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[V.1.]
The entire movement of history, just as its [communism's] actual act
of genesis--the birth act of its empirical existence--is, therefore, also
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, morality, law, 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 takes place 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 thus at first only philosophical, abstract
philanthropy, and that of communism is at once real and directly
bent on action.
[VI.1.]
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[V.2.]
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
accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature.
[VI.2.]
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