III.2. [Private Property and Communism]

To page XXXIX. But the opposition between lack of property and property is still an indifferent opposition, not grasped in its active connection, its inner relation, not yet grasped as a contradiction, so long as it is not understood as the opposition between labour and capital. Even without the advanced movement of private property, in ancient Rome, in Turkey, etc., this opposition can express itself in its first form. In that form it does not yet appear as posited by private property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private property as the exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as the exclusion of labour, are private property as the developed relation of contradiction, and hence a dynamic relation driving towards its resolution.

To the same page. The supersession of self-estrangement follows the same course as self-estrangement. At first private property is considered only in its objective aspect, but still with labour as its essence. Its form of existence is therefore capital, which is to be abolished “as such” (Proudhon). Or the particular kind of labour, labour levelled, fragmented and therefore unfree, is taken as the source of the harmfulness of private property and of its existence estranged from man: Fourier, who, like the Physiocrats, again takes agricultural labour to be at least the pre-eminent kind, while Saint-Simon, by contrast, declares industrial labour as such to be the essence and now also demands the exclusive rule of the industrialists and the improvement of the condition of the workers. Finally, communism is the positive expression of private property superseded, at first universal private property. In taking this relation in its universality, communism is

(1) in its first form only a generalisation and completion of this relation; as such it shows itself in a double form. On the one hand, the rule of material property looms so large over it that it wants to destroy everything that cannot be possessed by all as private property; it wants to abstract by force from talent, etc. Physical, immediate possession counts for it as the only purpose of life and existence; the role of worker is not abolished but extended to all men; the relation of private property remains the relation of the community to the world of things. Finally, this movement of opposing universal private property to private property finds expression in the animal form of setting the community of women, in which woman becomes a communal and common property, against marriage (which is admittedly a form of exclusive private property). One may say that this idea of the community of women is the open secret of this still wholly crude and thoughtless communism. Just as woman passes from marriage into general prostitution, so the whole world of wealth, that is, of the objective being of man, passes from the relation of exclusive marriage with the private owner into the relation of universal prostitution with the community. This communism, since it negates the personality of man everywhere, is only the consistent expression of private property, which is this negation. Universal envy, constituting itself as a power, is the hidden form in which greed reasserts itself and merely satisfies itself in another way. The thought of every piece of private property as such is at least turned against richer private property as envy and the urge to level down, so that these even constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism is only the completion of this envy and this levelling down on the basis of an imagined minimum. It has a definite, limited measure. How little this abolition of private property is a real appropriation is shown precisely by the abstract negation of the whole world of culture and civilisation, the return to the unnatural [IV] simplicity of the poor, crude man without needs, who has not gone beyond private property but has not even reached it yet.

The community is only a community of labour and of equality of wages, paid out by communal capital, by the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relation are raised to an imagined universality: labour as the role in which each is placed, capital as the recognised universality and power of the community.

In the relation to woman, as the prey and handmaid of communal lust, is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself; for the secret of this relation has its unambiguous, decisive, open, revealed expression in the relation of man to woman and in the way the immediate, natural relation of the species is conceived. The immediate, natural, necessary relation of human being to human being is the relation of man to woman. In this natural relation of the species, 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 determination. In this relation, then, it appears in a sensuous form, reduced to an observable fact, how far the human essence has become nature for man, or nature has become the human essence of man. From this relation one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relation it follows how far man has become and grasped himself as a species-being, as a human being. The relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore shows how far man’s natural behaviour has become human, or how far the human essence has become his natural essence, how far his human nature has become nature for him. This relation also shows how far man’s need has become a human need, how far, therefore, the other person as a person has become a need for him, how far in his most individual existence he is at the same time a social being.

The first positive abolition of private property, crude communism, is therefore only a form in which the vileness of private property appears, which wants to establish itself as the positive community.

(2) Communism (a) still political in nature, democratic or despotic; (b) with the abolition of the state, but at the same time still incomplete and still affected by private property, that is, by the estrangement of man. In both forms communism already knows itself to be the reintegration or return of man into himself, the supersession of human self-estrangement; but since it has not yet grasped the positive essence of private property, and has understood just as little the human nature of need, it is still held captive and infected by it. It has indeed grasped its concept, but not yet its essence.

(3) Communism as the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social, that is, human, man, a return become conscious and accomplished within the whole 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-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. It is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be this solution.

