1. An Unsettling Encounter 

It would be almost as easy to maintain that for the question that moved Heidegger's thinking, i.e. the question of being, Marx is uninteresting or irrelevant. This assertion, of course, would have to be argued for and would lead to a closer disputation with the texts of both thinkers. It would be a matter of showing that in Marx's writings, Heidegger would not have been in his element, that is to say, that there was not any significant connection between the issues that come into the focus of questioning in Heidegger's thinking and the issues that engage Marx's thinking. 

An alternative strategy would be to show that, from the perspective of Heidegger's thinking, Marx assumed a subordinate position, namely, as a metaphysician with an Hegelian heritage. If for Heidegger it is a matter of gaining a distance from metaphysics or of dismantling ontology, then it would at least be plausible that with the dismantling of the Hegelian ontology of spirit Heidegger had, so to speak, also hit a second bird, Marx, with the one stone. Marx would then stand on Hegelian ground which, with the dismantling of Hegelian metaphysics, would have been pulled from under his feet. But then it would be necessary to investigate to what extent Marx's inversion of the Hegelian dialectic, the famous setting-it-on-its-feet, did not make any essential difference with regard to locating Marx's text within metaphysics. In doing so, Heidegger's insight which he expresses with regard to Nietzsche's inversion of Platonism, that all inversion remains in the same, would apply. 

It would be possible, more or less for the sake of completeness, to close the gap in Heidegger's texts between Hegel and Nietzsche that bears the name 'Marx' with a monograph or some other learned treatise. There is no doubt that Marx is an important thinker in the Occidental genealogy whose influence in the history of philosophy and the social sciences as well as in the history of politics has been enormous, so that the task of drawing the connecting lines between these two important thinkers, Heidegger and Marx, is unquestionably posed. It would thus not need any long justification to argue for why a work on the relationship between Marx and Heidegger should be written. Furthermore, there is in any case already considerable secondary literature on this relationship which exceeds the bounds of a compact overview. 

Viewed from the standpoint of the matter at issue, i.e. from the standpoint of the respective issues of Marxian and Heideggerian thinking, there is, at least for me, an unsettling point of contact, a locus of striking similarities between Marx's and Heidegger's texts which absolutely challenges us to delve into the issue. It is a kind of overlapping between Marx's late texts and those of Heidegger's with regard to their respective assessments of the modern epoch: the epoch of the bourgeois-capitalist form of society on the one hand, and the technical age on the other, as they reveal themselves respectively in the texts of each thinker, reveal remarkable resemblances, despite all their profound differences. It will be worthwhile comparing the language of the set-up (Gestell) with that of capital, and closely and persistently investigating both these languages (and the thoughts they express) in their relatedness as well as their essential difference. This will provide an important guiding thread for the present study. 

According to Heidegger's own statements (which of course do not have to be taken as the final source of evidence), from 1937 on, at the time of writing the Contributions to Philosophy - From Enowning, the word 'propriation' or 'enowning' assumes a position as principal word in his thinking. The essence of technology is also thought through in the forties under the aura of propriation. In an unusual text from the fifties, Identity and Difference, whose unusual status among Heidegger's writings has been noticed by Gianni Vattimo(1), Heidegger talks of a twisting of the set-up into propriation, of the "sudden flash of propriation" within the set-up. In this text there is a sort of toggle relationship between the most extreme consummation of metaphysics and the twisting of metaphysics into propriation, in which humans would "lose" the determination of essence which metaphysics has "lent" them. Twisting (Verwindung), as Vattimo's pensiero débole elaborates, must not be confused with overcoming (Überwindung). In the small difference of a prefix there lies a subtle but decisive difference between Heideggerian thinking of being and metaphysical thinking. Twisting as well as overcoming relate to Western history. Whereas overcoming lies close to the Hegelian and a fortiori the Marxian conception of history, twisting or getting-over is supposed to initially indicate another type of thinking of history, namely, history as the history of being. "In the destiny of being there is never a mere sequence: now set-up, then world and thing, but in each case a passing-by and simultaneity of the early and the late."(2) The difference twisting/overcoming will provide a second guiding thread in the following.

2. Heidegger's Relationship to Marx 

In his reply to Beaufret, Heidegger maintains that "Marx's humanism does not require any recourse to antiquity" (p.318), a statement which, in view of Marx's proximity to Aristotle and especially to Aristotle's Politics must seem questionable. What does "recourse to antiquity" mean for Heidegger? When Marx determines the human as a social being, he is of course standing firmly in the Aristotelian tradition which couples the z%=on politiko/n intimately with the z%=on lo/gon e)/xon (Pol. 1253a). The idea that the fulfilment of needs should constitute the te/loj of the po/lij is also a conception that goes back to Aristotle. With his determination of communist society as a society in which human needs are acknowledged and their satisfaction secured, Marx shows himself to be a thinker who pushes the determination of human being to the limit and to its consummation. The above-cited statement by Heidegger could perhaps be interpreted as saying that, in his determination of human being, Marx simply continues the ancient tradition without giving it any further twist, i.e. that he adopts this tradition without questioning it. In this case, however, Marx would indeed, in comparison with the Christian determination of human being, make recourse to antiquity by separating the human essence from the Christian god and falling back on the ancient 'pagan' determination of human being as needy. This recourse differs of course from the humanism of a "Winckelmann, Goethe and Schiller" (p.318), which in its return to antiquity conceives humanitas as virtus and paide/ia and thus leads to a renaissance of Hellenism. But perhaps Marx's return to antiquity is all the more profound because it is unquestioning. When Heidegger singles out this Marxian determination of human being as need-having, it must still be clarified to what extent this emphasis neglects and possibly suppresses or distorts the view of other accentuations in Marxian discourse, particularly in the late writings. 

Marx's name crops up for a third and last time in the middle of the Letter on 'Humanism' where Heidegger speaks of the "homelessness of modern humans" (p.336) and the "overcoming of homelessness" (p.335). The fact that at this point Heidegger talks of an "overcoming" (Überwindung) as distinct from a getting-over or twisting (Verwindung) must arouse our attention. The "desolation of the being of beings" (p.335) is to be overcome in a homecoming of human being in which humans, released from subjectivity, become "shepherds of being" (p.338). Later on we will come back to Heidegger's understanding of overcoming and getting-over, especially since in some texts he distances himself from overcoming as a metaphysical figure. Because of his insight into the "alienation of humans" (p.336) which, however, he "recognized on the basis of Hegel" (ibid.), Marx is praised by Heidegger because "by experiencing alienation, he reaches into an essential dimension of history" (ibid.). Only the experience of this "essential dimension of history" can enable "a productive dialogue with Marxism" (ibid.). At this point, Heidegger seeks a nearness to Marx which however is strongly mediated by Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. (p.337) Does Heidegger take this "productive dialogue" further or does he leave it to others to do so? Are the concise remarks on the pages in the Letter on 'Humanism' following this comment already to be taken as this "productive dialogue" and thus in a certain way as getting this dialogue over and done with, or at least as staking out the fundamental relation of the thinking of being to Marxism? 

Heidegger points out that Marxist materialism is not to be understood as the vulgar assertion that "everything is only matter" (p.337) but as a metaphysical determination "according to which all beings appear as the material for labour". (p.337) This modern (i.e. post-medieval) determination of the essence of labour, according to Heidegger, was "thought through beforehand [in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit] as the process of unconditional production setting itself up, that is, as the objectification of the real by human being experienced as subjectivity." (ibid.) Did Marx simply adopt the determination of beings as the material of labour from Hegel? Is Marx's concept of alienation to be equated with an Hegelian conception or does it include a further significant twist? Does Marx's concept of alienation stay the same from the early writings through to the late writings? Does the concept of alienation play an important role in the late writings; does it play a role at all? Does the thinking of the young Marx irrevocably set the course with respect to fundamental questions concerning human being also for his later writings on the critique of political economy, or does his thinking go through essential modifications in the confrontation with the essence of capital? Does Marx stick to his humanist determination of human being; do humans remain "species beings" for him in the writings on the critique of political economy? If the occasion for the Letter has a lot to do with the influence of Marxism in France after the second world war, why does the word 'capital' not appear anywhere in the Letter on 'Humanism' given that this word, after all, is a principal word in Marxian thinking? Why does Heidegger's commentary restrict itself to needs and labour? The intervention of Althusser in France in the sixties — which was directed not least of all against the humanist-existentialist Marxism of Sartre — in which he insisted on a break in Marx's thinking between the early writings (before 1845) — especially the Economic-philosophical Manuscripts from 1844 — and the late writings (from 1857 onward), should make us prick up our ears and listen to hear whether Heidegger undertook an extremely restricted and therefore undifferentiated reading of Marxian texts in which Marx appears exclusively as humanist. Can the author of Capital also be understood as a humanist? What is the situation with regard to the German Ideology, written together with Engels in 1846, in which Marx settled accounts with Feuerbach's humanist philosophy? The late Marx no longer conceives of human being anthropologically as a species being, but historically-materialistically as the bearer of definite historically given relations of production, as a being that produces its life under definite social relations. The term species being disappears from the texts of the late Marx. Admittedly, Heidegger is not wrong in discerning human being in Marx as a labouring, producing essence, but the labouring human does not have to be understood humanistically in the sense of the Manuscripts from 1844 as an alienated natural being. The late Marx has a much more distanced, even ironical relationship to any affirmative positing of human being. "Let us, for a change, finally imagine an association of free people..." (Capital Vol. I; MEW23:92). Moreover, the late Marx does not criticize capitalism against the foil of a natural species being — he does not lament any fall from some sort of natural state of grace — but with respect to a casting of human being which he conceives as being historically on the make in capitalism, and sees as an historical possibility, a possibility which, to be on the safe side, should not be restricted to Marx's own time. 

