This chapter continues the themes of the preceding one by examining the importance of labor in Marx’s conception of spiritual life and in his diagnoses of social pathologies, especially in Capital. At the end of the chapter, I suggest that his conception of human society omits, or underemphasizes, important elements of the spiritual aspect of human social life that the theories of later chapters enable us to incorporate into a more adequate social ontology.

Labor and Its Normative Significance

I suggested in the previous chapter that the formula for capital’s circulation masks the true character of that process inasmuch as it presents capital’s movements as the motions of things (money and commodities), even though it is in fact human activity that makes those motions possible. Thus far, however, I have spoken of human activity in conjunction with the circulation of capital only in the sense that the individual transactions that make up that process – countless instances of M – C and C – M – are human actions undertaken in accordance with certain subjective aims: both capitalist and worker enter into those exchanges with the intention of achieving a specific end they are fully aware of. Exchange itself, then, is a human activity, a paradigm example of instrumentally rational action with clear criteria for success or failure: the agent who undertakes M – C succeeds by acquiring a commodity that will enable her eventually to turn M into M’, and the agent who undertakes C – M succeeds inasmuch as he receives a sufficient quantity of M to purchase, in a further exchange, a different C that will satisfy the desire or need that motivated the exchanges in the first place. It is possible that a kind of social pathology, one involving a failure of purely instrumental agency, might be located simply in some systematic inability of some or all of the agents involved to achieve the specific ends that motivate their exchanges. I return to this possibility below, but the most important forms of social pathology implicit in the formula for the circulation of capital are not of this type. If the main thrust of Marx’s diagnoses of pathology is to come into view, it will be necessary to find another sense in which the motions of capital represented in that formula depend on human activity. Doing so requires rejoining our analysis of the formula for the circulation of capital at the point at which we abandoned it in the previous chapter, just before comparing capital accumulation with the processes of life.

Recall that we left unsolved the central puzzle raised by M – C – M’ – C – M” – C – M’” …, namely, how it is possible for money in the form of capital to increase in quantity merely by its circulation. One could describe Marx’s puzzle in Hegelian terms by saying that the formula for the circulation of capital as articulated thus far is not explanatorily “self-standing” in that the possibility of the phenomenon it represents cannot be grasped in terms of that formula alone. For, as Marx goes on to argue, it represents a certain movement of things without reference to the specific type of human activity that makes that movement – the (apparent) self-expansion of exchange value – possible. True to his method of “transcendental” inquiry, he takes his next task to be to uncover the social conditions that make self-expanding value possible in order to bring the nature of capitalism more completely into view.

In the following sections of Capital, Marx attacks this puzzle by examining more closely the specific commodity workers bring to the market to convert into money, their labor power, and distinguishing between its exchange value (which, by hypothesis, the worker receives in full in the form of wages) and the amount of exchange value the “consumption” of that commodity in the productive process – translating the capacity to labor into actual laboring activity – produces for the buyer of the commodities necessary for production, the capitalist. What we learn is that M – C – M’ sheds its occult appearance only when it is further expanded so as to make clear that M can become M’ only if a process of production P, involving an expenditure of human labor, intervenes between the two M’s. Thus, if the possibility of M – C – M’ is to be grasped, it must be expanded into M – C … P … C – M’, where P, if it is to yield surplus value, must make use of a kind of activity (human labor) under specific social conditions – conditions that, as will be eventually revealed, make the systematic exploitation of human labor necessary.Footnote ¹ The most important of these conditions is the nonnatural circumstance that one class of humans appears in the marketplace as the owners of only one commodity (their labor power), while another appears as owners of exchange value in excess of what they need in order to satisfy their life needs.

The key to understanding the most important forms of social pathology depicted in this part of Capital lies in recognizing the nature of the specific activity that makes the self-augmentation of capital possible: human labor. This activity is different from, and spiritually more significant than, the activity involved in merely exchanging C for M. As the passages cited in the previous chapter make clear, Marx thinks of labor as social, productive activity that has the potential to make the life activity of human beings – the material reproduction of themselves and their society – a spiritual phenomenon subject to normative standards beyond the norms of health internal to merely biological life. Those passages also make clear what those standards require: a reappropriation of our activity that turns alienated social powers into free activity, where appropriating our own activity – making it genuinely our own – takes place along three dimensions: knowing (or understanding) it as it really is; collectively controlling or organizing it; and affirming it without illusion as appropriate to and worthy of the (spiritual) nature of human beings.Footnote ² In other words, unalienated social powers must be transparent, self-determined, and productive of the good of those whose powers they are. Moreover, making social powers productive of the good, and hence genuinely affirmable, requires reorganizing, and not merely reinterpreting, our activity so as to make it social in a sense that in capitalism it is not.

