227 -The idea of the rights of man was not discovered in the Christian world until the

last century. It is not innate in man. On the contrary, it can only be won in a struggle
against the historical traditions in which man has up to now been educated. Therefore
the rights of man are not a gift of nature or a legacy of previous history, but the prize of
the struggle against the accident of birth and the privileges which history has handed
down from generation to generation. They are the product of culture, and only he can
possess them who has earned them and deserved them.

230-31: Therefore not one of the so-called rights of man goes beyond egoistic man, man
as a member of civil society, namely an individual withdrawn into himself, his private
interest and his private desires and separated from the community. In the rights of man
it is not man who appears as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society,
appears as a framework extraneous to the individuals, as a limitation of their original
independence. The only bond which holds them together is natural necessity, need and
private interest, the conservation of their property and their egoistic persons. It is a
curious thing that a people which is just beginning to free itself, to tear down all the
barriers between the different sections of the people and to found a political community,
that such a people should solemnly proclaim the rights of egoistic man, separated from
his fellow men and from the community (Declara tion of 1791), and even repeat this
proclamation at a time when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation and is
for that reason pressingly required, at a time when the sacrifice of all the interests of
civil society becomes the order of the day and egoism must be punished as a crime.
(Declaration o f the Rights o f Man, etc., 1793.) This fact appears even more curious
when we observe that citizenship, the political community, is reduced by the political
emancipators to a mere means for the conservation of these so-called rights of man and
that the citizen is therefore proclaimed the servant of egoistic man; that the sphere in
which man behaves as a communal being [Gemeinwesen] is degraded to a level below
the sphere in which he behaves as a partial being, and finally that it is man as bourgeois,
i.e. as a member of civil society, and not man as citizen who is taken as the real and
authentic man. ‘The goal of all political association is the conservation of the natural
and imprescriptible rights of man’ (Declaration o f the Rights of Man etc., 1791, Article
2). 'Government is instituted in order to guarantee man the enjoyment of his natural and
imprescriptible rights’ (Declaration etc., 1793, Article 1). Thus even during the ardour
of its youth, urged on to new heights by the pressure of circumstances, political life
declares itself to be a mere means whose goal is the life of civil society. True,
revolutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory. While, for example,
security is declared to be one of the rights of man, the violation of the privacy of letters
openly becomes the order of the day. While the ‘unlimited freedom of the press’
(Constitution of 1793, Article 122) is guaranteed as a consequence of the right to
individual freedom, the freedom of the press is completely destroyed, for ‘the freedom
of the press should not be permitted when it compromises public freedom’.25 This
therefore means that the right to freedom ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into
conflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is simply the guarantee of the
rights of man, the rights of individual man, and should be abandoned as soon as it
contradicts its goal, these rights of man. But practice is only the exception and theory is
the rule.

234 - All emancipation is reduction of the human world and of relationships to man
himself Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of
civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other to the citizen, the
moral person. Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself
and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual
work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his
forces propres27 as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in
the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed

239- Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society and appears as such in all its
purity as soon as civil society has fully brought forth the political state. The god of
practical need and self-interest is money

Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may stand. Money
debases all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the
universal and self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore deprived the entire
world - both the world of man and of nature-of its specific value. Money is the
estranged essence of man’s work and existence; this alien essence dominates him and he
worships it.

254 - What is the basis of a partial and merely political revolution? Its basis is the fact
that one part o f civil society emancipates itself and attains universal domination, that
one particular class undertakes from its particular situation the universal emancipation
of society. This class liberates the whole of society, but only on condition that the whole
of society finds itself in the same situation as this class, e.g. possesses or can easily
acquire money and education. No class of civil society can play this role without
awakening a moment of enthusiasm in itself and in the masses; a moment in which this
class fraternizes and fuses with society in general, becomes identified with it and is
experienced and acknowledged as its universal representative; a moment in which its
claims and rights are truly the rights and claims of society itself and in which it is in
reality the heart and head of society. Only in the name of the universal rights of society
can a particular class lay claim to universal domination. Revolutionary energy and
spiritual selfconfidence are not enough to storm this position of liberator and to ensure
thereby the political exploitation of all the other spheres of society in the interests of
one’s own sphere. If the revolution of a people and the emancipation o f a particular
class [Klasse] of civil society are to coincide, if one class is to stand for the whole of
society, then all the deficiences of society must be concentrated in another class [Stand],
one particular class must be the class which gives universal offence, the embodiment of
a general limitation; one particular sphere of society must appear as the notorious crime
of the whole of society, so that the liberation of this sphere appears as universal self-
liberation. If one class [Stand] is to be the class of liberation par excellence, then
another class must be the class of overt oppression. The negative general significance of
the French nobility and the French clergy determined the positive general significance
of the class which stood nearest to and opposed to them - the bourgeoisie.

