Marx's Concept of Man - Notes

1. It is a sad comment, yet one which cannot be avoided, that this ignorance and distortion of Marx are to be found more in the United States than in any other Western country. It must be mentioned especially that in the last fifteen years there has been an extraordinary renaissance of discussions on Marx in Germany and France, centered especially around the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts published in this volume. In Germany the participants in this discussion are mainly Protestant theologians. I mention first the extraordinary Marxismusstudien, ed. by I. Fetscher, 2 vols. J.C.B. Mohr ( Tübingen, 1954 and 1957). Further, the excellent introduction by Landshut to the Kroener edition of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Then, the works of Lukacs, Bloch, Popitz and others, quoted later. In the United States a slowly increasing interest in Marx's work has been observed recently. Unfortunately, it is in some part expressed in a number of biased and falsifying books like Schwarzschild The Red Prussian, or in oversimplified and misleading books like the Overstreets' The Meaning of Communism. In contrast, Joseph A. Schumpeter, in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy ( Harper & Bros., 1947) offers an excellent presentation of Marxism. Cf. further on the problem of historical naturalism, John C. Bennett Christianity and Communism Today ( Association Press, New York). See also the excellent anthologies (and introductions) by Feuer ( Anchor Books) and by Bottomore and Rubel, ( Watts and Co., London). Specifically, on Marx's view of human nature I want to mention Venable Human Nature: The Marxist View, which, although knowledgeable and objective, suffers severely from the fact that the author could not make use of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Cf. also, for the philosophical basis of Marx's thought, H. Marcuse brilliant and penetrating book, Reason and Revolution ( Oxford University Press, New York, 1941), and the same author's discussion of Marx's theories vs. Soviet Marxism in Soviet Marxismk ( Columbia University Press, New York, 1958). Cf. also my discussion of Marx in The Sane Society ( Rinehart & Co. Inc., New York, 1955) and my earlier discussion of Marx's theory in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Vol. I ( Hirschfeld, Leipzig, 1932). In France, the discussion has been led partly by Catholic priests and partly by philosophers, most of them socialists. Among the former I refer especially to J. Y. Calvez' La Pensée de Karl Marx, ed. du Seuil, Paris 1956; among the latter, A. Kojcve, Sartre, and especially the various works of H. Lefèbvre.

2. The first English version was published in 1959 in Great Britain by Lawrence and Wishart, Ltd., using a recently published translation by the Foreign Language Publishing House, Moscow. The translation by T. B. Bottomore included in this volume is the first by any Western scholar.

3. Capital I, K. Marx, Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago 1906, p. 406.

4. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 181.

5. German Ideology, K. Marx and F. Engels, ed. with an introduction by R. Pascal, New York, International Publishers, Inc., 1939, p. 14. [My italics -- E.F.]

6. K. Marx and F. Engels, Die Heilige Familie (The Holy Family), 1845. [My translation -- E.F. ]

7. German Ideology, l.c. p. 7.

8. Theses on Feuerbach, German Ideology, 1.c. p. 197.

9. "While the capitalist of the classical type brands individual consumption as a vice against his function, of abstinence from accumulating, the modernized capitalist is capable of looking upon accumulation as abstinence from pleasure." ( Capital I, 1.c. p. 650).

10. I have tried to clarify this problem in a paper Über Aufgabe und Methode einer Analytischen Sozialpsychologie (On the Method and Aim of Analytic Social Psychology), Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Vol. I, C.L. Hirschfeld, Leipzig, 1932, p. 28-54.

11. Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Marx-Engels Verlag, ed. D. Rjazanow, Berlin, 1932. I., 6, p. 179. The abbreviation MEGA will be used in all following references.

12. While revising this manuscript I came across an excellent interpretation of Marx, characterized both by thorough knowledge and genuine penetration, by Leonard Krieger, The Uses of Marx for History in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XXXV, 3. "For Marx," Krieger writes, "the common substance of history was the activity of men -- 'men as simultaneously the authors and actors of their own history' -and this activity extended equally to all levels: modes of production, social relations and categories." (p. 362). As to the alleged "materialistic" character of Marx, Krieger writes: "What intrigues us about Marx is his capacity to find an essentially ethical rationale running within and across the centuries at the very same time that he perceives the diversity and complexity of historical existence." (p. 362) [My italics -- E.F.] Or later (p. 368): "There is no more characteristic feature of Marx's philosophical framework than his categorical reprobation of economic interest as a distortion vis-à-vis the whole moral man."

13. Cf. MEGA V, p. 596.

14. German Ideology, 1.c. p. 7.

15. Capital I, 1.c. p. 406.

16. Capital I, 1.c. p. 91-2.

17. Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, Marx, Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955, p. 362-4.

*. An instrument perfected in the late Middle Ages, to throw, by means of mirrors, an image of a scene on a plane surface. It was widely used by artists to establish the correct proportions of a natural object or scene. The image appeared on the paper inverted, though the later use of a lens corrected this.

18. German Ideology, 1.c. p. 13-4.

19. Cf. my article in Suzuki, Fromm, de Martino, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1960. Cf. also Marx's statement: "Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness, as it exists for other men, and for that reason is really beginning to exist for me personally as well; for language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal has no 'relations' with anything, cannot have any. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is therefore from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time it is consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men's relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural religion)." -- German Ideology, 1.c. p. 19.

20. German Ideology, 1.c. p. 197-8 [My italics -- E.F.] Cf. also Engels' famous letter to Mehring ( July 14, 1893) in which he states that Marx and he "had neglected [by emphasizing the formal aspects of the relationship between the socioeconomic structure and ideology to study] the manner and mode of how ideas come into being."

21. Capital I, 1.c., p. 824.

22. Capital I, 1.c., p. 668.

23. German Ideology, 1.c., p. 198.

24. Heilige Familie, MEGA V, p. 359. [My translation -E. F. ]

25. E.P. MSS., p. 141.

26. E.P. MSS. p. 139

27. H. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, Oxford University Press, New York, 1941, p. 146.

28. Marcuse, 1.c., p. 113.

29. Marcuse, 1.c., p. 142. Cf. Hegel, Science and Logic, Vol. I, p. 404

30. Marcuse, 1.c., p. 149

31. Marcuse, 1.c. p. 152.

32. Cf. Goethe's conversation with Eckermann, January 29, 1826.

33. Goethe, conversation with Eckermann on January 29, 1826. [My italics, and translation -- E.F. ]

34. Quoted by K. Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, W. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart, 1941, p. 24. [My translation -E.F. ]

35. Cf. the detailed description of the productive character orientation in E. Fromm, Man for Himself, Rinehart & Co., New York, 1947.

36. Cf. H. Popitz, Der entfremdete Mensch" (The Alienated Man) Verlag für Recht und Gesellschaft, A.G., Basel, p. 119.

37. E.P. MSS., p. 168.

38. E.P. MSS., pp. 126-7.

39. E.P. MSS., p. 134.

40. E.P. MSS., p. 134.

41. E.P. MSS., p. 133.

42. MEGA, Vol. III, p. 191.

43. E.P. MSS., p. 132. This last statement is one which is almost literally the same as has been made in Zen Buddhist thinking, as well as by Goethe. In fact, the thinking of Goethe, Hegel and Marx is closely related to the thinking of Zen. What is common to them is the idea that man overcomes the subject-object split; the object is an object, yet it ceases to be an object, and in this new approach man becomes one with the object, although he and it remain two. Man, in relating himself to the objective world humanly, overcomes self-alienation.

44. By "private property" as used here and in other statements, Marx never refers to the private property of things for use (such as a house, a table, etc.) Marx refers to the property of the "propertied classes," that is, of the capitalist who, because he owns the means of production, can hire the property-less individual to work for him, under conditions the latter is forced to accept. "Private property" in Marx's usage, then, always refers to private property within capitalist class society and thus is a social and historical category; the term does not refer to things for use, as for instance, in a socialist society.

45. E.P. MSS., p. 127.

46. E.P. MSS., p. 101.

47. E.P. MSS., pp. 137-8. This dialectic concept of the wealthy man as being the poor man in need of others is, in many ways, similar to the concept of poverty expressed by Meister Eckhart, in his sermon "Blessed Are the Poor," ( Meister Eckhart, transl. by R. B. Blakney, Harper and Bros., New York, 1941)

48. MEGA I, i a p. 184.

49. E.P. MSS., pp. 134-5.

50. E.P. MSS., p. 132.

51. E.P. MSS., pp. 144-5.

52. E.P. MSS., p. 145.

53. E.P. MSS., p. 138.

54. Marx refers here to speculations among certain eccentric communist thinkers of his time who thought that if everything is common property women should be too.

55. E.P. MSS., pp. 124 - 6.

56. Capital I, l.c. p. 197-8.

57. German Ideology, l.c. p. 22.

58. E.P. MSS., p. 107.

59. The connection between alienation and idolatry has also been emphasized by Paul Tillich in Der Mensch im Christentum und im Marxismus, Düsseldorf, 1953, p. 14. Tillich also points out in another lecture, "Protestantische Vision," that the concept of alienation in substance is to be found also in Augustine's thinking. Löwith also has pointed out that what Marx fights against are not the gods, but the idols, [cf. Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, l.c. p. 378 ].

60. This is, incidentally, also the psychology of the fanatic. He is empty, dead, depressed, but in order to compensate for the state of depression and inner deadness, he chooses an idol, be it the state, a party, an idea, the church, or God. He makes this idol into the absolute, and submits to it in an absolute way. In doing so his life attains meaning, and he finds excitement in the submission to the chosen idol. His excitement, however, does not stem from joy in productive relatedness; it is intense, yet cold excitement built upon inner deadness or, if one would want to put it symbolically, it is "burning ice."