It may be regarded as significant at this point that Heidegger here, where he speaks of a productive dialogue with Marxism, immediately starts talking about the essence of technology as "unconditional production": "The essence of materialism is concealed in the essence of technology." (p.337) Heidegger wants to locate Marxism from the standpoint of his thinking of the essence of technology as a "destiny of the history of being". The fact that in modernity all beings appear as the material for labour is to be traced back to technology and finally to te/xnh as a way in which "beings are revealed" (ibid.). In this way, Marxian materialism is to be given its well-considered metaphysical location. Marxism resonates further in the Letter on 'Humanism' with the words "communism" (p.337), "internationalism" (p.337) and "collectivism" (p.338) in which "an elementary experience" (p.337), namely the experience of the way of revealing of modern technology in "unconditional production" "is world-historical" (ibid.). Marxism is however, according to Heidegger, caught within the metaphysics of subjectivity and even the unification and uniformization of humanity in an internationalism and collectivism would only mean the "unconditional self-assertion" of the "subjectivity of humanity as a totality" (p.338). Insofar, the "essential homelessness of humanity" cannot even be experienced in Marxism, let alone overcome, for this would require a distancing experience from and an overcoming of subjectivity which can only happen when humans come to experience themselves as the "ek—sisting counter-throw [ob—ject] of being" (p.337) instead of as animal rationale. From the standpoint of their status as subject, humans become the "counter-throw", the object of being: thrown by being into the "poverty of the shepherd" (p.338). The shepherd is for Heidegger the appropriate contrasting image to the labouring, productive human. 

In Heidegger's eyes, Marxism does embody an essential experience of the homelessness of human being in modernity as alienation, but it is not able to experience the true ground for this alienation in the desolation of beings in their being as such, but instead preoccupies itself with gigantomaniac historical castings of an international, collective subject. The points of contact between Marx's and Heidegger's thinking are concentrated, from Heidegger's standpoint, on the question concerning the "essence of technology" (p.337), to which Marxism contributes insights into the totality of beings as material for labour and into "unconditional production, that is, objectification of the real by human being experienced as subjectivity" (p.337). These insights, however, are, according to Heidegger, essentially misrecognitions insofar as Marx does not experience the truth of being; the alienation of modern humanity is experienced — basically from an Hegelian standpoint, and this is the experience of an "essential dimension of history" (p.336) — but the experience remains captive to the metaphysics of subjectivity. The praise that "the Marxist view of history is superior to the rest of historiography" (p.336) is thus considerably diluted.

It is striking that Heidegger makes his assessment of Marxian thinking on the one hand on the basis of a — probably somewhat cursory — acquaintance with the early writings and, on the other, on the basis of the historico-political experiences of the socialist-communist movements which he himself lived through. The two pages in the Letter on 'Humanism' on which he locates Marxism metaphysically seem far removed from initiating "a productive dialogue with Marxism", but seem to be borne rather by an effort to wrap up this dialogue swiftly by means of the diagnosis 'desolation of beings in their being'. Factually, Heidegger did not enter into this dialogue as a critical discourse even later on. 

For this reason, it falls to us to ask whether Marx can be located metaphysically completely from an Hegelian standpoint and whether in the experience of alienation Marx left behind other writings that penetrate more deeply into its essential grounds in such a way that other dimensions come to light which Heidegger did not have in view. Not only are Heidegger's dealings with Marx very concise, without the extended written discourse which otherwise characterizes his disputations with thinkers in the Occidental tradition, but they reveal obvious enormous gaps insofar as only the topics of humans as labourers and alienation are dealt with, and that only cursorily. 

Since the Letter on 'Humanism' discusses Marxism with regard to alienation and positions this motif before the Hegelian background of the Phenomenology of Spirit, it does not seem to be unjustified to suppose that Heidegger mainly read the section on alienated labour in the 1844 Economic-philosophical Manuscripts. His formulations in the Letter on 'Humanism' represent an extremely compressed selection from this section, whereby it would not be uninteresting to investigate how Heidegger made his selection for a reading. The concept of alienation in Marx appears to merely provide Heidegger with a cue for his own understanding of alienation, which can be determined on the basis of the history of being and not at all Marxistically. 

How does Marx think alienation in the Economic-philosophical Manuscripts? What does Heidegger filter out in the reading of this text? What does he emphasize? 

Heidegger leads Marxian materialism back to Hegel: "The metaphysical essence of labour in modernity is thought through beforehand in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as the self-organizing process of unconditional producing, that is objectification of the real by humans experienced as subjectivity." (p.337) Hegel's idealism is supposed to have thought through the materialist determination of the essence of labour. But what does Marx accuse Hegel of in the Economic-philosophical Manuscripts? That he conceives alienation as the alienation of self-consciousness and not as the alienation of real people. At this time, Marx is still very strongly under Feuerbach's influence, from whom he takes leave philosophically only one year later — cf. the famous Theses on Feuerbach written down in 1845. Labour in Hegel is not the expenditure of real human essential forces but abstract spiritual labour: "The only labour that Hegel knows about and recognizes is abstract spiritual labour." (MEW Erg.Bd.1 p.574) The Phenomenology is a movement of self-consciousness; the externalization of self-consciousness in the objectivity of nature is overcome in knowledge, more precisely, in absolute knowledge. "Knowledge is its [consciousness's] sole objective comportment." (ibid. p.580) (The Heidegger of Being and Time would agree with this Marxian objection.) The otherness of the object outside itself is sublated in a knowledge that knows that it "is by itself in its other-being as such" (ibid. italics i.o. p.580). Marx repeats this formulation four times within a few lines as if he wanted to underscore for himself how Hegel sublates the contradiction of the externality of the object in a movement of spirit. Such a labour of spirit in the movement of sublation in thinking is still far removed from defining "all beings as the material of labour" (LH p.337) or "thinking through beforehand" labour as "unconditional producing" (ibid.). Rather, it is the case with Hegel that he thinks all beings as permeated by spirit, as knowable in absolute knowledge and "sets human being = self-consciousness" (ibid. p.584). Reality is thus left by Hegel the way it is; all beings, whether it be law, religion, art, nature, are retracted into philosophy in an essentially Christian movement of reconciliation. Idealist philosophy is thus counterposed as an illusory overcoming of alienation, as an overcoming in pure thinking, to "true humanism" which Marx still proposes in the Economic-philosophical Manuscripts.

The critique of Hegelian dialectics constitutes only the final section of the Economic-philosophical Manuscripts. The first sections are headed by titles from political economy: wages, profit of capital, ground rent. Only after these does the section, entitled by the editors of the Marx-Engels Werke: "Alienated Labour", follow. How does Marx think alienation? In contrast to Hegel, it is not an alienation of self-consciousness but of the labouring labourer. The product of the labourers' labour as well as the objective conditions of their producing stand over against them as alien. They are the alien property of an alien person: the capitalist. Private property, capital, landed property, money are some of the titles of these alien beings confronting the labourers. It is the class domination of the capitalists over the labourers which Marx ultimately attacks and which would be abolished in communism. With his comments in the Letter on 'Humanism' Heidegger circumnavigates all these highly political rubrics, as if they were philosophically unworthy of discussion. His reference to communism is also made in a way that distances him from it: "One may assume various positions vis-à-vis the teachings of communism and their grounding..." (p.337). It is not the alienness of object that is alien by virtue of its mere objectivity which would have to be overcome in a movement of sublating thinking, but the alienness of alien private property which would not have to strip off its objectivity at all but be transmuted into collective property. Why is this difference which separates Marx from Hegel like a chasm irrelevant for Heidegger? Why does he regard it as superfluous to call capital, private property, money, etc. by their names? Why is the economic dimension consistently blotted out? At this point it is absolutely necessary to keep psychological explanations at bay. The first point to be kept in mind is that for Heidegger "the essence of materialism is concealed in the essence of technology" (p.337) and that for the thinking of the essence of technology — a thinking that is located in the truth of being —, the economic dimension is irrelevant, perhaps too 'ontic'. Not only is the economic dimension allegedly irrelevant, it is moreover invisible as phenomenality for the determination of the essence of technology in Heidegger's thinking, indeed so much so, that Heidegger does not even see any reason to confront economic issues or to explicitly demarcate a distance from them. 