How, then, does Marx conceive of human labor, and why does it play a central role in his critique of capitalism?Footnote ³ Marx begins his account of human labor in Capital with a set of claims about the kind of thing it is at more or less all times and places. First, labor is an activity of life – “a process [that takes place] between the human being and nature”Footnote ⁴ – the necessity of which derives from a basic property humans share with the rest of animal life: the need “to appropriate the stuff of nature in a form useful for their own life” (Cap.: 283/MEGA: XXIII.192).Footnote ⁵ Labor is not merely one thing humans do among others; it is crucial to their survival, and for this reason it is a permanent dimension of human life, even if the unprecedented development of productive forces in capitalism opens up the possibility for necessary labor to take up increasingly less of our time (MER: 440–1/MEGA: XXV. 828). At the same time, human labor differs fundamentally from the life activity of other animals because it is an interchange (Stoffwechsel) with nature that humans “arrange, regulate, and control through their own deeds” (Cap.: 283/MEGA: XXIII.192). Human labor is consciously undertaken activity, not merely animal behavior, and as such it is to be understood and evaluated in categories appropriate to conscious agency.

Labor is a form of subjective agency, in the first place, because, unlike the behavior of nonhuman animals, it is guided by a conscious end, the satisfaction of a particular need or desire (Cap.: 284/MEGA: XXIII.193). Digestion can function well – and even functions best – when one is unaware of doing it, whereas the idea of unconscious labor is barely intelligible. Moreover, digestion differs further from labor in that it takes place without conscious direction of the body. Although both digestion and labor involve bodily interactions with nature in the service of life, only the latter requires conscious, intentional direction of the bodily motions it consists in. This means that the physical characteristics of one’s body and the natural world, as well as the particular nature of the need to be satisfied, place demanding constraints on how those motions must be undertaken.

In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx draws attention to another aspect of the conscious (and self-conscious) character of human labor. He begins by making what can sound like the same point about labor discussed immediately above: in contrast to nonhuman animals, “the human being makes his life activity into an object of his will and consciousness; his life activity is conscious.”Footnote ⁶ But it quickly becomes clear that he means by this something beyond the mere fact that human laborers imagine the product they intend to make before producing it: “The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from its activity. It is that activity.” For the human being, in contrast, life activity “is not a characteristic with which he simply merges; … his own life is an object for him.” Marx’s point is that human labor is not only conscious with regard to the end to be achieved and the means for doing so. It is, beyond this, life activity that the human being can distinguish from himself and thereby make into an object of reflection and evaluation. Human laborers can take a stance on their activity, whereas nonhuman animals cannot. It is this aspect of the conscious nature of labor that allows for the possibility of being subjectively alienated from what one does and that underlies the normative aspiration to reappropriate one’s activity by affirming it, or finding it good.

Like poiesis for Aristotle, labor in the service of life’s needs is productive – it brings about something other than itself – in that it is directed at a specific end external to the activity itself, where that end derives from and is answerable to specific needs outside itself. This is not to say that labor cannot also be experienced as intrinsically rewarding but only that it is constitutive of something’s being labor that part of its purpose be located in the satisfaction of a need outside itself. One consequence of the poietic character of labor is that affirming it as one’s own activity involves seeing its consequences as good, which includes recognizing that one’s labor has succeeded in satisfying the needs for the sake of which it was undertaken.

The fact that, unlike strolling in the park, labor is undertaken for specific instrumental reasons explains why it requires a degree of subjective engagement – a concentration and attention to the specificity of one’s objects and environment, as well as to the needs one is trying to satisfy – not essential to amusement or relaxation. Thus, labor distinguishes itself from less consequential activities because it engages and makes demands on the subjectivity of those who perform it to an extent, and in a multitude of ways, that many other human behaviors do not. Unlike enjoying a meal or shopping for clothes, labor requires deploying specific habits and skills acquired through the discipline of previous labor. This explains why Marx speaks of labor not as one activity among others but as a human power, something that is not extinguished when some specific activity comes to an end but remains as an enduring resource to be called upon again and again as further needs arise. The fact that labor is the exercise of a power and that it engages the worker’s personal makeup and history – specific habits and skills she has participated in acquiring – makes it plausible to think of laboring activity as (potentially) an externalization of self, or self-expression, which is itself a kind of freedom.

