
contexts as mine does. One of the central components of this aspect of
Marx’s thought is precisely that the ways in which human beings concep-
tualise and make sense of their natural, social, and historical environment
are themselves ongoing human practices which are, in important ways
and to a significant extent, influenced by the context within which their
human creators are situated. On such a conception, it is plausible to
suppose that language and language-use is a rather fluid and indetermi-
nate sort of thing: one whose elements are generally not tied down to
clear definitions; are sensitive to the needs and interests of those who use
them; and which, in turn, tend to shift and change, more or less explicitly
and more or less consciously, with the altering needs and interests of their
users. If we grant this, and if we further accept that concepts can influence
political practice in a significant way, then it follows that language and
language-use is itself something which can be, at least in principle, some-
thing which it is worth trying to change in order better to further one’s
political purposes. Again, this coheres much better with the alternative
readings suggested than it does with that of the justice-theorists.
Fourthly, the more fluid and indeterminate conception of language
and language-use, its connections to human practical activity and the
needs and interests inherent therein, and the resulting thesis about the
pragmatic revisability of language, all seem to cohere better with Marx’s
consistent emphasis—throughout his life—on developing the concepts
one employs to understand an aspect of reality such that they are best able
to match the “real movements” of the object of study, rather than setting
up an antecedently defined framework which the objects of study are
then subsequently analysed and/or evaluated in terms of. This includes
not only Marx’s discussions and analyses of straightforwardly descrip-
tive matters, such as in his critique of the classical political economists’
superficial analysis of capitalist social relations in the Economic and Philo-
sophical Manuscripts of 1844 46 and or his critique of Proudhon in the
Poverty of Philosophy for setting up a scheme of abstract and ahistor-
ical concepts prior to detailed empirical study—badly compromising the
latter as a result. It also occurs in at least one context, namely in the
1837 letter to his father, in which Marx has both normative and descrip-
tive concerns in one and the same investigation—namely his projected
study of law and legal systems.47 In this letter, one of Marx’s main stated
concerns is, as in the other instances just mentioned, that the concepts
needed to understand and evaluate something need to be developed
alongside, and in response to, the object of study. He contrasts this with
his own earlier idealistic attempts—as well as those of Kant and Fichte—
at proceeding from antecedently defined concepts and categories which
are then subsequently applied to the objects of study. Not only does this
further underscore that such concepts are malleable and should, when
appropriate, be altered or further developed in response to the needs and
interests of their users; it also explicitly presents an approach to language
and its use precisely in line with the alternative conception I have outlined
46 See for instance I/2:234–235.

