请将“The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien. [1975, p. 272; original emphasis]

The sundering of doer from done is inevitably the sundering of the doer himself.2 The production of an alien object is inevitably an active process of self-estrangement:

How could the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? … If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. [1975, p. 274]

Alienation of man from his own activity is self-estrangement: it is the worker himself who actively produces his own estrangement.

The rupture of the doer from the done is the negation of the doer’s power-to. The doer is turned into a victim. Activity is turned into passivity, doing into suffering. Doing is turned against the doer:

This relation is the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life – for what is life but activity? – as an activity which is turned against him, independent of him and not belonging to him. [1975, p. 275]

Alienation is the production of humans who are damaged, maimed, deprived of their humanity:

In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken away from him. [1975, p. 277]

This ‘tearing away from man the object of his production’ alienates him from his collective humanity, his ‘species-being’: ‘Estranged labour turns … man’s species-being … into a being alien from him, into a means for his individual existence’ (1975, p. 277; original emphasis). This implies the fragmentation of the collective human subject, the ‘estrangement of man from man’ (1975, p. 277). Mutual recognition is broken, not just between ruler and ruled, but between the workers themselves:

What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labour and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labour and object of labour. In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature. [1975, p. 277]

The term ‘species-life’ or ‘species-being’ refers surely to nothing other than the social flow of human doing, the material braiding of a mutually recognitive ‘we’.

This estrangement of man from man is not only an estrangement between workers but also the production of the non-worker, the master: ‘If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker’ (1975, p. 278). Estranged labour is the active producing of domination, the active conversion of power-to into power-over:

Just as he creates his own production as the loss of his reality, as his punishment; his own product as a loss, as a product not belonging to him; so he creates the domination of the person who does not produce over the product. Just as he estranges his activity from himself, so he confers upon the stranger an activity which is not his own. [1975, p. 279]3

The notion of alienation thus refers to the breaking of the social flow of doing, the turning of doing against itself. This is not the result of fate or divine intervention: human doing is the only subject, the sole constitutive power. We are the only gods, the sole creators. Our problem, as creators, is that we are creating our own destruction. We create the negation of our own creation. Doing negates itself. Activity becomes passivity, doing becomes non-doing, being. Alienation points both to our dehumanisation and to the fact that it is we who produce our own dehumanisation. But how can maimed, dehumanised, alienated people possibly create a liberated, human society? Alienation signals not only the urgency but also, apparently, the impossibility of revolutionary change.


III

The rupture of doing and done is introduced right at the beginning of Capital. Echoing the words of the 1844 Manuscripts (‘The alienation of the worker in his product means … that … it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him’), Marx begins the second paragraph of Capital saying, ‘A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us’ (1965, p. 35). The commodity is an object produced by us, but standing outside us. The commodity takes on a life of its own in which its social origin in human labour is extinguished. It is a product which denies its own character as product, a done which denies its own relation to doing.

The commodity is the point of fracture of the social flow of doing. As a product produced for exchange, it stands at the unhinging or dis-articulation of social doing. It is of course the product of a social doing, but the fact that it is produced for exchange on the market breaks the flow of doing, makes the thing stand apart from the doing of which it is both product and precondition. It stands on its own to be sold on the market, the work that produced it forgotten. The labour which produces it is social (labour for others), but it is indirectly social – it is labour for others which exists in the form of labour for oneself. The sociality of doing is ruptured, and with it the process of mutual recognition and social validation. Mutual recognition is removed from the producers and transferred to their products: it is the product which is recognised socially, in the process of exchange. Recognition of doing is expressed as the value of the product. It is now the quantitative, monetary measure of value (price) which provides social validation for the doing of people. It is money which tells you whether what you do is socially useful.

The commodity, then, is not a thing to be taken at face value. Analysis allows us to discern the labour that has produced the commodity and to see labour as the substance of its value, but that just leads us on to a far bigger question: why is it that the doing which produced the commodity is negated?

Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour-time by the magnitude of that value. [Marx 1965, p. 80]

Capital is a study of the self-negation of doing. From the commodity, Marx moves on to value, money, capital, profit, rent, interest – ever more opaque forms of the occultation of doing, ever more sophisticated forms of the suppression of power-to. Doing (human activity) disappears further and further from sight. Things rule. It is in this world where things rule, where the novum of human creativity disappears from sight, in this ‘enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world’ (Marx 1972a, p. 830), that it becomes possible to speak of the ‘laws of capitalist development’. It is on the basis of the critique of this insanity that it becomes possible to criticise the categories of the political economists, the rationality and laws of their analysis of an irrational, perverted world.

The core of all this is the separation of the done from the doing. This is inherent in the commodity, and receives its fully developed form in capital, the appropriation of the done by the owners of the past done (and therefore of the means of doing), the accumulation of done upon done, the accumulation of capital: ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!’ Accumulation is simply the voracious, relentless process of separating done from doing, of turning the done (as means of doing) against the doers in order to subject their present doing to the sole end of further accumulation. It is this ever-renewed process that gives a specific form to doing (as abstract labour, labour abstracted from any particular content, value production, surplus value production) and to the done (as value, as commodity, as money, as capital): all aspects of the ever-repeated rupture of the social flow of doing.

Marx now refers to this process of rupture not as alienation, but as ‘fetishism’. In his discussion of fetishism at the end of Chapter 1 of the first volume of Capital, he explains:

In order … to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent things endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and with the human race. [1965, p. 72]

The commodity is ‘a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (1965, p. 71). The ‘mystical character of commodities’, Marx says, comes not from their use value, but from the commodity form itself, that is, from the fact that the product of labour assumes the form of a commodity:

The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour-power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally, the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products. A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. [1965, p. 72]

Just as Marx had insisted on understanding self-estrangement as the product of self-estranged labour, so he emphasises that the peculiar character of commodities has its origin in the ‘peculiar social character of the labour that produces them’ (1965, p. 72). Commodity production is indirectly social labour: although the products are produced for social use, the form of production is private:”翻译为中文