In order to grasp the "process of unconditional producing" (p.337), it is not certain whether the observation that "all beings appear as the material of labour" (ibid.) suffices. Since in capitalism, even labour becomes the object of capital and everything becomes a potential and factual object of its movement, it could turn out that all beings rather become the object of capital (which would already put the subjectivity of human being into question). Then it would be a matter of determining the essence of capital, which of course does not exclude that capital could be traced back to labour — to be sure, under a definite, particular determination, a definite, special "form determinacy". Such a question, however, could not be developed further on the level of a critical reading of the early Marx since in the Economic-philosophical Manuscripts and even in the Theses on Feuerbach and the German Ideology there is still not a trace of the concept of value to be found. Only the value concept — a concept of value which is not simply taken over from the political economy of an Adam Smith or a Ricardo, but which undergoes a fundamental deepening and transformation and grounding — will put Marx in the position to bring bourgeois-capitalist society to its concept. In 1844 Marx can only state that capital is counterposed to the labourers as an alien power; he cannot yet grasp capital in its uncanniness(Unheimlichkeit; to\ dei/non) — a concept better known from a Heideggerian context. 

Different concepts of alienation are at play in Marx and Heidegger: For Marx, it is labour that is alienated because it is subjected to an alien power, capital, and which is supposed to be liberated from this power. For Heidegger, it is not labour subjugated to capital that is alienated and which is supposed to become free, self-determined labour, but labour itself, independently of its subjection to capital, is alienated as a free-for-all that drags beings out into the open, oblivious to their being. "Humankind is not the master of beings. Humankind is the shepherd of being." (p.338) Humans are not supposed to become the genuine (collective) subject of their labour, but they are supposed to become the 'proper object', the "counter-throw of being" (ibid.). 

3. The Historical Materialism of the German Ideology 

It will take some effort to ease Marx out of the automatic, foregone entanglement with totalitarian social systems. Is Marx necessarily an authoritarian thinker? Is his way of thinking hopelessly outmoded, stifled with the stuffiness of the nineteenth century, so that it can only be boring to read him today? Or does the collapse of Eastern European Socialism signify a possible liberation for Marx from a bracketing with politics so that he could be read from a greater, philosophical distance? 

In formulating their Historical Materialist conception of history, Marx and Engels look back into history as well as into the future. The retrospective view is directed towards the main stages in Western history. Four forms of European society are roughly outlined: patriarchal tribes, the city of antiquity, feudalism, bourgeois society, the last of which is supposed to go through a transition to a communist society in the future. The starting point for this movement of history through its great epochs is taken to be the life process "of real living individuals themselves" (MEW3:27). In this way, the idealist way of viewing is set "on its feet": "Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness." (ibid.) "Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being, and the being of humans is their real life process." (ibid. 26) The being of humans, their real life is taken as starting point for viewing history. "What constitutes life above all is eating and drinking, having a place to live, clothes and several other things." (ibid. 28) (The "several other things", especially today, could easily prove to be interminable.) The approach possesses the plausibility of self-evidence (which can also be transferred to a crude socialist politics). What is needed "above all" for living should also serve as the basis and precondition for the theory of history. What constitutes life are needs. Bread, for instance. They impel humans to produce their lives. Neediness and producing are coupled in human being, which is grasped from the standpoint of life — as life process. Production and consumption are only opposite sides of the same coin. Human being is cast essentially as needy, producing being. 

The founders of Historical Materialism repeat a time-honoured gesture of metaphysics when they grant humans a distinguishing feature, their differentia specifica vis-à-vis the animals: "They themselves start to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they start producing their means of life." (ibid. 21, first emphasis mine, ME) Humans are bringers-forth; through their activity, they guide means of life into presence; they are poietic beings, which is not only contingently a principal word in Aristotelian philosophy. It thus does not suffice to assert that humans produce their own lives; they are not simply needy producers, if they are not to be equated with animals, for animals too are driven by 'needs' and 'produce' their way of living. 

Later on in Marx as well, it will be no different with the determination of human being; the same metaphysical gesture will be repeated in Capital, at the start of the fifth chapter on the labour process: 

What however distinguishes the worst builder from the best bee is that he has built the cell in his head before he builds it in wax. At the end of the labour process a result comes about that at its beginning already existed in the labourer's imagination, that already existed ideally. (MEW23:193 emphasis mine, ME) 

And in this point, Marx and Engels do not distinguish themselves very much, not essentially from what Plato and Aristotle say metaphysically about producing: Humans see the ideas; they are exposed and set out to the being of beings, and when producing, their te/xnh is oriented teleo-logically toward this imagined being of what is to be produced. When they invert German idealism, Marx and Engels thus remains necessarily within the same, at the same pivotal point of a conception of producing which is of Platonic origin, or what is the same thing: Despite their materialist starting point with the life process, they implicitly posit human being metaphysically as being exposed to the being of beings; beings as such are accessible to the human yuxh/ (soul, psyche); they are open as such to human view. Even the idealism of a Plato proceeds from material life insofar as the openness of the As has a completely banal origin in everyday producing. Historical Materialism perhaps reminds idealism (which is based on a certain interpretation of Platonic philosophy) of its modest origins in everyday, producing life, at the location from where it begins the ascent into the heights of the ideas. 

Thus, when Marx and Engels postulate that being determines consciousness and try to tie this down to producing, a circle immediately arises, for the power of imagination itself, being able to see the ideal image of what is to be produced, is, as consciousness, an essential component of material producing itself. Practical dealings with material is always already ideal, imagining, a setting into an image, the seeing of a sight, a 'sight-seeing'. The attempt to demarcate a materialism from idealism by positing material, producing life as the basis for all imagining, for all ideologies, immediately proves itself to be infected by an idealism insofar as 'being' or 'life' always already includes a 'consciousness' or an 'understanding of being'. The difference is not possible in a pure form; it cannot be carried through cleanly, but results in a circle. This circle does not have to be regarded as disturbing or as a refutation. It only has to be entered 'properly' — as Heidegger shows in Being and Time. 

Marx and Engels want to posit "real life" as the starting point for a view of European history and, in doing so, to demarcate life from imagination and thinking, from ideologies which assume an autonomous form "in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. of a people" (MEW3:26). They emphasize on the contrary that "the production of ideas, imagination, consciousness is initially immediately interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of humans, language of real life." (ibid.) This "language", "direct secretion of their material comportment" (ibid.) is supposed to serve Marx and Engels as starting point. If productive activity cannot be entirely separated from imagination, then "imagination, thinking, the intellectual intercourse of humans" (ibid.) should at least remain restricted to the immediate domain of material life. The phenomena of quotidian, productive life are to be first brought into view, for only they provide a well-founded point of orientation for thinking. This 'materialist' starting point could be understood as meaning that humans are always already in the world and do not first gain access to it through the filter of the imaginations/representations in consciousness, with the difference that Marx and Engels demarcate this being-in-the-world as "being" or "life" or the "real process of life" from "consciousness" and "ideology" (ibid.) and thus attempt to tear apart the inseparable unity of being and being-aware (consciousness, or better still: understanding of being) in being-in-the-world. 

Marx and Engels thus start with "real living individuals" and view material life as a unity of "productive forces" and "forms of intercourse" (MEW3:38). They are especially interested in bourgeois society, but the materialist conception of history can be applied to all earlier forms of European society and even non-European forms of society, although Marx and Engels only comprehend these societies through an extension of insights which they have gained on the basis of European history. They want to use the analysis of material production as the basis for an explanation of phenomena of the "superstructure" (MEW13:8 and MEW3:36). They set about conceiving the analysis of the "mode of production" and 

the form of intercourse associated with this mode of production and produced by it, that is bourgeois society at its various stages, as the basis of all of history and presenting it in its action as state as well as explaining the entire gamut of theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, morality, etc. etc. from it and following their emergence from them, where of course, the matter can then be presented in its totality (and therefore also the interaction of these various facets on each other). (MEW3:37f). 