47 III/1:9–18, esp. 10–11 and 15–16.
from the point of view of a critique of the justice-theoretical conception.

Note that none of these four reasons constitute anything like a knock-
down argument against the justice-theoretical conception of language and
language-use that Geras needs to presuppose for his argument to hold
water. What they do provide is very good reason to prefer the more fluid,
indeterminate, and pragmatic conception over Geras’ justice-theoretical
one, which, in lieu of further evidence on the matter, renders the former
position the more plausible of the two.
If, then, it is plausible to believe that Marx held a view of language
and language-use which is fluid, indeterminate, and pragmatic in nature,
responsive to the needs and interests of its users, and capable of
contributing to social change, the two alternative readings proposed
above make a lot of sense. In the case of one of the alternative read-
ings, Marx can be interpreted as trying to shift the meanings and/or
uses of familiar normatively loaded terms such that they better suit the
needs and interests of the proletariat qua revolutionary class. In the case
of the more cognitive reading, Marx can be read as exploiting the fluidity
and indeterminacy of the relevant normatively laden concepts in order
to highlight certain previously unseen—now revealed, thanks to their
re-description—aspects of the process of capitalist appropriation and accu-
mulation as in fact, at least in crucial respects, the opposite of what they
are normally taken to be. Since Geras’ justice-theoretical view implied
in premise (a) is such a particularly strong one—and, furthermore, is
used to support a highly speculative conclusion—the burden of proof
lies on Geras to find decent support for such a claim if his argument
as per (a)–(c) is to go through. Unfortunately for moralist readings, such
evidence is nowhere to be found. The alternative readings proposed, and
the view of language and language-use which underlies them, have signif-
icant advantages, though they too remain speculative. They cohere better
with Marx’s actual practice with concepts and conceptual development;
they cohere better with his general account of practice, base and super-
structure, and so on; and they cohere far better with what Marx himself
has to say about the relationship between contexts, the objects of study,
and the language to be employed for making sense of them. Perhaps
most importantly, the alternative readings are in general less speculative
in nature, insofar as they do not demand that Marx must have had some
vitally important theoretical components of a kind which he both never
develops and explicitly, repeatedly, and vociferously rejects.
In summary, then, I have argued that a close look at the evidence and
arguments that Geras offers in favour of the justice-theoretical reading of
Marx reveals that his case is extremely flimsy, resting, at best, solely on the
syllogism (a)–(c). Furthermore, I have argued that there is little reason to
accept the major premise (a) in light of the availability of competing and
more plausible interpretations of what Marx is doing with the norma-
tively charged concepts in question—interpretations which need not rely
on implicit conceptions of justice. This, together with other good reasons
to reject the conclusion in (c), means that the interpretation in (a) ought
to be rejected. However, even if (a)–(c) is not rejected, the non-existent
principle(s) of justice required to make sense of these claims still do not
deserve serious consideration as the normative foundations of Marx’s
critique of capitalism, if only because the only diagnostic critiques he does
develop and retain rest on other foundations altogether.
One moralistic way in which these other grounds can be understood
is in terms of abstract and ahistorical principles or ideals of freedom,
equality, community, rationality, and so on.48 I believe that this position
carries a major and important insight—namely that Marx’s chief objec-
tions to capitalism were made in terms of its detrimental effects on human
freedom, self-rule, or self-direction, as diagnosed in his critique of capi-
talism that I’ve discussed throughout this book. Where this account goes
wrong, however, is in the way it posits these principles or ideals without
sufficient attention to the way they are grounded in Marx’s accounts of
human development, human beings, and human society. This is what I
have tried to provide throughout Part I, setting the stage for the later
chapters’ accounts of alienation, democracy, and socialism. Furthermore,
the way this other moralist kind of approach posits values externally—
either from the point of view of another society, or from some supposed
48 Brenkert (1979), Comninel (2010), arguably DeGoyler (1992) and Kamenka (1972)
(Kamenka 1969, by contrast, seems to claim these commitments in turn derive from a
normative conception of human nature or species-being), Lukes (1985), Mcbride (1975),
Peffer (1990), Sichel (1972), Soper (1987) and Sowell (1963). Allen’s (1974) appeal to
utility may also, arguably, fit into this category. There is a version of this claim according
to which Marx criticises capitalism in terms of the socialist and/or communist distributive
maxims as higher forms of society (cf. Lukes 1985; McBride 1975; Miller 1983; Nielsen
1988; Riley 1983; Sayers 1989, 1994, 2007a). Such a view, it seems to me, must in
turn rest on some other kind of normative foundations in terms of which the “higher”
and “lower” forms of society are determined as such. As a result of this they collapse,
ultimately, into more familiar variants (an argument Geras advances against Sayers in the
former’s 1992).
neutral or “God’s-eye” point of view—further neglects Marx’s funda-

mentally realist (and thus contextual) approach, premised as it is on the
evaluation of competing, achievable alternatives in light of their differing
social realisations. In Marx’s social theory, moral values and beliefs form
part of the superstructure which arises and is, at least in part, gener-
ated, conditioned, and constrained by the material base upon and within
which it does so. An acceptable account of the normative components
of Marx’s critique of capitalism must not only say something about the
surface commitments to, e.g. freedom, but must explicate them within
the deeper accounts of human nature, history, politics, and social change
they are embedded within.
There are three principal ways in which these surface commitments to
things like freedom can be so explicated: by grounding them in a norma-
tive conception of human nature; by grounding them in the social and
historical contexts within which they arise; and by grounding them jointly
in a conception of human development and their relevant contexts. In the
remainder of this appendix, I will briefly discuss and reject the first two;
the last is examined and defended in Part I.
(C) An Ethical Human Nature