256 - So where is the positive possibility of German emancipation? This is our answer.
In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a
class of civil society, a class [Stand] which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere
which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and which lays claim
to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in
general; a sphere of society which can no longer lay claim to a historical title, but
merely to a human one, which does not stand in one-sided opposition to the
consequences but in all-sided opposition to the premises of the German political system;
and finally a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from -
and thereby emancipating - all the other spheres of society, which is, in a word, the total
loss of humanity and which can therefore redeem itself only through the total
redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the
proletariat. The proletariat is only beginning to appear in Germany as a result of the
emergent industrial movement. For the proletariat is not formed by natural poverty but
by artificially produced poverty; it is formed not from the mass of people mechanically
oppressed by the weight of society but from the mass of people issuing from society’s
acute disintegration and in particular from the dissolution of the middle class. (Clearly,
however, the ranks of the proletariat are also gradually swelled by natural poverty and
Christian-Germanic serfdom.) When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution o f the
existing world order, it is only declaring the secret of its own existence, for it is the
actual dissolution of that order. When the proletariat demands the negation o f private
property, it is only elevating to a principle for society what society has already made a
principle for the proletariat, what is embodied in the proletariat, without its consent, as
the negative result of society. The proletarian then finds that he has the same right, in
relation to the world which is coming into being, as the German King in relation to the
world as it is at present when he calls the people his people just as he calls his horse his
horse. By calling the people his private property, the king is merely declaring that the
owner of private property is king. Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the
proletariat, so the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy; and once the
lightning of thought has struck deeply into this virgin soil of the people, emancipation
will transform the Germans into men. Let us sum up the result: The only liberation of
Germany which is practically possible is liberation from the point of view of that theory
which declares man to be the supreme being for man. Germany can emancipate itself
from the Middle Ages only if it emancipates itself at the same time from the partial
victories over the Middle Ages. In Germany no form of bondage can be broken without
breaking all forms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness,
cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the German
is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the
proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of
the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization
[Verwirklichung] of philosophy. When all the inner conditions are met, the day o f the
German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing o f the Gallic cock.

Mezzadra

“la esencia humana no es algo abstracto, inmanente al individuo singular. En su

realidad, es el conjunto de las relaciones sociales (in seiner Wirklichkeit ist es das
ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse)”. Menos comentado es otro fragmento de
estos mismos años, en el que la crítica de la abstracción se carga de valoraciones
posteriores. La cuestión es aquí, en La Sagrada Familia (1845), la crítica de lo que con
mordaz ironía definen como la “crítica crítica” de Bruno Bauer “y esposa”. Esta crítica,
escriben Marx y Engels, “reina en la soledad de la abstracción, que incluso cuando tiene
aires de ocuparse de un objeto, no sale de su soledad vacía para entrar en una relación
verdaderamente social con un objeto real, porque su objeto no es más que el objeto de
su imaginación, un objeto imaginario” (HF, p. 167). (Mezzadra, 40)

Ellos son, tomando una imagen de La ideología alemana (1845-1846), “individuos

histórico-universales” (IT, p. 36), hombres que se volvieron “individuos abstractos y,
por eso mismo, sólo entonces se ven en condiciones de relacionarse los unos con los
otros como individuos” (EN, p. 78). El máximo aislamiento coincide, aquí, con el
máximo de socialidad (ver Basso 2008). Es necesario situarse al interior de este nexo a
fin de estudiar los procesos que llevaron a que se interrumpa la comunicación entre el
individuo y el conjunto de condiciones (evidentemente no individuales, sino más bien,
“universales”) que empíricamente determinan su existencia –y producen subjetividad.
Contra la “crítica crítica”, se trata de poner en el centro de la investigación –para hacer
visible la producción de abstracciones que dominan materialmente a los hombres– la
actividad esencial del sujeto real, que vive y sufre en la sociedad presente, participando
de sus tormentos y de sus alegrías” (HF, p.169). Mezzadra, 41)