Thus, according to our view, all the collisions in history have their origin in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse. (MEW3:73) 

have to appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve their self-activation but to be able to secure their existence at all. (MEW3:67) 

In the development of the productive forces there comes a stage at which forces of production and means of intercourse are called forth which only cause havoc under existing relations, which are no longer forces of production but forces of destruction (machinery and money). (MEW3:69 cf. 60) 

Natural growth can be understood as a translation of the Greek fu/sij, whose opposite term is poi/hsij. Bringing-oneself-forth is opposed to producing, bringing another being forth. Natural growth is encountered in bourgeois society however not only as nature, but first and foremost and essentially as the alienated social activity of society itself. Nature as such, by contrast, has long since been brought under the control of humans and can be calculated precisely on the basis of natural scientific knowledge and technology; it has largely forfeited its uncanny power in the course of advancing modern technological developments that allow humans to intrude more and more deeply into nature. Ultimately, nature itself can be produced, what brings itself forth can be brought forth. Bourgeois society as a totality, social life itself, on the contrary, is perversely fu/sij-like, it is more fu/sij-like than nature itself. The world market is the modern self-upsurgence, it is not poietic bringing forth but a wild, opaque happening infected with contingency. This self-upsurgence of the world market and the social process as a whole is supposed, however, in communism, to be transmuted into a consciously controlled bringing-forth. With this, the consummate historical perfection of human poietic comportment would be initiated. Here the issue is not whether this perfection is feasible, whether it could be realized in world history and how high its 'price' would be — even the consideration, whether society would gain in 'freedom' or lose it is a mode of calculating thinking — but rather, attention is focused here on fundamental concepts of metaphysics that allow such thoughts to be formulated with a self-evidence that addresses and appeals to the modern casting of human being. 

Some of these fundamental concepts have already been named: fu/sij, poi/hsij, consciousness, nature (natural growth). These must be supplemented by necessity (a)nankai/on), contingency (sumbebhko//j), need (xrh=sij), force or potential (du/namij), freedom (e)leuqeri/a). They maintain intimate relations with each other. The question is how Marx casts human being, cast of course not simply in the sense of a plan that has been thought-up, but as the writing-down of something sent by history. This casting circles about human freedom as an historical possibility. When Marx and Engels talk about "fetters" having to be thrown off in the transition to a communist society, this transition has to be understood as the realization of the freedom of human being, as the liberation of an enslaved element from chains. For Marx and Engels, humans are needy beings who produce what they need to live — production is simultaneously production of the preconditions for the satisfaction of needs. Production, however, is the expenditure of a force, the realization of a potential. Insofar as humans constitute the controlling starting point for a movement that brings forth means of life, they are a power, a force (du/namij), more precisely, a productive force. How powerful humans are as producers of course depends on which means of production are employed, which in turn determine the character and the productivity of the labour process. Humans are productive not simply in expending bodily force, but essentially in knowing how to produce. They know how to produce means of life, and the productivity of labour, the expenditure of their labour-power, depends decisively on productive know-how. Production is control of a process of bringing-forth made possible by technical knowledge. Humans as producers control and dominate a bringing-forth, they control the process of a being coming into presence. This means above all that humans are able to counteract contingency or hold it at bay, i.e. exclude what could deflect the production process from the te/loj (end) of the intended product. Human productive power is domination over the presence of unintended contingency by holding it in absence. Contingency is what cuts across and mucks up what is intended, foreseen and planned. Production thus always implies also an overcoming of and domination over contingency. 

According to Marx and Engels, human freedom consists in humans developing the forces of production to satisfy their needs and in disposing freely — as subject, as underlying sub-stratum — of these, their productive forces. Freedom is thus located in a being-able-to-produce. Everything that hinders the forces of production or prevents free disposition over them to this extent injures and impairs human freedom. 

In the modern bourgeois epoch, as Marx and Engels rightly observe, the productive forces under the leadership of "large industry" and the technological effects of the sciences have risen enormously, indeed immeasurably. They have increasingly become collective, social forces. The increase in productive forces goes hand in hand with a progressive division of labour and with the development of world intercourse, in which the mutual dependency of the producers grows strongly, even to the point that production becomes a matter of a global economy in its mutual interrelationships. Humans as producers have progressed to become world producers, they have become the masters of immeasurable productive forces strewn over the globe and linked with each other in a network of production. Humans have become universal, world-encompassing producers and thus masters of the world. The individual cannot be viewed as producer, but only the total producer of world society, for only in this worldwide interlinking are humans today producers at all. What people need to cover their daily needs comes from all over the world, from the North Pole to the South Pole. And every producing activity is only possible — directly or indirectly — as activity for the world market. 

But, according to Marx and Engels, humans as world producers today are not yet free; they do not yet freely dispose of the productive forces that have already been developed and already exist. Mastery over universal production is not yet complete because there is no underlying social subject that could exercise this free disposition. In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels detect this "fetter" on the productive forces in the form of private property. The individual producers are not socialized and sociated as producers but only as citizens of state. Moreover, disposition over the productive forces is for the greatest part in the hand of the capitalists who, by constituting the ruling starting point for capital, are also the ruling starting point for the production process. The greater part of the population is excluded from exercising control over the means of production. As a consequence of this, the labourers receive much less of the social product than the capitalists; the distribution of wealth is extremely unequal. So that people can become free, therefore, private property must be abolished as a "form of intercourse", as a "relation of production", i.e. it must be sublated into directly social property. The proletariat is a universal class because it not only realizes its own freedom through a revolution, but also that of the capitalist class, which is also unfree in bourgeois society insofar as it is not a social subject that has control over the social productive forces as social forces. The productive forces of the world are splintered into millions of units strewn worldwide which only come into relation with each other via the market and mediated by competitive relations. Instead of conscious control, contingency holds sway over the products and thus over the productive forces themselves. The arbitrariness of the world market makes any planning of a subject null and void; subjects do not control production completely, even though it is without exception people who produce specific commodities. The world market confronts humans as an alien power. 

Social power, i.e. multiplied productive force, which arises through the synergy of various individuals as a result of the division of labour, appears to these individuals (because their working together itself is not voluntary, but a natural growth) not as their own, unified power but as an alien, violent force standing outside them about which they do not know where it is coming from and where it is going to, which they thus can no longer control and which, on the contrary, now runs through an idiosyncratic series of phases and stages of development, independent of the willing and activities of people, indeed which even direct this willing and these activities. (MEW3:34) 

The social fetters on the social productive forces must be eliminated and thrown off if humans are to become free. Only then will the violent force of contingency and 'natural growth' be abolished and a total social subject of the productive forces step into its place. Only then will a realm of freedom be realized. The preconditions for this transition to a higher social form are, according to Marx and Engels at the time of writing the German Ideology, of two kinds: first, the formation of an overwhelming mass of propertyless individuals whose conditions of existence are "unbearable" (MEW3:34) and "contingent" (MEW3:77) and second, the development of the productive forces to such a degree that the satisfaction of needs of the earth's entire population is guaranteed. With these preconditions it is the neediness of human being which steps into the foreground as opposed to the free disposition over the productive forces, which now appears as a condition of the universal satisfaction of needs. What Marx and Engels envisage as communism forms a single structured whole which includes a positing of human being. With this positing, the future is also cast. The advent of the future is thought by Marx and Engels as the abolition of the bourgeois form of intercourse, as its sublation into a conscious sociation in which a collective subject forms its will and realizes it by means of highly developed productive forces. From a casting of human being, history arises; from the lot sent by history, a casting of human being comes about. 

But it would be ahistorical to think that human being necessarily had to be posited for all time as a powerful, producing, needy, willing essence. 

What have we gained by these elaborations of Marx and Engels' writings? They serve to illumine the background against which Heidegger speaks about alienation, communism, Marxism and producing. It should have become even clearer that Heidegger and Marx talk about alienation in completely different ways. Heidegger blots out this background — the phenomenality of capitalist economy. For him, economy reduces to producing, production, the poietic, and that primarily as a mode of unconcealing. In the Letter on 'Humanism' does Heidegger not want to go into economic matters and in particular into the question of property? Does he simply want to steer clear of highly explosive political topics current in his own day? Do such matters not lie on the path of the question of being, the only question that moves him? Are the social relations of production for him themselves a 'superstructural phenomenon' viewed from the 'basis' of a 'fundamental ontology', i.e. are they a non-originary phenomenon? (It does not suffice, of course, to refer to the fact that Heidegger did not have 'enough time' to consider such topics, an explanation which would completely miss the issue of his thinking.) If Heidegger makes do with laconic remarks and statements in referring explicitly to Marxism, we have to proceed indirectly and look at how Heidegger deals with economic issues in general. To this end it will be useful to reread the famous analysis of equipment in Being and Time. 

