Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Press, 1976)
Greek thought forms the first stage in the course of movement that leads to Marx. p. 7
Unless we set the thought of Marx in the world-historical horizon of thought, we shall hardly come to
understand it; for it ties in at a precise moment of history. p. 14
What counts is to know how to understand simultaneously in a single movement both the globality of
history as containing men and the greatness and poverty of the human being, the “maker” of history in
concert with his fellows. Marx does indeed give predominance to one dimension and cuts it off from the
rest, but he does not keep it isolated. He focuses upon one dominant aspect, [which one? perhaps the
globality of history?] analyzing one determinant factor for the whole of existence; he deepens and amplifies
one reality, without for all that building up a concrete, total approach, one that would be more unitary than
unifying. He proposes one reading of the book of history and recommends one particular kind of action.
Nevertheless, the totality of the world holds other realities and other activities as well. p. 15 [D: esto puede
servir para justificar el que Marx no desconoce lo cualitativo, pero que desarrolla las consecuencias de la
prevalencia de lo cuantitativo.]
Marx thinks he has found the secret of the tragedy in his analysis of human labor. Man’s labor, the
production of goods, human reproduction, and, still more, man’s production of himself bind men to
Nature even while constituting an alienated bond. Marx thinks he has found in the alienation of labor the
riddle of the historical becoming of alienated mankind. p. 17
Behind Marx stands a whole world whose origins are Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, European, and
Modern. He wants his thought to be free of metaphysical presuppositions, but presuppositions, particularly
if they are metaphysical, are not always easy to see. Even when he has no intention of doing the
philosopher’s work, his thinking has a philosophical side; he makes “concrete” something that
comes to him from a long past. p. 19
Technique, the secret of the modern era under various forms, also operates in Marx’s work, and the
objective of his effort is simply a dealienated and total deployment of the power of technique. p. 20
We have to try to grasp the center of this thought, so inseparably philosophic, scientific, and technical, and
see it as animating a method that leads to both the construction of a theory of the whole and the formation
of a practical program. p. 20
To prepare a future dialog with the discourse of Marx, we have to make contact with the living heart of his
work, meditatively pursuing the methodic and systematic development of that work in its insertion in the
course of the world. p. 20 [D: esto se dice en referencia a Carta sobre el humanismo, donde Heidegger habla
de un posible diálogo con el marxismo.]
We are undertaking neither apology nor critique. [...] Something far more meaningful can result if, instead of
singing praises or launching into polemic, we prepare simply to follow the path taken by Marx’s thought at
grips with harsh reality and try to gain explicit understanding of the content of what is called his doctrine. p.
20
To present a thinking, to make it present and transparent, means also to reveal the presence of the
universality that encompasses its particularity. p. 22
In truly making a thinking present, we already trace the path to what will supersede it in a more or less
distant future. To supersede or transcend a thinking means to elucidate its truth, to understand its errance, to
continue it in taking it up once more, while rising beyond it and going further. p. 22
Between the original thinking of Marx (Marxian thought) and Marxism there are at once continuity and a
break in continuity. Can we separate Marx from Marxism? Of course not. But neither can we identify them.
Like Platonism and Cartesianism (mutatis mutandis), Marxism is bound to its founder by ties that manifest
the power of continuity as well as of discontinuity. Platonism, Christianity, Cartesianism, Marxism, all
follow a path blazed initially by a founder, even while moving away from his original intent. p. 22
When it becomes a philosophic, religious, or political movement, what begins as a foundational insight
takes on the character of a power seeking expansion; it follows a development that makes it change, and it
becomes thus a formative force. The difference that separates it in its first appearance from what it finally
becomes by way of its evolution must never be overlooked. Nevertheless, it has to be recognized that
something within it has allowed and made possible this process of its expansion and reification. p. 23
Marx the thinker is in strict sense simply not understandable without the onto-theo-logy of Hegel. It is a
strange “dialog” that both joins them and sets them against each other. p. 27
The World is no longer the world whose movement is the becoming of spirit; it is rather the world of
human activity. Still, the problem of the “motor” and meaning of history remains an open one; for, whereas
idealism fails in its effort to provide a basis for these things, antiidealism is deficient in not being bold
enough to move its questioning beyond this obsessive phantom of an ultimate ground. Does the World,
then, abide as a power other than man, one neither spiritual nor material, a question not yielding to a
reductive answer, a horizon that will not let itself be completely conquered? p. 27 [D: en algún sentido,
definición de ontoteología. También: quizá así pueda introducirse alguna explicación sobre el ser de la cosa,
con la que se ocupan Marx y Heidegger.]
