Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

not yet grasped the positive essence of private property nor the human

nature of needs, it is still imprisoned and contaminated by private property. It has understood its concept, but not yet its essence.154

The 'democratic' communism that Marx mentioned here must have been the Utopian, non-violent sort advocated by Etienne Cabet which was increasingly popular in Paris about this time, particularly in the League of the Just; the 'despotic' type probably alluded to the transitory dictatorship of the proletariat advocated by the followers of Babeuf. The second type of communism, involving the abolition of the state, was represented by Dezamy (who coined the famous phrase about an accountant and a register being all that was necessary to ensure the perfect functioning of the future communist society).

Thirdly, Marx described in a few tightly written and pregnant pages his own idea of communism - the culmination of previous inadequate conceptions:

Communism is the positive abolition of private property and thus of human self-alienation and therefore the real reappropriation of the human essence by and for man. This is communism as the complete and conscious return of man - conserving all the riches of previous development for man himself as a social, i.e. human, being. Communism as completed naturalism is humanism, and as completed humanism is naturalism. It is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man. It is the true resolution of the struggle between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution.155

Having thus outlined his own conception of communism, Marx went on to enlarge on three of its particular aspects: its historical bases, its social character, and its regard for the individual.

Dealing with the first aspect - the historical bases of communism - Marx drew a further distinction between his own communism and the 'underdeveloped' variety. The latter types (he cited as examples the Utop- ian communism of Cabet and Villegardelle) tried to justify themselves by appealing to certain historical forms of community that were opposed to private property. For Marx, this choice of isolated aspects or epochs implied that the rest of history did not provide the case for communism. In his own version, on the other hand, 'both as regards the real engendering of this communism - the birth of its empirical existence, and also as regards its consciousness and thought, the whole movement of history is the consciously comprehended process of its becoming'.156 Thus the whole

revolutionary movement 'finds not so much its empirical as its theoretical basis in the development of private property, and particularly of the economic system'.1" This was so because the alienation of human life was expressed in the existence of private property, and it was in the movement of private property, in production and consumption, that man had hitherto attempted to realise himself.

Religion, family, state, law, morality, science and art are only particular forms of production and fall under its general law. The positive abolition of private property and the appropriation of human life is therefore the positive abolition of all alienation, thus the return of man out of religion, family, state, etc., into his human, i.e. social, being.158

The basic alienation, Marx went on, took place in the economic sphere: religious alienation only occurred in the consciousness of man, whereas economic alienation occurred in his real life and thus its supersession involved the supersession of all alienations. Of course, the preaching of atheism might be important where religion was strong, but atheism was only a stage on the path to communism, and an abstract one at that; only communism proposed a doctrine of action that affected what was real.

Secondly, Marx emphasised the social character of communism and extended the reciprocal relation of man and society to man and nature:

. . . only to social man is nature available as a bond with other men, as the basis of his own existence for others and theirs for him, and as the vital element in human reality; only to social man is nature the foundation of his own human existence. Only as such has his natural existence become a human existence and nature itself become human. Thus society completes the essential unity of man and nature: it is the genuine resurrection of nature, the accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature.159

(This passage, and other similar ones, show Marx very much under the influence of Hegel, to such an extent that he almost said that nature was created by man).160 As regards the social aspect, Marx showed that the capacities peculiar to man were evolved in social intercourse. Even when a man was working in isolation, he performed a social act simply by virtue of his being human. Even thought - since it used language - was a social activity.

But this emphasis on the social aspects of man's being did not destroy man's individuality (and this was Marx's third point): 'However much he is a particular individual (and it is precisely his particularity that makes him an individual and a truly individual communal being), man is just as much the totality - the ideal totality - and the subjective existence of society as something thought and felt'.161

K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

Marx devoted most of the rest of this section to drawing a picture of unalienated man, man whom he called 'total' and 'multi-sided'. One should not, he said, have too narrow an idea about what the supersession of private property would achieve: just as the state of alienation totally vitiated all human faculties, so the supersession of this alienation would be a total liberation. It would not be limited to the enjoyment or possession of material objects. All human faculties - Marx listed seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring, acting, loving - would, in their different ways, become means of appropriating reality. This was difficult for alienated man to imagine, since private property had made men so stupid that they could only imagine an object to be theirs when they actually used it and even then it was only employed as a means of sustaining life which was understood as consisting of labour and the creation of capital.

Referring to Hess's work on this subject, Marx declared that all physical and mental senses had been dulled by a single alienation - that of having. But this absolute poverty would give birth to the inner wealth of human beings:

The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely in that these senses and qualities have become human, both subjectively and objectively. The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a social, human object produced by man and destined for him. Thus in practice the senses have become direct theoreticians. They relate to the thing for its own sake, but the thing itself is an objective human relationship to itself and to man and vice versa. (I can in practice only relate myself humanly to an object if the object relates humanly to man.) Need and enjoyment have thus lost their egoistic nature and nature has lost its mere utility in that its utility has become human utility.162

This cultivation or creation of the faculties could be achieved only in certain surroundings.