One of the ways that Marx’s adherence to notions of, e.g. freedom can be
understood, without moralistic appeals to ahistorical and abstract norma-
tive principles, is by grounding it in an ethical49 conception of human
nature. There are basically two ways in which this can be done.50 On the
one hand, the human “nature” or “essence” in question can be cashed
out in terms of distinctly human capacities for rational thought and delib-
eration, self-directed and other-directed activity, capacities for sociality
49 It is logically possible to propose a normative conception of human nature which is,

for instance, aesthetically or rationally normative, but not ethical. Positing such a concep-
tion as a reading of Marx is neither textually plausible, nor does it seem to have been
pursued by anyone grouped together in this section. Arguably, a normative conception of
rationality does play a part in those approaches which read Marx’s critique in terms of
objective interests or amoral goods, as discussed above.
50 I deliberately exclude, for obvious reasons, those who believe Marx to have an
Aristotelian account of human nature, but which holds this not to do any important
ethical work, e.g. Wood (2004) and Buchanan (1982) for the later, but not the earlier
(from 1844 onwards) Marx, since these reduce to some other (e.g. moralist or amoralist)
interpretation.
and community, etc., which are important as conditions for, and/or

constituents of, human development, and valued as such.51 So long as
this development of human nature is valued for the fact that it is such a
development and flourishing, it is this latter (i.e. human development)
evaluative conception that does the work of providing the normative
components on which Marx’s critique of capitalism is held to be based.
As such, this approach collapses into the second kind of internal critique
discussed in Part I. To the extent that such a conception differs from the
approach I advocate, my objections are that my approach can make better
sense of how these commitments (freedom, self-direction, a conception
of human nature, etc.) hang together, how they cohere with Marx’s other
statements about human needs, wealth, etc., and as a result my reading
can muster greater textual plausibility and depth of analysis.
On the other hand, a normative conception of human nature can be
cashed out in terms of a more detailed account of human nature with
a particular essence of telos, the ethical content of which is either basic
in some way or underwritten by an ergon-argument. We see this kind of
argument most prominently in the work of Nasser and Kain, the general
form of which can be sketched as follows52 :
1. There is a natural function, essence, or telos distinctive of the human

species and all members thereof (presumably barring pathology).
2. This function, essence, or telos constitutes the ethical good for
human beings.
3. This function, essence, or telos consists in one or more of the
following: rational thought and deliberation; freedom; self-directed
activity; autonomy; other-directed activity (in the sense of having
as its intentional goal the satisfaction also of other humans’ needs);
and/or the formation of healthy human relationships and commu-
nities.
51 Aronovitch (1980), Avineri (1968), Booth (1992) and Buchanan (1982) (for the
young Marx of 1844, but not the later one). Fromm (2004), Gilbert (1992), Leopold
(2007), probably Miller (1992) and Wilde (1998), see also McMurty (1978).
52 Kain (1988, 1992), Kamenka (1969), and Nasser (1975). Wood (2004) has inter-
esting points when it comes to the connection between Aristotle’s and Marx’s view of
human nature, but denies that this plays any non-amoralist normative role in Marx.
4. In order to achieve the human ethical good, it is therefore necessary

to ensure that these constituents of the human function, essence, or
telos, as per 3, are developed, nurtured, or realised.
This argument is then typically coupled with a reading of Marx’s theory

of history and critique of capitalism according to which these norma-
tive foundations require freedom from both natural and socially imposed
necessity or compulsion, that capitalism by its industrial and technological
advances has made such liberation possible in principle, but that capitalist
relations of production prevent this potential from being realised by the
nature of the social forms of necessity it imposes—a critique expressed
in especially the theory of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844. This view can affirm the aforementioned points
regarding the absence and repudiation of abstract principles in Marx’s
works traditionally advanced against moralist readings, while retaining a
genuinely normative basis for Marx’s critique of capitalism. In contrast to
the previous version discussed, this conception of an ethical human nature
rests not on a deeper commitment to human development. Instead, it
requires a much more limited account of which human essence or telos is
valuable in itself, as a result of which it does not have the same breadth
and open-endedness of the view that I advocate.
The account of a normative human nature in terms of a human essence
or telos, however, is not particularly plausible as a reading of Marx. First,
there is little explicit talk of a human “essence” in Marx’s later works.
This is not due to any substantial change from a “humanist” to an “anti-
humanist” position on Marx’s part—as is shown when one compares
Marx’s discussion of the difference between human beings and animals
from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to Volume I of
Capital (see Chapters 3, 4, and 7). Rather, as we have seen, the shift is
one of terminology only.53 Even though the very young Marx operates
with a conception of human “essence”, this has a very different struc-
ture from that of the static and ahistorical essences in, e.g. Aristotle and
Feuerbach. To take just one example, in the 6th of the Theses on Feuer-
bach Marx criticises Feuerbach for resolving the “religious essence into
53 For discussion of the use of the term “alienation” in the older Marx, see Cowling
2006.
the human essence”. “But”, he writes, “the human essence is no abstrac-

