4. The concept of man as alienated in the early
manuscripts implies that alienated man is unhappy,
maladjusted, truncated, psychologically if not physi-
cally unhealthy. It does not explain the phenomenon
of alienation which is active and voluntary rather than
passive and coerced. Marx himself was alienated from
his society but hardly from his “true” self, for he
undoubtedly found fulfillment in his role as critic and
social prophet. From this point of view to be alienated
from a society may be a condition for the achievement
of the serenity, interest, and creative effort and fulfill-
ment that are the defining characteristics of the psy-
chologically unalienated man. Marx's early theory of
alienation could hardly do justice, aside from its in-
herent incoherences, to Marx's mature behavior as an
integrated person alienated from his own society.
5. The existentialist interpretation of Marxism makes
it primarily an ethical philosophy of life and society,
very much akin to the ethical philosophies of social
life that Marx and Engels scorned during most of their
political career. Nonetheless this ethical dimension of
social judgment and criticism constitutes a perennial
source of the appeal of Marxism to generations of the
young, all the more so because of the tendencies both
in the Social-Democratic and, especially, in the Bol-
shevik-Leninist versions of Marxism to play down, if
not to suppress, the ethical moment of socialism. In
the canonic writings of these interpretations of Marx-
ism, socialism is pictured as the irreversible and in-
escapable fulfillment of an historical development and
moral judgments are explained, where they are recog-
nized, as reflections of class interest, devoid of universal
and objective validity. The doctrinal writings of both
Marx and Engels lend color to this view—despite the
fact that everything else they wrote, and even the
works purportedly of a technical and analytical char-
acter, like
Capital itself, are pervaded by a passionate
moral concern and a denunciation of social injustices
in tones that sound like echoes of the Hebrew social
prophets. The very word
Ausbeutung, or “exploita-
tion,” which is central to Marx's economic analysis,
is implicitly ethical although Marx seeks to disavow
its ethical connotations. Even critics of Marx's eco-
nomic theories and historicism, like Karl Popper, who
reject his contentions, recognize the ethical motivation
of Marx's thought. Capitalism is condemned not only
because it is unstable and generates suffering, but be-
cause uncontrolled power over the social instruments
of production gives arbitrary power over the lives of
those who must live by their use.
Nonetheless, despite its ethical reinterpretation of
Marxism, existentialist Marxism fails to make ends meet
theoretically. Either it ends up with a pale sort of
humanism, a conception of the good and the good
society derived from the essential nature of man and
his basic needs—a lapse into the Feuerbachianisms
rejected by Marx—or it denies the possibility of a
universally valid norm of conduct for man or society,
stresses the uniqueness of the individual moral act,
makes every situation in which two or more individuals
are involved an antinomic one in which right conflicts
with right and self with self. If the first version gener-
ates a universalism of love or duty and brotherhood
of man which Marx (and Hegel) reject as unhistorical,
the second points to a Hobbesianism in which “the
other” far from being “a brother” is potentially an
enemy. Marx conceals from himself the necessity of
developing an explicit positive ethics over and above
his condemnations of unnecessary human cruelty and
injustice. The closest he comes to such an ethic is in
his utopian conception of a classless society whose
institutions will be such that the freedom of each per-
son will find in the freedom of every other person “not
its limitation but its fulfillment.” Many critics find this
expectation an astonishingly naive conception of man
and society, which does not even hold for traditional
versions of the Kingdom of Heaven. But even this
utopian construction can hardly absolve Marxists from
the necessity of making and justifying specific ethical
judgments for the City of Man.
