Still awaiting discussion as value Relations are religion, ethics, science, family, literature and art. Wherever one travels in the realm of estrangement the story is the same. The fourfold relations of man to his activity, product, fellow men and species in each sphere are the misshapen midgets of what comes into existence in communism. Religion is the only other sphere, however, in which these relations are brought out in any detail. For Marx, ‘Religious estrangement as such occurs in the realm of consciousness, or man's inner life.’ This is contrasted with economic estrangement, ‘that of real life’. Whereas the latter concerns those distortions which are produced by man's efforts to stay alive, the former focuses on the distortions which result from his trying to comprehend this life. The connection Marx sees between the two halves of this dichotomy is expressed in his claim that ‘The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.’ The same disintegration that characterizes material existence characterizes the life of the mind.

As the ‘spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and human heart’, religion can be no more advanced than man's powers, together with their real achievements. What Marx says of the abstract thinker can be applied equally to all religious people: ‘his intuition of nature is only the act of confirming his abstraction from the intuition of nature – is only the conscious repetition by him of the process of begetting his abstraction’.

The question Marx set out to answer in Capital is ‘Why is labor represented by the value of its product and labor-time by the magnitude of that value?’ If Marx had succeeded in writing the work he planned to do on ethics, I believe the question which would have occupied most of his attention is ‘Why are approval and condemnation represented in our society as value judgements?’ Marx's critique of the capitalist economy is essentially an explanation of how existing forms of production, distribution, exchange and consumption arose, and how they are dependent on one another and on the character of human activity and achievement in areas far removed from the economy proper. Any critique of ethics would likewise have concentrated on showing how the distinctive forms of our ethical life, such as treating approval and disapproval as value judgements, are internally related to the whole social fabric out of which they arose. Why is this aspect of reality organized in this manner, into these forms?

Such an approach is already apparent in some of Marx's brief comments on this subject. He says, for example, that in bourgeois ethics speaking and loving lose their characteristic significance and ‘are interpreted as expressions and manifestations of a third artificially introduced Relation, the Relation of utility’. According to Marx, ‘something is demanded of the individual's power or capacity to do anything which is a foreign product, a Relation determined by social conditions – and this is the utility Relation’.

The last of the four broad relations Marx uses to reconstruct man's alienation in capitalist society is the tie between the individual and his species. Species, as we saw, is the category of the possible, denoting in particular those potentialities which mark man off from other living creatures. In so far as the conditions of communism allow an individual to develop and express all that he is capable of as a human being, communist man and species man are identical. When, therefore, Marx claims that ‘estranged human labor estranges the species from man’, he is saying that the unique configuration of relations which distinguishes the individual as a human being has been transformed into something quite different by the performance of capitalist labor.

Man's relation to his species differs qualitatively from the other relations that were examined. His relations to his work, product and other men are tangible, both ends of which exist in the present, while the relation between man and his species is removed, in which living people are measured by the standard of what it means to be a man. Perhaps this facet of alienation can be more clearly grasped if we consider it a reformulation of man's alienation in his work, product and other men, viewed now from the angle of the individual's membership in the species.

What have been stressed so far in this study are those qualities which all men have in common, while the qualities which distinguish different classes of men and bring them into conflict with one another have been underplayed. Before recounting the alienation (both common and unique) of workers and capitalists, the basis for such differences as exist between them must be clarified. Furthermore, the status of exceptions in Marxism, of men who do not share or only minimally share the fate of their class, requires attention before this fate itself is examined. Otherwise the theory of alienation is open to the facile refutation of pointing to instances where it does not apply.

According to Marx, social conditions determine character, both directly, through their effect on the individual's powers and needs, and indirectly, through the creation of interests which he then strives to satisfy; and the conditions under which capitalists and workers live differ significantly. As for the first, every person experiences with the social group to which he belongs how his particular tie to the mode of production and the familial, educational and religious training which that occasions, blocks certain personality developments and allows for and even spurs on others. These conditions fix the state of one's powers and needs, just as they determine the degree to which such needs will find satisfaction.

From the worker's fourfold alienation in the means of production our investigation branches off in two directions. The first takes us further into economics proper, to the division of labor, private property and, eventually, to Marx's treatment of the economic components of the capitalist system in Capital. The second takes us to other areas of man's life, social intercourse, politics and religion being the most important of these.

