News and Letters Essay Article April 1998

Alienation and the objectivity of freedom

by David L. Anderson

My days are full of the kind of alienation one feels in the modern world. I know my day is not my own. There is a division of me from my very essence, who I am. I work with my hands, which I like to do; I come from a family of mechanically-inclined people. I should be enjoying what I do, but the nature of our society and our labor is such that I don't.

Ten years ago, I wrote an article about this called "Alienation of the Human Spirit" (N&L, April 1987). At first, I liked the article up to a point, but something was gnawing at me. Two weeks later, I read Raya Dunayevskaya's "Why Hegel's PHENOMENOLGY? Why Now?" in the May 8, 1987 NEWS & LETTERS. In it she showed that Hegel's PHENOMENOLGY of Mind tells you about a lot of things that go down even after you "gain a mind of your own," in other words, even after you, as a worker, realize that you are alienated. There are so many traps you still face-stoicism, skepticism, even the "unhappy consciousness." All of a sudden, I was no longer satisfied with what I had written.

I had written that article because the alienation in the lives of those around me was becoming so bad. All this came back to mind a year ago, when I received a call that a close friend of mine had taken a gun and shot himself. The shock that hit me was not only remembering him, but the recollection of who I am. I am not much different from that person.

Three years ago, another friend overdosed on drugs for the third and final time. He was no idiot; he was considered one of the "smart ones." Yet even he could find no way out of this alienated life. That is why I say the dead weigh heavily on me. The dead and the living dead need an answer. We need to spell out the objectivity and the subjectivity of the Idea of Freedom.

CAPITALISM'S MANY-SIDED ALIENATIONS

As an answer, most Leftists would give you "the plan." It's like religion-that is, as soon as you find god (in this case, revolution), everything's going to be all right. But we are still in the pre-history of humanity. Many things still need to be worked out. The religious preachers talk about people who are alienated as if they suffer from some moral deficiency, some deficiency of character. But it is the life these people live that causes their alienation, not some moral deficiency.

Another friend of mine was good with his hands, a skilled worker. In the almost 20 years since I graduated from high school, the jobs are gone. He got his foot in the door of a good paying job just long enough to get used to it. All of a sudden, those jobs are gone and the nature of the work that remains is now different and more alienating.

Marx described this process in his 1844 essay "Alienated Labor." He shows that the product is of course alienated or ripped off from the worker. But he also shows that there is a deeper problem: Your very activity of laboring is alienated-if you're "lucky" to have a job. With alienated labor you're trapped in alienation from your species-being or humanity. It becomes a question of "it's either me or someone else," since there's always 500 others to take your job. You are separated from your humanity. And once you cut yourself off from your humanity, you are cut off from others, and you are trapped.

Psychologists focus only on the last two parts: the alienation from your humanity and from others. The problem is that they never get back to the most fundamental problem-the very way in which one lives and works. There's been drugs, psychological problems, etc., in other societies and times, but it's in this society, and foremost in THIS society, that these problems have taken on such strength.

It is not an individual question. It's a social phenomenon. In the kind of life we live under capitalism, everything is a commodity, an object. As Raya Dunayevskaya paraphrased Marx in his 1844 essay "Private Property and Communism," you can see this even if you forget the class struggle, by just looking at the man/woman relation. If you treat even "the one you love" in an alienated manner, as an object, it means everything is an object for you. Marx is saying: Even if everything else would work right in society, if this is how we relate to each other it shows this society has to be overthrown.

The only reason I have not gone down the same road as my friends, the dead and the living dead, is that I still have a concept of the importance of others. To me, the notion of the self becomes the core and the turning point, the way one cuts oneself off from the world, and also the only way back, once you see others not as objects but as living subjects. This is why Marx called his philosophy a "Thoroughgoing Naturalism or Humanism." Your humanity can only BE in relation to others. You have to hold onto your humanity. That gives you a whole different view of life. When you do not see others or yourself as an object, you are open for infinite possibilities.

What we have to "prove" is the kind of method that can help us hold onto all hope when all hope seems to be lost-the "quest for universality" as Marx named it, in each human being, or "individuality that lets nothing interfere with its universalism, i.e., with freedom itself" as Hegel named it.

THE DIALECTIC OF SELF AND OTHERS

This brings us back to "Why Hegel's PHENOMENOLGY? Why now?", especially concerning what happens when a person gets "a mind of one's own." Hegel discusses this in the section in the PHENOMENOLGY on the master/slave dialectic. He shows that the slave stands higher than the master because in the struggle for freedom he/she gains "a mind of one's own."

"Gaining a mind of one's own" is certainly great. But Hegel gives you so many paths that lead nowhere from that point. One is skepticism. To be skeptical of the world sounds good; but Hegel shows you that it leads nowhere. Another is stoicism-the idea of "just hang tough, you can do it." Yet he shows that also leads you nowhere-or at best, to the unhappy consciousness.