61. Eckermann's conversation with Goethe, February 18, 1829, published in Leipzig, 1894, page 47. [My translation -- E.F. ]

62. 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

63. The Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree, The Colonial Press, New York, 1899.

64. E.P. MSS., p. 95.

65. Capital I, l.c. p. 536.

66. E.P. MSS., p. 98.

67. E.P. MSS., p. 99.

68. E.P. MSS., p. 99.

69. E.P. MSS., pp. 102-3.

70. E.P. MSS., p. 107.

71. Capital I, 1.c. p. 396.

72. Capital I, 1.c. p. 680-1.

73. E.P. MSS., p. 143.

74. Capital I, 1.c. p. 461-2.

75. E.P. MSS., p. 95.

76. Capital I, 1.c. p. 708.

77. E.P. MSS., pp. 105-6

78. German Ideology, 1.c. p. 23.

79. E.P. MSS., p. 103

80. E.P. MSS., p. 103.

81. E.P. MSS., p. 146.

82. E.P. MSS., p. 146.

83. E.P. MSS., p. 146

84. E.P. MSS., p. 140.

85. E.P. MSS., pp. 140-2

86. E.P. MSS., p. 111.

87. E.P. MSS., p. 144.

88. E.P. MSS., p. 111.

89. Capital I, 1.c. p. 689.

90. Protestantische Vision, Ring Verlag, Stuttgart, 1952, p. 6. [My translation -- E. F. ]

91. Capital III, translated by Ernest Untermann, Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago 1909, p. 954

92. Quoted by R. Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, with a preface by H. Marcuse, Bookman Associates, New York, 1958, p. 19.

93. MEGA I, 1 a, p. 184.

94. Cf. my Man for Himself, Rinehart & Co., Inc., New York, 1947.

95. A. Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1944, p. 93.

96. Cf. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the EighteenthCentury Philosophers, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1932 and 1959; A. P. d'Entrèves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought, Oxford University Press, 1939; Baron Hans , Fifteenth-Century Civilization and the Renaissance, in Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 8; Harold J. Laski, Political Theory in the Later Middle Ages, The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I.

97. I shall deal with this development in detail in a forthcoming book in the World Perspective Religious Series, ed. by Ruth Nanda Anshen, Harper & Brothers, New York.

98. E.P. MSS., p. 127.

99. The idea of the relation between Messianic prophetism and Marx's socialism has been stressed by a number of authors. The following may be mentioned here: Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, Chicago University Press, 1949; Paul Tillich in writings quoted here. Lukacs, in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein speaks of Marx as of an eschatological thinker. Cf. also statements by Alfred Weber, J.A. Schumpeter, and a number of other authors, quoted in Marxismusstudien.

100. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1959, 2 volumes.

101. This and all following quotations from D. Bell are from his paper "The Meaning of Alienation" in Thought, 1959.

102. In Marx-Engels Archiv I, ed. by Rjazanow

103. C.B. Mohr, Tübingen, Vol. I and II, 1954, 1957.

104. The main work on this theme is by a Jesuit priest, Jean- Yves Calvez , La Pensée de Karl Marx, Editions du Seui Paris, 1956.

105. I will mention only the works of H. Lefèbvre, Navill, Goldmann, and of A. Kojève, J.-P. Sartre, M. Merlean-Ponty. Cf. the excellent paper Der Marxismus im Spiegel der FranzLösischen Philosophie by I. Fetscher, in Marxismusstudien, 1.c. Vol. I, p. 173 ff.

106. Oxford University Press, New York, 1941.

107. Bookman Associates, New York, 1958.

108. When outside circumstances made the publication of this work (German Ideology) impossible, "we abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose-selfclarification."

109. German Ideology, 1.c. p. 22.

110. German Ideology, 1.c. p. 22.

111. German Ideology, 1.c. p. 22-3.

112. It is significant that Marx corrected Engel's expression "self-activity" into "activity" when Engels used it with reference to previous history. It shows how important it was for Marx to keep the term "self-activity" for a non-alienated society. See MEGA I, Vol. V, p. 61.

113. Cf. the brilliant article by Th. Ramm, "Die Künftige Gesellschaftsordnung nach der Theorie von Marx und Engels," Marxissmusstudien II, 1.c. p. 77 ff.

114. Cf. Capital III, 1.c. p. 945-6 [My italics -- E.F.]

115. Cf. Capital I, 1.c. p. 529-30.

116. Capital I, p. 554-5.

117. Capital I, p. 563.

118. Capital I, 1.c. p. 708.

119. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 1.c. p. 198-9 [partly my italics -- E.F.]

120. Reminiscences of Marx and Engels, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, p. 127.

121. Reminiscences of Marx and Engels, 1.c. p. 252.

Marx's Concept of Man - 8. Marx, the Man

The misunderstanding and the misinterpretation of Marx's writings are paralleled only by the misinterpretation of his personality. Just as in the case of his theories, the distortion of his personality also follows a cliché repeated by journalists, politicians, and even social scientists who should know better. He is described as a "lonely" man, isolated from his fellows, aggressive, arrogant, and authoritarian. Anyone who has even a slight knowledge of Marx's life would have great difficulty in accepting this because he would find it difficult to reconcile it with the picture of Marx the husband, the father, and the friend.

There are perhaps few marriages known to the world which were a human fulfillment in such an extraordinary way as was that of Karl and Jenny Marx. He, the son of a Jewish lawyer, fell in love as an adolescent with Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a Prussian feudal family, and a descendant of one of the oldest Scottish families. They married when he was twenty-four years of age, and he survived her death by only a little over a year. This was a marriage in which, despite the differences in background, despite a continual life of material poverty and sickness, there was unwavering love and mutual happiness, possible only in the case of two people with an extraordinary capacity for love, and deeply in love with each other.

His youngest daughter, Eleanor, described the relationship between her parents in a letter referring to a day shortly before her mother's death, and over a year before the death of her father. "Moor" [ Marx's nickname], she writes, "got the better of his illness again. Never shall I forget the morning he felt himself strong enough to go into mother's room. When they were together they were young again -- she a young girl and he a loving youth, both on life's threshold, not an old, disease-ridden man and an old, dying woman parting from each other for life." [120]

Marx's relationship to his children was as free from any taint of domination, and as full of productive love, as that to his wife. One needs only to read the description given by his daughter Eleanor of his walks with his children, when he told them tales, tales measured by miles, not chapters. "Tell us another mile," was the cry of the girls. "He read the whole of Homer, the whole Nibelungenlied, Gudrun, Don Quixote, the Arabian Nights, etc. As to Shakespeare, he was the Bible of our house, and seldom out of our hands or mouths. By the time I was six, I knew scene upon scene of Shakespeare by heart." [121]

His friendship with Frederick Engels is perhaps even more unique than his marriage and his relationship to his children. Engels himself was a man of extraordinary human and intellectual qualities. He always recognized and admired Marx's superior talent. He devoted his life to Marx's work, and yet he was never reluctant to make his own contribution, and did not underestimate it. There was hardly ever any friction in the relationship between these two men, no competitiveness, but a sense of comradeship rooted in as deep a love for each other as one ever might find between two men.

Marx was the productive, nonalienated, independent man whom his writings visualized as the man of a new society. Productively related to the whole world, to people, and to ideas, he was what he thought. A man who read Aeschylus and Shakespeare every year in the original languages, and who during his saddest time, that of the illness of his wife, plunged into mathematics and studied calculus, Marx was a humanist through and through. Nothing was more wonderful to him than man, and he expressed that feeling in a frequently repeated quotation from Hegel: "even the criminal thought of a malefactor has more grandeur and nobility than the wonders of heaven." His answers to the questionnaire made up for him by his daughter Laura reveal a great deal of the man: his idea of misery was submission; the vice he detested most was servility, and his favorite maxims were "nothing human is alien to me" and "one must doubt of everything."

Why was this man supposed to be arrogant, lonely, authoritarian? Aside from the motive of slander, there were some reasons for this misunderstanding. First of all, Marx (like Engels) had a sarcastic style, especially in writing, and was a fighter with a good deal of aggressiveness. But, more importantly, he was a man with a complete inability to tolerate sham and deception, and with an utter seriousness about the problems of human existence. He was incapable of accepting dishonest rationalizations, or fictitious statements about important matters, politely and with a smile. He was incapable of any kind of insincerity, whether it referred to personal relations or to ideas. Since most people prefer to think in fictions rather than in realities, and to deceive themselves and others about the facts underlying individual and social life, they must indeed regard Marx as one who was arrogant or cold, but this judgment says more about them than it does about Marx.

If and when the world returns to the tradition of humanism and overcomes the deterioration of Western culture, both in its Soviet and in its capitalist form, it will see, indeed, that Marx was neither a fanatic nor an opportunist -- that he represented the flowering of Western humanity, that he was a man with an uncompromising sense of truth, penetrating to the very essence of reality, and never taken in by the deceptive surface; that he was of an unquenchable courage and integrity; of a deep concern for man and his future; unselfish, and with little vanity or lust for power; always alive, always stimulating, and bringing to life whatever he touched. He represented the Western tradition in its best features: its faith in reason and in the progress of man. He represented, in fact, the very concept of man which was at the center of his thinking. The man who is much, and has little; the man who is rich because he has need of his fellow man.