Our journey of inquiry will begin with Marx's economics, but, in the present chapter, evidence from Capital will not be used. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and other of Marx's early writings contain a great deal of economics which has been clearly fashioned as part of the broader theory of alienation. Capital exhibits the same connections, but they are not made explicit as often as they are in these early works. My aim in this chapter is to lay bare the ties between man's alienation, as described thus far, and the whole sphere of economics. Afterwards, when I come to Marx's chief contribution to economic thought, the labor theory of value, my main source will be Capital.

Engels declares ‘economics deals not with things but with relations between persons, and, in the last resort, between classes; these relations are, however, always attached to things and appear as things’. On this definition, it is man's alienated relations to his activity, products and other men, as expressed in the overt relations between things, that is the subject matter of Marx's economics.

Having presented labor-power as potential for alienated productive activity and the equation of labor and value, I am now in a position to explain the metamorphosis of value and the fetishism of commodities. Labor, as we saw, is embodied in all its products. Hence, as its equivalent in capitalism, the same applies to value. The worker produces an article which contains his labor in the form of use and exchange-value. Then, according to Marx:

The guises assumed by value in its merry-go-round journey through the economy include capital, commodity, landed property, profit, interest, rent, wages and money. Marx would maintain that these are ‘more concrete economic determinations from which value is abstracted and which from another point of view, can therefore also be regarded as a further development of it’. All derive from the worker's alienated productive activity, and each expresses the full set of conditions in which it exists. As components of value they are facets of the same organic whole, capitalist society. On this view, too much of orthodox economics has been devoted to trying to explain how such apparently distinct entities are related.

The powers most frequently associated with natural man, with human beings as living parts of nature, are labor, eating and sex. Marx never drew up a full list of man's natural powers; nor is he concerned to remove the verbal cloak which hides some from public inspection. What he labels a ‘natural power’ in one place is referred to as an ‘animal function’ or a ‘physical need’ in another. These expressions are not exact equivalents, but they are so closely related that we may take the examples Marx offers for any one as examples for the other two. Animal functions are the processes that living creatures undergo and the actions they undertake in order to stay alive; while physical needs are the desires they feel for the objects and actions required to keep them alive and functioning. With certain qualifications drawn from our earlier discussion, we could say that natural powers are similar to animal functions and the relation between both of them and physical needs is similar to the relation between power and need. When Marx refers, therefore, to drinking and procreation as animal functions, we are justified in adding them – assuming we want to distinguish between procreation and sex – to our list of man's natural powers.

Marx's reference to the needs of animals and savages can be viewed in the same light as his reference to physical needs; both reflect natural powers.

Marxism, as it emerges from this study, is like a magnificently rich tapestry with a multitude of colors and patterns superimposed on one another. To see them all we must begin by seeing them singly, to grasp one and then start on the outlines of another and so on, until every pattern is grasped along with the interconnections between them, as these interconnections too are part of the overall design. Yet, even as our attention is directed to the first pattern, we cannot help noticing sections of others, for each piece functions in more than one. Marx's theories are not interrelated, as this is ordinarily understood, but rather include one another. Thus, no matter with which one we begin, to draw out all its relations is to present Marxism, though it is the whole observed from a particular angle and expressed in a one-sided way.

The necessary distortion of Marxism introduced by this account of the theory of alienation can only be righted by equally detailed accounts of the same material as part of other major theories, and of the materialist conception of history in particular. Only then would Marxism be revealed with anything like the thoroughness with which Marx sought to reveal society. The chief justification for my own one-sided study lies in its dealing with the side that has received least serious attention.

The most formidable hurdle facing all readers of Marx is his ‘peculiar’ use of words. Vilfredo Pareto provides us with the classic statement of this problem when he asserts that Marx's words are like bats: one can see in them both birds and mice. No more profound observation has ever been offered on our subject. Thinkers through the years have noticed how hard it is to pin Marx down to particular meanings, and have generally treated their non-comprehension as a criticism. Yet, without a firm knowledge of what Marx is trying to convey with his terms, one cannot properly grasp any of his theories.

How, for example, are we to understand the startling claim that ‘Value is labor’ (my emphasis), or Marx's assertion that the ‘identity of consumption and production … appears to be a threefold one’, or his allusion to theory which under certain circumstances becomes a ‘material force’? Marx's statements frequently jar us, and instances of obscurity in his work, occasions where two or more interpretations seem equally applicable, are more numerous still.