4. Heidegger's Analysis of Production in Being and Time

The analysis of equipment is headed A. The Analysis of the Worldliness of the Surrounding World and Worldliness in General; § 15. The Being of Beings Encountered in the Surrounding World. The being of what is first encountered is to be determined. These are the 'things' that the Greeks call pra/gmata. Their being consists in "being-good-for...", (something or other) which comprises "serviceability, flexibility, applicability, handiness," (SZ 68) etc. Marx would call this use-value: things are useful in everyday dealings. For his part, Heidegger puts producing in the foreground: "...the work, what is to be produced in a specific situation, is what is primarily taken care of and therefore also what is primarily at hand." (SZ 69f) The relationship to equipment when manipulating, using and producing is always a relationship to a totality of equipment in an referential network of utility. One piece of equipment refers to the next, and so on. What is striking is that Heidegger only talks of producing, of production and not of circulation, although they mutually depend on each other (as Marx expounds at length in the introduction to the Grundrissen). How is circulation to be understood as a mode of being? Above all in relation to a particular piece of equipment, a special being encountered within the world, does something paradoxical become apparent when circulation is blanked out: Money is equipment that does not fit very well into the analysis of equipment. What is the being of money? If it is something at-hand, then its essence must lie in being-good-for.... For what can money be used, what is it good for? To buy things. Money is (good) for buying. Can buying be interpreted as a taking-care-of...? Buying is useful for, e.g. taking care of the supply of food; a supply of food is for meeting daily nutritional requirements. Meeting daily nutritional requirements is for the sake of maintaining Dasein's standard of living on a certain level, that is, for the sake of a possibility of its existence. (Cf. SZ 84) But buying is a very general taking-care-of..., if it remains a taking-care-of... at all, insofar as money is also good for buying to make more money by reselling. Money-making and especially making-more-money are useful for something special which cannot be traced back or tied back to a for-the-sake-of (a possibility of Dasein's existence) easily and perhaps not at all. 

Can money be produced? Can money take the position of the work, of what is primarily to be taken care of? If money cannot be produced, how can money be made? It has to be earned by selling something else, whether it be produced commodities, money capital, land or labour-power. Money is something at hand that cannot be something directly produced, but always mediated by some other taking-care-of... or another producing. Its for-what is, moreover, universal insofar as it can be used everywhere for purchasing vendibles. A reference to the entire world of commodities is essentially inherent in money. The world of commodities for its part, however, does not form a totality of being-useful-for in the Heideggerian sense because the members of the commodity world are universal, equally valid, without a special link between one commodity and the next; what a particular commodity is good-for in use may be quite definite, but factually it is sold in trade and becomes thereby — in money — abstractly universal. Its price tag is its qualitative equals sign (=) with every other commodity, independently of any context of use. The universality which is announced in the — factual or potential — price tag of a commodity can, to distinguish it from an "equipment network" (SZ 75), be called an exchange-value network. 

As vendible and with regard to their vendibility, the commodity for its owner is only a means to get money. The owner is indifferent to its particular being-good-for.... Heidegger talks about the commodity form only casually in referring to the "dozen commodity" (today it would be more appropriate to speak of the thousand and million commodity, i.e. mass-produced commodity) to mark it off from products "in simple handicraft states of affairs" (SZ 70). He is only interested in demonstrating that the reference to others is not lacking in the mass commodity, but is only "indefinite": it "points to arbitrary persons, the average" (SZ 71). In the reference to others, only the use-value being is addressed, not its exchange-value being, which refers to money. So that the commodity can become something at hand for its user, it must first strip off its particular being and be recognized universally in money. It has to make the transcendental leap from particularity to the abstract universality of money (value-being) before it can withdraw into a domestic at-handness for the end-user. Every commodity has to go through the eye of the needle of money in order to achieve a realization of its at-handness. 

With being-good-for..., it seems to me that only half the being of the initially encountered "intraworldly beings" is grasped, their being insofar as they refer to Dasein. Every thing is, however, a "value-laden thing" (SZ 68), not only in the sense addressed at this point by Heidegger, but in the completely prosaic sense that it has an exchange-value, a money value. The referential structure of being-good-for... that culminates in a conceptual determination of a being-good-for... totality of the world, casts the world only on the basis of the use-value being of things encountered for Dasein. This casting of being on the basis of at-handness allows the Heidegger of Being and Time to anchor the world in a for-the-sake-of-Dasein. "The primary 'what-for' is a for-the-sake-of." (SZ 84). 

for instance this thing at hand, which we therefore call a hammer, is useful for hammering, hammering is useful for fastening, fastening is useful for protection against bad weather, protection against bad weather is for the sake of Dasein's accommodation, that is, for the sake of a possibility of its being. (SZ 84) 

The "referential disturbance" (SZ 84) about which Heidegger speaks in the context of things being unusable, missing or refractory and in which the world makes itself noticeable, must be supplemented by this tear or crack of value-being in such a way that things double themselves in their self-revealing(4), i.e. they reveal themselves in their being — and are understood thus in their being — not only as being good-for... but also as being-for-the-having for such-and-such an amount of money. In this commodity-being, their (exchange-)value-being, things are disclosed as offered in exchange for money Things at-hand can be lacking ontically (and thus the referential network may be disturbed) because there is a lack of the universal mediator of access to things, i.e. money, to make the mediation with what is lacking. And money, in turn, could be lacking at the moment or in the long term because one does not have anything to sell that would be useful for others. The reference is 'disturbed' perhaps not in Dasein's circumspective view of the world, as if one did not know how things fit together, nor in a disturbed functionality, but factually in their accessibility, in the secured possibility of being able to put one's hands on the thing whereby its commodity-being or being-able-to-be-had-for-money lights up as such. The reference to others must therefore not only be understood on the basis of the usefulness of things (say, for an indefinite number of possible users), as indicated above, but just as much on the basis of the possibility and reality of exchange, i.e. their venality, which in turn is mediated by money. So that what is at-hand can realize its being-good-for... for others, its value-being must first be recognized in money and it must in a certain way be not useful for the seller. The seller must be able and willing to 'do without' it and therefore offer it for sale. Its being-good-for does not find any final point of return or recurrence in the seller, but rather the thing discloses itself primarily to the seller in its exchange-value-being, of being exchangeable. 

What does this state of affairs mean, more precisely, ontologically, i.e. in relation to the being of things? Not only are they useful for something in a totality of being-useful-for... which "is ultimately traced back to a what-for for which there is no being-useful-for..." (SZ 84), i.e. to a for-the-sake of Dasein itself, but things also have a value among themselves; they are always already abstractly set equal to each other as value-things, i.e. as commodities, and opened up towards money. "Our masters are a matter of indifference to us; we are on sale for money."(5)  The abstractness of this equalizing is based on blotting out the concrete what-for of things and therefore ultimately, to blotting out the for-the-sake of Dasein itself in favour of looking at their exchangeability for money. They are worth such-and-such (an amount of money). Things are not only equipment but also value and in their value-being they are on sale for an anonymous buyer, at the buyer's disposal through the mediation of money. The being of things comprises not only their equipment-being (at-handness) but also their value-being (vendibility). Things reveal themselves of themselves as equipment and at the same time as value-things, as commodities, i.e. as things that have a price and therefore are arbitrarily interchangeable with other things (albeit always in definite, quantitative price-determinate relations). 

Heidegger's equipment analysis offers the opportunity of articulating the use-value of things better, because ontologically more adequately. For Marx, use-value is always also — apart from its primary character as a product of useful labour — the natural form, a collection of physical properties as the attributes of a substrate. Insofar — but only insofar — Marx's analysis of use-value is subject to the Heideggerian critique of the ontology of presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). Marx's emphasis of the useful character of commodity-producing labour is sufficient, however, to make a link with Heidegger's determination of equipment as being-good-for... compelling and natural. 

The value-being of things in exchange puts itself beyond their being as equipment, their serviceability, etc. as if it did not have any relation with Dasein. As things of value, they are uncoupled from a for-the-sake-of-Dasein and lead their own lives among themselves on the market. Trade with products, i.e. the exchange of products for the sake of their usefulness may indeed be the intention of the actors, as if they did not have anything other than the at-handness of the products in mind, but the relation into which they put the products with each other, their market relation to each other, is ultimately an abstract-quantitative relation, and indeed so much so that trade can become autonomous and an end in itself. Marx calls this the inversion of the formula of simple commodity circulation into the general formula of capital, i.e. into the universal valorization of value, in which value itself becomes an automaton. The inversion is only possible because of the double nature of commodity things as being concretely useful things on the one hand and abstract quantities of value on the other. 

When people trade with each other, each person has their own interests in mind. For the dealer, the commodity is not a thing at-hand, but only a thing good for the customer whose needs are to be satisfied. The dealer must be interested in what the commodity is good for insofar as it concerns the customer, so that he, the dealer, can make his money. The use-value side is never of no consequence; the things must always be good for something. But here it is a matter of allowing the phenomenon of things, i.e. their mode of being, to come fully to light. Heidegger underlines the at-handness of equipment as the way in which things are "discovered" in taking-care-of... It must therefore be of interest how things, i.e. the non-Dasein-like beings "initially encountered", step into the openness of a discoveredness which boils down to how things in the openness are accessible to humans in their everyday actions. 