For it is not just a matter of the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses - the practical senses (desiring, loving, etc.) - in brief: human sensibility and the human character of the senses, which can only come into being through the existence of its object, through humanized nature. The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history.163

For plainly a starving man appreciated food in a purely animal way; and a dealer in minerals saw only value, and not necessarily beauty, in his

wares. For his faculties to become human faculties, man needed to be liberated from all external constraints.

It is passages such as this that have led some commentators to argue plausibly that Marx's model of human activity was an artistic one and that he drew much of his picture of man from romantic sources and particularly from Schiller. The idea of man's alienated senses finding objects appropriate to them, the attempt to form a connection between freedom and aesthetic activity, the picture of the all-round man - all these occurred in Schiller's Briefe.164 It is also possible that there was a more contemporary and personal influence of the same nature, in that Marx spent a lot of his time in Paris in the company of Heine and Herwegh, two poets who did their best to embody the German romantic ideal. Marx's picture of the all-round, unalienated individual was drawn to some extent from models that were very present to him at the time.

Marx went on to sketch the importance of industry in the history of mankind. The passages anticipated his later, more detailed accounts of historical materialism. It was the history of industry, he maintained, that really revealed human capabilities and human psychology. Since human nature had been misunderstood in the past, history had been turned into the history of religion, politics and art. Industry, however, revealed man's essential faculties and was the basis for any science of man. In the past, natural science had been approached from a purely utilitarian angle. But its recent immense growth had enabled it, through industry, to transform the life of man. If industry were considered as the external expression of man's essential faculties, then natural science would be able to form the basis of human science. This science had to be based on sense-experience, as described by Feuerbach. But since this was human sense-experience, there would be a single, all-embracing science: 'Natural science will later comprise the science of man just as much as the science of man will embrace natural science: there will be one single science.'165 Thus the reciprocal relationship that Marx had earlier outlined between man and nature was reflected here in his idea of a natural science of man.

The last part of his manuscript on communism consisted of a discussion, both digressive and uncharacteristic of his usual approach, on the question of whether the world was created or not. One of the key ideas in Marx's picture of man was that man was his own creator; any being that lived by the favour of another was a dependent being. Accordingly, Marx rejected the idea that the world was created, but got bogged down in an Aristotelian type of discussion about first causes in which he was defeated by his imaginary opponent until he broke off the argument and continued in a much more characteristic vein: 'But since for socialist man what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human

labour and the development of nature for man, he has the observable and irrefutable proof of his self-creation and the process of his origin.'166

Thus for socialist man the question of an alien being beyond man and nature whose existence would imply their unreality had become impossible. For him the mutual interdependence of man and nature was what was essential and anything else seemed unreal. 'Atheism, as a denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a denial of God and tries to assert through this negation the existence of man; but socialism as such no longer needs this mediation; it starts from the theoretical and practical sense-perception of man and nature as the true reality.'167 This perception, once established, no longer required the abolition of private property, no longer needed communism. Marx finished with a very Hegelian remark on the transitoriness of the communist phase:

Communism represents the positive in the form of the negation of the negation and thus a phase in human emancipation and rehabilitation, both real and necessary at this juncture of human development. Communism is the necessary form and dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism is not as such the goal of human development, the form of human society.168

Here communism seems to be viewed as merely a stage in the dialectical evolution, a stage that at a given moment would have served its purpose and be superseded. The picture, in the first part of the manuscript, of 'true communism' as 'the solution of the riddle of history'169 was much more static and unhistorical.

In the third and final section of the Manuscripts, Marx tried to come to grips definitively with the thought of the Master. He began by discussing the various attitudes of the young Hegelians to Hegel and singled out Feuerbach as the only constructive thinker; he then used Hegel to show up the weaknesses in Feuerbach's approach. Finally he settled down to a long analysis of Hegel's fundamental error, evident generally in the Phenomenology and particularly in the last chapter. Marx's style is here often obscure, involved and extremely repetitive, as he was constantly working over and reformulating his attitude to Hegel. In his doctoral thesis he had rejected the idea that Hegel was guilty of 'accommodation' and demanded that apparent contradictions be resolved by appeal to Hegel's 'essential consciousness'.170 In his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, he showed by reference to particular examples that Hegel's principles inevitably involved accommodation. But it was not until he transferred his attention from Hegel's Philosophy of Right to his Phenomenology that he was able to formulate a general criticism of Hegel's dialectic. Here it was clear that Marx, although still at home with Hegel's concepts and