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[XIV.2.]
dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than
does the industrial eunuch--the producer--in order to sneak for himself
a few pieces of silver, in order to charm the golden birds out of the
pockets of his dearly beloved neighbours in Christ. He puts himself at
the service of the other's most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between
him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each
of his weaknesses---all so that he can then demand the cash for this service
of love. (Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other's
very being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which
will lead the fly to the glue-pot. General exploitation of communal human
nature, just as every imperfection in man, is a bond with heaven - an
avenue giving the priest access to his heart; every need is an opportunity
to approach one's neighbour under the guise of the utmost amiability and
to say to him: Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the
condition sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign
yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.)
This estrangement manifests itself in part in that the sophistication
of needs and of the means [of their satisfaction] on the one side produces
a bestial barbarisation, a complete, crude, abstract simplicity of need
on the other; or rather in that it merely reproduces itself in its opposite.
Even the need for fresh air ceases to be a need for the worker. Man returns
to a cave dwelling, which is now, however, contaminated with the pestilential
breath of civilisation and which he continues to occupy only precariously,
it being for him an alien habitation which can he withdrawn from him
any day a place from which, if he does
[XV.2.]
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[XIV.1.]
(7) We have seen what significance, given socialism, the wealth of
human needs acquires, and what significance, therefore, both a new
mode of production and a new object of production obtain: a
new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment
of human nature. Under private property their significance is reversed:
every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as
to drive him to fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence and
to seduce him into a new mode of enjoyment and therefore economic
ruin. Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so
as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase
in the quantity of objects is therefore accompanied by an extension of
the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new
product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and mutual
plundering. Man becomes ever poorer as man, his need for money becomes
ever greater if he wants to master the hostile power. The power of his
money declines in inverse proportion to the increase in the volume
of production: that is, his neediness grows as the power of money
increases.
The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the economic
system, and it is the only need which the latter produces. The quantity
of money becomes to an ever greater degree its sole effective quality.
just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself
in the course of its own movement to quantitative being. Excess
and intemperance come to be its true norm.
Subjectively, this appears partly in the fact that the extension of products
and needs becomes a contriving and ever-calculating subservience
to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites. Private
property does not know how to change crude need into human need.
Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and whim; and no
eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to
stimulate his
[XV.1.]
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