Marx didn’t claim communism was better able than capitalism to satisfy human wants. He claimed that it actually produced humans with better wants - less acquisitive, less selfish. This is because Marx considered psychology to be largely a product of social structure.
He didn’t believe in an immutable human nature, only a range of potentialities.
‘Communism is…the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a…human being.’1
For Marx, this ‘human essence’ meant the potentialities he considered most important to actualise.
There were three: autonomy, sociality, and aesthetic enjoyment. He believed that ‘free conscious activity’ constitutes ‘the species character of man’.2 Unlike animals, Marx believed, man is capable of engaging in productive activity without being driven by physical want or need.
Man has a non-physical need to work. And when engaging in an activity because of this need, man identifies with what he is doing:
‘The external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits - hence as self-realisation, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom’.3
But Marx believed such work is free only when it is intellectually stimulating and physically easy; otherwise, man won’t enjoy it and will therefore attend to it:
‘the less he is attracted by the nature of the work and the way it has to be accomplished, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be’.4
Regarding sociality, the second potentiality Marx regarding as constituting the human essence, he said all distinctively human activity has a social dimension, claiming ‘the mode of existence of individual life is a more particular or a more general mode of the species life’.5 To this he added that humans have a unique capacity for empathising and cooperating.
Aesthetic enjoyment was the third and final potentiality. Humans are capable of disinterested enjoyment of nature and art:
‘For a man who is starving the human form of food does not exist…and it would be hard to say how this way of eating differs from that of animals.’6
Autonomy, sociality, aesthetic enjoyment: for Marx, these three potentialities constituted the human essence, and he wanted to actualise them. Under capitalism, he believed man was alienated or estranged from his essence. And he believed practical change was required:
‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’.7
Hegel had said man’s estrangement came from failing to conceive of himself and his entire natural/social world as manifestations of the world Spirit. Feuerbach had said it came from belief in any extra-human spiritual entity. But for Marx it wasn’t about intellectual error. He said obstructive social institutions were the cause.
He saw religion as ‘the fantastic realisation of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality’8 under capitalism; religion, he claimed, is ‘the opium of the people’. So why did he think capitalism prevented the actualisation of the three potentialities — autonomy, sociality and aesthetic enjoyment — he regarded as the human essence?
He claimed capitalism prevents the realisation of autonomy because workers must do as instructed by employers, and employers must obey the market - ‘an alien force existing outside them’, according to Marx9. Productive activity under capitalism is therefore not regulated, he believed, by conscious decisions.
The profit motive can also make work unpleasant because the main aim is to maximise the productivity of labour. This leads to job specialisation, giving less scope for a wide range of skills. And there is increased mechanisation. Monotonous and unattractive, thus does capitalism ‘distort the worker into a fragment of a man’.10
And the mutual self-interest that Marx saw as the social bond under capitalism he called ‘a caricature of true community’.11 Capitalism, Marx believed, ‘dissolves the human world into a world of atomistic individuals confronting each other in enmity’.12 Workers, under the yoke, are ill-disposed to employers; employers view workers as merely the prey of the desire for profit.
Since Marx believed that capitalism encourages the view that an object is only ours when we can use it, he also thought it prevented aesthetic enjoyment. ‘The dealer in minerals’, according to him, ‘sees only the commercial value, not the beauty and the peculiar nature of the minerals’.13 And Marx regarded saving as especially bad, advising people to ‘go dancing, go drinking, think, love theorise, sing’14 instead.
Man’s aesthetic sensibilities are further damaged, he believed, by manufacturers using advertising to stimulate unhealthy appetites for profit - consumerism. And this leaves modern man in slums worse than the caves of his prehistoric ancestors because they belong to another. And he’s conscious of how much richer the rich are.
Believing capitalism to alienate man from himself, Marx proposed communism as the ‘complete restoration of man to himself’. Focusing on autonomy, he said democratically regulated central planning would bring everything under conscious and planned control’.15
Workers would also be free to move between different forms of activity as inclination moved them, facilitating the development of a wide range of skills and talents. Nobody would be obligated to do anything they did not want to do. Labour would be free, not forced.
