Estrangement and Suffering. Much like the concept of estranged labour, Xxxx’x conception of suffering can be said to play a bridging function between political economy and philosophy within the Manuscripts. In the First Manuscript, it can be argued that Xxxx engages in an immanent critique of Xxxx Xxxxx’x political economy. In doing so Xxxx attempts to use Xxxxx'x own moral criterion to demonstrate that the goal of the present-day economic system is an unhappy society. Taking Xxxxx'x contention that a society in which the majority suffer is an unhappy one, Xxxx demonstrates that in every possible state of society, advancing, decreasing, and static prosperity, the result is suffering and misery for the vast majority. In the critical case of a society with advancing prosperity, Xxxx establishes the concept of estranged, alienated labour in order to demonstrate that misery is the product of “the very essence of present- day labour” [EW, p.288]. Xxxx calls this suffering under conditions of advancing wealth a 51 Xxxxxx Dialectics of Labour, pp.12-18 “complicated misery” [EW, p.286], because it is both a concentration of the workers’ activity in the hands of another and a distortion of that activity, so that the worker is more uniformly dependent on an abstract and one-sided type of activity. Therefore the concepts of suffering and estranged labour are both products of this project and are required to underpin the nascent critique of political economy that Xxxx is advancing. Xxxxxx argues that Xxxx’x “main critical category” changes within the First Manuscript from ‘abstraction’ to ‘estrangement’.52 In the first sections it is the separation and abstraction of labour from capital and landed property that is purely negative and harmful, whereas in the later sections it is more specifically the estrangement of labour that is diagnosed. I would argue that the concept of suffering links these critical categories. I have suggested and will demonstrate below that Xxxx’x notion of estranged labour depends upon the concept of species-being, or human essence. Xxxx roots this conception of the appropriation of man’s essence in the concept of suffering. As I will show later, Xxxx argues that man, “appropriates his integral essence in an integral way, as a total man” [EW, p.351]. Even the most debased and inhuman estrangement, the worst condition of suffering, is, for Xxxx, a confirmation of human reality. He argues that, “suffering, humanly conceived, is an enjoyment of the self for man” [EW, p.351]...
