Robert C. Tucker - The Marx-Engels Reader (Chapter 1.8: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ) lyrics

Economic and Philosophic Man*scripts of 1844 KARL MARX Soon after moving to Paris in November, 1843, Marx applied himself to the criticism of political economy-the new phase of his critical program foreshadowed in his two essays in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher. Between April and August of 1844 he produced the rough draft of what, judging by his preface, Was to have been a book. He did not finish it for publication, however, and it lay unpublished for more than eighty years. The surviving parts, comprising four man*scripts, were given the name shown above. An incomplete version in Russian translation was published in Moscow in 1927. The first full edition in German, prepared by D. Riazanov of the Marx•Engels Institute in Moscow, was published in Berlin in 1932, in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. The fundamentals of the Marxist interpretation of history are to be found in the 1844 man*scripts, including the notion of the proletarian revolution and future communism as the goal of the historical process. The theory is set forth, however, in terms of philosophical concepts drawn by Marx from Hegel and Feuerbach, most notably the concept of man's "self-alienation" or "self-estrangement." History, particularly under modern capitalism, is seen as a story of man's alienation in his life as producer, and communism is presented as the final transcendence of alienation via a revolution against private property. Because the 1844 man*scripts show us Marxism at the moment of its genesis in Marx's mind and because they help to clarify both the relation of Marxism to earlier German philosophy and its ethical significance, their publication has profoundly affected schoolarship on Marx and Marxism in our time. A part of the man*scripts consists largely of excerpts from writings of the political economists on such topics as wages of labor, profit of capital, and rent of land. The material reprinted here, comprising the extant portions in which Marx expounds his own position, consists of the preface and the sections entitled "Estranged Labour," "Private Property and Communism," "The Meaning of Human Requirements," "The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society," and "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole." A number of pa**ages in the man*scripts have been crossed out, apparently by Marx. There is no reason to think that the pa**ages crossed out had ceased to represent what Marx thought. He may well have been guided by editorial considerations in working over the draft of a man*script originally intended for publication.* Preface I have already given notice in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher of the critique of jurisprudence and political science in the form of a critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right. In the course of elaboration for publication, the intermingling of criticism directed only against speculation with criticism of the various subjects themselves proved utterly unsuitable, hampering the development of the argument and rendering comprehension difficult. Moreover the wealth and diversity of the subjects to be treated, could have been compressed into one work only in a purely aphoristic style; whilst an aphoristic presentation of this kind, for its part, would have given the impression of arbitrary systematizing. I shall therefore issue the critique of law, ethics, politics, etc., in a series of distinct, independent pamphlets, and at the end try in a special work to present them again as a connected whole showing the interrelationship of the separate parts, and finally, shall make a critique of the speculative elaboration of that material. For this reason it will be found that the interconnection between political economy and the state, law, ethics, civil life, etc., is touched on in the present work only to the extent to which political economy itself ex professo1 touches on these subjects. It is hardly necessary to a**ure the reader conversant with political economy that my results have been won by means of a wholly empirical an*lysis based on a conscientious critical study of political economy. [Whereas the uninformed reviewer who "tries to hide his complete ignorance and intellectual poverty by hurling the "utopian phrase" at the positive critic's head, or again such phrases as "pure, resolute, utterly critical criticism," the "not merely legal but social-utterly social-society," the "compact, ma**y ma**," the "oratorical orators of the ma**y ma**,"2 this reviewer has yet to fur" nish the first proof that besides his theological family-affairs he has anything to contribute to a discussion of worldly matters. It goes without saying that besides the French and English Socialists I have made use of German socialist works as well. The only original German works of substance in this science, however-other than Weitling's writings-are the essays by Hess published in Einundzwanzig Bogen,4 and Engels Umrisse ZlL einer Kritik der Nationalokonomie5 in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher where, likewise, I indicated in a very general way the basic elements of this work. [Besides being indebted to these authors who have given critical attention to political economy, positive criticism as a whole-and therefore also German positive criticism of political economy¬owes its true foundation to the discoveries of Feuerbach, against whose Philosophie der Zukunft6 and Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie7 in the Anecdotis,8 despite the tacit use that is made of them, the petty envy of some and the veritable wrath of others seem to have instigated a regular conspiracy of silence.] It is only with Feuerbach that positive, humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins. The less noise they make, the more certain, profound, widespread and enduring is the effect of Feuerbach's writings, the only writings since Hegel's Phanomenologie and Logik to contain a real theoretical revolution. In contrast to the critical theologians9 of our day, I have deemed the concluding chapter of the present work-the settling of accounts with Hegelian dialectic and Hegelian philosophy as a whole-to be absolutely necessary, a task not yet performed. This lack of thoroughness is not accidental, since even the critical theologian remains a theologian. Hence, either he had to start from certain presuppositions of. philosophy accepted as authoritative; or if in the process of criticism and as a result of other people's discoveries doubts about these philosophical presuppositions have arisen in him, he abandons them without vindication and in a cowardly fashion, abstracts from them showing his servile dependence on these presuppositions and his resentment at this dependence merely in a negative, unconscious and sophistical manner. [In this connection the critical theologian is either forever repeating a**urances about the purity of his own criticism, or tries to make it seem as though all that was left for criticism to deal with now was some other immature form of criticism outside itself-say eighteenth-century criticism-and the backwardness of the ma**es, in order to divert the observer's attention as well as his own from the necessary task of settling accounts between criticism and its point of origin-Hegelian dialectic and German philosophy as a whole-from this necessary raising of modern criticism above its own limitation and crudity. Eventually, however, whenever