Heidegger criticizes ontology, especially Cartesian ontology, for grasping things on the basis of their presence-at-hand, thus "skipping over" the more originary phenomenon of at-handness, which is rooted in everyday practice. He demonstrates how the "theoretical", contemplative, "staring" grasp of things as beings present-at-hand, as substances with properties represents a derivative mode of appearance of things as opposed to the immediate openness and obviousness of at-handness. He thus locates the originary being of things, and their truth or disclosedness, in everyday practice, in prosaic, active taking-care-of... Everyday life is a socio-historical location, the "place of history", as Heidegger calls the po/lij elsewhere. How then are things accessible to Dasein's circumspective view? We have already said it above: they are not only useful things, equipment, but also value-things, commodities. With this, a social dimension of being-with-others is addressed, without however shifting from an equally originary 'ontological' level. The social dimension is not stocked up on top of a more substantial or originary dimension, whether it be that of traditional ontology, or whether it be that of a Heideggerian ontology of equipment. The at-handness of things that Heidegger now posits as originary is just as much an historico-social dimension of things as their commodity-being or value-being. But how does this value-being appear in everyday life? As property. The value-being of things in their universality is of course a modern phenomenon that has only arisen along with the emergence of the capitalist economic mode, of bourgeois society. That things universally have a value, a price, presupposes a long historical development in which the abstractness of money relations and markets relations has asserted itself against other social relations. This does not mean however that value-being is not an originary phenomenon, just as little as the comparison between crude, ancient technology and modern, sophisticated technology has a bearing on making a difference to the ontological status of things. The ontological positing of things in their double nature begins already in the early history of the Occident. Value is merely a modern, highly developed and abstract form of appearance of property relations under which things are universally available for sale. The value-being of things is only given on the foundation of private property relations, which individuate and isolate owners. In earlier societies — and here only European-Occidental forms of society are of interest — property relations were different — something that does not concern us here — but at-handness and property were always equally open to sight, i.e. modes of an originary uncovering of things. In particular, for the Greeks things were not only useful products but also commodities and this double nature was also taken up by the philosophical thinking of an Aristotle where it challenged thinking. An adequate ontological analysis of beings encountered "at first and for the most part" must therefore take this double determination of essence into consideration. 

In the introduction to the Grundrissen, Marx emphasizes that production cannot be analyzed in isolation from distribution, exchange and consumption because all four together form the moments of a totality that mutually interact. Distribution is just another name for property relations; it determines how the productive forces of a society are distributed among its members. In particular, distribution determines factual access to the means of production, the land and the product. In the things encountered everyday, there is always a reference to others, and that not merely with regard to those who will use them, but with regard to their owners and possessors. Apart from at-handness, there is in one and the same thing the 'belonging-ness', the 'propertied-ness', if a neologism is permitted. Each thing belongs to someone, and even a thing that is lost or without an owner is only a deficient mode of belonging-ness. Belonging-ness is just as open to view as at-handness, and indeed in the same way as the latter, i.e. without being expressly thematized, implicitly. In taking-care-of... recourse is made to things at-hand with an implicit matter-of-factness that distinguishes between what one owns or at least possesses and what is owned or possessed by others. Belonging-ness as a network of relations is co-discovered with the totality of being-useful-for of equipment, which allocates the various things to their respective owners or possessors. The world of property is open to view for the circumspective view of Dasein as a network of property relations. 

By taking pra/gmata as the starting point for his analysis of things encountered in the world, Heidegger wants to put practical action and in particular, producing as practical modes of the disclosedness of world into the centre of attention. Practical action as the manipulation of things constitutes an essential component of being-in-the-world, and that so much so that Heidegger bases his first concept of world on it: the world is at first and for the most part a multi-layered network of references among equipment. But the world is at the same time and to the same extent a multi-layered network of property relations which Dasein has always already uncovered in taking-care-of... Because producing is always already a social producing, it always takes place within definite property relations that Dasein has always already discovered a priori in dealing with its affairs. What consequences does this doubling of the essence of things into things at-hand and things belonging-to have for Heidegger's analysis in Being and Time? 

In the third chapter of the first section, Heidegger is at pains to clarify the worldliness of the world on the background of a determination of Dasein as being-in-the-world and he achieves this aim by building up a conceptual structure around the pair of concepts "being-useful-for" (Bewandtnis) and "significance" (Bedeutsamkeit), whereby the latter is interpreted in the context of a for-the-sake-of-Dasein. 

In the familiarity with these relations, Dasein 'signifies' to itself, it gives itself its being and potential for being with respect to its being-in-the-world to its understanding in an originary way. (...) These relations are bracketed together among themselves as an originary totality; they are what they are as this significance, in which Dasein gives itself its being-in-the-world a priori to its understanding. (SZ 87) 

If however things are grasped not only on the basis of being-good-for..., but in their belonging-to..., they assume traits of a repulsion and assignment which may throw Dasein back onto itself, for it is primarily only its own property assigned to itself that is accessible; only under certain circumstances can access be gained to alien property, namely, only with the agreement of its owner, say, on the basis of a contractual agreement. The ownership and exchange relations which regulate access to things, so that they can also become factually at hand, are equally originary with pragmatic relations to things. 

The double nature of things encountered daily can be interpreted provisionally as at-handness and belonging-ness. This double nature, however, is not thematized in Being and Time, i.e. ultimately: the value-being of things is blotted out. Even when in Being and Time Heidegger comes to talk expressly of economics, the dimension of things being commodities does not come into view: "The everyday connection of equipment at hand, its historical emergence, employment, its factual role in Dasein is the subject of the science of the economy. Things at hand do not have to lose their character as equipment in order to become the 'subject' of a science (SZ 361). If now, however, commodity-being is taken into account, things show themselves from another aspect, namely from the aspect of their unavailability, an unavailability based on private property, or in other words, they reveal themselves in their restricted availability insofar as things, constantly at the beck and call of money, are available for sale. Because alien property belongs to someone else, this other person has control over it, and I do not; disposability is only mediated through being offered for sale. Here, as already sketched above, it is not a matter of a technical disturbance of the "referential network of utility", but a social disturbance, a barrier inherent in the structure of being-together-with-others. Unavailability as private property as such is a state of affairs that does not capture the essence of the value-being of things. Property has to be guided back to its essential grounding. To do this, something like a 'value-form analysis' is required which can deepen the insight into the unavailability of things. As will become apparent below, in view of an even deeper insight into the essence of the gathering of the gainable called the win (Gewinnst), this deepening of insight will not be the final fathoming. Insofar as value itself becomes a self-moving automaton, the unavailability of things loses the illusory appearance that it is simply a matter of the exclusive distribution of things among social subjects which could be eliminated by elevating distribution to a conscious social distribution, i.e. collective social ownership. Therefore, let us once again turn to Marxian texts.

5. A Complementary View of Marx 

I have produced for myself and not for you, just as you have produced for yourself and not for me. The result of my production has in itself just as little relation to you as the result of your production has an immediate relation to me, i.e. our production is not production of humans for humans as humans, i.e. it is not social production. (MEW Erg. Bd. 1 p.459)

In truth I produce another object, the object of your production, for which I intend to exchange this surplus [product ME], an exchange that I have already executed in thought. The social relation in which I stand towards you, my labour for your need is therefore also a mere illusion... (ibid. 460) 

The only understandable language that we speak to each other are our objects in their relationship to each other. We would not understand a human language, and it would remain without effect. [...] We are mutually alienated from human being to such an extent that the direct language of this essence appears to us as a violation of human dignity, whereas the alienated language of reified values appears as justified, self-assured and self-recognizing human dignity. (ibid. 461) 

Against this diremption, Marx posits a draft or casting of a true (in the sense authentic, genuine) society in which a true mutual recognition of needy human being gains ascendancy in social intercourse, in which even love is granted a secured position in everyday life. To produce for each other as humans would mean, among other things, "to have been a mediator for you between you and the species, [...] to know that I am affirmed in your thinking as well as your love." (ibid. 462) A true society is for Marx the realization of being-for-each-other, a being for others without the repelling, excluding limits of private property. It is a community, locus of being taken up into and protected by species being, an overcoming of the splintering into egocentric individuals. When Heidegger in the Letter on 'Humanism' writes down a word such as 'alienation', he evokes at the same time the entire problematic of the young Marx, the problematic of true mutual recognition of subjects which is already announced in Hegel, albeit not in the form of a critique of the form of society, since for Hegel bourgeois society does not represent a violation of human being. On the contrary, it is a realization of human freedom as particularity, which has to be elevated to a higher level and corrected in the state, not in such a way that it would be eliminated but rather realize the concept of freedom itself in accordance with reason. What, then, does it mean with respect to the critique of private property when Heidegger writes: "Because Marx, in experiencing alienation, reaches into an essential dimension of history..." (WM 336)? 

