Alienation, labor and sexuality in Marx's 1844 manuscript

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Rethinking Marxism
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Alienation, Labor, and Sexuality
in Marx's 1844 Manuscripts
Marcia Klotz
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To cite this article: Marcia Klotz (2006): Alienation, Labor, and Sexuality in Marx's 1844
Manuscripts, Rethinking Marxism, 18:3, 405-413
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RETHINKING MARXISM
VOLUME 18
NUMBER 3
(JULY 2006)
Alienation, Labor, and Sexuality in
Marx's 1844 Manuscripts
Marcia Klotz
Sexuality, like labor, is a form of productive human activity through which we come to
recognize ourselves as embodied, agential beings in the world. Under capitalism,
sexuality is alienated from us*/taken from us that it might be sold back to us in
estranged form, as a quality that appears to adhere to the commodity rather than to
human beings. This essay examines Marx's implicit and explicit invocation of
eroticism in the various manuscripts of 1844 to argue that the kind of sex-positive
politics celebrated in pro-sex feminism and queer activism is very much in keeping
with a Marxist agenda.
Key Words: Sexuality, Labor, Alienation, Consumerism, Sex-positive Feminism, 1844
Manuscripts
This paper represents an attempt to think through a theoretical exchange between
the fields of queer theory and Marxism by returning to the early Marx, specifically the
1844 Manuscripts. I'm interested in the critique of alienation that emerges from those
documents, which remain, to my view, among the most passionate and persuasive of
Marx's writings. I will be positing a parallel between sexuality and labor here as two
modes of human activity*/productive activity*/that are both subject, under a
capitalist mode of production, to alienation. In the process, I hope to use Marx's
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critique of alienation as a means of breaking out of a certain morass in queer theory,
which has followed Foucault in resisting the typologization of nonnormative
sexualities, even as it relies on a discourse of normativity to claim political relevance
for queer politics. I also hope to use a celebration of sexuality, championed by queer
politics and sex-positive feminism, to nuance Marx's own critique of alienation,
extending his focus to a much broader range of human activity.
I would like to begin by returning to the feminist debates of the early 1980s, the
period dominated by that which has come to be known as second-wave feminism. In
1981, Catharine MacKinnon articulated the relationship between sexuality and labor
in a pithy analogy: ``Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is
most one's own, yet most taken away.'' To return to MacKinnon's formulation at this
particular historical moment may seem to be digging the spurs into the emaciated
ribs of a very dead horse; her work, after all, has been roundly dismissed by both
sex-positive feminists and queer theorists. Nevertheless, I believe that MacKinnon
ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/06/030405-09
- 2006 Association for Economic and Social Analysis
DOI: 10.1080/08935690600748124

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was at least partially right in ways that neither she nor her detractors have fully
acknowledged.
For MacKinnon, women occupy the place of the proletariat in the sexual economy,
defined as a social class by that which is expropriated from them.
Work is the social process of shaping and transforming the material and
social worlds, creating people as social beings as they create value. It is that
activity by which people become who they are. Class is its structure,
production its consequence, capital its congealed form, and control its issue
. . . Sexuality is that social process which creates, organizes, expresses and
directs desire, creating the social beings we know as women and men, as
their relations create society . . . Heterosexuality is its structure, gender and
family its congealed forms, sex roles its qualities generalized to social
personae, reproduction a consequence, and control its issues. (1989, 2)
Of course, many of MacKinnon's critics have rejected this formulation because it
defines women as sexual victims, those unhappy, passive individuals for whom sex
exists only that it might be taken away. Pro-sex feminists have insisted that women
can and do take pleasure in sex, celebrating women-centered forms of sexual
expression. Queer theorists have similarly disparaged her narrow definition of
sexuality as a tool of oppression in heterosexual relationships, privileging instead
those sexual modalities that have nothing to do with traditionally defined notions of
gender and family. Yet both these critiques neglect the fundamental structure of her
argument, which gathers its force by the parallel she builds between feminist
methodology and Marxism. Sexuality is expropriated here just as labor is in Marx's
analysis; her rhetoric draws its strength from the passion and persuasiveness of his
critique of capitalism. Yet in MacKinnon's model, unlike Marx's, there is no way for
women to reclaim their sexuality because sex defines the arena that constitutes
women as an oppressed and expropriated social group: ``If being for another is the
whole of women's sexual construction, it can be no more escaped by separatism,
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men's temporary concrete absence, then eliminated or qualified by permissiveness,
which, in this context, looks like women emulating male roles'' (19). For her, women
can only escape their status as abject social beings by refusing sex altogether, for
their own sexuality has always been defined exclusively in male terms, the terms of
the oppressor.
Marx, in contrast, does not call for the proletariat to abandon labor*/quite the
opposite. Under capitalism, of course, labor is alienated, yet all hope for a better
world consists exclusively in the belief that labor could exist in a different,
unalienated form. Following Hegel, Marx argues that labor can and should result in
the self-actualization of the worker. Capitalism's enormous crime against humanity
consists precisely in the negation of that possibility.
The parallel between the expropriation of the proletariat's labor power and that of
female sexuality did not begin, of course, with MacKinnon's esssay of 1981; it has
deep roots in a Marxist feminist tradition that goes back at least to the appearance of
Engels's influential Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1972). In
that well-known work, Engels draws a parallel between proletarians, those who enter
the marketplace with nothing to exchange but their own labor power, and women,