Marx's Concept of Man - 7. The Continuity in Marx's Thought

Our presentation of Marx's concept of human nature, alienation, activity, etc., would be quite one-sided and, in fact, misleading if they were right who claim that the ideas of the "young Marx" contained in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts were abandoned by the older and mature Marx as remnants of an idealistic past connected with Hegel's teaching. If those who make this claim were right, one might still prefer the young to the old Marx, and wish to connect socialism with the former rather than with the latter. However, there is fortunately no such need to split Marx into two. The fact is that the basic ideas on man, as Marx expressed them in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and the ideas of the older Marx as expressed in Capital, did not undergo a basic change; that Marx did not renounce his earlier views, as the spokesmen of the above-mentioned thesis claim.

First of all, who are those who claim that the "young Marx" and the "old Marx" have contradictory views on man? This view is presented mainly by the Russian Communists; they can hardly do anything else, since their thinking, as well as their social and political system, is in every way a contradiction of Marx's humanism. In their system, man is the servant of the state and of production, rather than being the supreme aim of all social arrangements. Marx's aim, the development of the individuality of the human personality, is negated in the Soviet system to an even greater extent than in contemporary capitalism. The materialism of the Communists is much closer to the mechanistic materialism of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie that Marx fought against, than to Marx's historical materialism.

The Communist party of the Soviet Union expressed this view by forcing G. Lukacs, who was the first one to revive Marx's humanism, to a "confession" of his errors when Lukacs was in Russia in 1934, after being forced to escape from the Nazis. Similarly, Ernst Bloch, who presents the same emphasis on Marx's humanism in his brilliant book Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle Hope), [100] suffered severe attacks from Communist party writers, despite the fact that his book contains a number of admiring remarks about Soviet Communism. Aside from the Communist writers, Daniel Bell has recently taken the same position by claiming that the view of Marx's humanism based on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts "is not the historical Marx." "While one may be sympathetic to such an approach," says Bell, "it is only further myth-making to read this concept back as a central theme of Marx." [101]

It is indeed true that the classic interpreters of Marx, whether they were reformists like Bernstein, or orthodox Marxists like Kautsky, Plechanow, Lenin or Bucharin, did not interpret Marx as being centered around his humanist existentialism. Two facts mainly explain this phenomenon. First, the fact that the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts were not published before 1932, and were unknown until then even in manuscript form; and the fact that German Ideology was never published in full until 1932, and for the first time in part only in 1926. [102] Naturally, these facts contributed a great deal to the distorted and one-sided interpretation of Marx's ideas by the above-mentioned writers. But the fact that these writings of Marx were more or less unknown until the early twenties and the thirties, respectively, is by no means a sufficient explanation for the neglect of Marxist humanism in the "classic" interpretation, since Capital and other published writings of Marx, such as the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law (published in 1844) could have given a sufficient basis to visualize Marx's humanism. The more relevant explanation lies in the fact that the philosophical thinking of the time from the death of Marx to the 1920's was dominated by positivistic-mechanistic ideas which influenced thinkers like Lenin and Bucharin. It must also not be forgotten that, like Marx himself, the classic Marxists were allergic to terms which smacked of idealism and religion, since they were well aware that these terms were to a large extent, used to hide basic economic and social realities.

For Marx this allergy to idealistic terminology was all the more understandable, since he was deeply rooted in the spiritual, though nontheistic tradition, which stretches not only from Spinoza and Goethe to Hegel, but which also goes back to Prophetic Messianism. These latter ideas were quite consciously alive in socialists like St. Simon and Moses Hess, and certainly formed a great part of the socialist thinking of the nineteenth-century and even of the thinking of leading socialists up to the First World War (such as Jean Jaurès).

The spiritual-humanistic tradition, in which Marx still lived and which was almost drowned by the mechanistic-materialistic spirit of successful industrialism, experienced a revival, although only on a small scale in individual thinkers, at the end of the First World War, and on a larger scale during and after the Second World War. The dehumanization of man as evidenced in the cruelties of the Stalinist and Hitler regimes, in the brutality of indiscriminate killing during the war, and also the increasing dehumanization brought about by the new gadget-minded consumer and organization man, lead to this new expression of humanistic ideas. In other words, the protest against alienation expressed by Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, then muted by the apparent success of capitalist industrialism, raised its voice again after the human failure of the dominant system, and led to a re-interpretation of Marx, based on the whole Marx and his humanist philosophy. I have mentioned already the Communist writers who are outstanding in this humanist revisionism. I should add here the Yugoslav Communists who, although they have not as far as I know raised the philosophical point of alienation, have emphasized as their main objection to Russian Communism their concern for the individual as against the machinery of the state, and have developed a system of decentralization and individual initiative which is in radical contrast to the Russian ideal of centralization and of complete bureaucratization.

In Poland, East Germany and Hungary, the political opposition to the Russians was closely allied to the representatives of humanist socialism. In France, Germany and to a smaller extent in England, there is lively discussion going on regarding Marx which is based on a thorough knowledge and understanding of his ideas. Of literature in German, I mention only the papers contained in the Marxismusstudien, [103] written largely by Protestant theologians; French literature is even larger, and written by Catholics [104] as well as by Marxists and non-Marxist philosophers. [105]

The revival of Marxist humanism in English-speaking countries has suffered from the fact that the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts had never been translated into English until recently. Nevertheless, men like T. B. Bottomore and others share the ideas on Marxist humanism represented by the aforementioned writers. In the United States, the most important work which has opened up an understanding of Marx's humanism is Herbert Marcuse's Reason and Revolution; [106] Raya Dunayevskaya's Marxism and Freedom, with a preface by H. Marcuse, [107] is also a significant addition to Marxisthumanist thought.

Pointing to the fact that the Russian Communists were forced to postulate the split between the young and the old Marx, and adding the names of a number of profound and serious writers who negate this Russian position does not, however, constitute a proof that the Russians (and D. Bell) are wrong. While it would transcend the limits of this volume to attempt as full a refutation of the Russian position as is desirable, I shall try, nevertheless, to demonstrate to the reader why the Russian position is untenable.

There are some facts which, superficially appraised, might seem to support the Communist position. In German Ideology, Marx and Engels no longer used the terms "species" and "human essence" ("Gattung" and "menschliches Wesen"), which are used in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Furthermore, Marx said later (in the preface to The Critique of Political Economy, 1859) that in German Ideology he and Engels "resolved to work out in common the opposition of our view to the ideological view of German philosophy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience." [108] It has been claimed that this "settling of accounts" with their erstwhile philosophical conscience meant that Marx and Engels had abandoned the basic ideas expressed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. But even a superficial study of German Ideology reveals that this is not true. While German Ideology does not use certain terms such as "human essence," etc., it nevertheless continues the main trend of thought of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, especially the concept of alienation.

Alienation, in German Ideology, is explained as the result of the division of labor which "implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another." [109] In the same paragraph the concept of alienation is defined, as in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in these words: "man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him." [110] Here, too, we find the definition of alienation with reference to circumstances already quoted above: "This crystallization of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now." [111], [112]

Fourteen years later, in his polemic with Adam Smith (in 1857-8), Marx used the same allegedly "idealistic" arguments which he used in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, arguing that the need to work does not constitute in itself a restriction of freedom (provided it is not alienated work). Marx speaks of the "selfrealization" of the person, "hence [of] true freedom." [113] Eventually, the same idea that the aim of human evolution is the unfolding of man, the creation of the "wealthy" man who has overcome the contradiction between himself and nature and achieved true freedom, is expressed in many passages of Capital, written by the mature and old Marx. As quoted earlier, Marx wrote in the third volume of Capital: "Beyond it [the realm of necessity] begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise." [114]

In other parts of Capital, he speaks of the importance of producing "fully developed human beings," [115] the full development of the human race," [116] and "man's necessity to develop himself," [117] and of the "fragment of a man" as the result of the process of alienation. [118]

Since D. Bell is one of the few American writers interested in Marx's concept of alienation, I want to demonstrate why his position, which is in effect the same as that taken by the Russian Communists, for exactly the opposite motives, is also untenable. Bell's main claim is that to interpret Marx from the standpoint of the humanist writers quoted above is further myth-making. He claims that "Marx had repudiated the idea of alienation, divorced from the economic system, and, by so doing, closed off a road which would have given us a broader, more useful analysis of society and personality than the Marxiam dogmatics which have prevailed."

This statement is both ambiguous and erroneous. It sounds as if Marx, in his late writings, had repudiated the idea of alienation in its human meaning, and transformed it into a "purely economic category," as Bell says later on. Marx never repudiated the idea of alienation in its human sense, but he claimed that it cannot be divorced from the concrete and real life process of the alienated individual. This is something quite different from putting up the straw man of the "old Marx" who repudiates the "young Marx's" concept of human alienation. Bell must make this error because he accepts the whole cliché of the conventional interpretation of Marx. "For Marx the only social reality is not Man, nor the individual, but economic classes of men. Individuals and their motives count for naught. The only form of consciousness which can be translated into action -- and which can explain history, past, present and future -is class consciousness." In trying to show that Marx was not interested in the individual, but only in the mass, just as he was allegedly no longer interested in human, but only in economic factors, Bell does not see -- or does not mention -- that Marx criticized capitalism precisely because it destroys individual personality (as he criticized "crude communism" for the same reason), and that the statement that history can be explained only by class-consciousness is a statement of fact, as far as previous history is concerned, not an expression of Marx's disregard of the individual.

Unfortunately Bell misquotes a Marx text which is of decisive importance in order to prove his thesis. He says of Marx: "But in saying there is no human nature 'inherent in each separate individual' (as Marx does in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach) but only classes, one introduces a new person, a new abstraction."

