Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 3
How Marx Traces the Roots of
Alienation to Capitalist Society
(page 2)
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Marx analyzed the basic features of capitalist society, showing what it does to human beings, and how the system destroys our humanity. Marx showed how the basic capitalist features of money and greed transform human beings’ social interaction and psyche into alienated interaction and soul that are based on alienated false needs. Such alienated needs can be traced to the dead and abstract inhuman power of money and private property which are based on competitive relations between people — relations in which people’s humanity is distorted and debased:
“Every man speculates upon creating a new need in another in order to force him to a new sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence, and to entice him into new kind of pleasure and thereby into economic ruin. Everyone tries to establish over others an alien power in order to find there the satisfaction of his own egoistic need. With the mass of objects, therefore, there also increases the realm of alien entities to which man is subjected. Every new product is a new potentiality of mutual deceit and robbery. Man becomes increasingly poor as a man; he has increasing need of money in order to take possession of the hostile being. . . . The quantity of money becomes increasingly its only important quality. Just as it reduces every entity to its abstraction, so it reduces itself in its own development to a quantitative entity. Excess and immoderation become its true standard. This is shown subjectively partly in the fact that the expansion of production and of needs becomes an ingenious and always calculating subservience to inhuman, depraved, unnatural, and imaginary appetites. Private property does not know how to change crude needs into human; its idealism is fantasy, caprice, and fancy. No eunuch flatters his tyrant more shamefully or seeks by more infamous means to stimulate his jaded appetite, in order to gain some favor, than does the eunuch of industry, the entrepreneur, in order to acquire a few silver coins or to charm the gold from the purse of his dearly beloved neighbor. (Every product is a bait by means of which the individual tries to entice the essence of the other person, his money. Every real or potential need is a weakness which will draw the bird into the lime. Universal exploitation of human communal life. As every imperfection of man is a bond with heaven, a point from which his heart is accessible to the priest, so every want is an opportunity for approaching one’s neighbor, with an air of friendship, and saying, ‘Dear friend, I will give you what you need, but you know the conditio sine qua non. You know what ink you must use in signing yourself over to me. I shall swindle you while providing your enjoyment.’) The entrepreneur accedes to the most depraved fancies of his neighbor, plays the role of pander between him and his needs, awakens unhealthy appetites in him, and watches for every weakness in order, later, to claim the remuneration for this labor of love.”[2]
Marx saw very early on that money and a social system that is based on making products for money (profit), is a system in which the essence of all human beings is subjected to the drive for money and profit at the expense of real human needs. Such a system can only produce a deeply crippled human being. Marx had a profound understanding of exactly what capitalism does to human’s social life as well as human’s psychological make-up. Marx says, after we translate the 19th century language to today’s language, that most social and psychological behavior in capitalist society can be traced to the drive for profit, exploitation, and oppression of others. Both the oppressor and the oppressed are the slaves of the inhuman drive for profit. In such a system all human relationships reflect the need of the Dollar and not real human needs. Under such a system our emotions and thoughts are not genuine. They must in one fashion or another reflect the fluctuation of dollar and the irrational unstable social system behind it. Thus, in a system driven by the idolization of profit human beings are very weak; they have very little internal strength. Real strength comes from a productive relation to work and nature, in which humans can overcome separateness by treating each other with love and solidarity. Such human relationships can emerge only by overcoming the profound alienation that exist in all primitive (from a rich human point of view) class societies. Capitalism is not the exception of such class societies, but their highest stage that carries some of the most odious and explosive contradictions.
Marx says that under such a system needs are phony and artificially created. The weaker you are and the deeper you feel your insecurities from having exploitative relations to yourself and others, the more you need to rely on money and the artificial needs that it buys. Money and the dependency on things and consumption may make you feel that you are a “secure” human being. But in reality you are a wounded, weak and desperate human being without love.
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[2]From Karl Marx Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, quoted in Marx’s Concept of Man by Erich Fromm, pages 141-142, emphasis in original.