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[IV.1.]
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 handmaid 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 sensually 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 uncovers 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 discloses the degree to which man's need has
become a human need; the degree to which, therefore, the other
person as a person has become for him a need - the degree 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
therefore 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 the reintegration or return
of man to himself, the transcendence of human self-estrangement. But because
it has not yet grasped the positive essence of private property, and just
as little
[V.1.]
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[IV.2.]
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.
[V.2.]
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