What does Marx say in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach? "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual. In its reality it is the ensemble (aggregate) of social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter more deeply into the criticism of this real essence, is therefore forced: 1) to abstract from the process of history and to establish religious temperament as something independent and to postulate an abstract -- isolated -- human individual. 2) The essence of man can therefore be understood only as 'genus,' the inward, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals." [119] Marx does not say, as Bell quotes, that "there is no human nature inherent in each separate individual," but something quite different, namely, that "the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each individual." It is the essential point of Marx's "materialism" against Hegel's idealism. Marx never gave up his concept of man's nature" (as we have shown by quoting the statement from Capital) but this nature is not a purely biological one, and not an abstraction; it is one which can be understood only historically, because it unfolds in history. The nature (essence) of man can be inferred from its many manifestations (and distortions) in history; it cannot be seen as such, as a statistically existing entity "behind" or "above" each separate man, but as that in man which exists as a potentiality and unfolds and changes in the historical process.

In addition to all this Bell has not properly understood the concept of alienation. He defines it as "the radical dissociation into a subject that strives to control his own fate and an object which is manipulated by others." As follows from my own discussion, as well as that of most serious students of the concept of alienation, this is a completely inadequate and misleading definition. In fact, it is just as inadequate as Bell's assertion that Zen Buddhism (like other "modern tribal and communal philosophies" of "reintegration") aims "at losing one's sense of self" and thus is ultimately antihuman because they [the philosophers of reintegration, including Zen] are anti-individual. There is no space to refute this cliché, except to suggest a more careful and less biased reading of Marx and of Zen Buddhist texts.

To sum up this point of the alleged difference between the young and the mature Marx: it is true that Marx (like Engels), in the course of a lifetime, changed some of his ideas and concepts. He became more adverse to the use of terms too close to Hegelian idealism; his language became less enthusiastic and eschatological; probably he was also more discouraged in the later years of his life than he was in 1844. But in spite of certain changes in concepts, in mood, in language, the core of the philosophy developed by the young Marx was never changed, and it is impossible to understand his concept of socialism, and his criticism of capitalism as developed in his later years, except on the basis of the concept of man which he developed in his early writings.

Marx's Concept of Man - 6. Marx's Concept Of Socialism

Marx's concept of socialism follows from his concept of man. It should be clear by now that according to this concept, socialism is not a society of regimented, automatized individuals, regardless of whether there is equality of income or not, and regardless of whether they are well fed and well clad. It is not a society in which the individual is subordinated to the state, to the machine, to the bureaucracy. Even if the state as an "abstract capitalist" were the employer, even if "the entire social capital were united in the hands either of a single capitalist or a single capitalist corporation," [89] this would not be socialism. In fact, as Marx says quite clearly in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, "communism as such is not the aim of human development." What, then, is the aim?

Quite clearly the aim of socialism is man. It is to create a form of production and an organization of society in which man can overcome alienation from his product, from his work, from his fellow man, from himself and from nature; in which he can return to himself and grasp the world with his own powers, thus becoming one with the world. Socialism for Marx was, as Paul Tillich put it, "a resistance movement against the destruction of love in social reality." [90]

Marx expressed the aim of socialism with great clarity at the end of the third volume of Capital: "In fact, the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required. In the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of material production in the strict meaning of the term. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature, in order to satisfy his wants, in order to maintain his life and reproduce it, so civilized man has to do it, and he must do it in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With his development the realm of natural necessity expands, because his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production increase, by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis." [91]

Marx expresses here all essential elements of socialism. First, man produces in an associated, not competitive way; he produces rationally and in an unalienated way, which means that he brings production under his control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power. This clearly excludes a concept of socialism in which man is manipulated by a bureaucracy, even if this bureaucracy rules the whole state economy, rather than only a big corporation. It means that the individual participates actively in the planning and in the execution of the plans; it means, in short, the realization of political and industrial democracy. Marx expected that by this new form of an unalienated society man would become independent, stand on his own feet, and would no longer be crippled by the alienated mode of production and consumption; that he would truly be the master and the creator of his life, and hence that he could begin to make living his main business, rather than producing the means for living. Socialism, for Marx, was never as such the fulfillment of life, but the condition for such fulfillment. When man has built a rational, nonalienated form of society, he will have the chance to begin with what is the aim of life: the "development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom." Marx, the man who every year read all the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who brought to life in himself the greatest works of human thought, would never have dreamt that his idea of socialism could be interpreted as having as its aim the well-fed and well-clad "welfare" or "workers' " state. Man, in Marx's view, has created in the course of history a culture which he will be free to make his own when he is freed from the chains, not only of economic poverty, but of the spiritual poverty created by alienation. Marx's vision is based on his faith in man, in the inherent and real potentialities of the essence of man which have developed in history. He looked at socialism as the condition of human freedom and creativity, not as in itself constituting the goal of man's life.

For Marx, socialism (or communism) is not flight or abstraction from, or loss of the objective world which men have created by the objectification of their faculties. It is not an impoverished return to unnatural, primitive simplicity. It is rather the first real emergence, the genuine actualization of man's nature as something real. Socialism, for Marx, is a society which permits the actualization of man's essence, by overcoming his alienation. It is nothing less than creating the conditions for the truly free, rational, active and independent man; it is the fulfillment of the prophetic aim: the destruction of the idols.

That Marx could be regarded as an enemy of freedom was made possible only by the fantastic fraud of Stalin in presuming to talk in the name of Marx, combined with the fantastic ignorance about Marx that exists in the Western world. For Marx, the aim of socialism was freedom, but freedom in a much more radical sense than the existing democracy conceives of it-freedom in the sense of independence, which is based on man's standing on his own feet, using his own powers and relating himself to the world productively. "Freedom," said Marx, "is so much the essence of man that even its opponents realize it.... No man fights freedom; he fights at most the freedom of others. Every kind of freedom has therefore always existed, only at one time as a special privilege, another time as a universal right." [92]

Socialism, for Marx, is a society which serves the needs of man. But, many will ask, is not that exactly what modern capitalism does? Are not our big corporations most eager to serve the needs of man? And are the big advertising companies not reconnaissance parties which, by means of great efforts, from surveys to "motivation analysis," try to find out what the needs of man are? Indeed, one can understand the concept of socialism only if one understands Marx's distinction between the true needs of man, and the synthetic, artificially produced needs of man.

As follows from the whole concept of man, his real needs are rooted in his nature; this distinction between real and false needs is possible only on the basis of a picture of the nature of man and the true human needs rooted in his nature. Man's true needs are those whose fulfillment is necessary for the realization of his essence as a human being. As Marx put it: "The existence of what I truly love is felt by me as a necessity, as a need, without which my essence cannot be fulfilled, satisfied, complete." [93] Only on the basis of a specific concept of man's nature can Marx make the difference between true and false needs of man. Purely subjectively, the false needs are experienced as being as urgent and real as the true needs, and from a purely subjective viewpoint, there could not be a criterion for the distinction. (In modern terminology one might differentiate between neurotic and rational [healthy] needs). [94] Often man is conscious only of his false needs and unconscious of his real ones. The task of the analyst of society is precisely to awaken man so that he can become aware of the illusory false needs and of the reality of his true needs. The principal goal of socialism, for Marx, is the recognition and realization of man's true needs, which will be possible only when production serves man, and capital ceases to create and exploit the false needs of man.

Marx's concept of socialism is a protest, as is all existentialist philosophy, against the alienation of man; if, as Aldous Huxley put it, "our present economic, social and international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness," [95] then Marx's socialism is a protest against this very lovelessness, against man's exploitation of man, and against his exploitativeness towards nature, the wasting of our natural resources at the expense of the majority of men today, and more so of the generations to come. The unalienated man, who is the goal of socialism as we have shown before, is the man who does not "dominate" nature, but who becomes one with it, who is alive and responsive toward objects, so that objects come to life for him.

Does not all this mean that Marx's socialism is the realization of the deepest religious impulses common to the great humanistic religions of the past? Indeed it does, provided we understand that Marx, like Hegel and like many others, expresses his concern for man's soul, not in theistic, but in philosophical language.

Marx fought against religion exactly because it is alienated, and does not satisfy the true needs of man. Marx's fight against God is, in reality, a fight against the idol that is called God. Already as a young man he wrote as the motto for his dissertation "Not those are godless who have contempt for the gods of the masses but those who attribute the opinions of the masses to the gods." Marx's atheism is the most advanced form of rational mysticism, closer to Meister Eckhart or to Zen Buddhism than are most of those fighters for God and religion who accuse him of "godlessness."

It is hardly possible to talk about Marx's attitude toward religion without mentioning the connection between his philosophy of history, and of socialism, with the Messianic hope of the Old Testament prophets and the spiritual roots of humanism in Greek and Roman thinking. The Messianic hope is, indeed, a feature unique in Occidental thought. The prophets of the Old Testament are not only, like Lao Tzu or Buddha, spiritual leaders; they are also political leaders. They show man a vision of how he ought to be, and confront him with the alternatives between which he must choose. Most of the Old Testament prophets share the idea that history has a meaning, that man perfects himself in the process of history, and that he will eventually create a social order of peace and justice. But peace and justice for the prophets do not mean the absence of war and the absence of injustice. Peace and justice are concepts which are rooted in the whole of the Old Testament concept of man. Man, before he has consciousness of himself, that is, before he is human, lives in unity with nature ( Adam and Eve in Paradise). The first act of Freedom, which is the capacity to say "no," opens his eyes, and he sees himself as a stranger in the world, beset by conflicts with nature, between man and man, between man and woman. The process of history is the process by which man develops his specifically human qualities, his powers of love and understanding; and once he has achieved full humanity he can return to the lost unity between himself and the world. This new unity, however, is different from the preconscious one which existed before history began. It is the at-onement of man with himself, with nature, and with his fellow man, based on the fact that man has given birth to himself in the historical process. In Old Testament thought, God is revealed in history ("the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob"), and in history, not in a state transcending history, lies the salvation of man. This means that man's spiritual aims are inseparably connected with the transformation of society; politics is basically not a realm that can be divorced from that of moral values and of man's self-realization.