tion inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of
the social relations”; on Marx’s view, this conception drives Feuerbach to
abstract from the historical process and fix religious ideas in the isolated
human individual, rendering “essence” something which “can be compre-
hended only as ‘genus’, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally
unites the many individuals”.54 I discuss some of the positive implications
of this discussion for how Marx thinks about human nature or essence in
Chapters 3, 4, and 7. Here, I want only to draw one important point
from it. Any Aristotelian conception of human essence or telos as well as
(in particular premise 1 of) the ergon-argument sketched above, clearly
presupposes, and needs to presuppose, a human essence as an abstraction
inherent in every single human individual, as a kind of “genus” gener-
ality which somehow “naturally” unites all the individuals falling within
it. As such, it is a position which Marx explicitly rejects, at least from 1845
onwards. Furthermore, as I show in the section on “The Nature of Alien-
ation” in Chapter 7, since after these criticisms Marx continues to write
about human nature in essentially the same way as he does before (e.g.
in 1844), the Aristotelian reading of Marx’s supposed ethical conception
of human nature is implausible even as a reading of Marx’s views prior to
1845. It should therefore be rejected.
Secondly, Marx himself never formulates anything like a kind of ergon-
argument anywhere in his writings. If he in fact had a view that was so
close to Aristotle’s in this manner, it seems highly implausible that he
would both (a) fail to provide this crucial foundation, and (b) fail to
acknowledge his debts to the master—especially in light of the fact that
he readily acknowledges his significant debts to Aristotle elsewhere.
Third and last, since, as I show in Part I, there is a viable alterna-
tive which allows us both to account for the normative significance of
the kinds of human needs and capacities this approach rightly highlights,
without having to posit either an implausible notion of human “essence”
or a non-existent argument or argumentative structure, we have further
reason to look elsewhere to the foundations provided by a metric of
human development. With this reading out of the way, I turn to the
last remaining alternative reading of the normative foundations of Marx’s
54 Marx (1992, p. 423/IV:3, p. 21).

critique of capitalism, namely that which reads that critique as an internal

critique formulated in terms of principles.
(D) Internal Critique Based on Ethical Principles

Fourthly, there is the kind of “internal critique” or “immanent critique”55
advocated by, among others, Seyla Benhabib and Steven Lukes, which,
while still being one that primarily employs normative principles of some
kind for its critical purposes, seeks to analyse and develop the normative
principles which are generated within, and also in part by, the various
contexts within which they arise, and analysing the various inconsisten-
cies, contradictions, and ideological perversions to which the normative
fabric of a given social context is subject. The principles in question may
be ethical or more narrowly moral in nature, but they can also belong to
wider normative concerns to do with, e.g. rationality or aesthetic consid-
erations. This kind of internal analysis is performed in order to criticise
things like a society’s—and other relevantly similar societies’—empirical
beliefs, normative goals and ideals, as well as practices, social relations,
institutions, legislation, policy, or whatever. Instead of criticising a society
in terms of normative principles assumed or imposed abstractly and ahis-
torically, such critique is “internal” in the sense that it criticises a form of
society in terms of that society’s own internal evaluative standards.
Not all variants of internal critique—or readings of Marx in terms
thereof—fit into this category, however; many rest on normative foun-
dations which are not internal in the required sense. We must thus
distinguish at least two senses in which a given critique can be internal.
The first, normative, sense is the one just given, and it is in this sense
and in this sense only, that internal critique can be said to be based on
normative foundations interestingly different from, e.g. moralist readings
or readings based on an ethical human nature. Internal readings in this
normative sense include, inter alia, those who read Marx in terms of an
emancipatory telos of liberation from natural necessity, in turn derived
from a descriptive analysis of human historical development,56 those who
55 Some writers who read Marx’s work in part or in whole in terms of such a notion
(to be clarified below) include Antonio (1981), Benhabib (1984), Buchanan (1981),
Buchwalter (1991), Chitty (1997), Geuss (1981), Lohmann (1986), Lukes (1985) and
Sayers (1989, 1994, and possibly 2007a).
56 Antonio (1981).
read Marx as criticising capitalism in terms of the Lockean natural rights