Let us now consider why labor is a social activity. The principal reason is that (nearly all) labor is cooperative. While most labor requires the working together of many hands – harvesting crops, building ships, educating children – this is not Marx’s main point. The type of cooperation most relevant here stems from the fact that even in capitalism the totality of productive activities that enable society to reproduce itself comprises, whether recognized as such or not, a socially organized scheme of cooperation. We have already encountered this idea in two places: in the account of commodity fetishism and in noting that if social reproduction and the process of circulation are to occur, the various instances of M – C – M’ must correspond to the various instances of C – M – C, implying that the actions of social members must materially complement one another if all are to achieve their aims. The socially organized character of labor, together with its status as productive activity, means that labor is not only socially organized – divided up according to some cooperative scheme – but also social in the sense of having to realize, in some sense, a collective good. Human labor is social, or cooperative, because achieving my ends depends on my cooperators achieving theirs, and vice versa, where this is accomplished within a network of complementary acts that produce for all. Capitalist production requires cooperation in a further sense: among classes rather than merely among individuals occupying different places in the material division of labor. The need for this type of cooperation is reflected in the fact that, from the perspective of individual participants, the circulation of exchange value takes two forms, with distinct starting points, depending on the class positions of those involved: C – M – C and M – C – M’. This complementarity goes beyond that involved in every form of the division of labor, where my specific needs must be satisfiable by the specific activities of others, and vice versa: capitalism also demands the cooperation of differently situated economic classes, defined by their respective ownership relations to the productive forces – where, of course, “cooperation” does not imply that its benefits and burdens are distributed equally or fairly.

The social, or cooperative, nature of labor emphasized above does not simply follow from its definition. As the example of Robinson Crusoe shows, it is conceptually possible for there to be labor that is not part of any socially organized scheme. Rather, the cooperative nature of labor at issue here follows from a fundamental social condition under which the great majority of human production takes place, namely, that a division of labor, simple or complex, renders each of us dependent on others for our survival and well-being. This thoroughgoing interdependence necessitates that individuals’ productive activities be organized according to a cooperative scheme of some sort if there is to be even a rough correspondence between the various kinds of labor undertaken and the diverse needs it must satisfy. Borrowing Hegel’s terminology, we could say that a laborer in capitalism is an I that is a we – where what one does is determined by how one’s activity fits in with that of other social members – even if in this case one is likely to be unaware that one’s activity is in reality a social power. Or, to put the point differently, what I do as a laborer in capitalism is constituted – although only objectively, through mechanisms of the market – as a specialized and intricately coordinated part of a cooperative project directed at satisfying not only my needs but also those of my cooperators. (We must also say, then, that a laborer in capitalism is not yet fully an I that is a we in Hegel’s sense inasmuch as she does not understand herself and her labor as parts of a social project. Becoming fully an I that is a we requires not only knowing one’s own powers as social powers but also consciously organizing them as such.)

In sum, labor is a complex form of self-conscious, intentional activity that our natural needs compel us to undertake.Footnote ⁷ It is of great importance to humans not merely because nature compels us to labor but also because, in the societies we are familiar with, it occupies a major portion of our waking life. Even more importantly, the complexity of most forms of labor – the intricate skills it relies on if it is to achieve its ends in conformity with its objects’ constraints, as well as the transformation of the laborer it effects through the acquisition of ever more sophisticated skills – makes this form of activity well suited to be a source of subjective satisfaction and self-expression.Footnote ⁸ Labor is not only relevant but crucial to social philosophy for Marx because he views human societies as centrally engaged in the material reproduction of life. This reproduction is accomplished through socially organized labor such that individuals can satisfy their own life needs only by integrating their specialized labor into a complex, societywide web of laboring activity that constitutes, whether laborers know it or not, a collective project. Labor is so central to what human beings do, to what they are, and to how they conceive of themselves that it is not merely a means to reproducing the material conditions of life but also “a specific manner in which they express their life, a specific way of life that belongs to them” (MER: 150/MEGA: III. 21). Social life, then, has both material and spiritual dimensions, and since the former requires interacting with the world as a living being, both “the physical and spiritual life of humans is bound up with nature” (MER: 75/MEGA: LV: 516). It is for all these reasons that Marx regards labor both as appropriately judged by the norms of free agency and as central to a social philosophy concerned with realizing the human good.Footnote ⁹

Labor in Capitalism

We are now in a position to ask how and why Marx regards labor in capitalism as destined to fall short of the standards of free activity. As already noted, Marx holds that in capitalism the cooperative character of our labor (in the main sense distinguished above) is concealed from us by the atomized way in which production is undertaken when coordinated, unconsciously, by a system of market exchange. It is this that explains why labor in capitalism is not usually recognized by those who perform it as the social activity it already is, and this lack of transparency, a consequence of a basic feature of capitalism (commodity production), constitutes a part of the spiritually pathological, “fetishistic” character of that mode of production.