Marx’s philosophical thought, aiming for the abolition of philosophy by its transformation into practical
social reality, shapes itself within the horizon of the ontological metaphysics of Hegel. p. 29
For Hegel, the truth of reality lies in the idea, so that the “rational” and the “real” coincide. He wants to
translate the real into the form of thought, but the real (the true) is not even separable from thought; for
the real is revealed in discourse and as such is thought. The determinations of consciousness, of
(philosophical) science, and of knowledge are determinations of the essence of things as much as they are
thoughts. p. 29
Reality and idea, thought and thing are identical, given that identity implies negativity, mediation, and
difference. Totality constitutes a reign of [p. 30] higher harmony and not that of nondistinction or of
unification in nondifference. pp. 29-30 [D: sirve para hablar de la indiferenciación, o diferenciación,
inherente a la cosa]
Thought is identical with being, being is thought. Thought is a force that says what is in becoming. The
absolute-and-true is spirit but the absolute is in becoming, which is not change but the process of the
revelation of the absolute (that is, of spirit). p. 30
The text just quoted says further that philosophy, in the Greek sense of the word philosophia, must give up
its former essence and name to become real knowledge, that is, absolute knowledge of absolute idea which is
the soul of Totality. Marx will take issue with this goal of absolute and total knowledge by a double
opposition. On the one hand, against total absolute knowledge, he will put total productive praxis, and on
the other, against absolute Subject, objective subjects, producers of material goods. p. 32 [D: esto quizá sirva
para ilustrar en qué sentido Marx se inserta en diálogo con Hegel.]
He [Marx] takes his stand on the plane of doing, conceiving the totality of what is as a totality of what is
done [...]. p. 38 [D: Esto sirve para justificar que l o que es, es m
ercancía.]
Of these texts, the Paris writings, known as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, hold a
place of absolute centrality and quite special importance; for here is found the comprehensive
thinking by which the young Marx gained his own position against that of Hegel. In addition, the
1844 Manuscripts have been and remain the richest in ideas of all Marxian and Marxist writings.
[...] the 1844 Manuscripts show Marx’s own thought in its first unfolding. p. 45 [D: orientación
bibliográfica]
Marx’s thought is a unitary thing. There are not two Marxes, the early and the late, the youthful and the
mature. Thought is the sort of thing that undergoes development as a unitary process. Nevertheless, one
must not forget that Marx’s thought, even if unitary, shows two periods integrally bound together. p. 45
The Paris Manuscripts of 1844 contain the central point of Marx’s thought, its philosophic core
and the seed of a further scientific and technical elaboration; and it is this center with its blazing
ramifications that becomes thereafter consolidated in doctrine. p. 46
It is not only the world Hegel lived in but also the Hegelian world (not to say simply the world) that
becomes alien to Marx. For him, the world has become uninhabitable, inasmuch as alienation has
made all men uprooted beings. Marx’s thought is inscribed in the world that has ceased to be a
homeland or to contain homelands for modern man; he is without being, having no place
whatsoever. p
. 48 [D: fundamental. Pueden trazarse simetrías con C
onstruir Habitar Pensar.]
