Studying Marx's Grundrisse

The part of our discussion on 11 February 2021, on pages 266-274, which I will pursue further below, is the one about the passage noted by Penny on p.266.

"The labour which stands opposite capital is alien [fremde] labour, and the capital which stands opposite labour is alien capital".

In my view, all Marx means here is that in the exchange between capitalist and worker, the capitalist deals with someone else's labour, and the worker with someone else's capital.

"Alien", or in German fremd, here just means "someone else's". Fremd can be translated as alien, but it is a more common and matter-of-fact word in German than alien is in English, and without the same emotional weight.

Thus:

She has visited many foreign countries. Sie hat viele fremde Länder bereist. Ships from foreign lands... Schiffe aus fremden Ländern...

Fremd here has no more connotation of hostility or opposition than the English word "foreign". Maybe less.

Entfremdet, alienated, or Entfremdung, alienation, are a different matter. They have more connotation of opposition, of contrived distancing, etc.

Entfremdung does appear in Hegel's writings, but much more often in his Phenomenology of Spirit (which, as far as I know, Marx never referred to or cited) than in the Science of Logic (which we know Marx was glancing through at the time he wrote the Grundrisse) or other later writings.

Unlike with many other words, Hegel gives no special connotation to Entfremdung different from what other writers would give it. He got the idea mainly from the Romantics, who were influential when he was young. Hegel himself, especially when he was young, was a harmonistic liberal, believing in a society which would combine some measure of individual freedom with togetherness and "everyone in their place".

Although in many other aspects Hegel's use of terminology was very distinctive, he was like other German writers of his time in using the word Entfremdung as part of a cluster of words with overlapping meanings.

Inwood, in his Hegel Dictionary comments:

1. Entfremdung corresponds to entfremden ("to make alien")... It primarily indicated the estrangement of persons from one another.

2. Entäusserung corresponds to entäussern, "to make OUTER or external (ausser)", and means "surrender" or "divestiture". (Hegel uses Entäusserung, but not Entfremdung, to refer to the alienation, i.e. voluntary disposal, of one's own property)

Other words in the same area are: Entzweiung (from zwei, "two"), "bifurca­tion", "disunion"; Zerrissenheit (from zerreissen, "to tear, rend, dismember, disconnect"), "dismemberment", "disjointedness"; Zwiespalt (also from zwei), "discord", "conflict", "discrepancy"; Diremtion ["diremption"]; and Trennung, "separation" (from trennen, "to separate").

Undoubtedly Marx in his younger years was influenced by the Romantic legacy, and possibly in part as it was filtered through Hegel's Phenomenology. Engels even more so. In his Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels wrote:

"The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city".

Remember, Engels grew up in a small town, where everyone would have known everyone else they met on the street. Partly out of such thoughts, I guess, Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto and in later writings, supported the then-common idea of the abolition of the division of town and country by way of the distribution of the population into a large number of small settlements.

Socialists have quietly let that idea drop, and I think rightly. There are great social advantages in having both dense big cities and sizeable patches of unurbanised countryside, rather than a whole country defined by a uniform spread of suburbia.

In the Grundrisse Marx criticises the greedy, indifferent individualism of bourgeois society - but also, and more harshly, the yearnings of romanticism.

"Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.)"

To put it in provocative terms: bourgeois alienation is much "preferable" to the pre-capitalist forms of togetherness, and the socialist future will build on positive contributions from that bourgeois alienation.