discoveries (such as Feuerbach's) are made about the nature of his own philosophic presuppositions, the critical theologian partly makes it appear as if he were the one who had accomplished this, producing that appearance by taking the results of these discoveries and, without being able to develop them, hurling them in the form of catch-phrases at writers still caught in the confines of philosophy; partly he even manages to acquire a sense of his own superiority to such discoveries by covertly a**erting in a veiled, malicious and sceptical fashion elements of the Hegelian dialectic which he still finds lacking in the criticism of that dialectic (which have not yet been critically served up to him for his use) against such criticism-not having tried to bring such elements into their proper relation or having been capable of doing so, a**erting, say, the category of mediating proof against the category of positive, selforiginating truth, etc., in a way peculiar to Hegelian dialectic. For to the theological critic it seems quite natural that everything has to be done by philosophy, so that he can chatter away about purity, resoluteness, and utterly critical criticism; and he fancies himself the true conqueror of philosophy whenever he happens to feel some "moment" in Hegel1 to be lacking in Feuerbach-for however much he practises the spiritual idolatry of "self-consciousness" and "mind" the theological critic does not get beyond feeling to consciousness.] 2 On close inspection theological criticism-genuinely progressive though it was at the inception of the movement-is seen in the final an*lysis to be nothing but the culmination and consequence of the old philosophical, and especially the Hegelian, transcendentalism, twisted into a theological caricature. This interesting example of the justice in history, which now a**igns to theology, ever philosophy's spot of infection, the further role of portraying in itself the negative dissolution of philosophy-i.e., the process of its decay-this historical nemesis I shall demonstrate on another occasion. [How far, on the other hand, Feuerbach's discoveries about the nature of philosophy required still, for their proof at least, a critical settling of accounts with philosophical dialectic will be seen from my exposition itself.] Estranged Labour3 We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labour, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land-likewise division of labour, competition, the concept of exchange-value, etc. On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumu¬lation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; that finally the distinction between capitalist and land-rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory-worker, disappears and that the whole of society must I fall apart into the two cla**es-the property-owners and the propertyless workers. Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property, but it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulae the material process through which private property actually pa**es, and these formulae it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws-i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy does not disclose the source of the division between labour and capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause; i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to evolve. Similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently fortuitous circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how, to it, exchange itself appears to be afortuitous fact. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are avarice and the war amongst the avaricious competition. Precisely because political economy does not grasp the connections within the movement, it was possible to counterpose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft-liberty to the doctrine of the corporation, the doctrine of the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate-for competition, craft-liberty and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only as fortuitous, premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, the corporation; and feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and natural consequences. Now, therefore, we have to grasp the essential connection between private property, avarice, and the separation of labour, capital and landed property; between exchange and competition, value and the devaluation of men, monopoly and competition, etc.; the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system. Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primor dial condition explains nothing. He merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. He a**umes in the form of fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce-namely, the necessary relationship between two things-between, for example, division of labour and exchange. Theology in the same way explains the origin of evil by the fall of man: that is, it a**umes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained. We proceed from an actual economic fact. The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity-and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally. This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces-labour's product-confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour's realization is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labour appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.4 So much does labour's realization appear as loss of reality that the worker loses reality to the point of starving to d**h. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labour itself becomes an object which he can get hold of only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the dominion of his product, capital. All these consequences are contained in the definition that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself-his inner world-becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the greater is the worker's lack of objects. Whatever the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien. Let us now look more closely at the objectification, at the production of the worker; and therein at the estrangement, the loss of the object, his product. The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is manifested, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces. But just as nature provides labor with the means of life in the sense that labour cannot live without objects on which to operate, on the other hand, it also provides the means of life in the more restricted sense-i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the worker himself. Thus the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life in the double respect: first, that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labour-to be his labour's means of life; and secondly, that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker. Thus in this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labour, i.e., in that he receives work; and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. Therefore, it enables him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second, as a physical subject. The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker. (The laws of political economy express the estrangement of the worker in his object thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the mightier labour becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labour becomes, the duller becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature's bondsman.) Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production. It is true that labour produces for the rich wonderful things-but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces-but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty-but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labour by machines-but some of the workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into machines. It produces intelligence-but for the worker idiocy, cretinism. The direct relationship of labour to its produce is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the man of means to the objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence of this first relationship-mid confirms it. We shall consider this other aspect later. When we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labour we are asking about the relationship of the worker to production. Till now we have been considering the estrangement, the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects, i.e., the worker's relationship to the products of his labour. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production¬within the producing activity itself. How would the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity of production. If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself. What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour? First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates independently of the individual-that is, operates on him as an alien, divine or diabolical activity-in the same way the worker's activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self. As a result. therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions-eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But in the abstraction which separates them from the sphere of all other human activity and turns them into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal. We have considered the act of estranging practical human activity, labour, in two of its aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object exercising power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature as an alien world antagonistically opposed to him. (2) The relation of labour to the act of production within the labour process. This relation is the relation of theworker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker's own physical and mental energy, his personal life or what is life other than activity-as an activity which is turned against him, neither depends on nor belongs to him. Here we have self-estrangement, as we had previously the estrangement of the thing. We have yet a third aspect of estranged labour to deduce from the two already considered. Man is a species being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object (his own as well as those of other things), but-and this is only another way of expressing it-but also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being. The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on inorganic nature; and the more universal man is compared with an animal, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, the air, light, etc., constitute a part of human consciousness in the realm of theory, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art-his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make it palatable and digestible-so too in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, or whatever it may be. The universality of man is in practice manifested precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body-both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life-activity. Nature is man's inorganic body-nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. Man lives on nature-means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life-activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It turns for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form. For in the first place labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need-the need to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species-its species character-is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man's species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life. The animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being. Or it is only because he is a species being that he is a Conscious Being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life-activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence. In creating an objective world by his practical activity, in working-up inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces. only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal's product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty. It is just in the working-up of the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself to be a species being. This production is his active species life. Through and because of this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of la bour is, therefore, the objectification of man's species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him. Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes man's species life a means to his physical existence. The consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by estrangement in such a way that the species life becomes for him a means. Estranged labour turns thus: (3) Man's species being, both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man's own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being. (4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life-activity, from his species being is the estrangement of man from man. If a man is confronted by himself, he is confronted by the other man. "What applies to a man's relation to his work, to the product of his labour and to himself, also holds of a man's relation to the other man, and to the other man's labour and object of labour. In fact, the proposition that man's species nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man's essential nature.5 The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man stands to himself, is first realized and expressed in the relationship in which a man stands to other men. Hence within the relationship of estranged labour each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the position in which he finds himself as a worker. We took our departure from a fact of political economy-the estrangement of the worker and his production. We have formulated the concept of this fact-estranged, alienated labour. We have an*lysed this concept-hence an*lysing merely a fact of political economy. Let us now see, further, how in real life the concept of estranged, alienated labour must express and present itself. If the product of labour is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong? If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien, a coerced activity, to whom, then, does it belong? To a being other than me. Who is this being? The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labour. No more was nature. And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labour and the more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the produce in favour of these powers. The alien being, to whom labour and the produce of labour belongs, in whose service labour is done and for whose benefit the produce of labour is provided, can only be man himself. If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker's activity is a torment to him, to another it must be delight and his life's joy. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man. We must bear in mind the above-stated proposition that man's relation to himself only becomes objective and real for him through his relation to the other man. Thus, if the product of his labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If his own activity is to him an unfree activity, then he is treating it as activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion and the yoke of another man. Every self-estrangement of man from himself and from nature appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from himself. For this reason religious self-estrangement necessarily appears in the relationship of the layman to the priest, or again to a mediator, etc., since we are here dealing with the intellectual world. In the real practical world self-estrangement can only become manifest through 'the real practical relationship to other men. The medium through which estrangement takes place is itself practical. Thus through estranged labour man not only engenders his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers that are alien and hostile to him; he also engenders the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as he begets his own production as the, loss of his reality, as his punishment; just as he begets his own product as a loss, as a product not belonging to him; so he begets the dominion of the one who does not produce over production and over the product. Just as he estranges from himself his own activity, so he confers to the stranger activity which is not his own. Till now we have only considered this relationship from the standpoint of the worker and later we shall be considering it also from the standpoint of the non-worker. Through estranged, alienated labour, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labour of a man alien to labour and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labour engenders the relation to it of the capitalist, or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour. Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself. Private property thus results by an*lysis from the concept of alienated labour-i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged life, of. estranged man. True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) from political economy. But on an*lysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labour, it is really its consequence, just as the gods in the beginning are not the cause but the effect of man's intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal. Only at the very culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, re-emerge, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and that secondly it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realization of this alienation. This exposition immediately sheds light on various hitherto unsolved conflicts. (1) Political economy starts from labour as the real soul of production; yet to labour it gives nothing, and to private property everything. From this contradiction Proudhon has concluded in favour of labour and against private property. We understand, however, that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of estranged labour with itself, and that political economy has merely formulated the laws of estranged labour. We also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are identical: where the product, the object of labour pays for labour itself, the wage is but a necessary consequence of labour's estrangement, for after all in the wage of labour, labour does not appear as an end in itself but as the servant of the wage. We shall develop this point later, and meanwhile will only deduce some conclusions. A forcing-up of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that the higher wages, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not conquer either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity. Indeed, even the equality of wages demanded by Proudhon only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour into the relationship of all men to labour. Society is then conceived as an abstract capitalist. Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one aspect must therefore mean the downfall of the other. (2) From the relationship of estranged labour to private property it further follows that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone was at stake but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation-and it contains this, because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and every relation of servitude is but a modification and consequence of this relation. Just as we have found the concept of private property from the concept of estranged, alienated labour by an*lysis, in the same way every category of political economy can be evolved with the help of these two factors; and we shall find again in each category, e.g., trade, competition, capital, money, only a definite and developed expression of the first foundations. Before considering this configuration, however, let us try to solve two problems. (1) To define the general nature of private property, as it has arisen as a result of estranged labour, in its relation to truly human, social property. (2) We have accepted the estrangement of labour, its alienation, as a fact, and we have an*lysed this fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development? We have already gone a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the question as to the origin of private property into the question as to the relation of alienated labour to the course of humanity's development. For when one speaks of private property, one thinks of being concerned with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly concerned with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution. As to (1): The general nature of private property and its relation to truly human property. Alienated labour has resolved itself for us into two elements which mutually condition one another, or which are but different expressions of one and the same relationship. Appropriation appears as estrangement, as alienation; and alienation appears as appropriation, estrangement as true enfranchisement. We have considered the one side-alienated labour in relation to the worker himself, i.e., the relation of alienated labour to itself. The property-relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labour we have found as the product, the necessary outcome of this relation of alienated labour. Private property, as the material, summary expression of alienated labour, embraces both relations-the relation of the worker to work, to the product of his labour and to the non-worker, and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product of his labor. Having seen that in relation to the worker who appropriates nature by means of his labour, this appropriation appears as estrangement, his own spontaneous activity as activity for another and as activity of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, production of the object as loss of the object to an alien power, to an alien person-we shall now consider the relation to the worker, to labour and its object of this person who is alien to labour and the worker. First it has to be noticed, that everything which appears in the worker as an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears in the non-wor ker as a state of alienation, of estrangement. Secondly, that the worker's real, practical attitude in production and to the product (as a state of mind ) appears in the non-worker confronting him as a theoretical