Interest as an Attribute of Individuality

The category of interest was thus central to Marx's theory on many levels; it provided insight into present conditions and into their transcendence. In his critique of political economy, to be sure, the category played only a subsidiary role, but in his coverage of contemporary events, interest frequently functioned as an analytic category

specifying the motives of actors. Once installed at the heart of the Marxian enterprise as a kind of tacit concept, interest could be invoked whenever the fundamental premises of Marx's theory were at stake.

Proof of the continuing importance of the category for Marx can be found relatively late, in his 1881 notebooks on Henry Sumner Maine's Lectures on the Early History of Institutions . At one point in these lectures, Maine rebuked the analytical jurists such as Bentham for treating sovereignty as a question of pure will, rather than acknowledging the limits imposed by "the vast mass of influences, which we may call for shortness moral." Marx transcribed Maine's criticism, only to comment acidly that Maine could not see the economic influences behind moral phenomena. Then, in a remarkable passage, Marx attacked the analytical viewpoint of Bentham as well as the conventionalism of Maine. Both missed

the many levels: that the apparent supremely independent existence of the state is only apparent , that in all its forms it is an excrescence of society; as its appearance occurs first on a given stage of development, subsequently fading again, as soon as society has reached a hitherto unattained stage. The first separation of individuality not originally from despotic shackles (as blockhead Maine understands it), but from satisfying and sociable bonds, the primitive community—therewith the one-sided elaboration of individuality. The true content of the latter is shown when we analyze the contents of the "latter"—interests . We find then that interests have become common to social groups, that their characteristic interests have become class-interests and thus that this individuality is itself class-etc. individuality, in the last instance having economic conditions for a basis. The state is built on this foundation, and presupposes it.^[38]

Several aspects of this passage are noteworthy. Marx here underlined the historical specificity of interest, by linking it to the individuality which emerges within civil society after the disintegration of the "primitive community."^[39] More important for our purposes, though, is the explicit connection thus drawn between individuality and interest. But what does it mean to call interest the "true content" of individuality? What distinguished interest from other human faculties? Since Marx never explicitly defined the term, we will have to reconstruct his answer from a variety of sources.

We can start with a criticism of Kantian idealism in The German Ideology . There Marx and Engels accused Kant of failing to notice

that "theoretical ideas . . . had as their basis material interests and a will that was conditioned and determined by the material relations of production."^[40] The locus of interest that emerges from this statement is indicative: situated between ideas and material circumstances, and tied to a will "conditioned and determined" by social relations, it appears implicitly as an aspect of the individual animated by wants, practically oriented toward satisfying these wants, and rational—even enlisting "theoretical ideas"—in pursuing their satisfaction. That interest transcended the mere instinct for survival was commonly taken for granted: as Ferguson had put it, the interested individual pursued wants with "reflection and foresight." That Marx himself shared this understanding is confirmed by several comments in an 1842 article, where interest was characterized as "crafty" and "keen-sighted," amoral but practical, absorbed in worldly affairs.^[41] As Marx summarized his early understanding, "interest has no memory, for it thinks only of itself. And the one thing about which it is concerned, itself, it never forgets. But it is not concerned about contradictions, for it never comes into contradiction with itself. It is a constant improviser, for it has no system, only expedients."^[42]

While Marx was here condemning that "self-seeking interest which brings nothing of a higher order to realization," it is not impossible to amend this early account with later fragments, and to piece together a description of how the faculty of interest might contribute to the emancipatory process: for it seems only natural that the cooperative pursuit of a social transformation in the universal interest would, in turn, transform the individual faculty of interest. The proletarian, in pursuing his class interest, might then evolve a fraternal solidarity beyond selfish concerns and an abiding rationality beyond expedient cunning. Marx himself held such hopes for the labor movement: "When communist artisans form associations, education and propaganda are their first aims. But the very act of associating creates a new need—the need for society—and what appeared to be a means has become an end." In modern society, however, the preconditions for such a rational solidarity could be found only among the proletarians, who stood to gain "life, freedom, humanity" from pursuing their interests in common. For, as Marx put it in Capital , to explain "why capitalists form a veritable freemason society vis-à-vis the whole working class, while there is little love lost between them in competition among themselves," the

common interest "is appreciated by each only so long as he gains more by it than without it." In sharp contrast to individual capitalists, all proletarians "have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."^[43]