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MARXIAN SEXUAL POLITICS
407
those who often come to the marketplace with only their sexuality to sell. They can
sell either on a short-term basis, as sex workers, or on a long-term basis, as wives. For
Engels, gender relations function as both a microcosm for the labor relations of the
contemporary mode of production and, simultaneously, as a kind of historical
museum where the labor relations of bygone modes of production are preserved. A
woman is, of course, her husband's proletariat, yet because she sells her sexuality,
alongside her labor power, for her entire lifetime, she is also his slave. In an
agricultural social order, she is his serf. Hence, sexuality constitutes a mode of human
activity that is alienated under capitalism just as labor is alienated. Yet it
distinguishes itself*/at least as it pertains to married women*/in that it retains
additional, anachronistic modes of alienation that no longer apply to the con-
temporary mode of coercive labor power. Engels's analysis, though persuasive as far
as it goes, is limited by his unquestioned assumption that ``sex'' is something that
women naturally possess and that men naturally want. His focus on heterogenital sex
limits his discussion to a very small part of the realm of human sexual activity.
I would like to expand the analysis here to include a wider range of sexual activity
and sexual subjects by returning to MacKinnon's parallel between sex and labor, and
thinking of both in terms of Marx's analysis of alienation. That analysis is developed
most thoroughly in the various manuscripts of 1844. In those documents, he returns
repeatedly to erotic themes and tropes, though he does not develop a systematic
analysis of eroticism as a topic in itself. In The Holy Family: Against Bruno Bauer and
Company, for example, Marx returns from time to time to the question of sexual love
as part of a broad polemic against the Young Hegelians (and, through them, Hegelian
idealism). He attacks Edgar Bauer, for example, for rejecting any form of love that
``objectifies'' the beloved in the name of a more spiritual, acorporeal spiritual union.
``What Herr Edgar combats here is not merely love but everything living, everything
which is immediate, every sensuous experience, any and every real experience''
(Marx and Engels 1975, 27). He later accuses Franz Zychlin von Zychlinski, another
member of Bauer's school, of using Hegelian philosophy to justify a prudish Christian
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morality. Like Bauer, Zychlinsky decried the ``concrete sensuality'' of ``warm blood''
and ``nerve currents'' in favor of a more spiritual, devout emotion that joins man to
woman in order to reproduce the species. Marx responds sarcastically: ``As soon as
there is no more nerve current and the blood in the veins is no longer hot, the sinful
body, this seat of sensual lust, becomes a corpse and the souls can converse
unhindered about `general reason,' `true love,' and `pure morals''' (77). These
arguments, though relatively undeveloped in themselves, are nestled within more
familiar and more thoroughly articulated critiques of the Right Hegelians: Marx and
Engels decry their adversaries' unwillingness to recognize the process by which the
wealth of the social elite is produced through the misery of the laboring class, or the
centrality of the masses' political activities in determining the course of history. They
move back and forth between insisting on the positive materiality of the mode of
production and that of the sensuous human body, suggesting a parallel between the
two projects.
The structure of The Holy Family thus presumes a model of human subjectivity that
might be summarized in Rosemary Hennessy's assertion: ``As human beings we work
and desire, we have needs and sensations*/all at the same time.'' Unfortunately,