Later in the PHENOMENOLGY OF MIND he takes this up in another way in the chapter "Absolute Freedom and Terror." I think this question of absolute freedom and terror is the question of our day-more so than when Hegel wrote about it. That's because his discussion of this reminds me of revolutionaries of our day. This is what Dunayevskaya writes of that chapter in "Why Hegel's PHENOMENOLGY? Why Now?":

"The last section of the Spirit in Self-Estrangement that we have been dealing with, Hegel entitled 'Absolute Freedom and Terror.' It is an analysis of what happened to the French Revolution as factionalism broke up the unity of the revolution so that for 'pure personality' the world became 'absolutely its own will,' so that terror succeeded so-called absolute freedom, since, by being only negative it was 'merely the rage and fury of destruction.' In a word, Hegel considers that if you have not faced the question of reconstruction on new beginnings, but only destruction of the old, you have, therefore, reached only 'death-a death that achieves nothing, embraces nothing within its grasp; for what is negated is the unachieved, unfulfilled punctual entity of the absolutely free self.' This is where he identifies that absolutely free self with a faction. 'The victorious faction only is called the government...and its being government makes it, conversely, into a faction and hence guilty.'"

One thing that strikes me in this passage is the whole question of Hegel's critique of "pure personality." If freedom is narrowed to personal revelation, you revert back to the self that is alienated from others-what Marx speaks of in 1844 in discussing the kind of personality that becomes separate from the world around it. Marx points out that the key here is that the world takes on the appearance of an object; everything appears as an object outside the self.

COGNITION DOESN'T JUST REFLECT REALITY

This brings me to a point made by Lenin in his PHILOSOPHIC NOTEBOOKS on Hegel from 1914-15. Shortly before reaching the final chapter of Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC, "The Absolute Idea," Lenin writes:

"Alias: man's cognition not only reflects the world but creates it. The notion [=man], as subjectivity, presupposes an otherness which is in itself [= nature independent of man]. This notion [=man] is the impulse to realize itself, to give itself objectivity in the objective world through itself, and to realize [fulfill] itself....What the subject has in the fact of its determinateness in and for itself, is a certainty of its own actuality and the non-actuality of the world."*

Lenin rightly sees that the existing world is an object alien to us; it is not who we are, it is an object outside ourselves. And because it is an object outside ourselves, we understand that world to be "non-actual." In recognizing this, we get both a view of what we are against and a glimpse of what the world could be for us. This provides a glimpse of the cognition which "not only reflects the world" that we oppose, but also "creates it."

That is, instead of just taking the objective world as is and being weighed down by it, we are opposed to it and develop through its contradictions. This is a step beyond just being alienated. It is a movement from and through alienation. "Man" (the human being) has a sense in the back of his/her head that this is not the world they want.

The non-actuality of the world is the one thing we get in this damn society. The question is not to leap beyond the given society, as with religion, but instead through one's own experience to struggle against alienation and gain a mind of one's own. It is not just an abstract category to me. It is through the struggle, our own activity of life, that we realize the non-actuality of the world.

In light of the limits that we still face after gaining "a mind of one's own," the question is what kind of unity of objective and subjective can get us on the path to freedom. What is needed, it seems to me, is a new unity of mental and manual, of theory and practice, of worker and intellectual, worked out as an absolute. Such a new unity would open up a new beginning. It is the kind of unity that has the highest form of contradiction within itself, and thereby contains self-movement.

The need for the unity of object and subject, of worker and intellectual, is due to the incomplete nature of each of us. We all come to this society as individuals with different histories and thoughts. We need to work out the unity that can have us face the limits of our own selves and the contradictions we all have. We should not let the contradictions lie there, whether they be sexism, racism or heterosexism, as if they can be left till the day after revolution. We instead need a physical place, a forum, where all these voices can speak together. Just knowing we're alienated is not going to get us anywhere.

The only answer is a place where different groups of people in this society can talk to each other, where diversity and difference can come to life and speak to each other in a context set by a philosophy of liberation. Such a space-as paper, as organization-would have a dynamic to it that comes from not just quantity but quality, that is from the different qualities we bring to the idea of freedom as different people from diverse historical backgrounds.

The objectivity of this is not something we can "prove" until we make it be. Yet we can see throughout history that there have been "individuals who let nothing interfere with their universalism"-whether it was the Paris Communards of 1871, the beginning of the Russian Revolution in 1917, or the Hungarian workers' councils in 1956. No, they did not get us to the new society. But they did show that the idea of freedom manifests itself in mass struggles, and that the will to liberty has actual existence in the real world: "Cognition not only reflects the world but creates it", exists both theoretically and practically, in theory and in the life of the people.

This is what Marx saw in the Paris Commune of 1871, when he said the greatest thing about it was "its own working existence." The actions of the workers in the Paris Commune helped Marx demystify the fetishistic character of the commodity. Not only did the Paris Communards give a view of the new society, they also aided the next stage of Marx's theoretical development. This is the history of ideas as well as of people, simultaneously "speaking" to each other. It shows us what we as human beings can be. Hopefully, it will emerge in our time on an even higher level.

*See Lenin's PHILOSOPHIC NOTEBOOKS in COLLECTED WORKS, VOL. 38 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1961), pp. 212-13. The material in brackets is by Lenin and represents his effort to "translate" the Hegelian categories.

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