theory it generates,57 or more broadly those who read Marx as in some
way critiquing capitalist society in terms of the values and normative stan-
dards it, in part or in whole, generates58 In addition to these, there are
also positions which appeal more broadly to people’s ends and ideals,
at least in part determined by the contexts within which these develop,
and hold that various forms of descriptive investigation (e.g. into polit-
ical economy) can rightly lead to the revision of these principles, with
downstream effects on individual and collective action.59
There is another, methodological, sense in which the terms “internal
critique” and “immanent critique” are sometimes used without appealing
to the same kind of normative components. One such reading would
be one that interprets Marx as critiquing capitalism for failing to live
up to the achievable potentials available at a given stage of develop-
ment—be these potentials for human emancipation, human development,
maximising productive outputs of goods and services, or whatever. Such
critique is internal insofar as capitalism is critiqued only in light of certain
contextual parameters, such as a certain level of development of the
productive powers. However, to the extent that such critique invokes
evaluative criteria which are not principles internal to a given context, its
normative components collapse into one of the other options discussed
elsewhere in this appendix or in Part I.60
As is the case with many readings of Marx and the normative founda-
tions for his critique of capitalism, there are elements worth preserving
in the principles-based internal reading as well, particularly in terms of
its ability to elucidate the elements of ideologikritik in Marx’s works and
his love of demonstrating the hypocrisy and illusory nature of appeals
to the supposed freedom and equality inherent in capitalist exchange
and production. However, it is not clear that Marx’s own rejection and
57 Lohmann (1986).
58 Benhabib (1984), Buchanan (1981) and Geuss (1981).
59 This seems to be, at least part of, Geuss (1981), McCarney (1990) and Chitty
(1997).
60 Lohmann (1986), for instance, reads Marx as both engaged in immanent critique
of the kind just discussed, but also developing a (rather unclear) form of abstract and
ahistorical critique as well. Buchwalter (1991) believes Marx must rest on some abstract
and ahistorical values of rationality, self-realisation, and so on. Lukes (1985) holds Marx
to mix forms of internal and a more moralistic form of critique.
critique of capitalism in fact rests on any of the above-mentioned internal,

or any relevantly similar, normative principles. While delighting in demon-
strating the illusory nature of equality under capitalism, for instance, he
never uses these principles or ideals for any further positive purpose in
terms of mounting a critique of capitalism or for envisioning a future
socialist society.
Furthermore, it is not clear that this kind of internal critique reading
can account for Marx’s numerous statements, some of which we have
discussed in section (A) of this appendix, rejecting ethical principles for
these purposes. In principle, it seems an account of the origins of a
society’s conceptions of right, justice, and morality in which these arise
within, and are at least in part determined by, their contexts could be
combined with an exposition of capitalism showing it to in fact violate
such principles and on that basis, recommend revolutionary action—
this seems to be exactly what the internal critique reading wants to
establish. If successful, this would offer a way in which Marx’s views
(as discussed in particular by Wood and others) on right, justice, and
morality can be squared with a normatively grounded critique of capi-
talism without requiring problematic appeals to a normative conception
of human nature. However, any view which takes Marx to be relying on
principles of some kind, as this approach must, seems to run into the
following cluster of general problems:
1. Marx nowhere devotes significant time or space to elaborating

such principles or sets thereof in their own right (with the partial
exception of freedom, which I examine in Chapter 3).
2. As we have seen in our discussion of the justice-theoretical readings
in section (A) of this appendix, Marx explicitly denies relying on any
notions of right, justice, distributive maxims, or morality whatsoever.
3. As we have also seen, Marx explicitly, consistently, and vociferously
criticises all those who do rely on such notions to criticise capitalism.
4. It is not clear that a notion of right, justice, morality, and/or any
distributive maxims either (a) play a significant role in the formu-
lation and deployment of, or (b) are required to make sense of the
normative grounds for, Marx’s linchpin critical diagnosis of capitalist
society as expressed in his two respective theories of alienation.
There seems to be no way in which this cluster of objections can be

