How to Read Marx by Peter Osborne

Author:Peter Osborne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Reference, Communism, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Post-Communism & Socialism
ISBN: 0393328783
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2006-01-15T08:00:00+00:00

6

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COMMUNISM

...the theory of the communists can be summed up in the single sentence: supersession of private property.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848

But the opposition between propertylessness and property is still an indifferent opposition, not grasped in its active connection, its inner relation, not yet grasped as contradiction, as long as it is not understood as the antithesis between labour and capital...labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute private property in its developed relation of contradiction: a vigorous relation, therefore, driving towards resolution...

In grasping this relation in its generality, communism is (1) in its initial form only a generalization and completion of that relation...the domination of material property bulks so large that it threatens to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by everyone as private property. Physical, immediate possession is the only purpose of life and existence for it; the category of the worker is not superseded but extended to all humankind; it wants to abstract from talent, etc, in a violent manner.

The relation of private property remains the relation of the community to the world of things; ultimately this movement to oppose general private property to private property is expressed in the bestial form of opposing to marriage (which is admittedly a form of exclusive private property) the community of women, in which the woman becomes communal and common property. One might say that this thought of the community of women is the revealed secret of this as yet wholly crude and unthinking communism. Just as women are to go from marriage into general prostitution, so the whole world of wealth (i.e. the objective essence of humankind) is to make the transition from the relation of exclusive marriage with the private owner to relation of universal prostitution with the community. This communism, in so far as it negates the personalities of men and women in every sphere, is but the consistent expression of private property, which this negation is. General envy constituting itself as a power is the hidden form in which greed reasserts itself and satisfies itself, but in another way...The crude communist is merely the culmination of this envy and desire to level down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited measure. How little this abolition of private property is an actual appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, and the return to the unnatural simplicity of the poor men and women who have no needs, who have not even reached the stage of private property, let alone gone beyond it...

The first positive abolition of private property — crude communism — is therefore only a form of appearance of the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community.

(2) Communism (a) still of a political nature, democratic or despotic; (b) with the abolition of the state, but still essentially incomplete and influenced by private property, i.

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