Moreover, part of the legacy Marx inherits, via Feuerbach, from Hegel’s conception of spiritual phenomena is the view that if human activities are unfree in the sense just articulated – unknown as the social powers they in fact are – those same activities will appear to those who carry them out as, and actually be, powers that control or dominate the very subjects whose powers they are, thereby inverting the proper relation between agents and their activities. According to this view, a necessary concomitant of the unrecognized social character of labor in capitalism is that the unconsciously coordinated productive activities of individuals manifest themselves as objective laws of the market that dictate (without there being a dictator) nearly everything about production in that society, including what will be produced, how it will be produced, and whether workers will be able to find employment at wages high enough to satisfy their families’ needs. That market-determined forces control us rather than vice versa is not directly visible from the formula for the circulation of capital, but it is a consequence of a feature of that process implicitly represented by that formula, namely, that exchange value, not the satisfaction of specific needs, is capitalist production’s “driving incentive and determining aim” (Cap.: 250/MEGA: XXIII.164). If profitability calculated in terms of quantities of exchange value determines what and how a society produces, then “decisions” on those matters elude the control of those whose activities make up that collective project; far from determining their own activities, they are determined instead by a social power that has its ultimate source only in themselves. Insofar as it strives toward its end unmediated by the consciousness and wills of the agents who make it possible, capital is an alienated social power that serves first and foremost its own ends (those of capitalists) and only secondarily, if at all, the ends of those whose labor it depends on.

A further respect in which the activities of laborers in capitalism fail to be fully their own comes into view by focusing on the extent to which, under the conditions of capitalist production, their labor is productive of the good and hence affirmable by them. As suggested above, Marx’s conception of spiritually satisfying life activity requires that such activity not only be transparent to and organized by the subjects whose activity it is, but also satisfy the ends that are the reasons for undertaking it and be seen by those subjects as doing so. In the case of labor, seeing what one has accomplished as good includes seeing that one has achieved the ends that motivated one’s activity in the first place, which entails seeing that one’s own life needs have been satisfied through one’s labor. (Here the requirement that activity be affirmable by its agents is hard to separate from the requirement that it be controlled by them. If we cannot affirm what we have done because we have failed to achieve our ends, then there is a sense in which our activity has eluded our control: even if we organize our activity and in that sense determine it ourselves, its failure to bring satisfaction implies a loss of control over what we have done.)

In order to understand this aspect of Marx’s critique of capitalism we must return to the abstract nature of capital’s driving aim, its being defined exclusively in terms of homogenous units of exchange value. We saw above that whereas life achieves its vital aims only by establishing very specific relations with its surrounding world determined by the requirements of life and the circumstances of its environment, capitalist accumulation is more self-sufficient: its aim is supremely indifferent to the particular forms the commodities it produces assume, including the use values they possess. It is the abstract nature of the value capital aims at – its utter disregard for the particularities of its products – that explains Marx’s statement that in capitalism “use values are produced only because and to the extent that they are the material substratum, the bearers, of exchange value” (Cap.: 293/MEGA: XXIII.201). This perfect indifference between abstract exchange value and the particular use values that are its bearers is relevant to whether laborers can recognize and affirm their activity as their own because it opens up a permanent, nearly unbridgeable gap between the two kinds of value capitalist circulation depends on: those whose labor produces commodities enter the market with aims defined in terms of use values, but their production is organized by a different end, the maximal accumulation of exchange value. Of course, capitalist circulation can achieve that end only if it produces use values of some kind – there must be effective demand for its products if surplus value is to issue from the process – but it is indifferent to what specifically it produces as long as production serves accumulation. Hence the motor driving capitalist production is perilously decoupled from the ends of those whose labor sustains it.

It may be fine for living processes to be autonomous and self-moving in the sense of being determined only by purposes internal to themselves, but something has gone badly wrong when the movements of things, which are underwritten by human activities, serve the sole end of maximizing surplus value. The internal character of capitalist circulation’s aim is especially inappropriate when the activity that makes it possible is human labor. For (in every mode of production we have known thus far) labor is not generally undertaken for its own sake but for ends external to it, the satisfaction of needs laborers have independently of their laboring. No matter how unalienated it might be, labor retains an ineliminable moment of poiesis, aiming, in part, at ends external to it.Footnote ¹⁰ One of the dangers of the self-moving character of capital’s circulation is that its criteria for success do not track the needs of those who make the process possible; when such tracking is absent, their labor fails even as poiesis.

We broached this topic in the previous chapter in asking whether the two complementary transactions that capital’s circulation depends on, the laborer’s C – M – C and the capitalist’s M – C – M’, are, even from a narrowly instrumental perspective, equally successful at satisfying the respective subjective aims motivating them. The decoupling of use value from exchange value at the heart of capitalist production opens up the permanent possibility that the end of accumulating surplus value is achieved while the ends that motivate workers are not, or only partially. In fact, there are three possibilities for failure, all of which point to real phenomena familiar to members of capitalist societies: First, there may be workers who need to sell their labor power in order to live but who cannot find work (the problem of unemployment); second, those who find work may receive wages too low to satisfy their needs, since, as with all commodities, the price of labor power is determined by principles of supply and demand operating beyond the control of human agents (the problem of the working poor); and, third, even if workers find a living wage on the market, the vast majority of use values actually produced may be available only to those to whom surplus value accrues (the problem of extreme inequality in access to the wealth produced in a cooperative project). Of course, the formula for capital’s circulation alone implies not the necessity, but only the endemic possibility, of these outcomes. It is only when the decoupling of use value and exchange value is supplemented by doctrines developed later in Capital – the rising organic composition of capital and the dynamic of the industrial reserve army – that Marx can claim failures of this type to be necessary features of capitalist production.

