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Sense-perception (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when it
proceeds from sense-perception in the two-fold form of sensuous consciousness
and sensuous need – is it true science. All history is the history of preparing
and developing “man” to become the object of sensuous consciousness, and turning
the requirements of “man as man” into his needs. History itself is a real part
of natural history of nature developing into man. Natural science will in time
incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will
incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.
....Karl Marx
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
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Private Property and Communism
The antithesis between lack of property and property, so long as it is not
comprehended as the antithesis of labour and capital, still remains an
indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, in its internal
relation, not yet grasped as a contradiction. It can find expression in this
first form even without the advanced development of private property (as in
ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.). It does not yet appear as having been established
by private property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private
property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of
labour, constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction –
hence a dynamic relationship driving towards resolution.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
The transcendence of self-estrangement follows the same course as
self-estrangement. Private property is first considered only in its objective
aspect – but nevertheless with labour as its essence. Its form of existence is
therefore capital, which is to be annulled “as such” (Proudhon). Or a particular
form of labour – labour levelled down, fragmented, and therefore unfree – is
conceived as the source of private property’s perniciousness and of its
existence in estrangement from men. For instance, Fourier, who, like the
Physiocrats, also conceives agricultural labour to be at least the exemplary
type, whereas Saint-Simon declares in contrast that industrial labour as such is
the essence, and accordingly aspires to the exclusive rule of the industrialists
and the improvement of the workers’ condition. Finally, communism is the
positive expression of annulled private property – at first as universal private
property.
By embracing this relation as a whole, communism is:
(1) In its first form only a generalisation and consummation of it [of this
relation]. As such it appears in a two-fold form: on the one hand, the dominion
of material property bulks so large that it wants to destroy everything which is
not capable of being possessed by all as private property. It wants to disregard
talent, etc., in an arbitrary manner. For it the sole purpose of life and
existence is direct, physical possession. The category of the worker is not done
away with, but extended to all men. The relationship of private property
persists as the relationship of the community to the world of things.
Finally, this movement of opposing universal private property to private
property finds expression in the brutish form of opposing to marriage (certainly
a form of exclusive private property) the community of women, in which a woman
becomes a piece of communal and common property. It may be said that this idea
of the community of women gives away the secret of this as yet completely crude
and thoughtless communism.[30] Just as woman passes from marriage to general
prostitution, [Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general
prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not
the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes – and the latter’s
abomination is still greater – the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head.
– Note by Marx [31]] so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man’s objective
substance) passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of
private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community. This
type of communism – since it negates the personality of man in every sphere – is
but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation.
General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which greed
re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way. The thought of
every piece of private property as such is at least turned against wealthier
private property in the form of envy and the urge to reduce things to a common
level, so that this envy and urge even constitute the essence of competition.
Crude communism is only the culmination of this envy and of this levelling-down
proceeding from the preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited standard.
How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in
fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and
civilisation, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude
man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property,
but has not yet even reached it.
The community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages paid out by
communal capital – by the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of
the relationship are raised to an imagined universality – labour as the category
in which every person is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality
and power of the community.
In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is
expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the
secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised
expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct
and natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and
necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this
natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his
relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to
nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is
sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the
human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the
human essence of man.
From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development.
From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being,
as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to
woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore
reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the
extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the
extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This
relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human
need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become
for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the
same time a social being.
The first positive annulment of private property – crude communism – is thus
merely a manifestation of the vileness of private property, which wants to set
itself up as the positive community system.
(2) Communism (a) still political in nature – democratic or despotic; (b) with
the abolition of the state, yet still incomplete, and being still affected by
private property, i.e., by the estrangement of man. In both forms communism
already is aware of being reintegration or return of man to himself, the
transcendence of human self-estrangement; but since it has not yet grasped the
positive essence of private property, and just as little the human nature of
need, it remains captive to it and infected by it. It has, indeed, grasped its
concept, but not its essence.
