The Inversion In The 1844 Manuscripts

This thesis intends to deal with the problem of inversion in young Marx. The problem was first proposed by Althusser who believes the idea of Marx’s inversion is lacking in rigor and is not able to explain the specificity of Marxist theory. However, through an examination of the usage of Verkehrung in German literature and daily language, we could find that inversion is not merely a spatial one, so is Marx’s inversion of Hegelian dialectic. Focusing on the 1844 Manuscripts, I unfold my thesis from two perspectives:the ontological inversion and that in the critique of political economy. Ontologically, Marx constitutes a first-order mediation, i.e. productive activity between man and nature. While the first-order mediation is fundamentally ontological, estranged labor, the second-order mediation has undercut the first one in human history up to present. Marx’s inversion of Hegel is not a simple substitution of material production for the activity of mind, and it was based on the distinction between the two mediations that Marx inversed Hegelian dialectic. In Hegel there is only alienating mediation, so he absolutizes alienation and ignores not only the precondition of alienation but also the supersession of it. Therefore the 1844 Manuscripts were not a copy of Feuerbachian subject-predicate inversion. As for the critique of political economy, which is internally related with the first inversion, the inner relationships of private property is more significant to Marx’s inversion than the relation of laborer and product. His critique in 1844 is not founded on a hypothesis of human nature but on a dialectical analysis of the inner structure of private property system:the second-order mediation becomes a self-alienating system and it continuously produces and reproduces the alienating totality. It is because Marx highly emphasizes the creativity and activity of labor that he considers it as the subjective essence of private property, and here labor does not merely mean a laborer, but the dynamics of the whole system. Furthermore, the two dimensions of inversion are interrelated to each other. What is inverted is not only the spirit in Hegel, God in religion, but also the economic operation of capitalist society. All these elements are within the alienating mediation and reflect and mediate each other. However, in 1844 Marx was not able to explain systematically how the mediating moments realize.