Man works to live. Unlike animals, he works to wrest the goods from Nature that will permit him to satisfy
his natural needs. It is not something he does all alone but with other men, in a social frame. The essence of
labor is social. It is the community, human society, always in some historic form, that struggles against
nature to gain subsistence. Real, sensuous, material, and practical activity working some transformation is
the very first given, behind which we cannot go. The essence of man is not an abstraction based on isolated
individuals. It is constituted as human existence in and by the ensemble of social relations founded on labor
and passing through historical development. 53
This production of material goods by labor not only allows men to live, it also manifests a specific way of
living; for individuals [54] show their existence in working and are determined by what they produce and
the way they produce it. 53-54
[Marx’s thought] begins with the appearance and development of labor and technique as subjugating
Nature, Nature itself being what has led naturally to men who must work to live. But we have to ask, Is
there here only one basis for all development, or are we, from the very beginning, involved in a “dualism”
that sets Nature and Technique in opposition to each other? “Everything” derives from Nature, of course,
since it is Nature that becomes productive human nature. Nevertheless, “everything” derives from
Technique as well, because it is Technique that allows men to take hold of the natural world. The duality
can perhaps be reduced in favor of either of the unities (and entities) that compose it, without thereby being
abolished. 55
A break with nature, a break between individuals and the community, and a break between producer and
consumer accompany the division of labor, which becomes in a way the principal and, as it were, single
cause of alienation. 58
Marxian materialism is historical. (The founder of Marxism never spoke of dialectical materialism.) It is
based on the idea of the primacy of economic process as structurally determining the whole development of
the superstructure. This historical materialism cares little about knowing whether it in fact explains the past,
present, or future becoming of world history and whether it is applicable to any culture whatever. It
describes the actual state of affairs existing in bourgeois, capitalist Europe and has no concern for the riddles
posed by Indian or Chinese history. In its view, the truth of the present-day world is the actual truth of the
planet. 63
[Footnote to 64] It is Engels who, with his Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (published
in 1884, therefore after Marx’s death) gives to Marxism its dialectical schema of universal history:
thesis─primitive communism, a society without private property and without classes; antithesis
(negation)─societies divided into classes, especially Greco-Roman, slave societies, medieval and feudal
societies, modern and bourgeois-capitalist societies; synthesis (negation of the
negation)─socialism-communism, which is the passage from “pre-history,” primitive and civilized, to true
history. We do not find in Marx this vision of a primitive communism with entirely communal property, a
kind of golden age and lost paradise which will be once again realized at the end of the dialectical process of
universal history but on a conscious and higher level. Marx begins directly with historical man as someone
who through social labor sets himself over and against nature and alienates himself in and by labor, the
division of labor, and his status as “laborer.” But men can transcend that alienation and wholly dealienate
themselves economically and socially. Nevertheless, Marx does admit a primitive sort of collective property,
a form of primitive community from which private property and private right is issued. 347-348 [D: es
decir, que tiene que presuponerse algo fuera del capitalismo para poder definir, delimitar el ser del
capitalismo. Sólo eso es lo que Marx presupone.]
Private ownership alienates the species productive activity of man and prevents him from showing his true
universality. Linked to the division of labor, it stabilizes, consolidates, fragments, and individualizes what is
essentially comunal. Private ownership introduces the particular into the heart of the universal, generalizes
what is thus particular, and alienates and subjugates man; by always individualizing what is by its social
essentiality common to [68] all, it prevents man from being man (a natural, human, social being) and locks
him into relations of having. Under the sway of private ownership, man ends up by becoming an alien
object in his own eyes, a subject who is not but who has (who above all has not) and who is had. 67-68 [D:
interesantísimo! Delata el modo de ser preeminente en las relaciones capitalistas.]