(3) Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human
self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence
by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as
a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing
the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed
naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism;
it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between
man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence,
between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity,
between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history
solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.
The entire movement of history, as simply communism’s actual act of genesis –
the birth act of its empirical existence – is, therefore, for its thinking
consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming. Whereas the
still immature communism seeks an historical proof for itself – a proof in the
realm of what already exists – among disconnected historical phenomena opposed
to private property, tearing single phases from the historical process and
focusing attention on them as proofs of its historical pedigree (a hobby-horse
ridden hard especially by Cabet, Villegardelle, etc.) By so doing it simply
makes clear that by far the greater part of this process contradicts its own
claim, and that, if it has ever existed, precisely its being in the past refutes
its pretension to reality.
It is easy to see that the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both
its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property –
more precisely, in that of the economy.
This material, immediately perceptible private property is the material
perceptible expression of estranged human life. Its movement – production and
consumption – is the perceptible revelation of the movement of all production
until now, i.e., the realisation or the reality of man. Religion, family, state,
law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and
fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property as
the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all
estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state,
etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence. Religious estrangement as such
occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economic
estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces both
aspects. It is evident that the initial stage of the movement amongst the
various peoples depends on whether the true recognised life of the people
manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world – is more ideal
or real. Communism begins from the outset (Owen) with atheism; but atheism is at
first far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an
abstraction.
The philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only philosophical, abstract
philanthropy, and that of communism is at once real and directly bent on action.
We have seen how on the assumption of positively annulled private property man
produces man – himself and the other man; how the object, being the direct
manifestation of his individuality, is simultaneously his own existence for the
other man, the existence of the other man, and that existence for him. Likewise,
however, both the material of labour and man as the subject, are the point of
departure as well as the result of the movement (and precisely in this fact,
that they must constitute the point of departure, lies the historical necessity
of private property). Thus the social character is the general character of the
whole movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so is society
produced by him. Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their mode
of existence, are social: social activity and social enjoyment. The human aspect
of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist for him as
a bond with man – as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for
him – and as the life-element of human reality. Only then does nature exist as
the foundation of his own human existence. Only here has what is to him his
natural existence become his human existence, and nature become man for him.
Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature – the true resurrection of
nature – the consistent naturalism of man and the consistent humanism of nature.
Social activity and social enjoyment exist by no means only in the form of some
directly communal activity and directly communal enjoyment, although communal
activity and communal enjoyment – i.e., activity and enjoyment which are
manifested and affirmed in actual direct association with other men – will occur
wherever such a direct expression of sociability stems from the true character
of the activity’s content and is appropriate to the nature of the enjoyment.
But also when I am active scientifically, etc. – an activity which I can seldom
perform in direct community with others – then my activity is social, because I
perform it as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a
social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own
existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make
of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.
My general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of that of which the
living shape is the real community, the social fabric, although at the present
day general consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such confronts
it with hostility. The activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is
therefore also my theoretical existence as a social being.
Above all we must avoid postulating “society” again as an abstraction vis-à-vis
the individual. The individual is the social being. His manifestations of life –
even if they may not appear in the direct form of communal manifestations of
life carried out in association with others – are therefore an expression and
confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and species-life are not
different, however much – and this is inevitable – the mode of existence of the
individual is a more particular or more general mode of the life of the species,
or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life.
In his consciousness of species man confirms his real social life and simply
repeats his real existence in thought, just as conversely the being of the
species confirms itself in species consciousness and exists for itself in its
generality as a thinking being.
Man, much as he may therefore be a particular individual (and it is precisely
his particularity which makes him an individual, and a real individual social
being), is just as much the totality – the ideal totality – the subjective
existence of imagined and experienced society for itself; just as he exists also
in the real world both as awareness and real enjoyment of social existence, and
as a totality of human manifestation of life.
Thinking and being are thus certainly distinct, but at the same time they are in
unity with each other.
Death seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular individual
and to contradict their unity. But the particular individual is only a
particular species-being, and as such mortal.