Related thoughts arose in Greek (and Hellenistic) and Roman thinking. From Zeno, the founder of Stoic philosophy, to Seneca and Cicero, the concepts of natural law and of the equality of man exercised a powerful influence on the minds of men and, together with the prophetic tradition, are the foundations of Christian thinking.

While Christianity, especially since Paul, tended to transform the historical concept of salvation into an "other-worldly," purely spiritual one, and while the Church became the substitute for the "good society," this transformation was by no means a complete one. The early Church fathers express a radical criticism of the existing state; Christian thought of the late Middle Ages criticizes secular authority and the state from the standpoint of divine and natural law. This viewpoint stresses that society and the state must not be divorced from the spiritual values rooted in revelation and reason ("intellect" in the scholastic meaning of the word). Beyond this, the Messianic idea was expressed even in more radical forms in the Christian sects before the Reformation, and in the thinking of many Christian groups after the Reformation, down to the Society of Friends of the present time.

The mainstream of Messianic thinking after the Reformation, however, was expressed no longer in religious thought, but in philosophical, historical and social thought. It was expressed somewhat obliquely in the great utopias of the Renaissance, in which the new world is not in a distant future, but in a distant place. It was expressed in the thinking of the philosophers of the enlightenment and of the French and English Revolutions. It found its latest and most complete expression in Marx's concept of socialism. Whatever direct influence Old Testament thinking might have had on him through socialists like Moses Hess, no doubt the prophetic Messianic tradition influenced him indirectly through the thought of the enlightenment philosophers and especially through the thought stemming from Spinoza, Goethe, Hegel. What is common to prophetic, thirteenth-century Christian thought, eighteenth-century enlightenment, [96] and nineteenth-century socialism, is the idea that State (society) and spiritual values cannot be divorced from each other; that politics and moral values are indivisible. This idea was attacked by the secular concepts of the Renaissance ( Machiavelli) and again by the secularism of the modern state. It seems that Western man, whenever he was under the influence of gigantic material conquests, gave himself unrestrictedly to the new powers he had acquired and, drunk with these new powers, forgot himself. The elite of these societies became obsessed with the wish for power, luxury, and the manipulation of men, and the masses followed them. This happened in the Renaissance with its new science, the discovery of the globe, the prosperous City States of Northern Italy; it happened again in the explosive development of the first and the present second industrial revolutions.

But this development has been complicated by the presence of another factor. If the state or the society is meant to serve the realization of certain spiritual values, the danger exists that a supreme authority tells man -and forces him -- to think and behave in a certain way. The incorporation of certain objectively valid values into social life tends to produce authoritarianism. The spiritual authority of the Middle Ages was the Catholic Church. Protestantism fought this authority, at first promising greater independence for the individual, only to make the princely state the undisputed and arbitrary ruler of man's body and soul. The rebellion against princely authority occurred in the name of the nation, and for a while the national state promised to be the representative of freedom. But soon the national state devoted itself to the protection of the material interests of those who owned capital, and could thus exploit the labor of the majority of the population. Certain classes of society protested against this new authoritarianism and insisted on the freedom of the individual from the interference of secular authority. This postulate of liberalism, which tended to protect "freedom from," led, on the other hand, to the insistence that state and society must not attempt to realize "freedom to," that is to say, liberalism had to insist not only on separation from State and Church, but had also to deny that it was the function of the state to help realize certain spiritual and moral values; these values were supposed to be entirely a matter for the individual.

Socialism (in its Marxist and other forms) returned to the idea of the "good society" as the condition for the realization of man's spiritual needs. It was antiauthoritarian, both as far as the Church and the State are concerned, hence it aimed at the eventual disappearance of the state and at the establishment of a society composed of voluntarily cooperating individuals. Its aim was a reconstruction of society in such a way as to make it the basis for man's true return to himself, without the presence of those authoritarian forces which restricted and impoverished man's mind.

Thus, Marxist and other forms of socialism are the heirs of prophetic Messianism, Christian Chiliastic sectarianism, thirteenth-century Thomism, Renaissance Utopianism, and eighteenth-century enlightenment. [97] It is the synthesis of the prophetic-Christian idea of society as the plane of spiritual realization, and of the idea of individual freedom. For this reason, it is opposed to the Church because of its restriction of the mind, and to liberalism because of its separation of society and moral values. It is opposed to Stalinism and Krushchevism, for their authoritarianism as much as their neglect of humanist values.

Socialism is the abolition of human self-alienation, the return of man as a real human being. "It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, be tween objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is a solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution". [98], [99] For Marx, socialism meant the social order which permits the return of man to himself, the identity between existence and essence, the overcoming of the separateness and antagonism between subject and object, the humanization of nature; it meant a world in which man is no longer a stranger among strangers, but is in his world, where he is at home.

Marx's Concept of Man - 5. Alienation

The concept of the active, productive man who grasps and embraces the objective world with his own powers cannot be fully understood without the concept of the negation of productivity: alienation. For Marx the history of mankind is a history of the increasing development of man, and at the same time of increasing alienation. His concept of socialism is the emancipation from alienation, the return of man to himself, his self-realization.

Alienation (or "estrangement") means, for Marx, that man does not experience himself as the acting agent in his grasp of the world, but that the world (nature, others, and he himself) remain alien to him. They stand above and against him as objects, even though they may be objects of his own creation. Alienation is essentially experiencing the world and oneself passively, receptively, as the subject separated from the object.

The whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry.[59] The essence of what the prophets call "idolatry" is not that man worships many gods instead of only one. It is that the idols are the work of man's own hands -- they are things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself. In doing so he transforms himself into a thing. He transfers to the things of his creation the attributes of his own life, and instead of experiencing himself as the creating person, he is in touch with himself only by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged from his own life forces, from the wealth of his own potentialties, and is in touch with himself only in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in the idols. [60]The deadness and emptiness of the idol is expressed in the Old Testament: "Eyes they have and they do not see, ears they have and they do not hear," etc. The more man transfers his own powers to the idols, the poorer he himself becomes, and the more dependent on the idols, so that they permit him to redeem a small part of what was originally his. The idols can be a godlike figure, the state, the church, a person, possessions. Idolatry changes its objects; it is by no means to be found only in those forms in which the idol has a socalled religious meaning. Idolatry is always the worship of something into which man has put his own creative powers, and to which he now submits, instead of experiencing himself in his creative act. Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses. The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish -- yet one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience. The same holds true for all other achievements of man; ideas, art, any kind of man-made objects. They are man's creations; they are valuable aids for life, yet each one of them is also a trap, a temptation to confuse life with things, experience with artifacts, feeling with surrender and submission.

The thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries criticized their age for its increasing rigidity, emptiness, and deadness. In Goethe's thinking the very same concept of productivity that is central in Spinoza as well as in Hegel and Marx, was a cornerstone. "The divine," he says, "is effective in that which is alive, but not in that which is dead. It is in that which is becoming and evolving, but not in that which is completed and rigid. That is why reason, in its tendency toward the divine, deals only with that which is becoming, and which is alive, while the intellect deals with that which is completed and rigid, in order to use it." [61]

We find similar criticisms in Schiller and Fichte, and then in Hegel and in Marx, who makes a general criticism that in his time "truth is without passion, and passion is without truth." [62]

Essentially the whole existentialist philosophy, from Kierkegaard on, is, as Paul Tillich puts it, "an over onehundred-years-old movement of rebellion against the dehumanization of man in industrial society." Actually, the concept of alienation is, in nontheistic language, the equivalent of what in theistic language would be called "sin": man's relinquishment of himself, of God within himself. The thinker who coined the concept of alienation was Hegel. To him the history of man was at the same time the history of man's alienation (Entfremdung). "What the mind really strives for," he wrote in The Philosophy of History, "is the realization of its notion; but in doing so it hides that goal from its own vision and is proud and well satisfied in this alienation from its own essence." [63] For Marx, as for Hegel, the concept of alienation is based on the distinction between existence and essence, on the fact that man's existence is alienated from his essence, that in reality he is not what he potentially is, or, to put it differently, that he is not what he ought to be, and that he ought to be that which he could be.

For Marx the process of alienation is expressed in work and in the division of labor. Work is for him the active relatedness of man to nature, the creation of a new world, including the creation of man himself. (Intellectual activity is of course, for Marx, always work, like manual or artistic activity.) But as private property and the division of labor develop, labor loses its character of being an expression of man's powers; labor and its products assume an existence separate from man, his will and his planning. "The object produced by labor, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object and turned into a physical thing; this product is an objectification of labor." [64] Labor is alienated because the work has ceased to be a part of the worker's nature and "consequently, he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless." [65] Thus, in the act of production the relationship of the worker to his own activity is experienced "as something alien and not belonging to him, activity as suffering (passivity), strength as powerlessness, creation as emasculation." [66] While man thus becomes alienated from himself, the product of labor becomes "an alien object which dominates him. This relationship is at the same time the relationship to the sensuous external world, to natural objects, as an alien and hostile world." [67] Marx stresses two points: 1) in the process of work, and especially of work under the conditions of capitalism, man is estranged from his own creative powers, and 2) the .objects of his own work become alien beings, and eventually rule over him, become powers independent of the producer. "The laborer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the laborer." [68]

A misunderstanding of Marx on this point is widespread, even among socialists. It is believed that Marx spoke primarily of the economic exploitation of the worker, and the fact that his share of the product was not as large as it should be, or that the product should belong to him, instead of to the capitalist. But as I have shown before, the state as a capitalist, as in the Soviet Union, would not have been any more welcome to Marx than the private capitalist. He is not concerned primarily with the equalization of income. He is concerned with the liberation of man from a kind of work which destroys his individuality, which transforms him into a thing, and which makes him into the slave of things. Just as Kierkegaard was concerned with the salvation of the individual, so Marx was, and his criticism of capitalist society is directed not at its method of distribution of income, but its mode of production, its destruction of individuality and its enslavement of man, not by the capitalist, but the enslavement of man -- worker and capitalist -- by things and circumstances of their own making.