[V] The whole movement of history is therefore both its real act of generation (the birth of its empirical existence) and also, for its thinking consciousness, the comprehended and known movement of its becoming; whereas that still incomplete communism seeks a historical proof for itself, a proof in what already exists, in particular historical forms opposed to private property. It tears particular moments out of the movement (Cabet, Villegardelle, etc., especially ride this hobby-horse) and fixes them as proofs of its historical pedigree; and in doing so it shows precisely that by far the greater part of this movement contradicts its claims, and that if it ever existed, its past existence refutes its pretension to essential being.

It is easy to see why the whole revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property, of the economy to be precise.

This material, immediately sensuous private property is the material, sensuous expression of estranged human life. Its movement, production and consumption, is the sensuous revelation of the movement of all production hitherto, that is, of the realisation or reality of man. Religion, the family, the state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production and fall under its general law. The positive supersession of private property, as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive supersession of all estrangement, and so the return of man from religion, the family, the state, etc., to his human, that is, social existence. Religious estrangement as such takes place only in the realm of consciousness, of man’s inner life; but economic estrangement is the estrangement of real life, and its supersession therefore embraces both sides. It goes without saying that the movement takes its first beginning among the various peoples according to whether the true, acknowledged life of the people goes on more in consciousness or in the external world, is more ideal or more real life. Communism begins at once (Owen) with atheism; atheism is at first still far from being communism, since that atheism is still mostly an abstraction. The philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only a philosophical, abstract philanthropy, while that of communism is at once real and directly bent on action.

We have seen how, on the presupposition of positively superseded private property, man produces man, himself and the other man; how the object, which is the direct activity of his individuality, is at the same time his own existence for the other man, the existence of the other man, and the other man’s existence for him. Equally, however, both the material of labour and man as subject are the result as well as the starting point of the movement (and the historical necessity of private property lies precisely in the fact that they must be this starting point). The social character is thus the general character of the whole movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so it is produced by him. Activity and enjoyment, in their content, are also social in their mode of existence: social activity and social enjoyment. The human essence of nature exists only for social man; for only here does nature exist for him as a bond with man, as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him, as the vital element of human reality; only here does it exist as the basis of his own human existence. Only here has his natural existence become his human existence, and nature become man for him. Society is therefore the completed unity in essence of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the realised naturalism of man and the realised humanism of nature.

[VI] Social activity and social enjoyment by no means exist only in the form of a directly communal activity and directly communal enjoyment, although communal activity and communal enjoyment, that is, activity and enjoyment expressed and confirmed directly in real society with other men, will occur wherever that direct expression of sociality is grounded in the essence of their content and suited to its nature.

But even when I am active scientifically, etc., an activity I can seldom carry out in direct community with others, I am social, because I am active 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; therefore what I make of myself I make of myself for society, and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.

My universal consciousness is only the theoretical form of that of which the real community, the social being, is the living form, whereas at present universal consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such confronts it with hostility. Hence the activity of my universal consciousness, as such, is also my theoretical existence as a social being.

Above all we must avoid fixing “society” once again as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being. His expression of life, even if it does not appear in the direct form of a communal expression of life carried out together with others, is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual life and species-life are not different, however much (and this is necessary) the mode of existence of individual life is a more particular or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species a more particular or more general individual life.

As species-consciousness man confirms his real social life and merely repeats his real existence in thought, just as conversely species-being confirms itself in species-consciousness and exists for itself in its universality, as a thinking being.

Man, therefore, however much he is a particular individual (and it is precisely his particularity that makes him an individual and a real individual social being), is just as much the totality, the ideal totality, the subjective existence of society as thought and felt for itself; just as in reality he exists both as the contemplation and real enjoyment of social existence and as a totality of human expression of life.

Thinking and being are thus certainly distinct, but at the same time 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.

[Crossed through in the manuscript: (4) Just as private property is only the sensuous expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time rather becomes an alien and inhuman object for himself; that his expression of life is his alienation of life, his realisation his de-realisation, an alien reality: so the positive supersession of private property, that is, the sensuous appropriation of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human works, for and by man, is not to be conceived only in the sense of immediate, one-sided enjoyment, only in the sense of possessing, of having. Man appropriates his all-round essence in an all-round way, and so as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, willing, acting, loving), in short, all the organs of his individuality, like the organs that are directly communal in form, [VII] are in their objective behaviour, their behaviour towards the object, the appropriation of that object. The appropriation of human reality, its behaviour towards the object, is the activation of human reality; human efficacy and human suffering, for suffering, humanly understood, is a self-enjoyment of man.