Engels was well aware of the trouble people had in coming to grips with Marx's terminology. In his Preface to the English edition of Capital I, he says, ‘there is, however, one difficulty we could not spare the reader: the use of certain terms in a sense different from what they have, not only in common life, but in ordinary political economy.’

In issuing a declaration of man's species character, Marx was drawn to portray life activity in communism, because only then does the individual develop into a complete species being, only then do the differences between man and the animal world become all that they can be. According to Marx, ‘The real active orientation of man to himself as a species being, or his manifestation as a real species being (i.e., as a human being), is only possible by his really bringing out of himself all the powers that are his as the species man.’ Elsewhere, he states explicitly that the individual living under capitalism is not a real species being and, again, that the work of this individual ‘has lost all semblance of life activity’. The fact is that by ‘species man’ Marx can refer to all men always as well as to communist men alone, but he most often uses this expression to refer to the latter. In this case, species life activity is what people are moving toward rather than what the people of all periods actually engage in.

On this interpretation, Marx's description of species life activity must be considered very incomplete. Besides being ‘free’ and ‘conscious’, this activity will also be willed, purposive, physically and mentally flexible, concentrated and social. However, as we have seen, man's social activity in communism is quite different from what goes by the same name in all earlier societies.

The ‘fetishism of commodities’ refers to people's misconception of the products of labor once they enter exchange, a misconception which accords these forms of value leading roles in what is still a human drama. The metamorphosis of value is a tale about man, his productive activity and products, and what happens to them all in capitalist society. Misreading this story as one about the activities of inanimate objects, attributing to them qualities which only human beings could possess, positing living relations for what is dead, is what Marx calls the ‘fetishism of commodities’.

According to Marx, ‘This fetishism of commodities has its origins … in the peculiar social character of the labor that produces them.’ This character, as we saw, is reproduced in the product, value. As the abstract product of alienated labor, value expresses the relations of the individuals engaged in such labor. However, though value contains human relations, it actually conveys them as relations between their products. Hence, the remark, ‘When, therefore, Galiani says: Value is a relation between persons … he ought to have added: a relation between persons expressed as a relation between things’.

For Marx, it is through the monetary expression of exchange value that the ties between people at work have remained so carefully hidden. He maintains that it is

If alienated labor is at the center of Marx's economics, value is not one whit closer to the perimeter – for the two are ‘identical’, different facets of the same whole, contrasting expressions for the same social relations. According to Marx, ‘Value is labor’; it is ‘materialized labor in its general social form’. Or again, he claims, ‘Value as such has no other “material” than labor itself’. There are other such forthright statements of the equation of labor and value, but they seem equally to have missed their mark. For most readers of Capital, ‘value’ remains an economic expression synonymous with ‘worth’, a judgement strictly measurable in monetary terms. Its tie with labor is believed to be capable of conclusive empirical demonstration; this applies to most defenders of the labor theory of value as well as its critics. However, Marx's conception of value is of an altogether different nature. Its unity with labor is assumed, and the rich assortment of facts brought forward on this subject are for purposes of illustration and not proof. For Marx, value, or as he sometimes says, ‘value in general’, is transfigured labor, and no manner of evidence could serve him as a counter argument.

Thus, while Marx frequently declaims what value is, he never sets out to discover it, nor is he interested in proving it. Indeed, he treats the ‘necessity of proving the concept of value’ as ‘nonsense’.

Marx's scholarly concern was with capitalism, and in studying this society he naturally operated with social Relations, his vocabulary reflecting the real social ties which he uncovered. What remains to be explained, however, is how Marx could conceive of social factors as Relations where physical objects are involved. For in his discussions, machines, the real articles produced, the worker's person, etc., are all components of one social Relation or another. We learn, for example, that ‘capital is, among other things, also an instrument of production, also past personal labor’. According to the definition given earlier, every such component is itself a Relation. It follows from this that Marx conceives of things as Relations. Unless this conclusion can be defended, the interpretation I have offered of social Relations will have to be drastically altered. By drawing together the relevant evidence and tracing the history of the broad philosophical position that underlies Marx's practise, I shall try in this chapter to provide such a defense.

Most modern thinkers would maintain that there cannot be relations without things just as there cannot be things without relations. Things, according to this ‘common sense’ view, constitute the basic terms of each relation and cannot themselves be reduced to relations. However, this objection only applies to Marx if what he is doing is caricatured as trying to reduce the terms of a relation to that which is said to stand between them.