Marx goes still further. In unalienated work man not only realizes himself as an individual, but also as a species-being. For Marx, as for Hegel and many other thinkers of the enlightenment, each individual represented the species, that is to say, humanity as a whole, the universality of man: the development of man leads to the unfolding of his whole humanity. In the process of work he "no longer reproduces himself merely intellectually, as in consciousness, but actively and in a real sense, and he sees his own reflection in a world which he has constructed. While, therefore, alienated labor takes away the object of production from man, it also takes away his species life, his real objectivity as a species-being, and changes his advantage over animals into a disadvantage in so far as his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him. Just as alienated labor transforms free and self-directed activity into a means, so it transforms the species life of man into a means of physical existence. Consciousness, which man has from his species, is transformed through alienation so that species life becomes only a means for him." [69]

As I indicated before, Marx assumed that the alienation of work, while existing throughout history, reaches its peak in capitalist society, and that the working class is the most alienated one. This assumption was based on the idea that the worker, having no part in the direction of the work, being "employed" as part of the machines he serves, is transformed into a thing in its dependence on capital. Hence, for Marx, "the emancipation of society from private property, from servitude, takes the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not in the sense that only the latter's emancipation is involved, but because this emancipation includes the emancipation of humanity as a whole. For all human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all types of servitude are only modifications or consequences of this relation." [70]

Again it must be emphasized that Marx's aim is not limited to the emancipation of the working class, but the emancipation of the human being through the restitution of the unalienated and hence free activity of all men, and a society in which man, and not the production of things, is the aim, in which man ceases to be "a crippled monstrosity, and becomes a fully developed human being." [71] Marx's concept of the alienated product of labor is expressed in one of the most fundamental points developed in Capital, in what he calls "the fetishism of commodities." Capitalist production transforms the relations of individuals into qualities of things themselves, and this transformation constitutes the nature of the commodity in capitalist production. "It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which the laborer exists to satisfy the need of self-expansion of existing values, instead of on the contrary, material wealth existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part of the laborer.

As in religion man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production he is governed by the products of his own hands." [72] "Machinery is adapted to the weakness of the human being, in order to turn the weak human being into a machine." [73]

The alienation of work in man's production is much greater than it was when production was by handicraft and manufacture. "In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool; in the factory the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labor proceed from him; here it is the movement of the machines that he must follow. In manufacture, the workmen are parts of a living mechanism; in the factory we have a lifeless mechanism, independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage." [74] It is of the utmost importance for the understanding of Marx to see how the concept of alienation was and remained the focal point in the thinking of the young Marx who wrote the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and of the "old" Marx who wrote Capital. Aside from the examples already given, the following passages, one from the Manuscripts, the other from Capital, ought to make this continuity quite clear:

"This fact simply implies that the object produced by labor, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object and turned into a physical thing; this product is an objectification of labor. The performance of work is at the same time its objectification. The performance of work appears in the sphere of political economy as a vitiation of the worker, objectification as a loss and as servitude to the object, and appropriation as alienation." [75]

This is what Marx wrote in Capital: "Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labor are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power." [76]

Again the role of private property (of course not as property of objects of use, but as capital which hires labor) was already clearly seen in its alienating functioning by the young Marx: "Private property," he wrote, "is therefore the product, the necessary result, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself. Private property is thus derived from the analysis of the concept of alienated labor; that is, alienated man, alienated labor, alienated life, and estranged man." [77]

It is not only that the world of things becomes the ruler of man, but also that the social and political circumstances which he creates become his masters. "This consolidation of what we ourselves produce, which turns into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up to now." [78] The alienated man, who believes that he has become the master of nature, has become the slave of things and of circumstances, the powerless appendage of a world which is at the same time the frozen expression of his own powers.

For Marx, alienation in the process of work, from the product of work and from circumstances, is inseparably connected with alienation from oneself, from one's fellow man and from nature. "A direct consequence of the alienation of man from the product of his labor, from his life activity and from his species life is that man is alienated from other men. When man confronts himself, he also confronts other men. What is true of man's relationship to his work, to the product of his work and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, to their labor and to the objects of their labor. In general, the statement that man is alienated from his species life means that each man is alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life." [79] The alienated man is not only alienated from other men; he is alienated from the essence of humanity, from his "species-being," both in his natural and spiritual qualities. This alienation from the human essence leads to an existential egotism, described by Marx as man's human essence becoming "a means for his individual existence. It [alienated labor] alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life." [80]

Marx's concept touches here the Kantian principle that man must always be an end in himself, and never a means to an end. But he amplifies this principle by stating that man's human essence must never become a means for individual existence. The contrast between Marx's view and Communist totalitarianism could hardly be expressed more radically; humanity in man, says Marx, must not even become a means to his individual existence; how much less could it be considered a means for the state, the class, or the nation.

Alienation leads to the perversion of all values. By making economy and its values -- "gain, work, thrift, and sobriety" [81]-- the supreme aim of life, man fails to develop the truly moral values, "the riches of a good conscience, of virtue, etc., but how can I be virtuous if I am not alive, and how can I have a good conscience if I am not aware of anything?" [82]In a state of alienation each sphere of life, the economic and the moral, is independent from the other, "each is concentrated on a specific area of alienated activity and is itself alienated from the other." [83]

Marx recognized what becomes of human needs in an alienated world, and he actually foresaw with amazing clarity the completion of this process as it is visible only today. While in a socialist perspective the main importance should be attributed "to the wealth of human needs, and consequently also to a new mode of production and to a new object of production," to "a new manifestation of human powers and a new enrichment of the human being," [84] in the alienated world of capitalism needs are not expressions of man's latent powers, that is, they are not human needs; in capitalism "every man speculates upon creating a new need in another in order to force him to a new sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence, and to entice him into a new kind of pleasure and thereby into economic ruin. Everyone tries to establish over others an alien power in order to find there the satisfaction of his own egoistic need. With the mass of objects, therefore, there also increases the realm of alien entities to which man is subjected. Every new product is a new potentiality of mutual deceit and robbery. Man becomes increasingly poor as a man; he has increasing need of money in order to take possession of the hostile being. The power of his money diminishes directly with the growth of the quantity of production, i.e., his need increases with the increasing power of money. The need for money is therefore the real need created by the modern economy, and the only need which it creates. The quantity of money becomes increasingly its only important quality. Just as it reduces every entity to its abstraction, so it reduces itself in its own development to a quantitative entity. Excess and immoderation become its true standard. This is shown subjectively, partly in the fact that the expansion of production and of needs becomes an ingenious and always calculating subservience to inhuman, depraved, unnatural, and imaginary appetites. Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need; its idealism is fantasy, caprice and fancy. No eunuch flatters his tyrant more shamefully or seeks by more infamous means to stimulate his jaded appetite, in order to gain some favor, than does the eunuch of industry, the entrepreneur, in order to acquire a few silver coins or to charm the gold from the purse of his dearly beloved neighbor. (Every product is a bait by means of which the individual tries to entice the essence of the other person, his money. Every real or potential need is a weakness which will draw the bird into the lime. Universal exploitation of human communal life. As every imperfection of man is a bond with heaven, a point at which his heart is accessible to the priest, so every want is an opportunity for approaching one's neighbor with an air of friendship, and saying, 'Dear friend, I will give you what you need, but you know the conditio sine qua non. You know what ink you must use in signing yourself over to me. I shall swindle you while providing your enjoyment.') The entrepreneur accedes to the most depraved fancies of his neighbor, plays the role of pander between him and his needs, awakens unhealthy appetites in him, and watches for every weakness in order, later, to claim the remuneration for this labor of love." [85] The man who has thus become subject to his alienated needs is "a mentally and physically dehumanized being...the self-conscious and self-acting commodity." [86] This commodity-man knows only one way of relating himself to the world outside, by having it and by consuming (using) it. The more alienated he is, the more the sense of having and using constitutes his relationship to the world. "The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being." [87]

There is only one correction which history has made in Marx's concept of alienation; Marx believed that the working class was the most alienated class, hence that the emancipation from alienation would necessarily start with the liberation of the working class. Marx did not foresee the extent to which alienation was to become the fate of the vast majority of people, especially of the ever increasing segment of the population which manipulate symbols and men, rather than machines. If anything, the clerk, the salesman, the executive, are even more alienated today than the skilled manual worker. The latter's functioning still depends on the expression of certain personal qualities like skill, reliability, etc., and he is not forced to sell his "personality," his smile, his opinions in the bargain; the symbol manipulators are hired not only for their skill, but for all those personality qualities which make them "attractive personality packages," easy to handle and to manipulate. They are the true "organization men" -- more so than the skilled laborer-their idol being the corporation. But as far as consumption is concerned, there is no difference between manual workers and the members of the bureaucracy. They all crave for things, new things, to have and to use. They are the passive recipients, the consumers, chained and weakened by the very things which satisfy their synthetic needs. They are not related to the world productively, grasping it in its full reality and in this process becoming one with it; they worship things, the machines which produce the things-and in this alienated world they feel as strangers and quite alone. In spite of Marx's underestimating the role of the bureaucracy, his general description could nevertheless have been written today: "Production does not simply produce man as a commodity, the commodity-man, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping with this role as a spiritually and physically dehumanized being -- [the] immorality, deformity, and hebetation of the workers and the capitalists. Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity...the human commodity." [88]

To what extent things and circumstances of our own making have become our masters, Marx could hardly have foreseen; yet nothing could prove his prophecy more drastically than the fact that the whole human race is today the prisoner of the nuclear weapons it has created, and of the political institutions which are equally of its own making. A frightened mankind waits anxiously to see whether it will be saved from the power of the things it has created, from the blind action of the bureaucracies it has appointed.