If a laborer in capitalism is fortunate enough to find work that pays her a living wage, it may well be that her own labor succeeds in satisfying the needs that led her to labor in the first place. This means that, from her individual perspective, she may well be able to affirm the results of her productive activity as having enabled her to succeed in what she set out to do in entering the market. (There remains the question of whether her activity is transparent and self-determined, but this can be put aside for now.) Since some workers in capitalism may be fortunate in this respect, the more basic obstacle to their being able to see the results of their activity as good lies elsewhere. It comes into view only by looking at labor not from an individual perspective – with regard to what one's own activity achieves for oneself – but as a totality, as constituting a cooperative project, or social power. If one's labor satisfies one's own needs, but only on the condition that the labor of others produce the goods that do so, then it is both theoretically and morally shortsighted to assess the situation only in terms of what one's own activity yields for oneself. If capitalist production is a cooperative undertaking, it ought to be collectively affirmable, which it can be only if it succeeds in satisfying all its participants’ needs. The formula for the circulation of capital explains why, viewed from the perspective of the whole, it is a matter of chance whether labor in capitalism satisfies needs in ways that can be affirmed by more than a few. For the end that determines the specific forms that production assumes – maximal accumulation – is divorced from all consideration of the collective good, even when interpreted as thinly as possible, as the satisfaction of its participants’ life needs.

This is the reason Marx enjoins us not only to recognize our labor as a social power but also to organize it as such – to make it into a social power in a more robust sense than it already is in capitalism. This is the most important respect in which Marx’s view of the requirements of spiritual health differs from Hegel’s: it is not enough merely to understand what we already do as what it truly is in order to be free in our life activity. The ultimate goal of Marx’s diagnoses of social pathology is not simply to bring to consciousness what is hidden from view in commodity production – that the labor of each is determined via market mechanisms by its relation to the labor and needs of all – but also to reorganize our labor such that it answers to standards of the collective good, including the material needs of all, thereby making that labor collectively affirmable. If we are to do this fully – uniting the ends of life with those of freedom – our concern must also be to satisfy the vital needs of all in a way that makes our laboring activity subjectively free: collectively transparent, controlled, and affirmable by us not merely in its results but also as an activity itself. Unalienated labor is not activity that has shed its nature as poiesis but activity in which poiesis is united with praxis (activity engaged in for its own sake), insofar as productive activity, because self-determined and self-expressive, is, at least in part, an end in itself and not carried out solely for the sake of what it produces.

Why Pathology?

It is time to return to the question of why the defects of capitalism implicit in these sections of Capital should be thought of as social pathologies, as opposed to normative shortcomings of some other kind. I distinguished above five instances of pathology, each of which involved a failure to satisfy at least one of the requirements of free life activity, namely: that that activity be transparent to those whose activity it is; that it be collectively organized or controlled by them; and that it be genuinely productive of their good and hence collectively affirmable. The five respects in which capitalist production was said to fail short of these criteria, and hence to imply social pathologies, were: i) Capitalism thoroughly remakes nature in accordance with its purely abstract end, threatening to undermine the very conditions of future human life; ii) capitalist growth tends to be measureless and uncontrolled with respect to rhythm, pace, form, and size (and is therefore indifferent to the human good); iii) the cooperative (social) nature of labor in capitalism is hidden from those whose labor it is; iv) laboring activity is determined not by human subjects but by nonconscious market forces; and v) production’s determining end, exchange value, tracks only accidentally the good and needs of those who produce.

