Angel Hernandez criticizes my Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx on three essential points. He contends that: 1. in Marx’s mature writings, ‘alienation’ becomes synonymous with capitalist exploitation, as these writings have only one single object: an analysis of the capitalist mode of production; 2. it is therefore wrong to present the mature Marx as still sharing the position of The German Ideology that alienation of labour is linked to the social division of labour and commodity production in general footnote¹ ; 3. the concept that division of labour could wither away under communism is utopian. If, therefore, alienation is caused by division of labour, then it becomes again an anthropological destiny and not a historically limited and determined condition of man. footnote² In that case, the process of dis-alienation can never be fully achieved.

I agree with Angel Hernandez that the analysis of the capitalist mode of production was the essential object of Marx’s Capital. But the dialectical method used by Marx made it impossible to analyse capitalism without analysing its origins. footnote³ Therefore, the mature writings of Marx and Engels in their totality cannot be reduced to an analysis of the capitalist mode of production only.

Marx himself insists upon the links between capitalism and commodity production. He stresses that commodity production contains potentially footnote⁴ all the elements which lead to its own generalization, i.e. capitalist commodity production. It follows that all the patches of analysis concerning the origins and the disappearance of commodity production dispersed in Marx’s mature works, could and should be systematically organized and developed. In the course of such a systematization, one has of course to take into consideration that under pre- and post-capitalist conditions, the dominant mode of production has first to be determined, together with its structure and its laws of motion, before one can examine the contradictory role which the beginnings or remnants of commodity production play in the context. Marx himself gave very fruitful indications about the method to be used, when he dealt with the combination of feudal production relations and simple commodity production. footnote⁵

It remains unassailable, nevertheless, that all Marx’s theses concerning commodity fetichism, reification of human relations and alienation of labour, apply to commodity production in general and not only to capitalist commodity production. In fact, the first chapter of volume I of Capital explicitly deals with commodity production in general. To deny that the mature Marx considered labour to be alienated under simple commodity production, or that he considered human relations to be reified under precapitalist commodity production, flies in the face not only of the whole logic of Marx’s writings, but of explicit statements of Marx himself. footnote⁶

In the same way one cannot close one’s eyes to the evidence that the mature Marx and Engels kept unchanged the conviction, dating from their youth, that, together with commodity production, the social division of labour was the key source of alienated labour. Specific statements by Engels can be quoted. footnote⁷ Important passages of the Grundrisse deal at length with the need to develop the ‘rich individuality’, with an all-sided development of all its capacities—a development which implies transcending the social division of labour. footnote⁸ But the Critique of the Gotha Programme, a programmatic document written by the mature Marx, is as explicit as one could ask for: ‘In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished. . .’ footnote⁹

Angel Hernandez can only deny the possibility of a withering away of the social division of labour by investing this concept with a positivist content. Of course, no human being will under communism become an expert of ‘all’ sciences, or be active in ‘all’ fields of human activity. But this, after all, is not what Marxists argue about when they see the disappearance of the social division of labour as a precondition for disalienating labour, i.e. its ultimate emancipation. What they mean are five closely interrelated processes, which, together, constitute the very essence of the building of a communist society:

1. The withering away of the division between munual and intellectual labour, not only through the disappearance of all uncreative, repetitive, tiresome and boring manual labour, but also through the massive reintroduction of intellectual labour into production, and the blending of all labour with creative activities, for all human beings;