Marx's Concept of Man - 4. The Nature of Man

1. The Concept of Human Nature

Marx did not believe, as do many contemporary sociologists and psychologists, that there is no such thing as the nature of man; that man at birth is like a blank sheet of paper, on which the culture writes its text. Quite in contrast to this sociological relativism, Marx started out with the idea that man qua man is a recognizable and ascertainable entity; that man can be defined as man not only biologically, anatomically and physiologically, but also psychologically.

Of course, Marx was never tempted to assume that "human nature" was identical with that particular expression of human nature prevalent in his own society. In arguing against Bentham, Marx said: "To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticize all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch." [22] It must be noted that this concept of human nature is not, for Marx -- as it was not either for Hegel -an abstraction. It is the essence of man -- in contrast to the various forms of his historical existence -- and, as Marx said, "the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual." [23] It must also be stated that this sentence from Capital, written by the "old Marx," shows the continuity of the concept of man's essence ( Wesen) which the young Marx wrote about in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. He no longer used the term "essence" later on, as being abstract and unhistorical, but he clearly retained the notion of this essence in a more historical version, in the differentiation between "human nature in general" and "human nature as modified" with each historical period.

In line with this distinction between a general human nature and the specific expression of human nature in each culture, Marx distinguishes, as we have already mentioned above, two types of human drives and appetites: the constant or fixed ones, such as hunger and the sexual urge, which are an integral part of human nature, and which can be changed only in their form and the direction they take in various cultures, and the "relative" appetites, which are not an integral part of human nature but which "owe their origin to certain social structures and certain conditions of production and communication." [24] Marx gives as an example the needs produced by the capitalistic structure of society. "The need for money," he wrote in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, "is therefore the real need created by the modern economy, and the only need which it creates.... This is shown subjectively, partly in the fact that the expansion of production and of needs becomes an ingenious and always calculating subservience to inhuman, depraved, unnatural, and imaginary appetites." [25]

Man's potential, for Marx, is a given potential; man is, as it were, the human raw material which, as such, cannot be changed, just as the brain structure has remained the same since the dawn of history. Yet, man does change in the course of history; he develops himself; he transforms himself, he is the product of history; since he makes his history, he is his own product. History is the history of man's self-realization; it is nothing but the self-creation of man through the process of his work and his production: "the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labor, and the emergence of nature for man; he therefore has the evident and irrefutable proof of his self-creation, of his own origins." [26]

2. Man's self-activity

Marx's concept of man is rooted in Hegel's thinking. Hegel begins with the insight that appearance and essence do not coincide. The task of the dialectical thinker is "to distinguish the essential from the apparent process of reality, and to grasp their relations." [27] Or, to put it differently, it is the problem of the relationship between essence and existence. In the process of existence, the essence is realized, and at the same time, existing means a return to the essence. "The world is an estranged and untrue world so long as man does not destroy its dead objectivity and recognize himself and his own life 'behind' the fixed form of things and laws. When he finally wins this self-consciousness, he is on his way not only to the truth of himself, but also of his world. And with the recognition goes the doing. He will try to put this truth into action, and make the world what it essentially is, namely, the fulfillment of man's self-consciousness." [28] For Hegel, knowledge is not obtained in the position of the subjectobject split, in which the object is grasped as something separated from and opposed to the thinker. In order to know the world, man has to make the world his own. Man and things are in a constant transition from one suchness into another; hence "a thing is for itself only when it has posited (gesetzt) all its determinates and made them moments of its self-realization, and is thus, in all changing conditions, always 'returning to itself'." [29] In this process "entering into itself becomes essence." This essence, the unity of being, the identity throughout change is, according to Hegel, a process in which "everything copes with its inherent contradictions and unfolds itself as a result." "The essence is thus as much historical as ontological. The essential potentialities of things realize themselves in the same comprehensive process that establishes their existence. The essence can 'achieve' its existence when the potentialities of things have ripened in and through the conditions of reality. Hegel describes this process as the transition to actuality." [30] In contrast to positivism, for Hegel "facts are facts only if related to that which is not yet fact and yet manifests itself in the given facts as a real possibility. Or, facts are what they are only as moments in a process that leads beyond them to that which is not yet fulfilled in fact."[31]

The culmination of all of Hegel's thinking is the concept of the potentialities inherent in a thing, of the dialectical process in which they manifest themselves, and the idea that this process is one of active movement of these potentialities. This emphasis on the active process within man is already to be found in the ethical system of Spinoza. For Spinoza, all affects were to be divided into passive affects (passions), through which man suffers and does not have an adequate idea of reality, and into active affects (actions) (generosity and fortitude) in which man is free and productive. Goethe, who like Hegel was influenced by Spinoza in many ways, developed the idea of man's productivity into a central point of his philosophical thinking. For him all decaying cultures are characterized by the tendency for pure subjectivity, while all progressive periods try to grasp the world as it is, by one's own subjectivity, but not separate from it. [32] He gives the example of the poet: "as long as he expresses only these few subjective sentences, he can not yet be called a poet, but as soon as he knows how to appropriate the world for himself, and to express it, he is a poet. Then he is inexhaustible, and can be ever new, while his purely subjective nature has exhausted itself soon and ceases to have anything to say." [33] "Man", says Goethe, "knows himself only inasmuch as he knows the world; he knows the world only within himself and he is aware of himself only within the world. Each new object truly recognized, opens up a new organ within ourselves." [34] Goethe gave the most poetic and powerful expression to the idea of human productivity in his Faust. Neither possession, nor power, nor sensuous satisfaction, Faust teaches, can fulfill man's desire for meaning in his life; he remains in all this separate from the whole, hence unhappy. Only in being productively active can man make sense of his life, and while he thus enjoys life, he is not greedily holding on to it. He has given up the greed for having, and is fulfilled by being; he is filled because he is empty; he is much, because he has little. [35] Hegel gave the most systematic and profound expression to the idea of the productive man, of the individual who is he, inasmuch as he is not passive-receptive, but actively related to the world; who is an individual only in this process of grasping the world productively, and thus making it his own. He expressed the idea quite poetically by saying that the subject wanting to bring a content to realization does so by "translating itself from the night of possibility into the day of actuality." For Hegel the development of all individual powers, capacities and potentialities is possible only by continuous action, never by sheer contemplation or receptivity. For Spinoza, Goethe, Hegel, as well as for Marx, man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive, inasmuch as he grasps the world outside of himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers, and of grasping the world with these powers.

Inasmuch as man is not productive, inasmuch as he is receptive and passive, he is nothing, he is dead. In this productive process, man realizes his own essence, he returns to his own essence, which in theological language is nothing other than his return to God.

For Marx man is characterized by the "principle of movement," and it is significant that he quotes the great mystic Jacob Boehme in connection with this point. [36] The principle of movement must not be understood mechanically but as a drive, creative vitality, energy; human passion for Marx "is the essential power of man striving energetically for its object."

The concept of productivity as against that of receptivity can be understood more easily when we read how Marx applied it to the phenomenon of love. "Let us assume man to be man," he wrote, "and his relation to the world to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc. If you wish to influence other people you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return, i.e., if you are not able, by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune." [37] Marx expressed also very specifically the central significance of love between man and woman as the immediate relationship of human being to human being. Arguing against a crude communism which proposed the communalization of all sexual relation, Marx wrote: "In the relationship with woman, as the prey and the handmaid of communal lust, is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself; for the secret of this relationship finds its unequivocal, incontestable, open and revealed expression in the relation of man to woman and in the way in which the direct and natural species relationship is conceived. The immediate, natural and necessary relation of human being to human being is also the relation of man to woman. In this natural species relationship man's relation to nature is directly his relation to man, and his relation to man is directly his relation to nature, to his own natural function. Thus, in this relation is sensuously revealed, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which human nature has become nature for man and to which nature has become human nature for him. From this relationship man's whole level of development can be assessed. It follows from the character of this relationship how far man has become, and has understood himself as, a species-being, a human being. The relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It indicates, therefore, how far man's natural behavior has become human, and how far his human essence has become a natural essence for him, how far his human nature has become nature for him. It also shows how far man's needs have become human needs, and consequently how far the other person, as a person, has become one of his needs, and to what extent he is in his individual existence at the same time a social being." [38]

It is of the utmost importance for the understanding of Marx's concept of activity to understand his idea about the relationship between subject and object. Man's senses, as far as they are crude animal senses, have only a restricted meaning. "For a starving man the human form of food does not exist, but only its abstract character as food. It could just as well exist in the most crude form, and it is impossible to say in what way this feeding activity would differ from that of animals. The needy man, burdened with cares, has no appreciation of the most beautiful spectacle." [39] The senses which man has, so to speak, naturally, need to be formed by the objects outside of them. Any object can only be confirmation of one of my own faculties. "For it is not only 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."[40] The objects, for Marx, "confirm and realize his [man's] individuality... The manner in which these objects become his own depends upon the nature of the object and the nature of the corresponding faculty;...The distinctive character of each faculty is precisely its characteristic essence and thus also the characteristic mode of its objectification, of its objectively real, living being. It is therefore not only in thought, but through all the senses that man is affirmed in the objective world." [41]