One feature of these pathologies that distinguishes Marx’s position from most other theories of social pathology is that the pathologies in question are endemic to the form of modern society he investigates. The pathologies of capitalism he diagnoses are normal rather than anomalous phenomena, such that pathology could be said to be intrinsic to capitalist society. In other words, dysfunction – both material and spiritual – is built into, or follows from, basic features of capitalist production, namely: commodity production in accordance with the principles of market exchange; the existence of economic classes defined by their ownership relations to the means of production; and the fact that capital’s organizing principle is the maximization of surplus value measured exclusively in quantitative terms. That these pathologies are intrinsic to capitalism explains why Marx is a revolutionary rather than a reformer: no cures exist for them short of substituting a new mode of production for the old. There are, however, resources in Marx’s texts that might license us to formulate his position on the “cure” for capitalism in a weaker form. He claims, to be sure, to be uncovering “the natural laws” that govern capitalist production “with iron necessity” (Cap.: 91/MEGA: 23: 12). Yet at the same time he calls those laws “tendencies” and admits that extra-economic factors, such as the Factory Acts in nineteenth-century England, can act as a counterweight to these tendencies, making the empirical phenomena governed by them less harsh than the laws of capitalist production would by themselves predict.Footnote ¹¹ One might claim, then, that what is intrinsic to capitalism is a tendency to pathology and that one task of the diagnostician of social pathology is to think about what political or social measures might prevent the pathological tendencies of capitalism from issuing in real pathologies.

Although this is a position followers of Marx might plausibly take (and that many haveFootnote ¹²), it is not Marx’s. For the passage cited here makes clear that, although extra-economic measures might mollify the ills of capitalism and prolong its life, its pathological tendencies are destined to win out, making the sickness and eventual death of capitalism a necessity in the long run (Cap.: 91/MEGA: XXIII.12). This insistence on the need for revolution is one respect in which social pathology on Marx’s account diverges significantly from biological illness, where cures never consist in rebuilding the organism into a being of a different kind. Moreover, this aspect of his view poses a special problem for articulating the idea of dysfunction at the heart of his conception of pathology: in Marx’s case what counts as a dysfunction cannot be determined by reference to how the capitalist system standardly works in the same way that a dysfunction of the heart shows up only in relation to an understanding of what the heart is supposed to do that derives from how it normally functions. Many of the pathologies examined in this chapter appear instead as perfectly functional if one takes the maximization of surplus value to be the function of capital’s circulation; these pathologies can be recognized as such only by bringing in normative criteria external to the reality of capital’s functioning. (This issue is more complex than it appears, for there is a sense in which Marx believes that the normative criteria presupposed by his diagnoses of pathology are indeed internal to capitalism – or, better perhaps: internal to capitalism understood as a form of life [Jaeggi Reference Jaeggi2019: 36–51]. For he takes the validity of the ideal of free social activity, embodied in unalienated labor, to depend both on the real aspirations capitalism has generated in its participants and on its having produced the material conditions of that ideal’s realization in dramatically improved human productive powers.)

These features of Marx’s position – that capitalism’s pathologies are intrinsic and incurable and that the standards defining its dysfunctionality cannot simply be read off of how the system standardly works – only increase the urgency of asking: Why conceive of capitalism’s intrinsic defects on the model of illness? As we have seen, Marx refers to human societies, both capitalist and precapitalist, as organisms, but the analogies he invokes are too weak to point directly to any determinate picture of what social illness might consist in. I have argued, however, that even the weak sense in which Marx takes capitalist society to be a “social organism of production” provides resources for conceiving of some of capitalism’s defects as illnesses. The thought here is that the capitalist economy is a highly coordinated ensemble of productive activities, one function of which is to produce the material conditions of its own reproduction. (That capitalism serves this function is compatible with its driving end being the private accumulation of surplus value, since achieving the latter presupposes that the former is also achieved.) Moreover, many of the goal-directed processes through which capitalist society reproduces itself involve self-perpetuating dynamics that resemble processes through which living organisms maintain and reproduce themselves. The dynamics in question constitute something like a living system of forces, where one force affects and is affected in turn by others, with the result that their interaction acquires a life of its own, not directly dependent on the intervention of conscious agency. In a being of this sort many forms of dysfunctionality become possible, and it is this – the presence in a “living” being of a dysfunctional dynamic – that makes the use of the concept of social pathology appropriate. One source of such dysfunctionality in capitalist society is the circumstance that, being unguided by a conscious agent, the dynamics in question escape the control of those subject to them (who are, at the same time, the agents whose activity fuels them), producing systematic consequences not intended by anyone, not even the most advantageously situated.

What is essential to a social organism in this sense is simply the working together of differentiated individuals, who make specialized contributions to social production, which must be elaborately coordinated – if only blindly – if the goods produced are to correspond to the needs of producers. Even here, however, Marx’s conception of a social organism of production is more complex than this, encompassing features that stretch the society–organism analogy and provide resources for expanding the notion of dysfunction to include spiritual pathologies. One complexity is that although much of the coordination among laborers is accomplished unconsciously in capitalism, this itself depends on there being a large amount of coordination – internal to a workplace, where workers’ relations are not mediated by exchange – that, unlike coordination in biological organisms, requires conscious planning (Cap.: 477/MEGA: XXIII.377), even if not by the workers themselves. Thus, in human social life, even where unconscious coordination seems to reach its highest point, such coordination depends on conscious agency.