The "essentiality of what is historical" lies for Heidegger in "being" (ibid.). Do the exchange relations that predominate in the bourgeois form of society entertain an essential relation with being? Are they a destiny sent by being? Is the value-being of things in its revealedness an historical destiny sent to human being? If te/xnh and technology as historical ways of disclosing beings in their being are part of the Occidental history of being, why does not (exchange)-value-being as mode of disclosure equally belong to the same history in an originary way? If exchange-value represents an independent mode of being equiprimordial with being-good-for..., why does Heidegger start directly and exclusively with production, with (poihtikh/) te/xnh? Why does he then push "unconditional production" (ibid. 337) into the foreground? Did he overlook, perhaps even push something aside, out of view? Or did he overlook something and push it aside in order to see even more deeply — into being itself? It is striking that Heidegger picks out only one moment of the fourfold totality of production, distribution, exchange and consumption. By contrast, Marx toils away for years on end to bring exchange relations in bourgeois society to their concept. As social practices, production and exchange have an equal weight for Marxian analysis, even though "in the final instance" production is supposed to be the decisive, determining moment. 

Marx is the first thinker in the Western tradition after Aristotle to undertake the task of analyzing philosophically, metaphysically in detail the form of social intercourse which we call exchange or trade. Exchange, the buying and selling of commodities, is a kind of everyday taking-care-of... which Heidegger, on the other hand, blots out of his equipment analysis. If Plato and Aristotle can be said to have gained their metaphysical conceptual structure on the basis of the paradigm of everyday poi/hsij, of production, Heidegger continues this tradition unquestioningly insofar as he ties down intercourse with things primarily to a "work". But Aristotle had also already made a start with the analysis of the value-form, as Marx remarks (MEW23:73f), an analysis that obviously does not resonate significantly with Heidegger. He not only retouches property relations out of the equipment analysis; he also excludes the practices of exchange which constitute the social form of intercourse, even though everyday dealings with things in exchange truly deserve the name of acting/trading with pra/gmata. 

Even though in his late writings Marx no longer speaks so enthusiastically of true, genuine humans in a state of non-alienation, and with relentless persistence develops the concepts for penetrating more deeply into existing capitalism on the basis of the value concept, it nevertheless remains detectable in Marx in what true human freedom consists, namely, in an "association of freely associated producers". On the basis of the structure of value concepts developed for the critique of political economy, the alienation problematic of the early writings is transformed into the problematic of fetishism in the late writings, whereby a decisive shift of emphasis takes place in the critique. No longer do two individuals who mutually recognize or fail to recognize each other and who are separated by private property encounter one another, but rather, the autonomization of the products of human labour in the commodity and money forms comes more sharply into perspective so that, as value, they assume an independent existence vis-à-vis humans as a whole. No longer is it humans who are alienated from each other by private property, but rather, humans as a whole in their social being-together are removed from their own products as value-things; in the value-form of sociation, social labour has conquered an autonomous realm in which it leads its own life and follows its own self-movement. 

This formulation of a shift of emphasis cannot be maintained, however, without further nuances insofar as even the early Marx does not neglect to speak of an autonomization of the products of labour vis-à-vis humans. In the excerpts from J.S. Mills' Elements of Political Economy (1844), for instance, there are even passages that may be regarded as preliminary versions of a more detailed value-form analysis in Capital, where reference is even made to "equivalent" and "relative existence" with respect to private property (MEW Erg. 1:453) and also to money, in which "the complete domination of things over humans appears" (ibid. 455). The shift in emphasis from the early to the late Marx does not consist therefore in the introduction of a completely new motif but first of all, in the disappearance of talk about untrue, alienated, inhuman humanity and true recognition and secondly, in the much more profound and conceptually grounding elaboration of the dialectics of the value-form from the simple value-form to the money form in the later writings on the critique of political economy, in which the value concept becomes the express foundation of a systematically elaborated and connected theory of the capitalist mode of production. This value-form analytical theory allows Marx to unveil, decipher and fathom the fetishism that inheres in autonomized money so that what appears as properties of things (essentially: money) is traced back to productive social activity. Reified social relations are uncovered and thus made fluid again in thinking with the intention of critical enlightenment. Can the value-being of commodities really be deciphered as the mystified form of social labour in such a way that there were an historical prospect(6) of guiding fetishized products in the direction of transparently socialized products? Or does the value-being of commodities refer instead to a withdrawal of beings in their being from any producibility by humans? These questions represent an interface between Marxian and Heideggerian thinking which come down to a question concerning value-being as an historical destiny of being, a question that will be taken up again up below. To anticipate: where Marx , starting with his casting of human being as needy and productive, tried to determine the value-being of commodities quantitatively by tying it back to the quantity of "socially necessary labour-time" in a commodity, the removal of this metaphysical positing of ground in labour implies that the value-being of commodities represents a groundless, non-manipulable magnitude which 'shows up' in the openness of being-together. 

What does this transformation of the alienation problematic from early to late Marxian thinking signify? It is no longer the mutual worthlessness of humans for each other as humans that is emphasized and appears as a violation of human being (in the late Marx, such emphatically humanistic passages cannot be found). Does private property (for the late Marx — and in general) represent a distortion of the true community — presupposing that the 'true community' is a tenable critical category? If at all, then not as such, but only derivatively, for it is value and not private property (and the associated mutual exclusion of possession of the products) that now stands at the centre of the (labour of) critique. Private property is only the mode of appearance of something more essential, more originary: it is a mode of appearance of value which, in the form of appearance of money, reigns over the commodity world like a king and puts its seal on the diremption of universal from particular interests. According to Marx, this king is to be disempowered in order to harmonize individual needs of life with a universal, collective being-in-the-world. Would genuine mutual recognition of humans result from this disempowerment? Would their essential neediness then gain full social recognition and satisfaction? Would a satisfied and therefore peaceful essencing of humankind thus come about? 

In this draft of communism it is as if the opposed striving of humans against each other in competitive society had been overcome and a genuine being-for-each-other, a social solidarity had stepped into its place. It is as if the resistance of the other had disappeared, at least insofar as private property inevitably brings forth opposed interests. The exclusivity of private property compels each individual to fend for him or herself, compels each individual to assert him or herself in the struggle for existence, whereas the social recognition of neediness would eliminate this antagonistic opposition. In favour of an harmonious distribution of social wealth? Would the overcoming of the value-form and thus the 'just', conscious distribution of material goods really signify an elimination of social antagonism and the foundation for a realization of fraternity? Viewed from the standpoint of the value problematic, does the struggle for existence in competition represent an alienation of human being, a violation of its innermost essence or rather its realization? The answer depends on the historical casting of human being. 

For it seems that the historical casting of humans as needy beings posits their essence as too 'low', too 'simple', too 'modest'. Are humans concerned essentially with their own needs, as seems to have been the case in part in 'real, existing socialism', or rather with their desires? Does not human being always already reach beyond itself, and especially beyond the horizon of so-called needs of life? Is this reaching beyond not already indicated by the well-known phenomenon of corruption in real, existing socialist bureaucracies? The concept of need includes a reference to a natural moment, to what humans absolutely need to live: something to eat, clothing and protection against bad weather. Even if, starting from these basic needs, further 'social' needs are stacked up on top in the course of 'democratic' disputation and conflict, such as the 'need' for education, the casting of human being on the basis of need and neediness remains in the dimension of moderation, of setting up a familiar, homely world. Desire, by contrast, always includes something excessive, unbounding, disinhibiting; it always shoots out beyond what is moderate; it does not allow itself to be quenched by the satisfaction of needs and is to this extent voracious. Desire cannot be comprehended as stocked up on top of basic needs, as a kind of superstructure on the basis or foundation of more basic needs, since the limits have always already been transcended in the desire of human being. For desire, need is nothing, secondary, unimportant. Desire casts humans out of their habitual, quotidian ruts in taking care of daily concerns, no matter what the cost. 

