KARL MARX

96 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
it is man's nature to be his own creator; he forms and develops himself
by working on and transforming the world outside him in co-operation
with his fellow men. In this progressive interchange between man and
the world, it is man's nature to be in control of this process, to be the
initiator, the subject in which the process originates. However, this nature
has become alien to man; that is, it is no longer his and belongs to
another person or thing. In religion, for example, it is God who is the
subject of the historical process. It is God who holds the initiative and
man is in a state of dependence. In economics, according to Marx, it is
money or the cash-nexus that manoeuvres men around as though they
were objects instead of the reverse. The central point is that man has lost
control of his own destiny and has seen this control invested in other
entities. What is proper to man has become alien to him, being the
attribute of something else. 132
Having discussed this relationship of the worker to the objects of his
production, Marx defined and analysed three further characteristics of
alienated man. The second was his alienation in the act of production.
'How would the worker be able to confront the product of his work as
an alien being if he did not alienate himself in the act of production
itself?' 133 Marx distinguished three aspects of this type of alienation: firstly,
labour was external to the worker and no part of his nature; secondly, it
was not voluntary, but forced labour; and thirdly, man's activity here
belonged to another, with once more the religious parallel: 'As in religion
the human imagination's own activity, the activity of man's head and his
heart, reacts independently on the individual as an alien activity of gods
or devils, so the activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity.
It belongs to another and is the loss of himself.' 134 The result of this was
to turn man into an animal, for he only felt at ease when performing the
animal functions of eating, drinking and procreating - in his distinctly
human functions he was made to feel like an animal.
Marx had analysed man as alienated from the product of his labour
and also as alienated in the act of production (this second he also called
'self-alienation'). He then derived his third characteristic of alienated
labour from the two previous ones: man was alienated from his species,
from his fellow men. Marx then defined what he meant by 'species', a
term he took over from Feuerbach. The two chief characteristics of
a species-being were self-consciousness and universality: 'Man is a speciesbeing
not only in that practically and theoretically he makes both his own
and other species into his objects, but also, and this is only another way
of putting the same thing, he relates himself as to the present, living
species, in that he relates to himself as to a universal and therefore free
being.' 135 This universality consisted in the fact that man could appropriate