addressed without appealing to alternative normative components such
as amoralism or a human development-based view. Having rejected the
former in section (A) above, I advocate the latter in Part I.
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mentary Volume, 7 , 251–268.
Zibechi, R. (2012). Territories in resistance: A cartography of Latin American
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Index
A 85, 86, 88, 91, 92, 104, 105,

Alienation 108–110, 112, 119–121,
first theory of, 7–9, 91, 103, 109, 123–132, 135–138, 140, 143,
120 145, 147, 150–152, 156, 157,
from labour/production, 63, 119, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165,
128, 146, 151 168–170, 172–174, 180, 183,
from others, 11, 63, 119, 147, 151, 187–191, 195, 198, 200,
195, 200 202–211, 213–219, 221, 222,
from product of labour, 63, 119, 226–246, 249, 250, 253–256,
122, 133, 200 258–260
from species-being, 11, 63, 119, Communism, 2, 22, 171
143, 146, 151, 206 Communist society, 168
Amoralism, 227, 229, 237–239, 261 Contradictions (of capitalism), 4, 11,
Authority, 99, 136, 137, 162, 179 23, 41, 131, 151, 195, 198, 199,
On Authority, by F. Engels, 139 204, 205
C D
Capital, 122, 127, 132, 137, 140, Democracy, 4, 7–11, 70, 82, 84, 87,
143, 148, 163, 164, 201, 203, 89–101, 103, 105, 107–109,
241 155, 156, 172, 213, 253
Capitalism, 1–12, 21–23, 31, 41–43, Division of labour, 5, 11, 131, 136,
45, 50, 53, 58, 62–65, 70, 79, 137, 139, 156, 158, 161–163,
284 INDEX
165, 167, 168, 172, 174–176, M

180, 183, 190, 214, 217 Markets, 5, 42, 58, 59, 61, 110, 129,
Domination, 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 40, 58, 59, 131, 158–161, 166, 167, 169,
61, 62, 89, 97, 101, 120, 125, 180, 183, 186–190, 201, 214,
127, 128, 130, 137, 140, 148, 215, 217
149, 159–164, 190, 200, 201, Marx, K., 1–12, 21–43, 45, 49–70,
207, 208, 216, 217 79–101, 103–109, 111, 112,
impersonal domination, 5, 61, 62, 119–152, 155–175, 180,
129–131, 140, 158, 159, 161, 182–184, 187, 188, 190, 191,
180, 189, 190, 203, 214 195–207, 209, 210, 213–219,
personal domination, 61, 62, 130, 221–224, 226–260
131, 158, 161, 167 Method (of political theory)
agent-centred, 10, 109–112, 195,
206, 213
realisation-oriented, 9, 108, 112,
E 213
Engels, F., 93, 105, 111, 112, 128, realist, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 12, 23, 104,
137, 139, 150, 155, 157, 158, 207, 209, 213, 214
161, 165, 196, 197, 209 Moralism, 7, 209, 222, 233, 236,
238–241, 243, 252–254, 256,
258
F
Freedom, 1, 2, 4–7, 9–12, 21, 25, N
26, 40, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 54, Nature, 10, 11, 21, 22, 24, 29, 33,
57–64, 70, 79, 83, 84, 91–93, 49–51, 53–55, 57, 58, 65, 69,
96, 97, 111, 119, 130, 140, 141, 79, 80, 86–88, 109, 132, 134,
146, 151, 155, 157, 160, 163, 137, 138, 140, 142–144, 146,
166, 170, 172, 182, 189, 195, 149, 151, 156, 164, 169, 170,
198, 204, 207–210, 213, 214, 173, 197, 198, 200, 205, 207,
216, 221, 229, 233, 236, 238, 208, 213, 215, 217, 221, 224,
239, 241, 243, 253–256, 259, 226, 228, 238, 240, 248, 249,
260 252, 254, 256, 258–260
human nature, 50, 51, 58
P
H
Planning, 5, 61, 131, 158–161, 166,
Hayek, Friedrich, 10, 156, 172, 183,
175, 178, 183–188, 190, 214,
186–188, 190
217
Human nature, 7, 10, 37, 40, 49, 51,
52, 55, 56, 58, 87, 109, 141,
147, 189, 221, 222, 228, 232, R
233, 244, 253–258, 260 Realism, 2–5, 23, 111, 207, 209, 214
INDEX 285
Republicanism, 2, 92 195, 197, 200, 202–204, 207,