Workers, themselves the products of capitalism, produce capital, and they will be its gravediggers as well. It
is the worker who, by his alienated labor, “produces” capital, and it is capital that transforms man into the
worker, thereby reducing him to being nothing but a worker. Man the worker, at once producer, product,
and simple commodity, is now the fatal terminal point of the movement of history and technology. At the
same time, the [72] worker becomes living capital with needs. If he does not work, selling his labor force as a
commodity, he loses his interest and thereby his very existence. The value of the worker, as capital, rises
according to supply and demand, and the value of his life lowers to its farthest limit. The whole life of the
worker is only the supply of a commodity. Reduced to being only a worker, his human properties exist only
to the degree that they are for him alien capital that can relate back to him. Thus, owing to capitalism, the
workers make a living by losing life, themselves producing the forces that alienate them and of which they
are the byproducts. 72 [D: interesante. De nueva cuenta aparece la dialéctica cualitativo-cuantitativo, aquí
en la vida del hombre en tanto que trabajador como instancia]
It is certainly true that modern capitalism has caused certain modifications in the life of workers and that a
surplus of gains has made it a little more accommodating to the workers. Nevertheless, Marx’s intention was
to grasp the deeper truth that governs the empirical truth of capitalism. 72 [D: Recuerda a Marzoa: Marx
pretende encontrar la verdad profunda del mundo moderno, algo que has citado en “Losing sense of the
irreducible”]
What we have called Marx’s humanistic radicalism energetically shows itself in his conception of capital.
Capital is indeed the great protagonist of the present-day drama. It dominates and crushes both those who
produce it, thanks to their social labor, and those who enjoy it, individually or in small groups. However, it
is men who are involved in this experience. Wishing to break all fetishism of the so-called objective, the
passionate objectivism of the man who authors Capital points constantly to human subjects in subjection.
72
This whole cool passion and this prophetic rage turn also to another particular reality of the reified world.
Logic and feeling take up the battle against the res par excellence, money. Money, having the capability of
buying anything, capable of appropriating anything, has become the object par excellence. Its essence is
simply the universality of its properties, and its being can be seen [73] as a being-able-to that is unlimited in
its power. Money is the alienator because it is, and especially because it has become, the go-between for the
needs of human life on the one side and the objects of these needs on the other, the pandering intermediary
standing between the life of man and the existence of other men. 72-73 [D: la conexión entre res y dinero es
interesante. Se lo relaciona, o identifica, con la “cosa”. Además, el dinero es el modo de ser nivelado de todas
las cosas por excelencia.]
Money is alienating and cursed because it reverses the (natural?) properties of things, reconciles contraries,
puts the humanity of men into subjection, and prostitutes everything it buys. The properties of money
become the properties of him who, having it as the “universal property,” can appropriate everything. 74
These human lives and these cities, technical in character, technical in origin, alienated and alienating, are
the obverse of the coin of progress. Men no longer enjoy the products of their labor, since the worker
receives only what is indispensable for him to perpetuate his physical life and continue to sell his labor force.
Those who hold the means of production throw out their products as so much bait to draw the money of
others, creating and awakening needs and desires, too often artificial, in order thereafter to satisfy them.
Real needs are far from being really satisfied, while a crowd of artificial needs is artificially produced and
artificially satisfied. [...] Everything has become crude, uniform, automatic, and mechanical. The reign of
quantity, abstract quantity, spreads and transforms the earth of men into a civilized desert. 83 [D: ¿Guiño a
Hölderlin? “Donde crece el desierto, crece también el poder de vencerlo” o algo así. Heidegger, Nietzsche,
Marzoa y quizá Mann hablan del desierto también.]
Capitalist society, by generalizing labor and positing the basis for integral technological development, has
brought about the preparation of what will abolish it. It has universalized labor, making it maximally
alienating, and set up the practical reality of abstract labor operating in a total indifference. Technicist labor
is present no longer under a particular form but imposes itself on everyone in the universality of its
abstraction; it no longer is intimately bound to the individual. “The fact that the specific kind of labour is
irrelevant presupposes a highly developed complex of actually existing kinds of labour, none of which is any
more the all-important one. The most general abstractions arise on the whole only when concrete
development is most profuse, so that a specific quality is seen to be common to many phenomena, or
common to all.” [quoted from Critique of Political Economy]
The extreme mechanization and automatization of labor, the transformation of every reality and process
into components of an industrial mechanism, the abstract and automated technicism that has been
developed to the utmost by the most modern societies and invades the technically underdeveloped
countries, all this moves in the direction of its own negation. This state of affairs─the transformation of all
men into workers free to sell their labor force and the development of a total indifference toward the mode
of labor─can and must lead to the freeing of all workers, to the superseding of both traditional and modern
labor. Yet as a liberation of workers it coincides with the liberation of productive forces, for capitalist
technique is not only alienating, it is itself alienated. 85 [D: la esencia de la técnica? qué significará la última
oración?]