attitude. Thirdly, the non-worker does everything against the worker which the worker does against himself; but he does not do against himself what he does against the worker. Let us look more closely at these three relations.6 Private Property and Communism Re. p. XXXIX. The antithesis of propertylessness and property so long as it is not comprehended as the antithesis of labour and capital, still remains an antithesis of indifference, not grasped in its active connection, its internal relation-an antithesis not yet grasped as a contradiction. It can find expression in this first form even without the advanced development of private property ( as in ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.). It does not yet appear as having been established by private property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction-hence a dynamic relationship moving inexorably to its resolution. Re. the same page. The transcendence of self-estrangement follows the same course as self-estrangement. Private property is first considered only in its objective aspect-but nevertheless with labour as its essence. Its form of existence is therefore capital, which is to be annulled "as such" (Proudhon). Or a particular form of labour-labour levelled down, parcelled, and therefore unfree-is conceived as the source of private property's perniciousness and of its existence in estrangement from men; for instance, Fourier, who, like the physiocrats, also conceived agricultural labour to be at least the exemplary type, whilst Saint-Simon declares in contrast that industrial labour as such is the essence, and now also aspires to the exclusive rule of the industrialists and the improvement of the workers condition. Finally, communism is the positive expression of annulled private property-at first as universal private property. By embracing this relation as a whole, communism is: (1) In its first form only a generalization and consummation of this relationship. It shows itself as such in a two fold form: on the one hand, the dominion of material property bulks so large that it wants to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by all as private property. It wants to abstract by force from talent, etc. For it the sole purpose of life and existence is direct, physical possession. The category of labourer is not done away with, but extended to all men. The relationship of private property persists as the relationship of the community to the world of things. Finally, this movement of counter posing universal private property to private property finds expression in the bestial form of counter posing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the community of women, in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property. It may be said that this idea of the community of women gives away the secret of this as yet completely crude and thoughtless communism. Just as the woman pa**es from marriage to general prostitution,7 so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man's objective substance) pa**es from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community. In negating the personality of man in every sphere, this type of communism is really nothing but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which avarice re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way. The thoughts of every piece of private property-inherent in each piece as such-are at least turned against all wealthier private property in the form of envy and the urge to reduce to a common level, so that this envy and urge even constitute the essence of competition. The crude communism is only the consummation of this envy and of this levelling-down proceeding from the preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited standard. How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and undemanding man who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even attained to it. The community is only a community of labour, and an equality of wages paid out by the communal capital-the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined- universality-labour as a state in which every person is put, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community. In the approach to woman as the spoil and handmaid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural procreative relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural relationship of the s**es man's relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature-his own natural function. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature has to him become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man's whole level of development. It follows from the character of this relationship how much man as a species being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man's natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence-the extent to which his human nature has come to be nature to him. In this relationship is revealed, too, the extent to which man's need has hecome a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need-the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being. The first positive annulment of private property-crude communism-is thus merely one form in which the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community, comes to the surface. (2) Communism (a) of a political nature still-democratic or despotic; (b) with the annulment of the state, yet still incomplete, and being still affected by private property (i.e., by the estrangement of man). In both forms communism already knows itself to be re-integration or return of man to himself, the transcendence of human self-estrangement; but since it has not yet grasped the positive essence of private property, and just as little the human nature of need, it remains captive to it and infected by it. It has, indeed, grasped its concept, but not its essence. (3) Communism as the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being-a return become conscious, and accomplished within the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully-developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully-developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man-the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. The entire movement of history is, therefore, both its actual act of genesis (the birth act of its empirical existence) and also for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its coming-to-be. That other, still immature communism, meanwhile, seeks an historical proof for itself-a proof in the realm of the existent-amongst disconnected historical phenomena opposed to private property, tearing single phases from the historical process and focussing attention on them as proofs of its historical pedigree (a horse ridden hard especially by Cabet, Villegardelle, etc.). By so doing it simply makes clear that by far the greater part of this proc¬ess contradicts its claims, and that, if it has once been, precisely its being in the past refutes its pretension to being essential. That the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property-in that of the economy, to be precise-is easy to see. This material, immediately sensuous private property is the material sensuous expression of estranged human life. Its movement production and consumption-is the sensuous revelation of the movement of all production hitherto-i.e., the realization or the reality of man. Religion, family, state, law, morality, 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 this human, i.e., social made of existence. Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man's inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces bath aspects. It is evident that the initial stage of the movement amongst the various peoples depends an whether the true and for them authentic life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world-is mare ideal or real. Communism begins from the outset (Owen) with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, it is still mostly an abstraction. The philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only philosophical, abstract, philanthropy, and that of communism is at once real and directly bent an action. We have seen haw an the premise of positively annulled private property man produces man-himself and the other man; haw the object, being the direct embodiment of his individuality, is simultaneously his awn existence far the other man, the existence of the other man, and that existence far him. Likewise, however, bath the material of labour and man as the subject, are the paint 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 whale movement: just as society itself produces man as man, So is society produced by him. Activity and consumption, bath in their content and in their mode of existence, are social: social activity and social consumption; the human essence of nature first exists only far social man; for only here does nature exist far him as a bond with man-as his existence for the other and the other's existence for him-as the life-element of the human world; only here does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence. Only here has what is to him his natural existence became his human existence, and nature became man for him. Thus society is the consummated oneness in substance of man and nature-the true resurrection of nature-the naturalism of man and the humanism of nature bath brought to fulfilment. Social activity and social consumption exist by no means only in the farm of same directly communal activity and directly communal consumption, although communal activity and communal consumption-i.e., activity and consumption which are manifested and directly confirmed in real a**ociation with other men-will occur wherever such a direct expression of sociality stems from the true character of the activity's content and is adequate to the nature of consumption. But again when I am active scientifically, etc.,-when I am engaged in activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others-then I am social, because I am active as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own, existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being. My general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of that of which the living shape is the real community, the social fabric, although at the present day general consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such antagonistically confronts it. Consequently, too, the activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is my theoretical existence as a social being. What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of "Society" as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being. His life, even if it may not appear in the direct form of a communal life carried out together with others-is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man's individual and species life are not different, however much-and this is inevitable-the mode of existence of the individual is a more particular, or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life. In his consciousness of species man confirms his real social life and simply repeats his real existence in thought, just as conversely the being of the species confirms itself in species-consciousness and is for itself in its generality as a thinking being. Man, much as he may therefore be a particular individual (and it is precisely his particularity which makes him an individual, and a real individual social being) , is just as much the totality-the ideal totality-the subjective existence of thought and experienced society present for itself; just as he exists also in the real world as the awareness and the real enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of human life-activity. Thinking and being are thus no doubt distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each other. d**h seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the definite individual and to contradict their unity. But the determinate individual is only a determinate species being, and as such mortal. (4) Just as private property is only the sensuous expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the a**ertion of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realization is his loss of reality, is an alien reality: conversely, the positive transcendence of private property-i.e., the sensuous appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements-is not to be conceived merely in the sense of direct, one-sided gratification-merely in the sense of possessing, of having. Man appropriates his total essence in a total manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world-seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, being aware, sensing, wanting, acting, loving-in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, are in their objective orientation or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of that object, the appropriation of the human world; their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human world;8 it is human efficaciousness and human suffering, for suffering, apprehended humanly, is an enjoyment of self in man. Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it-when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc.,-in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realizations of possession as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property-labour and conversion into capital. In place of all these physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses-the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world. ( On the category of "having," see Hess in the Twenty-One Sheets. ) The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object-an object emanating from man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man,9and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost their egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use. In the same way, the senses and enjoyments of other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social organs develop in the form of society; thus, for instance, activity in direct a**ociation with others, etc., has become an organ for expressing my own life, and a mode of appropriating human life. It is obvious that the human eye gratifies itself in a way different from the crude, non•human eye; the human ear different from the crude ear, etc. To recapitulate; man is not lost in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is possible only when the object becomes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for him in this object. On the one hand, therefore, it is only when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man's essential powers1-human reality, and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers-that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects which confirm and realize his individuality, become his objects: that is, man himself becomes the object. The manner in which they become his depends on the nature of the objects and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to it; for it is precisely the