Estamos pasando así, casi sin darnos cuenta, del primer comienzo, el filosófico, al
segundo, el político: son el Estado y la propiedad privada los dispositivos, como
decimos hoy, que “transforman a los hombres en abstracciones” en tanto que “producen
el hombre abstracto” (HF, p. 204). Es evidente que el tema elegido como hilo conductor
de esta exploración de la cocina marxiana –la producción de subjetividad– ilumina,
desde las obras juveniles, la “especularidad” del Estado y la propiedad privada (en tanto
cristalización en una dimensión separada de las condiciones comunes que determinan la
existencia de las personas), “la constitución política culmina por tanto”, anota
lapidariamente Marx de forma concisa, en “la constitución de la propiedad privada”
(CFHDP, p. 124). El proceso descripto en La ideología alemana a través del que las
“fuerzas productivas” terminan por aparecer “como completamente independientes y
separadas de 42 los individuos, como un mundo aparte” está, por supuesto, orientado a
ofrecer estas fuerzas como fuerzas “de la propiedad privada y, por lo tanto, de los
individuos en cuanto propietarios privados” (IA, p. 78). Como se verá en breve, esta
figura del individuo como propietario privado constituye la contracara de las figuras de
la ciudadanía, producto de cierto “perfeccionamiento” de un Estado moderno que no es
sino “la forma (...) que resume toda la sociedad civil de una época” (IA, p. 80), la
garantía de las relaciones de dominación que organizan –en particular a través de la
función esencial de ‘derecho privado’ (cfr. IA, p. 80)– la norma propietaria Mezzadra,
42)

McLellan, D. (1988). Marxism: essential writings. Oxford University Press, USA.

Alienation and the Proletariat (Holy Family)

By investigating ‘the whole as such’ to find the conditions for its existence, Critical
Criticism is searching in the genuine theological manner, outside the whole, for the
conditions for its existence. Critical speculation moves outside the object which it
pretends to deal with. The whole contradiction is nothing but the movement of both its
sides, and the condition for the existence of the whole lies in the very nature of the two
sides. Critical Criticism dispenses with the study of this real movement which forms the
whole in order to be able to declare that it, Critical Criticism as the calm of knowledge,
is above both extremes of the contradiction, and that its activity, which has made the
‘whole as such’, is now alone in a position to abolish the abstraction of which it is the
maker. Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are
both forms of the world of private property. The question is what place each occupies in
the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole. Private
property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its
opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the contradiction, self-
satisfied private property. The proletariat, on the other hand, is compelled as proletariat
to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, the condition for its existence, what makes it
the proletariat, i.e. private property. That is the negative side of the contradiction, its
restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property. The
propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-alienation.
But the former class finds in this self-alienation its confirmation and its good, its own
power: it has in it a semblance of human existence. The class of the proletariat feels
annihilated in its self-alienation; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an
inhuman existence. In the words of Hegel, the class of the proletariat is in abasement
indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the
contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright,
decisive, and comprehensive negation of that nature. the materialist conception of
history 1844–1847 | 149 Within this antithesis the private owner is therefore the
conservative side, the proletarian, the destructive side. From the former arises the action
of preserving the antithesis, from the latter, that of annihilating it. Indeed private
property, too, drives itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution, only,
however, through a development which does not depend on it, of which it is
unconscious and which takes place against its will, through the very nature of things;
only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, that misery conscious of its
spiritual and physical misery, that dehumanization conscious of its dehumanization and
therefore self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that private property
pronounced on itself by begetting the proletariat, just as it carries out the sentence that
wagelabour pronounced on itself by bringing forth wealth for others and misery for
itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of
society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat
disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property. When socialist
writers ascribe this historic role to the proletariat, it is not, as Critical Criticism pretends
to think, because they consider the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since the
abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete
in the full-grown proletariat; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the
conditions of life of society today in all their inhuman acuity; since man has lost himself
in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of
that loss, but through urgent, no longer disguiseable, absolutely imperative need—that
practical expression of necessity—is driven directly to revolt against that inhumanity; it
follows that the proletariat can and must free itself. But it cannot free itself without
abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life
without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are
summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling
school of labour. The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of
the proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is,
and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do. Its aim and historical
action is irrevocably and obviously demonstrated in its own life situation as well as in
the whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need to dwell here upon
the fact that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its
historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete
clarity.
Marx

- Political life in the modem sense is the scholasticism of the life of the people.
The monarchy is the perfect expression of this estrangement The republic is the
negation of that estrangement, but within its own sphere. It is self-evident that
the political constitution as such is only developed when the private spheres
have achieved an independent existence (90)

The perfected political state is by its nature the species-life of man in opposition to his
material life. All the presuppositions of this egoistic life continue to exist outside the
sphere of the state in civil society, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political
state has attained its full degree of development man leads a double life, a life in heaven
and a life on earth, not only in his mind, in his consciousness, but in reality. He lives in
the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil
society, where he is active as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases
himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers. The relationship of the
political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relationship of heaven to earth.
(220)