The Marx of Communism by Alexandros Chrysis

Author:Alexandros Chrysis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031067426
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

This largely cryptic Marxian commentary on political communism, democratic or despotic, but also on communism of an imperfect and, in that sense, formal “abolition of the state”, despite its otherwise obscure nature, certainly indicates a rejection of specific variants of communism as ineffective forms of understanding and overcoming human self-alienation.9 Such forms of communism, which are, in fact, expressions of a mechanistic and, consequently, anti-dialectical negation of individual property, tend to substantially play down the content and importance of human needs and, therefore, fail to illuminate the way out of the alienating reality of capitalism. However, the fact that Marx criticises the kind of communism which, in one way or another, is based on a philosophically vulgar and politically inhuman materialism, must not lead to the erroneous conclusion that Marxian communism is proposed, on the contrary, as an expression of an ethereal, ideal perception of man and society.

It would be the autumn of 1844, namely in the pages of The Holy Family, that is, immediately after the writing of the Paris Manuscripts, when Marx would pick up communism where he had left it. Against the idealistic, the “absolute socialism” advocated by Bruno Bauer and his philosophical companions, he would define and demonstrate the “mass-type profane communism and socialism” as an expression of the European proletariat’s action. An unbridgeable gap separates the opposing “mass-type profane communism and socialism” of the English and French proletarians from the neo-Hegelian, “absolute socialism” of Critical Criticism, as Marx ironically labels Bauer’s philosophy: “The first proposition of profane socialism rejects emancipation in mere theory as an illusion and for real freedom it demands besides the idealistic ‘will’ very tangible, very material conditions”.10

Insisting on finding an answer to the question “what is not Marxian communism”, it is indeed worth quoting, and in fact in detail, Marx’s sarcasm towards the idealistic socialism of the “Holy Family”, the philosophical tendency of the Bauer brothers and those of like mind:According to Critical Criticism, the whole evil lies only in the workers’ “thinking”. It is true that the English and French workers have formed associations in which they exchange opinions not only on their immediate needs as workers, but on their needs as human beings. In their associations, moreover, they show a very thorough and comprehensive consciousness of the “enormous” and “immeasurable” power which arises from their co-operation. But these mass-minded, communist workers, employed, for instance, in the Manchester or Lyons workshops, do not believe that by “pure thinking” they will be able to argue away their industrial masters and their own practical debasement. They are most painfully aware of the difference between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage-labour and the like are no ideal figments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their self-estrangement and that therefore they must be abolished in a practical, objective way for man to become man not only in thinking, in consciousness, but in mass being, in life. Critical Criticism, on the contrary, teaches

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