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only when we have it, when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn on our body, lived in by us, etc., in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself in turn conceives all these immediate realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life they serve as means is the life of private property: labour and capitalisation.

In place of all physical and mental senses, therefore, there has come the simple estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human essence had to be reduced to this absolute poverty so that it might give birth to its inner wealth out of itself. (On the category of having see Hess in the Einundzwanzig Bogen.)

The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and qualities have become human, subjectively as well as objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object, made by man for man. The senses have therefore become theoreticians directly in their practice. They relate 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 or enjoyment has therefore lost its egoistic nature, and nature its mere utility, since use has become human use.

Likewise the senses and the enjoyment of other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these immediate organs, therefore, social organs develop, in the form of society; thus, for example, activity directly in society with others, etc., has become an organ of my expression of life and a mode of appropriating human life.

It goes without saying that the human eye enjoys things differently from the crude, inhuman eye, the human ear differently from the crude ear, etc.

We have seen. Man does not lose himself in his object only when it becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is possible only when it becomes for him a social object, and he himself becomes for himself a social being, as society becomes a being for him in this object.

On the one hand, therefore, as objective reality everywhere becomes for man in society the reality of human essential powers, human reality, and therefore the reality of his own essential powers, all objects become for him the objectification of himself, objects that confirm and realise his individuality, his objects; that is, he himself becomes the object. How they become his depends on the nature of the object and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to it; for it is precisely the determinateness of this relation that forms the particular, real mode of affirmation. An object is different for the eye from what it is for the ear, and the object of the eye is a different object from that of the ear. The peculiarity of each essential power is precisely its peculiar essence, and so also the peculiar mode of its objectification, of its objectively real, living being. Man is therefore affirmed in the objective world not only in thinking [VIII] but with all his senses.

On the other hand, taken subjectively: just as music first awakens man’s musical sense, and for the unmusical ear the most beautiful music has no sense, is [no] object, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers, and so can exist for me only as my essential power exists for itself as a subjective capacity, since the sense of an object for me (it has sense only for a sense corresponding to it) extends exactly as far as my sense extends: for this reason the senses of social man are other senses than those of the unsocial man. Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature is the wealth of subjective human sensibility, a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form, in short senses capable of human enjoyments, senses that confirm themselves as human essential powers, partly first developed and partly first produced. 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 humanity of the senses, comes into being only through the existence of its object, through humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the whole of world history down to the present. The sense that is caught up in crude practical need has only a narrow sense.] For the starving man the human form of food does not exist, but only its abstract existence as food; it could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it is impossible to say how this activity of feeding differs from the animal activity of feeding. The man full of cares and needs has no sense for the finest spectacle; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value, not the beauty and peculiar nature of the mineral; he has no mineralogical sense. The objectification of the human essence, in both its theoretical and its practical aspect, is therefore needed both to make man’s senses human and to create the human sense corresponding to the whole wealth of human and natural being.

[Crossed through in the manuscript: Just as through the movement of private property and of its wealth and misery, material and mental, nascent society finds all the material for this forming, so society once formed produces man in this whole wealth of his being, produces the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses, as its constant reality.] We see how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their opposition, and with it their existence as such opposites, in the social condition. (We see how the resolution of the theoretical oppositions themselves is possible only in a practical way, only through the practical energy of man, and how their resolution is therefore by no means merely a task of knowledge but a real task of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived it as a merely theoretical task.)