These points touch on the principal respect in which the social pathologies attributable to Marx fit uncomfortably with the model of illness and the central mark of that concept, dysfunctionality: the spiritual pathologies I have articulated here appear as such only if one brings into the picture external normative presuppositions about how a human society with highly developed productive capacities “ought to” function that are not derived from how capitalism in fact normally (standardly) works. In contrast, diagnoses of pathology, whether in animals or societies, involve applying immanent standards – they depend on a judgment that a living system fails to meet the standards of health immanent in its own normal functioning.

I have suggested that there may be ways of interpreting Marx that make the diagnoses of pathology I have attributed to him more immanently grounded in the reality of their objects than seems to be the case when focusing only on the formula for capital’s circulation. Yet despite these possibilities, there are reasons to want to go beyond the account of the immanent dysfunctionality of the pathologies his critique of capitalism allows us to give, where these reasons stem from more than merely a desire to fit Marx as neatly as possible into the tradition of social pathology theory. These reasons are also not simply due to the fact that Marx’s focus is capitalist social life, where the cleavage between normative social consciousness and normal functioning might seem to be distinctive of that form of economy alone. (In that case, the problem I am pointing to would be a problem of capitalism, not of Marx’s view of the nature of social life more generally.) Rather, as I argue below, these reasons for dissatisfaction point to a problem at the root of Marx’s social ontology,Footnote ¹³ at least as it is articulated in his understanding of social life and transformation generally – namely, in his theory of historical materialism.Footnote ¹⁴ Although Marx recognizes the thoroughly socialized (vergesellschaftet)Footnote ¹⁵ character of humans and their life activity, there is a fundamental aspect of sociality missing from – or, at best, highly undeveloped in – his conception of social life in general.Footnote ¹⁶ One might articulate this objection by saying that Marx’s conception of human society is excessively materialistic, that in explaining in general what societies are and how they work it ascribes too small a role to human consciousness. The point I want to make might be formulated in this way, but if so, it must be further qualified.

Marx’s framework for understanding how societies in general function and, especially, how they develop and eventually transform themselves, posits relations among four elements said to belong to any mode of production (except for very simple societies that lack class divisions): the productive forces; the relations of production (or economic structure of society); the superstructural legal and political institutions; and social consciousness, which, in class societies, is the locus of ideology (MER: 4/MEGA: XIII.8–9). Because Marx unmistakably embraces some form of materialism, it is often thought that the consciousness of social members, including the normative acceptance of their institutions, plays no role in his understanding of social reality. This, however, is incorrect. His inclusion of social consciousness among the elements of all class-based modes of production is a clear acknowledgment that, in some form, the meaning social members ascribe to their social participation, including the values they take it to realize, is essential to social life. If social consciousness, including beliefs about the legitimacy of institutions, functions to shore up existing relations of production (G. A. Cohen Reference Cohen1978: 290–2), then Marx’s materialist thesis is not that normative consciousness can be dispensed with in social life.

His view, rather, encompasses two claims, both of which deny the explanatory primacy (but not in every respect the causal efficacyFootnote ¹⁷) of social consciousness. The first claim is that the content of a given society’s social consciousness is explained by something outside itself, namely, the existing relations of production, where this explanation is functional: a certain configuration of social consciousness is dominant because it serves to shore up existing relations of production. The second claim is that what ultimately explains how societies develop and transform themselves is, again, external to consciousness – in this case, the state of development of the productive forces and the extent to which the economic structure of society continues to further their development. Neither claim implies that social life can go on without social consciousness that legitimates existing institutions in the eyes of their members. Indeed, historical materialism implies precisely the opposite: social life requires that its participants conceive of their social participation as having a “point,” or as serving the good in some way. One might even say that this reveals a further sense in which social life for Marx is spiritual: generally speaking, social activity – including in capitalism – is informed by a sense on the part of agents of what makes their institutions legitimate and their own activity good. In this context one should recall Marx’s statement that labor is not, in most times and places, merely a means to reproducing material life but also “a specific manner in which [social participants] express their life, a specific way of life that belongs to them” (MER: 150/MEGA: III. 21).

Since the role consciousness plays in Marx’s account of capitalist functioning is frequently misunderstood, it is important to distinguish two ways in which it enters that account. First, the circulation of capital depends on individuals, capitalists, and workers, acting on specific conscious aims: they exchange M for C and C for M with an explicit goal in mind, either to satisfy their needs or to accumulate surplus value. The good for the sake of which they engage in such exchanges is a particular good: the satisfaction of one’s needs or an increase in one’s private fortune. This form of conscious agency is essential to capitalism’s functioning, but it is not what Marx has in mind in speaking of social consciousness – first, because it involves no norms beyond those of instrumental reason and, second, because it is concerned with individual actions, not with the goodness or legitimacy of the social system itself.