By relating himself to the objective world, through his powers, the world outside becomes real to man, and in fact it is only "love" which makes man truly believe in the reality of the objective world outside himself. [42] Subject and object cannot be separated. "The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human, social object, created by man and destined for him...They [the senses] relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa. Need and enjoyment have thus lost their egoistic character, and nature has lost its mere utility by the fact that its utilization has become human utilization. (In effect, I can only relate myself in a human way to a thing when the thing is related in a human way to man.)" [43]

For Marx, "Communism is the positive abolition of private property, [44] of human self-alienation, and thus the real appropriation of human nature through and for man. It is, therefore, the return of man himself as a social, i.e., really human being, a complete and conscious return which assimilates all the wealth of previous development. Communism as a fully developed naturalism is humanism and as a fully developed humanism is naturalism. It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution." [45] This active relationship to the objective world, Marx calls "productive life." "It is life creating life. In the type of life activity resides the whole character of a species, its species-character; and free, conscious activity is the species-character of human beings." [46] What Marx means by "species-character" is the essence of man; it is that which is universally human, and which is realized in the process of history by man through his productive activity.

From this concept of human self-realization, Marx arrives at a new concept of wealth and poverty, which is different from wealth and poverty in political economy. "It will be seen from this," says Marx, "how, in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy, we have the wealthy man and the plenitude of human need. The wealthy man is at the same time one who needs a complex of human manifestations of life, and whose own self-realization exists as an inner necessity, a need. Not only the wealth but also the poverty of man acquires, in a socialist perspective, a human and thus a social meaning. Poverty is the passive bond which leads man to experience a need for the greatest wealth, the other person. The sway of the objective entity within me; the sensuous outbreak of my life-activity, is the passion which here becomes the activity of my being." [47] The same idea was expressed by Marx some years earlier: "The existence of what I truly love [specifically he refers here to freedom of the press] is felt by me as a necessity, as a need, without which my essence cannot be fulfilled, satisfied, complete." [48]

"Just as society at its beginnings finds, through the development of private property with its wealth and poverty (both intellectual and material), the materials necessary for this cultural development, so the fully constituted society produces man in all the plenitude of his being, the wealthy man endowed with all the senses, as an enduring reality. It is only in a social context that subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity, cease to be antinomies and thus cease to exist as such antinomies. The resolution of the theoretical contradictions is possible only through practical means, only through the practical energy of man. Their resolution is not by any means, therefore, only a problem of knowledge, but is a real problem of life which philosophy was unable to solve precisely because it saw there a purely theoretical problem." [49]

Corresponding to his concept of the wealthy man is Marx's view of the difference between the sense of having and the sense of being. "Private property," he says, "has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when it is directly eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., in short, utilized in some way. Although private property itself only conceives these various forms of possession as means of life, and the life for which they serve as means is the life of private property -- labor and creation of capital. Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses; the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order to be able to give birth to all his inner wealth." [50]

Marx recognized that the science of capitalistic economy, despite its worldly and pleasure-seeking appearance, "is a truly moral science, the most moral of all sciences. Its principal thesis is the renunciation of life and of human needs. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house [ Br., pub], and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt -- your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being. Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth. And everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you; it can eat, drink, go to the ball and to the theatre. It can acquire art, learning, historical treasures, political power; and it can travel. It can appropriate all these things for you, can purchase everything; it is the true opulence. But although it can do all this, it only desires to create itself, and to buy itself, for everything else is subservient to it. When one owns the master, one also owns the servant, and one has no need of the master's servant. Thus all passions and activities must be submerged in avarice. The worker must have just what is necessary for him to want to live, and he must want to live only in order to have this." [51]

The aim of society, for Marx, is not the production of useful things as an aim in itself. One easily forgets, he says, "that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people." [52] The contradictions between prodigality and thrift, luxury and abstinence, wealth and poverty, are only apparent because the truth is that all these antinomies are equivalent. It is particularly important to understand this position of Marx today, when both the Communist, and most of the Socialist parties, with some notable exceptions like the Indian, also Burmese and a number of European and American socialists, have accepted the principle which underlies all capitalist systems, namely, that maximum production and consumption are the unquestionable goals of society. One must of course not confuse the aim of overcoming the abysmal poverty which interferes with a dignified life, with the aim of an ever-increasing consumption, which has become the supreme value for both Capitalism and Krushchevism. Marx's position was quite clearly on the side of the conquest of poverty, and equally against consumption as a supreme end.

Independence and freedom, for Marx, are based on the act of self-creation. "A being does not regard himself as independent unless he is his own master, and he is only his own master when he owes his existence to him self. A man who lives by the favor of another considers himself a dependent being. But I live completely by another person's favor when I owe to him not only the continuance of my life but also its creation; when he is its source. My life has necessarily such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation." [53] Or, as Marx put it, man is independent only "...if he affirms his individuality as a total man in each of his relations to the world, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, willing, loving -- in short, if he affirms and expresses all organs of his individuality," if he is not only free from but also free to.

For Marx the aim of socialism was the emancipation of man, and the emancipation of man was the same as his self-realization in the process of productive relatedness and oneness with man and nature. The aim of socialism was the development of the individual personality. What Marx would have thought of a system such as Soviet communism he expressed very clearly in a statement of what he called "crude communism," and which referred to certain communist ideas and practices of his time. This crude communism "appears in a double form; the domination of material property looms so large that it aims to destroy everything which is incapable of being possessed by everyone as private property. It wishes to eliminate talent, etc., by force. Immediate physical possession seems to it the unique goal of life and existence. The role of worker is not abolished but is extended to all men. The relation of private property remains the relation of the community to the world of things. Finally, this tendency to oppose general private property to private property is expressed in an animal form; marriage (which is incontestably a form of exclusive private property) is contrasted with the community of women, [54] in which women become communal and common property. One may say that this idea of the community of women is the open secret of this entirely crude and unreflective communism. Just as women are to pass from marriage to universal prostitution, so the whole world of wealth (i.e., the objective being of man) is to pass to the relation of universal prostitution with the community. This communism, which negates the personality of man in every sphere, is only the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. Universal envy setting itself up as a power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which reestablishes itself and satisfies itself in a different way. The thoughts of every individual private property are at least directed against any wealthier private property, in the form of envy and the desire to reduce everything to a common level; so that this envy and levelling in fact constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism is only the culmination of such envy and levelling-down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. How little this abolition of private property represents a genuine appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the whole world of culture and civilization, and the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless individual who has not only not surpassed private property but has not yet even attained to it. The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal capitalist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed universality; labor as a condition in which everyone is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community." [55]

Marx's whole concept of the self-realization of man can be fully understood only in connection with his concept of work. First of all, it must be noted that labor and capital were not at all for Marx only economic categories; they were anthropological categories, imbued with a value judgment which is rooted in his humanistic position. Capital, which is that which is accumulated, represents the past; labor, on the other hand is, or ought to be when it is free, the expression of life. "In bourgeois society," says Marx in the Communist Manifesto,"...the past dominates the present. In communist society the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality." Here again, Marx follows the thought of Hegel, who understood labor as the "act of man's self-creation." Labor, to Marx, is an activity, not a commodity. Marx originally called man's function "self-activity," not labor, and spoke of the "abolition of labor" as the aim of socialism. Later, when he differentiated between free and alienated labor, he used the term "emancipation of labor."

"Labor is, in the first place, a process in which both man and nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and nature. He opposes himself to nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labor that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labor power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labor was still in its first instinctive stage. We presuppose labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman's will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be." [56]

Labor is the self-expression of man, an expression of his individual physical and mental powers. In this process of genuine activity man develops himself, becomes himself; work is not only a means to an end -- the product -- but an end in itself, the meaningful expression of human energy; hence work is enjoyable.

Marx's central criticism of capitalism is not the injustice in the distribution of wealth; it is the perversion of labor into forced, alienated, meaningless labor, hence the transformation of man into a "crippled monstrosity." Marx's concept of labor as an expression of man's individuality is succinctly expressed in his vision of the complete abolition of the lifelong submersion of a man in one occupation. Since the aim of human development is that of the development of the total, universal man, man must be emancipated from the crippling influence of specialization. In all previous societies, Marx writes, man has been "a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic." [57]

There is no greater misunderstanding or misrepresentation of Marx than that which is to be found, implicitly or explicitly, in the thought of the Soviet Communists, the reformist socialists, and the capitalist opponents of socialism alike, all of whom assume that Marx wanted only the economic improvement of the working class, and that he wanted to abolish private property so that the worker would own what the capitalist now has. The truth is that for Marx the situation of a worker in a Russian "socialist" factory, a British state-owned factory, or an American factory such as General Motors, would appear essentially the same. This, Marx expresses very clearly in the following:

"An enforced increase in wages (disregarding the other difficulties, and especially that such an anomaly could only be maintained by force) would be nothing more than a better remuneration of slaves, and would not restore, either to the worker or to the work, their human significance and worth.

"Even the equality of incomes which Proudhon demands would only change the relation of the presentday worker to his work into a relation of all men to work. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist." [58]

The central theme of Marx is the transformation of alienated, meaningless labor into productive, free labor, not the better payment of alienated labor by a private or "abstract" state capitalism.