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Marx and Engels remain so focused on a sarcastic polemic against their adversaries
that they neglect a positive exposition of their own perspective, yet their attack
implies a kind of parallel: those who debase sexual pleasure will also deny the role of
human production in determining the course of history. Conversely, a robust
understanding of historical materialism apparently leads toward an appreciation for
sensuality that might, in today's language, be termed sex-positive.
I would like to now turn to the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, where Marx
offers a much more detailed articulation of his own theories. Erotic tropes and
metaphors rarely appear in this body of fragmentary writings and, when they do, tend
to play a negative role, illustrating the distasteful, alienating effects of private
property. It is significant that these metaphors do not appear in Marx's famous
description of the impoverished worker's alienation, whose body and spirit are
maimed and disfigured as labor is converted into the surplus value of the capitalist.
Negative sexual metaphors are used, rather, to illustrate how private property
alienates even the capitalists who reap the rewards of alienated labor.
[P]rivate property does not know how to change crude need into human
need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and infatuation. No eunuch flatters his
despot more basely or uses more infamous means to revive his dulled
capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favor for himself than does the
industrial eunuch*/the manufacturer*/in order to sneak a silver penny or
two or coax the gold from the pocket of his dearly beloved neighbor . . . He
puts himself at the service of the other's most depraved fancies, plays the
pimp between him and his need, excites unhealthy appetites in him, and
pounces on every weakness, so that he can then demand the money for this
service of love. (Marx 1964, 359)
The image of the sexual procurer here*/the sycophantic eunuch of the Orientalist
version (and Orientalist, we must admit, it certainly is), the conniving pimp of the
Western*/stands in for the capitalist who must perform that magic by which
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commodities are transformed into money. Erotic desire stands in metonymically for
the desire for all consumer goods, goods that are not designed to meet ``human
need'' but emerge as a result of ``fantasy, caprice and infatuation .''
This passage represents one of the few areas in Marx's opus where his critique of
capitalism moves away from the realm of production and into that of consumption. In
advertising commodities that satisfy no need and deliver no real pleasure, the
capitalist appeals to the most frivolous impulses in the consumer. If private property,
in essence, is defined as the congealed form of alienated labor, it manages to infect
both buyer and seller with that alienation as it is exchanged. Corrupted sexuality
serves as a privileged metaphor to illustrate the alienation of consumerism. Different
from the alienation of production, it can be summed up as the pervasive corruption of
all human relations in a system that treats human beings as a means to an end: the
generation of capital.
The procurer of sex reappears at a later point in the essay, but here the metaphor
functions to illustrate a different aspect of capitalism: ``Money is the pimp between
man's need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which
mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me

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MARXIAN SEXUAL POLITICS
409
it is the other person'' (375). Here, the pimp is no longer the advertiser of
unnecessary, joyless satisfactions; he takes the place of money itself. Money stands
between us and all that we desire or need for our lives; it is the pimp that sells us all
objects, all other people, and even ourselves as the object of our own desire. Marx
quickly develops this rather cryptic passage with a further reference to alienated sex.
The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money's
properties are my properties and essential powers*/the properties and
powers of its possessor. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means
determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most
beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness */its
repelling power*/is nullified by money. (377)
Money not only procures the object of my sexual desire*/a beautiful woman. It also
procures me for myself; I need not see my own ugliness when I look in the mirror, for
she finds me beautiful, or rather, she finds beauty in the money she sees in me.
We might be tempted to dismiss these metaphors as a rather cynical rhetorical
appeal to the bourgeois reader's prudery. Marx invokes the exchange of sex for money
to awaken disgust in his audience, then associates that distaste with capitalism as a
whole. What interests me here, however, is the point in his argument where he finds
it necessary to take recourse to the repellent affect of corrupted sexuality. The
metaphor of the pimp is not needed to illustrate his more famous, powerful analysis
of alienation as it applies to production. Instead, it brings home the alienation that
takes place in the less obvious, interpersonal realm on the other side of the capitalist
process: in the transformation of commodities into their money form, and in the
transformation of money itself into human relations. And that, I would argue, is
precisely the place where a contemporary analysis of sexual alienation within the
modern capitalist social order ought to begin: not with a discussion of its role in
production, or even in the re production of the labor force, but rather with its role in
consumption.
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In Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of
Abundance, Lawrence Birken argues that the rich and ornate typology of sexual
perversions that emerged at the turn of the century*/Foucault's sexual mosaic, if you
will*/corresponded to the new economic theories of the marginalist school. In the
1870s, an economic theory emerged that defined economic strength according to
levels of consumption, in contrast to earlier theorists, who had posited that the
strength of a given economy depended on the level of production it could sustain. The
marginalists distinguished themselves from those who believed in the utility theory of
value (the notion that any given commodity's value would be determined by the
public's need for it), by positing that desire, no matter how whimsical, determined
value. Within the new economic model, people were defined primarily as consumers,
each with a given set of idiosyncratic desires, rather than as producers, each with a
predictable, roughly equivalent set of needs. Birken charts the rise of sexology as a
parallel development to the rise of the marginalist school. For sexologists, each
individual represented a particular ``case,'' a bundle of sexual interests and
perversions, just as the marginalists saw in each individual a unique and unpredict-
able bundle of consumer desires. It was equally important to understand both ``in a