The second place at which consciousness enters Marx’s account of how capitalism functions – as social consciousness – is more robustly normative, and it has as its object society (or its economic structure) as a whole. This form of consciousness is necessary to capitalism’s functioning because workers’ acceptance of the disadvantageous terms under which they participate in it requires that they take those terms and their systematic consequences to be meet certain ethical standards (to be both just and productive of the good). The beliefs Marx ascribes to the social consciousness that legitimates capitalist relations of production can be read off of his account in Capital, after the mystery of the source of surplus value has been resolved, of how the wage–labor relation appears to participants in the system themselves, namely, as embodying ideals of “freedom, equality, property, and Bentham” (Cap.: 280/MEGA: XXIII.189). More specifically, the social relation that makes the production of surplus value, and hence capitalism, possible appears as just because it is based on a contract that is freely entered into by all parties; respects the property rights of each; and involves the exchange of equivalents. It appears as good because the social system it makes possible seems to realize a version of the utilitarian ideal, where each, in following only his own interests, participates in a scheme of social production that serves the good of all.

The respect in which consciousness plays a diminished role in Marx’s account of capitalism – and of social life more generally – is that the social consciousness it presupposes in its members is systemically inefficacious (or, as is often said, “epiphenomenal”).Footnote ¹⁸ More precisely – since it is efficacious in that capitalism could not survive without it – social consciousness in no way tracks, constitutes, or steers the course of capitalist accumulation and development, and in this sense it remains external to the actual functioning of the economy it claims to be about. In an important sense, what participants in capitalism take themselves to be doing is irrelevant to what they in fact do – external to how the system actually functions – if the latter is understood in terms of the systematic consequences of their coordinated activities and the ends those activities actually achieve. In capitalism, for Marx – as well as in other modes of production – real functioning and social consciousness fall apart. The normative beliefs of social participants enable capitalism to function, but they are not internal to its functioning, which means that any spiritual dysfunctions Marx’s theory diagnoses remain external to the system’s actual functioning. The problem here – for a proponent of social pathology theory – is that if the analogy between societies and biological organisms is to be tight enough to warrant applying the idea of (spiritual) dysfunction to the former, then it must be possible to ascribe (spiritual) functions to social institutions that are more directly bound up with how they actually function than is the case in the pathologies examined in this chapter. In analyzing the circulation of capital and ascribing to it a function (the accumulation of surplus value), Marx proceeds fully immanently; the problem is that this immanent function is unrelated to the standards for healthy functioning his diagnoses of pathology presuppose.

It is worth asking whether this aspect of Marx’s view of social life derives from his focus on the (capitalist) economy rather than on institutions such as the family and the state. As Hegel recognizes, civil society functions (largely) “behind the backs” of its participants (PhR: §§181–2, 184, 186–7), which is to say: even without consciousness on their part of the good those institutions achieve or of what their well-functioning consists in. For Hegel, however, this aspect of civil society distinguishes it from social life more generally, where what Marx calls social consciousness is necessary for the healthy functioning of institutions and where, even more fundamentally, the content of that consciousness is (partially) constitutive of institutions’ actual functions. I do not mean to suggest that Marx’s diagnoses of the social pathologies of capitalism are themselves ill-founded but only that the conception of social life implicit in them (and in his historical materialism) is not generalizable to other social spheres or to social life generally and is therefore not rich enough to capture social pathologies more broadly, outside the domain of the capitalist economy. As I have suggested, the problem here is not merely that Marx’s view falls short of being a paradigmatic example of social pathology theory but that there is an important element of social reality related to normative social consciousness that his understanding of social life in general leaves out of sight.

In subsequent chapters I attempt to make good on this claim by examining various conceptions of social reality, according to which normative social consciousness is (partially) constitutive of, not external to, the functioning of social institutions and by showing that these views capture an essential element of human social life that Marx’s historical materialism overlooks or obscures, namely, the extent to which normative commitments (of various kinds) – and not merely need, interest, or power – are what holds society together and underlie its functioning. According to these views, determining the functions of social institutions, as well as what their members actually do when participating in them, depends on what those members take themselves to be accomplishing in their social activity. Since the latter includes their sense of the point of what they collectively do – of the good their cooperation serves – normative standards, including conceptions of the good, are not external but internal to the real functioning of institutions. Hence, in the case of social (but not biological) life, functioning well includes realizing the good at which participants themselves take their institutions to aim. In Marx’s critique of capitalism, in contrast, it is possible to characterize how capitalism functions – as he does in laying out the implications of the formula for the circulation of capital – without taking into account the participants’ understanding of what makes their cooperative project worthy of their participation. Chapter 6 begins to address this deficiency in Marx’s social ontology by examining and defending Rousseau’s claim that human society is “artificial.”