With this, the motif of desire, of the uncanny unbounding of human being announces itself for the first time. It will occupy our attention further because it puts the Marxian casting of human being as need-having into question. At this point, with regard to Heidegger, I first want to address the significance of this topic for the equipment analysis. Namely, it is no accident that in the equipment analysis, Heidegger speaks of simple tools such as the hammer and the self-evident for-the-sake-of... of Dasein such as "protection against bad weather", for these for-the-sake-of... can also be comprehended in the moderate framework of human neediness. Even though Heidegger develops a language in Being and Time that differs from that of metaphysics, Dasein's taking-care-of... in everyday life is basically still a modest satisfaction of needs; its taking-care-of-itself is taking care of its needs. It is only for this reason that the equipment analysis and the use-value side of the Marxian commodity analysis can so easily made consonant with each other. However, already in Being and Time, Heidegger signals very clearly a break with the casting of human being from the standpoint of need-satisfaction by declaring everyday taking-care-of... to be a mode of improperness, inauthenticity or 'disownedness' (by being). Even though the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity is by no means obvious, it can nevertheless be understood as an indication that even early on, Heidegger is concerned with an excessive element, that is to say, with a transcendent, ek—static, self-casting essence of the human, with the uncanny, unhomely relation of the human being to being itself which, as in the fundamental, uncanny mood of anxiety, tears humans out of their habitual quotidian lives. 

This could be a point where one could demonstrate that from the very beginning, Heidegger had gone far beyond Marx, that the question of being bursts the somewhat complacent casting of human being as needy once and for all and unmasks it as inadequate. But such an assessment would not take account of one major strand in the thinking of the late Marx, that is above all, the value-form problematic which to the present day has not been duly appreciated. With respect to the latter, namely, it can be shown that a phenomenality of desire, of excess — probably against Marx's own intentions, which aimed at guiding and tying back excess to social labour, i.e. to a collective subjectivity — is unfolded and that with this, even in Marx himself, when read against the grain, such a simple picture of humans as needy beings can no longer be maintained without further ado. 

The question remains, what the critique of political economy really signifies, what it really aims at. Can the critique of political economy be translated unproblematically into a practical critique of the existing relations, i.e. into a revolutionary, practical overcoming of a form of society, as formulated in the early Feuerbach theses? Even if this were Marx's self-understanding, it can still be asked whether the critique of political economy reveals another inner tendency and admits another type of 'violent' reading that point to getting-over and twisting capitalism instead of overcoming it. If humans as purely needy beings become questionable and a desiring, more uncanny essence comes to occupy the position of human being, can an authentic (needy) human essence and an inauthentic, (alienated) human essence then still be distinguished from each other? It still has to be investigated to what extent the conceptual pairs need-alienation on the one hand, and desire-fetishism on the other are counterposed respectively to each other. It can be shown, namely, that a desiring essence is already entangled with fetishism so deeply that it is no longer easy to gain a critical distance or an innocent ground of unalienated authenticity from where the lever of critique could be put into a position of leverage against an 'untrue' (covered-up) existing capitalist world.

6. Money and Desire 

According to the Marxian casting of communism, needs provide humans with their measure. The fulfilment of needs results in fulfilled human being. Social production is there to fulfil human needs. In this way, everything has its measure. Alienation only arises when the needs of the members of society are not fulfilled. Viewed in this way, Marx located freedom in the social fulfilment of needs, in the realm of necessity that first has to be secured before a superfluous freedom can be lived out. The first priority is that social production and need gratification be brought into harmony with each other so that each person receives his or her portion of social wealth in proportion to need. This harmony is upset by the immoderate moment that capital sets in motion, for as valorization of value, capital knows no limits to its circuitous, self-augmenting, accumulating movements. Everywhere on the globe, capital starts making surplus-value out of value. Endlessly. The augmentation of value is, from Marx's viewpoint, a bad infinity: insatiable, voracious hunger for surplus-value which brutally sucks everything that is into the self-augmenting movement of valorization. These excessive, reified relations of production thus have to be abolished to allow humans with their needs to have a chance. 

But even the relation to money in simple circulation, i.e. before the transition of money to capital, already leaves room enough for desire, lust, obsession, since simple circulation itself requires the formation of a hoard. The miser now steps onto the stage, a character mask well-known from time immemorial. Thus not an inhuman figure, but a desiring being which is not alien, but close to our essence. 

The movement of exchange-value as exchange-value, as an automaton, can only be that of surpassing its quantitative limit. By stepping beyond a quantitative limit of the hoard, however, a new barrier is created which in turn has to be overcome. [...] Hoard formation thus does not have any immanent limit, no measure within itself, but is an endless process that finds in its result at any time a motive for its beginning. [...] Money is not just one object of the obsession with gaining wealth, it is the object of this obsession. [...] Miserliness holds on to the hoard by not allowing the money to become means of circulation, but rather the lust for gold maintains its money soul, its constant tension against circulation. (MEW13:109f) 

'The origin of miserliness is located in money [...] gradually, a kind of madness flares up here, no longer miserliness, but the lust for gold.' (Plinius Historia naturalis) (ibid.) 

There are also parallel passages to the above-cited passage in the Grundrissen and Capital, although in the latter, the lack of measure is dealt with in the context of the transformation of money into capital. With money, obsession enters history; humans are overcome by an impelling urge. "Money is thus not only the object, but simultaneously the source of the obsession with wealth." (Gr.:133) It can only be such a source because it is disclosed to human being in its value-being. Humans understand money as money, i.e. in its purely quantitative, abstract value-being. The obsession with money overrides every need and is insofar, according to the Marxian casting of essence, already necessarily an alienation from essence: 

Abstract obsession with enjoyment is realized by money in the determination in which it is the material representative of wealth; it realizes miserliness, insofar as it is merely the universal form of wealth vis-à-vis commodities as its particular substances. In order to keep it as such, miserliness has to sacrifice any relation to objects of particular needs, renounce, in order to satisfy the need of the lust for money as such. (Gr.:134) 

Simple commodity circulation — selling in order to buy — serves as a means for a final purpose outside circulation, the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs. As opposed to this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for valorization of value only exists within this permanently renewing movement. The movement of capital is therefore measureless, excessive. (MEW23:167; emphasis mine ME)

True wealth (o( alhqino\j plou=toj) consists of such use-values; for the measure of this kind of property, sufficient for a good life, is not unlimited. There is however a second art of acquisition which is preferably and rightly called chrematistics as a consequence of which there seems to be no limit to wealth and property. (Art. Pol. I iii 1256b30ff, cited after MEW23:167) 

dio\ t$== me\n fai/netai a)nagkai=on ei)=nai panto\j plou/tou pe/raj, e)pi\ de\ tw=n ginome/nwn o(rw=men sumbai=non tou)nanti/on: pa/ntej ga\r ei)j a)/peiron au)/xousin oi( xrhmatizo/menoi to\ no/misma. (1257b32-34) 

It therefore seems to be necessary for all wealth to have limits; nevertheless we see the opposite happening: all those who are preoccupied with the acquisition of wealth strive to make money grow endlessly.

In the Marxian draft of socialism, "labour-time serves simultaneously as the measure of the producer's individual share of total labour and therefore also of the individually consumable portion of the common product" (MEW23:93). In socialism, the measure is supposed to prevent the measureless excess of an unequal distribution of the social product under socialism, which is, however, the case under capitalism. The first measure for a socialist society would be the "necessary labour-time for society in general and each section of society (i.e. room for the development of the full productive forces of the individual, thus also of society)". (Gr. 595) The "necessary labour-time" in turn will "have its measure in the needs of the social individual". (Gr. 596) But this measure will be exceeded by far, since in a socialist society 

the development of social productive forces will accelerate so quickly that, although now production is calculated on the wealth of all, the disposable time of all grows. For real wealth is the developed productive force of all individuals. It is then no longer labour-time, but disposable time which serves as the measure of wealth. (Gr. 596) 

Marx's thinking remains critique, i.e. it remains negatively determined by the opposition to capitalism and at the same time it gains its force from this opposition. Marx is concerned with the overcoming, abolition, destruction of fetters which capitalism puts on the development of the productive forces, so that the working class can come to enjoy the fruits of this development. Positively, however, it remains unclarified in Marx, through what agency and to what reference point the measurelessness of human being is to be made to submit, if, as we have seen, it can be maintained that human being cannot be exhaustively determined by neediness. This is a deficit of Marxian thinking, that it remains a negative movement. On the one hand, it posits human being in labour: humans as labourers, as producers of their own social living conditions; on the other hand however, it equally casts a liberation of human being from a determination through labour by demanding that the development of the productive forces should benefit labouring humans. But what are humans supposed to do when they are not working? Whence could human being take its measure if production, the guiding forth of beings into the clearing of presence, were to become inapplicable as measure? 

The "money soul" is presumably a guiding channel for the excessive measurelessness of human being under capitalism. If human being is desirous and craving and not merely needy, thinking must have an answer to the measurelessness of human being through which it submits the latter into a binding structure. The limitlessness of capital represents one answer to the measurelessness of human being; it does not make human being into an excessive and measureless essence, as Marxian critique would like to have it. Presumably, the endless movement of augmentation which bends desire around into an endless, senseless circling is not the only answer to the excessiveness of human being. Perhaps it is merely a metaphysical answer which could still be twisted and somehow got over.

7. The Essence of Capital and the Essence of Technology