As a structure erected on the real foundation of productive forces and relations of production, both of
which are activated by men and not things, the State assumes an alienated form that at the same time acts to
alienate, thus becoming the organization of an illusory community independent of the real universal
interest. The State not only is not what it claims to be, the reality of the universal, it also derives its raison
d’être from the contradiction that exists between the common interest (which is unsatisfied) and particular
interests (the dominating interests). Modern man is fragmented through the processes of reification, by
which both the natural and the human are eliminated. He becomes worker, salary winner, economic man,
political animal, citizen, civil servant, and so on, all separately, never in the form of species man (which
perhaps he has never been anyway), that is, man as a totality working, living, and organizing community life
with his fellow men. Man is thus split in two: he has a public life and a private life which are
incommunicable and contradictory. 100 [D: de nuevo la dialéctica de lo cualitativo y lo cuantitativo. El
estado no es m
ás que una ficción. Y sin embargo impera y niega la naturaleza (cualitativa) del hombre.]
It [Marx’s critical analysis] is directed against the modern world, the bourgeois world─which in fact is not a
world. [D: y no es un mundo precisamente porque se constituye como la ficción de equidad entre los
ciudadanos. Mundo se emplea aquí con un marcado sentido heideggeriano.] [...] Ongoing technicism and
bureaucratism have seized human social reality, their formalism has set itself up as a terribly real power and
become their very content. 103
Marx, taking up and perpetuating Western tradition, with its basis in the human ego as agent, that is, in the
will and its power, pushes that tradition to its ultimate consequence and rejects one particular phase of
Western history, the bourgeois, capitalist phase. For it is within this phase especially that the state
bureaucracy rose as master of society, “in its will to do everything, i.e., in its making will the causa prima, for
it is pure active existence, which receives its content from without.” The State thus becomes the
all-powerful subject that as absolute, that is, as separated from its basis, treats everything as its object. Marx,
in contrast, wants the will of men as agents to be coextensive with the general social order and collective
power, the agent-ego thus being universalized and the whole of human history a single phenomenon
becoming the Subject who transforms, produces, and administers objects. Western tradition is thus pushed
to its ultimate consequences in being extended universally; rationalist, technicist individualism is
transmuted into communism, the foundations of which remain technique, ratio, and will; and communism
finally leads to anarchy. Man, once worker, wage earner, proletarian, bourgeois, civil servant, public man
and private man, theoretician, practician, man subjugated by labor and the division of labor, by capital and
class distinction, by institutions and the constructions of the spirit, will become total man in a total society,
and his being will be inscribed in the rhythm of the historical becoming of the Universe. 105
Since his [Marx’s] aim is to annihilate reality as it is, he takes hold of things in their present
existence─seeing them, of course, from his particular vantage point, yet at least that vantage point reveals
an aspect of the whole [107] of ontic reality. 106-107 [D: Marx se ocupa de lo que es, aunque sea para
abolirlo (o precisamente porque se propone tal).]
But we gain nothing of the essential in thinking we can pillory Marx’s thought with designations of this
kind [i.e., theoretical, practical, open and speculative, fixed and dogmatic]. That thought remains still
actively fertile and extremely problematic, if not ambiguous, and not simply dialectical; it can sustain several
interpretations, in the realms both of thought and of reality. 107
We wish to let Marx himself speak and then comprehend his words, filled as they are with questions, in the
manner of all great words. 108
Thought always takes flight, and reality always keeps its own weight, without, for all that, thought being
unreal or nonreal. Faced with the questions of thought and the problems of reality, man and mankind set
themselves such tasks as they are unable to solve, for not everything is of the realm of the given and the
practical. Thought can at certain moments grasp that which is and blaze a path to becoming, but
being-in-becoming once more slips away. 108
He [Marx] directed his efforts to deciphering reality, lending his ear to the voices of human tragedy that
cried from earth to heaven, though he held no belief in a heaven. Could he have spoken or done otherwise?