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culture in which the desire of the masses [was considered] as important as their
labor'' (1988, 12). Birken thus ties the slow social acceptance of a wide range of
sexualities in the course of the twentieth century to the gradual ascendancy of
consumer-based economic theory.
Birken dismisses Marx as one of the many pre-marginalist economic theorists who
refused sexuality a place in their analyses of the economic world. Yet, as I have
shown, Marx does introduce sex into his discussion, if only as a metaphor of corrupted
human relations, at precisely the point where Birken locates it in his own historical
analysis. The figure of the sexual procurer comes into rhetorical play as an illustration
of a consumerism that conjures unnecessary desires, transforming the buyer from
human being into a source of wealth for the seller. The pimp represents the self-
commodification of those who learn to judge their own value through the eyes of
others, their attractiveness determined by the amount of money they hold.
Despite the fact that the world Marx was describing in 1844 was far removed from
our own advertisement-saturated society, his denunciation of consumerism has not
lost in relevance. Though the direct commodification of sex still constitutes
something of a scandal in bourgeois society, sex sells virtually every other commodity
on the market. In the process, eroticism itself becomes disconnected from the people
who practice it and attaches itself more and more to the commodities exchanged. As
a metonym for consumer desire per se, sex comes to define that which the consumer
lacks. We watch the glamorous models and actors who ostentatiously display a
hypermediated form of sexuality, linking it to everything from tooth whitener to
machine guns. In the world of commodity advertising, sex defines the limits of the
charmed circle from which all are excluded. There is a world of sex out there, but we
are not a part of it; we find ourselves on the outside looking in. Even if we are having
sex, it's never quite as fun or glamorous as what we ought to be having. We are too fat
or too thin, too poorly dressed, too pimply or too wrinkly, to participate.
Commodities embody the sex that we presumably cannot have*/unless, of course,
we purchase a cool car, the right house, fashionable clothes, an enticing scent, hip
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music, the best skin cream.
Consumer society has literalized Marx's description of advertising as pimp,
mediating between the buyer and her needs. Advertising no longer appeals to the
consumer's needs as if to gratify sexual desire; it explicitly appeals to sex itself, as a
privileged realm from which the consumer is excluded, in order to stoke desire for the
various goods that radiate the aura of that rarefied glow of the charmed erotic circle.
In purchasing commodities we are purchasing sex, buying ourselves as both desirable
and desiring subjects. This is where Catherine MacKinnon is right. Sexuality is like
labor, as she argues, ``that which is most one's own, yet most taken away.'' She is
wrong, however, in imagining that the alienation of sexuality applies only to women.
It's true of all of us: women, men, queer, straight, old and young, all races, all levels
of ability. Sex may not be taken away and sold back to us in the same manner for all of
those groups, and I am not arguing that all are equally alienated or oppressed under
the mantle of consumer culture. Homophobia, racism, classism, ageism, and the
innumerable varieties of social stigma that define our sexual culture have complex
and differential effects on how any given individual will relate to the commodifica-
tion of sexuality. But no one escapes it.

