New Left Review I/72, March-April 1972

Ernest Mandel

Reply to Hernandez’s ‘The Development of Marx’s Economic Thought’

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 [1]; 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. [2] In that case, the process of dis-alienation can never be fully achieved.

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