Thought thinks that which is, and political action constructs and destroys cities and empires; yet that does
not mean that thought is ineffective. 108
Part IV. Human Alienation
He [Marx] continues to move within the dimension of thought in which there is a “separation” between the
physical and the metaphysical, reality and idea, matter and mind (spirit), practice and theory. Marx’s
thought is metaphysical, even though he wishes to pass beyond opposition and dualism; it is metaphysical,
as all Western European thought since Descartes is, in the very fact that it gives a privileged position to the
physical and sensuous in relation to the “metaphysical.” Marx thinks and operates with the distinction and
difference that exist in a metaphysical way between what truly is and what only secondarily is. For him, that
truly and fundamentally is which is not suprasensible but sensible; and yet this tenet is stated within a
metaphysical oppositeness. The World, the totality of being, remains double: material and spiritual. 146 [D:
recuerda mucho a la crítica de Heidegger a Nietzsche. También a los modelos de fundamentación ideal y
fáctica.]
Sketching the genesis of the ideology with broad strokes, Marx wants to bring everything that gives the
appearance of the ethereal and the celestial back to the earth and the soil from which it issues. It is on the
earth that real, concrete, active, productive men act, determined by the degree of development of productive
forces. These same historical men thus produce the products that mount from the earth toward
heaven─ideas and representations, thought and consciousness. All these elements of idealistic and
intellectualistic superstructure emanate from being─not Being but the being of man─express being,
reflect and invert being; they constitute the material of ideological alienation, of the concealing of truth;
they are deceitful, illusory mirages that express through consciousness the alienation of that of which
consciousness is the alienated awareness. 152
In opposition to Hegel, who saw in history the development of spirit, Marx offers his own design, an
inversion of Hegel’s. Marx inverts metaphysics by no longer seeking in the invisible and suprasensible the
foundation for the physical (the visible, the sensible, [153] or sensuous) and by making the material, the
practical, the empirical the foundation for the spiritual. He moves here completely along the axis of the
distinction, the difference, the cut, the fault, between what truly is and what by that standard is only in a
derived way; and so he remains still a metaphysician. He is a metaphysician of the inversion of the order of
the “two worlds,” for he speaks of the base, the real structure, which has now become what truly is, and of
superstructure, of idealistic, spiritualistic emanation, which, measured against the true, is now only derived.
152-153
For the moment let us keep in mind the twofold movement by which Marx encompasses the double
movement of production. Ever since Plato, who stands as the true origin of Western European metaphysics
(i.e. philosophy), ever since Judeo-Christianity and its theology and on up to modern European thought
(Descartes, Kant, Hegel), the idea separates from the entity in dominion over it; thought stands opposed to
nature in transcendence beyond it; and idea, God, spirit, or thought is being par [156] excellence, true
Being, in relation to which the sensuous entity is different and derivative. From Descartes on, thought,
conception, ideas, and consciousness become the measure of the reality of anything that is, and the ego of
man is their locus. Hegel brings this metaphysics, that is, metaphysics simply put, to its consummation, and
Spirit, the foundation of the totality of being, recognizes itself in universal history and the fully achieved
forms of self-consciousness. Truth according to Hegel is, of course, “the movement of its becoming”; but
truth is idea, for “the absolute idea is alone being.” From the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit to the
Science of Logic the being-becoming of totality simply is, for Hegel, idea. Yet even though after Hegel the
reaction is generally one of opposition to his metaphysics, this opposition remains within metaphysics.
Marx is the first one to work its inversion. For him, sense nature, the essentially active forces of man as
social, the development of productive forces, and the material economic and social conditions are what
contain truth and reality and constitute the material base, in relation to which idealistic
superstructure─thought, ideas, conceptions, consciousness─is derivative and different and constitutes the
domain of spiritualistic ideology. Nonetheless, this reversing of metaphysics remains metaphysical, and we
shall see that Marx does not end up abolishing all “superstructure.” 155-156