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If Marx's critique of capitalism as a system that alienates labor power rests on a
presumed alternative, a Utopian society in which labor is not alienated, then a sexual
politics that takes Marxist theory as a serious model must likewise imagine an
alternative mode of sexuality*/the possibility of unalienated sex. We might begin to
think of this mode by relocating sex in the realm of production rather than
consumption. Like labor, sex is a form of human activity that produces many things:
pleasure, human relations, intimacy, fun, knowledge, a sense of self or of many
selves, just for starters. Queer and other sex-positive activists have come a long way
in defining safe havens, spaces where the creative power of sex can be celebrated on
its own terms in contemporary U.S. culture. I would argue that sexual politics in that
key works not simply against heteronormativity, but also against the alienating power
of capitalism itself.
Do such speculations take us far away from Marx's own areas of interest? Hardly. In
closing the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, he describes the coming
revolution in emphatically sensual terms.
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only
ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly
possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it . . .
Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the
simple estrangement of all these senses*/the sense of having. The super-
session of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all
human senses and attributes. Need or enjoyment have therefore lost their
egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility in the sense that its
use has become human use. The eye has become a human eye, just as its
object has become a social, human object*/an object emanating from man
to man . . . In the same way, the senses and enjoyments of other men have
become my own appropriation. Similarly, the senses and enjoyments of
other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these direct organs,
therefore, social organs develop in the form of society; thus, for instance,
activity in direct association with others, etc., has become an organ for
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expressing my own life, and a mode of appropriating human life . (1964,
351A/2)
This description of a transformation from the sensory organs of an individual into
some kind of collective mode of perception surely represents one of the most
enigmatic and Utopian passages in Marx's entire oeuvre. If we take it seriously, the
erotic realm of bodily pleasures would certainly be one of the arenas of human
experience*/and of human production*/most immediately transformed by doing
away with private property.
It must be admitted, however, that the repeated appeal to the ``human'' in this
citation raises a troubling issue. Althusser, for one, has been quick to criticize the
young Marx for repeatedly having recourse to a humanism indebted less to Hegel than
to Kant and Fichte. Marx's entire critique of alienation rests on a belief in an
essentialist humanism*/that which defines our ``species-being,'' which is taken from
us in order to generate surplus value. As Althusser reads him, Marx refuted this
humanism as an essentialist ideology in his ``Theses on Feuerbach'' in 1845. His later,

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more truly ``Marxist'' writings avoid both the concepts of alienation and of humanism,
focusing instead on economic, political, social, and ideological structures.
I cannot begin to do justice to the larger question of Marx's humanism in this
limited space, but I would like to venture a few comments on the topic, which is, in
my view, central to any attempt to define a Marxian sexual politics. While Althusser
rejects the critique of alienation for its reliance on ``humanist ideology,'' it seems to
me that he does not pay close enough attention to the nuances in Marx's own usage
of the ``human,'' which clearly moves beyond the philosophical tradition of Kant,
Fichte, or Hegel. Alienation, for Marx, does not simply involve withholding that
which has always made us human, but rather, the negation of a certain potential
that has not yet been realized. We have not yet become ``human'' and cannot,
under capitalist conditions. In the passage just cited, Marx imagines a postcapitalist
world order in which the ``human'' itself has been radically redefined. This is not a
world in which Man has enshrined himself as the center of the universe, putting all
other natural elements to whatever use he chooses to make of them, but rather a
place where ``nature has lost its mere utility in the sense that its use has become
human use.'' The opposition of ``utility'' to ``human use'' implies that a strictly
utilitarian approach to nature is contrary to a new vision of the ``human,'' which
might be understood in terms of a more holistic approach to nature*/a recognition,
perhaps, of the interconnectedness of various life forms. Paradoxically, Marx's usage
of the ``human'' means precisely the opposite from the more mundane use of the
term: it does not set our species off from other life forms, but recognizes the
interconnectedness between human subjectivity and other objects of the natural
world.
Similarly, the pleasures of the senses, stupefied and deadened in the present social
order through their association with the ``sense of having,'' would be sharpened and
revivified in a world that no longer revolved around bourgeois individuals defined by
their possessions. Emancipation of the senses means freeing them from their
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embeddedness in the possessive individual. The eye only becomes a truly ``human
eye'' when the beauty enjoyed by another becomes available as ``my own
appropriation.'' What Marx envisions here is nothing less than the abolition of the
Cartesian mind/body split, along with the opposition between public and private. The
human body*/in all its sensory specificity*/dissolves into the social body, as the
organs of perception become broadly generalized.
Marx thus redefines the ``human'' to indicate a potential mode of being in a
postcapitalist world in which intersubjectivity comes to take the place of individual
subjectivity, attaching the most basic modes of bodily experience to the inter-
subjective. The transformation of labor, of course, is at the heart of the revolutionary
project by which humanity comes to a fundamentally different understanding of itself
and its role within the universe. And yet this process cannot be conceived without an
equally thorough-going transformation of that other mode of productive human
activity*/sexuality.

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References
Birken, L. 1988. Consuming desire: Sexual science and the emergence of a culture of
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Engels, F. 1972. The origin of the family, private property and the state . New York:
Pathfinder.
Floyd, K. 2006. Luka
cs and sexual humanism. Rethinking Marxism 18 (3): 397A/403.
Hennessy, R. 2006. Returning to reproduction queerly: Sex, labor, need. Rethinking
Marxism 18 (3): 387A/95.
MacKinnon, C. 1989. Toward a feminist theory of the state . Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Marx, K. 1964. Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 . Trans. M. Milligan, ed.
D. J. Struik. New York: International Publishers.
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