[Crossed through in the manuscript: We see how the history of industry and the objective existence of industry as it has come to be is the open book of man’s essential powers, human psychology present to the senses, which has hitherto been conceived not in its connection with man’s essence but always only in an external relation of utility, because, moving within estrangement, people could conceive only man’s general existence, religion, or history in its abstract-general essence, as politics, art, literature, etc., [IX] as the reality of man’s essential powers and as man’s species-acts. In ordinary, material industry (which can be conceived as a part of that general movement just as well as that movement itself can be conceived as a particular part of industry, since all human activity has so far been labour, and so industry, activity estranged from itself) we have before us, in the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects, in the form of estrangement, the objectified essential powers of man. A psychology for which this book, the very part of history most present to the senses and most accessible, is closed cannot become a real science with genuine content.] What indeed is one to think of a science that loftily abstracts from this great part of human labour and does not feel its own incompleteness, so long as so wide a wealth of human activity says nothing to it except what can be said in a word: “need”, “vulgar need”! The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and appropriated a constantly growing material. Philosophy, however, has remained just as alien to them as they remained to philosophy. Their momentary union was only a fantastic illusion. The will was there, but the capacity was lacking. Historiography itself takes account of natural science only in passing, as a factor of enlightenment, of utility, of particular great discoveries. But natural science has intervened all the more practically in human life through industry, has transformed it and prepared human emancipation, however much it was immediately bound to complete dehumanisation. Industry is the real historical relation of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If it is therefore conceived as the exoteric revelation of man’s essential powers, then the human essence of nature, or the natural essence of man, is also understood; natural science will therefore lose its abstractly material, or rather idealist, orientation and become the basis of human science, just as it has already become the basis of actual human life, though in estranged form; and one basis for life and another for science is a lie from the start. (Nature as it comes into being in human history, the act of origin of human society, is the real nature of man; therefore nature as it comes into being through industry, though in estranged form, is true anthropological nature.) Sensuousness (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when science starts from sensuousness in the double form of sensuous consciousness and sensuous need, that is, only when science starts from nature, is it real science. The whole of history is the history of the preparation and development for “man” to become the object of sensuous consciousness, and for the need of “man as man” to become a need. History itself is a real part of natural history, of nature’s becoming man. Natural science will in time subsume the science of man just as the science of man will subsume natural science: there will be one science.

[X] Man is the immediate object of natural science; for the immediate sensuous nature for man is immediately human sensuousness (an identical expression), immediately as the other man sensuously present to him; for his own sensuousness exists as human sensuousness for himself only through the other man. But nature is the immediate object of the science of man. Man’s first object, man, is nature, sensuousness; and the particular human sensuous essential powers, since they find their objective realisation only in natural objects, can find their self-knowledge only in the science of natural being in general. The element of thought itself, the element of thought’s expression of life, language, is of a sensuous nature. The social reality of nature and human natural science, or the natural science of man, are identical expressions. [Crossed through in the manuscript: We see how the rich man and rich human need take the place of the wealth and poverty of political economy. The rich man is at the same time the man in need of a totality of human expressions of life, the man in whom his own realisation exists as an inner necessity, as need. Not only the wealth but also the poverty of man equally acquires, on the presupposition of socialism, a human and therefore social meaning. It is the passive bond that makes man feel the greatest wealth, the other man, as a need. The rule of the objective being in me, the sensuous outbreak of my essential activity, is passion, which thus becomes here the activity of my being.]

(5) A being regards itself as independent only when it stands on its own feet, and it stands on its own feet only when it owes its existence to itself. 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 also created my life, if he is the source of my life; and my life necessarily has such a ground outside itself if it is not my own creation. Creation is therefore an idea very hard to drive out of the popular consciousness. The self-subsistence of nature and of man is incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts all the tangibilities of practical life.

The creation of the earth has received a mighty blow from geognosy, that is, from the science that presents the formation of the earth, its coming into being, as a process, as self-generation. Generatio aequivoca, spontaneous generation, is the only practical refutation of the theory of creation.

Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle already says: you were begotten by your father and your mother, so in you the mating of two human beings, a species-act of human beings, has produced the human being. You see, then, that man owes his existence to man even physically. So you must not keep in view only the one side, the infinite progression, which leads you to ask further: who begot my father, who his grandfather, etc.? You must also hold on to the circular movement that is sensuously visible in that progression, by which man repeats himself in procreation, so that man always remains the subject. But you will answer: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progression, which drives me on and on until I ask: who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer: your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you come to that question; ask yourself whether your question is not put from a standpoint to which I cannot reply because it is a perverse one. Ask yourself whether that progression as such exists for rational thought. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting from man and nature. You posit them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. 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, be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, [XI] think of yourself as non-existent too, for you too are nature and man. Do not think, do not 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 egoist that you posit everything as nothing and yet want to exist yourself?

You may reply: I do not want to posit the nothingness of nature, etc.; I ask you about its act of origin, as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, etc.

But since for socialist man the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the production of man through human labour, nature’s becoming for man, he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his process of origin. Since the essential reality of man and of nature, since man as the existence of nature for man and nature as the existence of man for man, has become practically, sensuously visible, the question of an alien being, a being above nature and man (a question that implies an admission of the inessentiality of nature and man), has become practically impossible. Atheism, as the denial of this inessentiality, no longer has any meaning, for atheism is the negation of God, and posits the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer needs such mediation. It starts from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as essential being. It is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated by the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated by the abolition of private property, by communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and so the real moment of human emancipation and recovery, necessary for the next stage of historical development. 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. [XI]