Revolution, 4, 5, 10, 12, 39, 84, 100, 209, 214, 217, 218, 229, 235,
106, 108, 110, 150, 175, 190, 237, 246, 253
191, 196, 199, 200, 203–205, Socialist society, 2, 11, 22, 156, 157,
207, 231, 235, 236 162, 167, 168, 170, 172, 183,
190, 196, 217–219, 242, 245,
260
S
Socialism, 2, 4, 8, 10–12, 22, 23,
41–43, 70, 91, 92, 95, 104, 105,
111, 112, 139, 152, 155–158, W
161, 162, 165, 166, 168–175, Weber, Max, 10, 156, 172, 173,
180, 182, 183, 187, 188, 190, 175–177, 180, 181, 188, 190

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Karl Marx’s Realist

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Cover image: © duncan1890/E+/Getty Image

I owe a great thanks to my Ph.D. supervisors Raymond Geuss and

A couple of chapters of the book have been previously published. Parts

Part I Human Development and Freedom

Part II Alienation and Democracy

Part III Alienation: The Unfreedom of Capitalism

Appendix: A Brief Overview of the (Other) Principal

Marx is a theorist of emancipation, famous as a trailblazing analyst of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

another, there’s a tendency not to explore the foundational role played by

socialism. My reconstruction begins by explaining the normative commit-

reconstruction of how all the main elements of his critique of capitalism

freedom as non-domination and defended against common misconceived

With the analysis of Marx’s first theory of alienation in place, Chapter 5

Chapter 4, basically consists in a familiar Young Hegelian critical concept of “alienation”

the years 1843–4, leading to the second theory of alienation that he

and reproduce certain forms of power that come to dominate their

between the productive powers/forces and relations and between workers

Rawls, J. (2005). Political liberalism (Expanded Edition). Columbia University

Tabak, M. (2020). Marx’s philosophy of revolution and freedom: A critical

Human Development and Freedom

The core of Marx’s thought is his conception of human beings, activity,

Marx values human development as the development of powers, as the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

The Basic Structure of Marx’s

1. It is valuable for human beings to realise their powers of free or self-

It’s important to note the contextual parameters involved in 3 and 4.

Human Development as the Development of Powers

The same sentiment is echoed in the Grundrisse, where Marx writes

[W]hat is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities,

Before this, in the same work, Marx describes the production of a

3 Marx (1992, p. 354/I:2, p. 271/394), emphases in the original.

Finally, he returns to this point in Volume 3 of Capital, writing of the

7 Marx (1991, p. 959/II:15, p. 795).

paragraph. Instead, particular decisions about which powers to value and

8 Marx (1993, p. 409/II.1.2, p. 322).

11 See Sen (1992, 1993, 1999, 2010).

called a normative theory of needs16 that’s distinct from his commitment

(a) something which is a requirement for the avoidance of harm,

individuals, social institutions, and more besides. It therefore includes all

24 Leopold (2007, p. 228).

27 Marx (1990, p. 125/II:6, p. 69).

When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruc-

30 Marx (1992, p. 365/I:2, p. 425).

mobile phones, the internet—in time becomes necessary to function in

The Interaction Between Powers and Needs

The connection between needs and powers alluded to in this passage,

wages and benefits, decreasing workplace domination, stopping workplace

up their powers willingly and that we should expect people in positions

Human Development and Real Politics

of genuine moral import and potentially of significant value to agents

is not a list of what it would mean to be a fully developed human being,

43 Wilkinson and Pickett (2010).

issues to do with indeterminacy, disagreement, ranking, and commensu-

Wright, E. O. (2010). Envisioning real utopias. Verso.

Marx has a positive concept of freedom as self-direction,1 rooted in an