(4) Just as private property is only the perceptible expression of the fact that
man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a
strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the manifestation
of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realisation is his loss of
reality, is an alien reality: so, the positive transcendence of private property
– i.e., the perceptible appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of
human life, of objective man, of human achievements should not be conceived
merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided enjoyment, merely in the sense of
possessing, of having. Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a
comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human
relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking,
observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of
his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form,
are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the
appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their
orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, [For this
reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and
activities] it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly
considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man.
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours
when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly
possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by
us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct
realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve
as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital.
In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the
sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had
to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner
wealth to the outer world. [On the category of “having”, see Hess, in the
Philosophy of the Deed].
The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all
human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these
senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye
has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object –
an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in
their practice theoreticians. They 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, [in practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing
relates itself humanly to the human being] and vice versa. Need or enjoyment
have consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere
utility by use becoming human use.
In the same way, the senses and enjoyment of other men have become my own
appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social organs develop in
the form of society; thus, for instance, activity in direct association with
others, etc., has become an organ for expressing my own life, and a mode of
appropriating human life.
It is obvious that the human eye enjoys things in a way different from the
crude, non-human eye; the human ear different from the crude ear, etc.
We have seen that man does not lose himself in his object only when the object
becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is possible only when the
object becomes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being,
just as society becomes a being for him in this object.
On the one hand, therefore, it is only when the objective world becomes
everywhere for man in society the world of man’s essential powers – human
reality, and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers – that all
objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects which
confirm and realise his individuality, become his objects: that is, man himself
becomes the object. The manner in which they become his depends on the nature of
the objects and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to it; for it
is precisely the determinate nature of this relationship which shapes the
particular, real mode of affirmation. To the eye an object comes to be other
than it is to the ear, and the object of the eye is another object than the
object of the ear. The specific character of each essential power is precisely
its specific essence, and therefore also the specific mode of its
objectification, of its objectively actual, living being. Thus man is affirmed
in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses.
On the other hand, let us look at this in its subjective aspect. Just as only
music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music
has no sense for the unmusical ear – is [no] object for it, because my object
can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers – it can therefore
only exist for me insofar as my essential power exists for itself as a
subjective capacity; because the meaning of an object for me goes only so far as
my sense goes (has only a meaning for a sense corresponding to that object) –
for this reason the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social
man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is
the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty
of form – in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming
themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being.
For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical
senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the
senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The
forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down
to the present.
The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For the
starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its
abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form,
and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from
that of animals. The care-burdened, poverty-stricken man has no sense for the
finest play; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the
beauty and the specific character of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense.
Thus, the objectification of the human essence, both in its theoretical and
practical aspects, is required to make man’s sense human, as well as to create
the human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural
substance.
<Just as through the movement of private property, of its wealth as well as its
poverty – of its material and spiritual wealth and poverty – the budding society
finds at hand all the material for this development, so established society
produces man in this entire richness of his being produces the rich man
profoundly endowed with all the senses – as its enduring reality.>
We see how subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity
and suffering, lose their antithetical character, and – thus their existence as
such antitheses only within the framework of society; <we see how the resolution
of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of
the practical energy of man. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a
problem of understanding, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not
solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.
We see how the history of industry and the established objective existence of
industry are the open book of man’s essential powers, the perceptibly existing
human psychology. Hitherto this was not conceived in its connection with man’s
essential being, but only in an external relation of utility, because, moving in
the realm of estrangement, people could only think of man’s general mode of
being – religion or history in its abstract – general character as politics,
art, literature, etc. – as the reality of man’s essential powers and man’s
species-activity. We have before us the objectified essential powers of man in
the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects, in the form of estrangement,
displayed in ordinary material industry (which can be conceived either as a part
of that general movement, or that movement can be conceived as a particular part
of industry, since all human activity hitherto has been labour – that is,
industry – activity estranged from itself.)