In a famous passage in The German Ideology, Marx wrote that
‘in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.’16
This is because individuals become entitled to means of subsistence on the basis of their need for them, so no one is forced to work to get the money to buy his subsistence. Later, Marx became sceptical of the idea that work itself could be creative self-expression. Locating freedom in the sphere beyond work, he came to believe that that communism maximised freedom by minimising work.
This was for three reasons. First, since private ownership no longer exists, no-one capable of work is able to live on the basis of the labour of others without also working themselves. All able-bodied persons must work, so that cuts down the time each person spends working. Second, wasteful work such as supervising is eliminated, and - third - centralised planning improves efficiency.
Sociality is actualised because humans under communism, he believes, are no longer selfish because the means of subsistence are distributed on the basis of their need or want for them. They regard the well-being of others as the source of their own happiness.
And the extinction of acquisitiveness and selfishness he believes communism will achieve will, he says, foster disinterestedness, aiding aesthetic appreciation:
‘The supersession of private property is the complete emancipation of all human sense and attributes’.17
But does communism actually make people more autonomous, selfless and aesthetically sensitive? No. As Aristotle remarked, ‘the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold’. And Marx ultimately got human nature wrong — with disastrous consequences.
Regarding autonomy, having a plan doesn’t necessarily enhance freedom relative to market forces, but before we get to that an important point is worth stressing. Marx’s historical materialism is ultimately incompatible with free will. In writing his books, he believed he was merely a link in history’s causal chain. Thought is purely the effect of social conditions, and everything is necessarily predetermined by causal chains.
Back to planning: dictators can implement plans, allowing no room for autonomy. Only a fully democratic plan promotes autonomy, but in a complex society decisions end up being made by a specialist minority. The average individual actually ends up with less freedom because of the central direction of labour.
The fantasy of being people being able to follow their whims is totally incompatible with central planning. Capitalism only divides work in a way that results in unfulfilling labour for some because this has been found to be more productive.
If it led to greater productivity or even just static output but improve relations between workers and employers, job rotation would immediately be introduced. But it doesn’t. And since income is proportionate to productivity, workers choose unfulfilling work because it gives them greater income. That is their choice.
Profit is the motive for the incessant search under capitalism to improve productivity. Under socialism, there isn’t the same incentive, so capitalism actually creates more leisure. If workers today were content with the material standard of living that workers in Marx’s day had, they would have massive amounts of leisure time.
But people prefer consumer goods to free time. And that, too, is their choice. Marxists respond by saying these desires are created by advertising, but acquisitiveness and selfishness existed long before capitalism. The genius of capitalism is that it allows people to pursue their self-interest while promoting the interests of others.
Ironically, Marx’s fantasy of eradicated acquisitiveness and selfishness under communism failed because all societies that have attempted to establish socialism have succumbed to dictatorship by power elites exploiting their positions of authority selfishly. The main use for Marx’s disinterested aesthetic sense is presumably appreciating empty grocery store shelves or human skulls.
Achieving equality requires the suppression of dissidents and the inequality of the revolutionary vanguard who, after tasting their unequal power, will never give it up. And scarcity will never be abolished because as we become capable of producing more, our desires and expectations increase.
What’s true in Marx isn’t new, and what’s new isn’t true. Ultimately, as Simone Weil observed, ‘not religion but revolution is the opium of the people’. And because it gets human nature wrong all its attempts to bring heaven down to earth have only raised hell. The most bloodless political theories have created the bloodiest realities.
Recommended Reading
A. Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Marx (London, 1983)
David Conway, A Farewell to Marx (Penguin, 1987)
P. Singer, Marx (Oxford, 1980)
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (EPM) in Marx, Early Writings (Harmondsworth, 1975), p.348
EPM, p.328
Grundisse (Harmondsworth, 1973), p.611
Capital, Vol 1 (Harmondsworth, 1976), p.284
EPM, p.350
EPM, p.352-3
‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Early Writings, p.423
Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Early Writings, p.244
German Ideology in Marx and Engels, Collected Works (London, 1976), p.47-48
Capital, Vol 1, p.799
‘Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy’, Early Writings, p.265
‘On the Jewish Question’, Early Writings, p.240
EPM, p.353
EPM, p.361
Capital, Vol 1, p.173
C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 53
EPM, p.352
Marx's Big Mistake about Human Nature