A psychology for which this book, the part of history existing in the most
perceptible and accessible form, remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine,
comprehensive and real science. What indeed are we to think of a science which
airily abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel
its own incompleteness, while such a wealth of human endeavour, unfolded before
it, means nothing more to it than, perhaps, what can be expressed in one word –
“need”, “vulgar need”?
The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and have accumulated an
ever-growing mass of material. Philosophy, however, has remained just as alien
to them as they remain to philosophy. Their momentary unity was only a
chimerical illusion. The will was there, but the power was lacking.
Historiography itself pays regard to natural science only occasionally, as a
factor of enlightenment, utility, and of some special great discoveries. But
natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically
through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although
its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanisation of man.
Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, and therefore of
natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric
revelation of man’s essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human
essence of nature or the natural essence of man. In consequence, natural science
will lose its abstractly material – or rather, its idealistic – tendency, and
will become the basis of human science, as it has already become – albeit in an
estranged form – the basis of actual human life, and to assume one basis for
life and a different basis for science is as a matter of course a lie. <The
nature which develops in human history – the genesis of human society – is man’s
real nature; hence nature as it develops through industry, even though in an
estranged form, is true anthropological nature.>
Sense-perception (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when it
proceeds from sense-perception in the two-fold form of sensuous consciousness
and sensuous need – is it true science. All history is the history of preparing
and developing “man” to become the object of sensuous consciousness, and turning
the requirements of “man as man” into his needs. History itself is a real part
of natural history of nature developing into man. Natural science will in time
incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will
incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.
Man is the immediate object of natural science; for immediate, sensuous nature
for man is, immediately, human sensuousness (the expressions are identical) –
presented immediately in the form of the other man sensuously present for him.
Indeed, his own sense-perception first exists as human sensuousness for himself
through the other man. But nature is the immediate object of the science of man:
the first – object of man – man – is nature, sensuousness; and the particular
human sensuous essential powers can only find their self-understanding in the
science of the natural world in general, just as they can find their objective
realisation only in natural objects. The element of thought itself – the element
of thought’s living expression – language – is of a sensuous nature. The social
reality of nature, and human natural science, or the natural science of man, are
identical terms.
<It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy
come the rich human being and the rich human need. The rich human being is
simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human manifestations of
life – the man in whom his own realisation exists as an inner necessity, as
need. Not only wealth, but likewise the poverty of man – under the assumption of
socialism[32] – receives in equal measure a human and therefore social
significance.
Poverty is the passive bond which causes the human being to experience the need
of the greatest wealth – the other human being. The dominion of the objective
being in me, the sensuous outburst of my life activity, is passion, which thus
becomes here the activity of my being.>
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(5) A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet;
and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man
who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I
live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of
my life, but if he has, moreover, created my life – if he is the source of my
life. When it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of
this kind outside of it. The Creation is therefore an idea very difficult to
dislodge from popular consciousness. The fact that nature and man exist on their
own account is incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts everything
tangible in practical life.
The creation of the earth has received a mighty blow from geognosy – i.e., from
the science which presents the formation of the earth, the development of the
earth, as a process, as a self-generation. Generatio aequivoca is the only
practical refutation of the theory of creation.[33]
Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has
already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore
in you the mating of two human beings – a species-act of human beings – has
produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his
existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect – the
infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father?
Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement
sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in
procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I
grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever
further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only
answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how
you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed
from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask
yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you
ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from
man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove
them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will
also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then
be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of
yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think,
don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the
existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you
conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?
You can reply: I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature, etc. I ask
you about its genesis, just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones,
etc.
But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is
nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence
of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through
himself, of his genesis. Since the real existence of man and nature has become
evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become
evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man,
the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man – a
question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man – has
become impossible in practice.
Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism
is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation;
but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It
proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man
and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no
longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s
positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property,
through communism.
Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the
actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the
process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary
form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is
not the goal of human development, the form of human society. [34]