determinateness of this relationship which shapes the particular, real mode of affirmation. To the eye an object comes to be other than it is to the ear, and the object of the eye is another object than the object of the ear. The peculiarity of each essential power is precisely its peculiar essence, and therefore also the peculiar mode of its objectification, of its objectively actual living being. Thus man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses. On the other hand, looking at this in its subjective aspect: just as music alone awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear-is no object for it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers and can therefore only be so for me as my essential power is present for itself as a subjective capacity, because the sense of an object for me goes only so far as my senses go (has only sense for a sense corresponding to that object) -for this reason the senses of the social man are other senses than those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man's essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form-in short, senses capable of human gratifications, senses confirming themselves as essential powers of man ) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses-the practical senses (will, love, etc. )-in a word, human sense-the humanness of the senses-comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanized nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present. The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract being as food; •it could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding-activity differs from that of animals. The care-burdened man in need has no sense for the finest play; the dealer in minerals sees only the mercantile value but not the beauty and the unique nature of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the human essence both in its theoretical and practical aspects is required to make man's sense human, as well as to create the human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance. Just as resulting from the movement of private property, of its wealth as well as its poverty-or of its material and spiritual wealth and poverty-the budding society finds to hand all the material for this development: so established society produces man in this entire richness of his being-produces the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses-as its enduring reality. It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence, as such antitheses in the social condition; it will be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible way, by virtue of the practical energy of men . Their resolution is therefore by no means merely, a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one. It will be seen how the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man's essential powers, the exposure to the senses of human psychology. Hitherto this was not conceived in its inseparable connection with man's essential being, but only in an external relation of utility, because, moving in the realm of estrangement, people could only think man's general mode of being-religion or history in its abstract general character as politics, art, literature, etc.,-to be the realityof man's essential powers and man's species-activity. We have before us the objectified essential powers of man in the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects, in the form of estrangement, displayed in ordinary material industry (which can be conceived as a part of that general movement, just as that movement can be conceived as a particular part of industry, since all human activity hitherto has been labour-that is, industry-activity estranged from itself). A psychology for which this, the part of history most contemporary and accessible to sense, remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine, comprehensive and real science. What indeed are we to think of a science which airily abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel its own incompleteness, while such a wealth of human endeavour unfolded before it means nothing more to it than, perhaps, what can be expressed in one word-"need, " "vulgar need"? The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and have accumulated a constantly growing ma** of material. Philosophy, however, has remained just as alien to them as they remain to philosophy. Their momentary unity was only a chimerical illusion. The will was there, but the means were lacking. Even historiography pays regard to natural science only occasionally, as a factor of enlightenment and utility arising from individual great discoveries. But natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, however directly and much it had to consummate dehumanization. Industry is the actual, historical relation of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man's essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man. In consequence, natural science will lose its abstractly material-or rather, its idealistictendency, and will become the basis of human science, as it has already become the basis of actual human life, albeit in an estranged form. One basis for life and another basis for science is a priori a lie. The nature which comes to be in human history-the genesis of human society-is man's real nature; hence nature as it comes to be through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature. Sense-perception ( see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when it proceeds from sense-perception in the twofold form both of sensuous consciousness and of sensuous need-that is, only when science proceeds from nature-is it true science. All history is the preparation for "man" to become the object of sensuous consciousness, and for the needs of "man as man" to become [natural, sensuous] needs. History itself is a real part of natural history-of nature's coming to be man. Natural science will in time subsume under itself the science of man, just as the science of man will subsume under itself natural science: there will be one science. Man is the immediate object of natural science: for immediate, sensuous nature for man is, immediately, human sensuousness (the expressions are identical ) -presented immediately in the form of the other man sensuously present for him. For his own sensuousness first exists as human sensuousness for himself through the other man. But nature is the immediate object of the science of man: the first object of man-man-is nature, sensuousness; and the particular human sensuous essential powers can only find their self-knowledge in the science of the natural world in general, since they can find their objective realization in natural objects only. The element of thought itself-the element of thought's living expression-language-is of a sensuous nature. The social reality of nature, and human natural science, or the natural science about man, are identical terms. It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy come the rich human being and rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human life activities-the man in whom his own realization exists as an inner necessity, as need. Not only wealth, but likewise the poverty of man-given socialism-receives in equal measure a human and therefore social significance. Poverty is the pa**ive bond which causes the human being to experience the need of the- greatest wealth-the other human being. The dominion of the objective being in me, the sensuous outburst of my essential activity, is emotion, which thus becomes here the activity of my being. (5) A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if owe him not only the sustenance of my life, but if he has, moreover, created my life-if he is the source of my life; and if it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside it. The Creation is therefore an idea very difficult to dislodge from popular consciousness. The self¬mediated being of nature and of man is incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts everything palpable in practical life. The creation of the earth has received a mighty blow from geogen -i.e., from the science which presents the formation of the earth, the coming-to-be of the earth, as a process, as self-generation. Generatio aequivoca2 is the only practical refutation of the theory of creation. Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said. You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings-a species-act of human beings-has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically, man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect-the infinite progression which leads you further to enquire: "Who begot my father? Who his grandfather?", etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progression, by which man repeats himself in procreation, thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progression which drives me even further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is a perverse one. Ask yourself whether that progression as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don't think, don't ask me, for as soon as you think and. ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egoist that you postulate everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to be? You can reply: I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature. I ask you about its genesis, just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, etc. But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through human labour, nothing but the coming-to-be of nature for man, he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his process of coming-to-be. Since the real existence of man and nature has become practical, sensuous and perceptible-since man has become for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man-the question about an alien being , about a being above nature and man-a question which implies the admission of the inessentiality of nature and of man-has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this inessentiality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the practically and theoretically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man's positive self-consciousness no longer mediated through the annulment of religion, just as real life is man's positive reality, no longer mediated through the annulment of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and recovery. Communism is the necessary pattern and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development-the structure of human society. The Meaning of Human Requirements We have seen what significance, given socialism, the wealth of human needs has, and what significance, therefore, both a new mode of production and a new object of production have: a new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature.3 Under private property their significance is reversed: every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to a fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new depend¬ence and to seduce him into a new mode of gratification 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 accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potency of mutual swindling and mutual plundering. Man becomes ever poorer as man; his need for money becomes ever greater if he wants to overpower hostile being; and the power of his money declines exactly 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 modern 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 attribute: just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to something merely quantitative. Excess and intemperance come to be its true norm. Subjectively, this is even partly manifested in that the extension of products and needs falls into contriving and ever¬calculating subservience to inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites.Private property does not know how to change crudeneed 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 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 pennies-in order to charm the golden birds out of the pockets of his Christianly beloved neighbours. 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 gluepot. 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 conditio 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.) And partly, this estrangement manifests itself in that it produces refinement of needs and of their means on the one hand, and a bestial barbarization, a complete, unrefined, abstract simplicity of need, on the other; or rather in that it merely resurrects itself in its opposite. Even the need for fresh air ceases for the worker. Man returns to living in a cave, which is now, however, contaminated with the mephitic breath of plague given off by civilization, and which he continues to occupy only precariously, it being for him a n alien habitation which can be withdrawn from him any day-a place from which, if he does not pay, he can be thrown out any day. For this mortuary he has to pay. A dwelling in the light, which Prometheus in Aeschylus designated as one of the greatest boons, by means of which he made the savage into a human being, ceases to exist for the worker. Light, air, etc.-the simplest animal cleanliness-ceases to be a need for man. Dirt-this stagnation and putrefaction of man-the sewage of civilization (speaking quite literally) -comes to be the element of life for him. Utter, unnatural neglect, putrefied nature, comes to be his life-element. None of his senses exist any longer, and not only in his human fashion, but in an inhuman fashion, and therefore not even in an animal fashion. The crudest modes (and instruments) of human labour are coming back: the tread mill of the Roman slaves, for instance, is the means of production, the means of existence, of many English workers. It is not only that man has no human needs-even his animal needs are ceasing to exist. The Irishman no longer knows any need now but the need to eat, and indeed only the need to eat potatoes-and scabby potatoes at that, the worst kind of potatoes. But in each of their industrial towns England and France have already a little Ireland. The savage and the animal have at least the need to hunt, to roam, etc.-the need of companionship. Machine labour is simplified in order to make a worker out of the human being still in the making, the completely immature human being, the child-whilst the worker has become a neglected child. The machine accommodates itself to the weakess of the human being in order to make the weak human being into a machine. How the multiplication of needs and of the means of their satisfaction breeds the absence of needs and of means is demonstrated by the political economist (and the capitalist: it should be noted that it is always empirical business men we are talking about when we refer to political economists-their scientific confession and mode of being). This he shows: (1) By reducing the worker's need to the barest and most miserable level of physical subsistence, and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement. Hence, he says: Man has no other need either of activity or of enjoyment. For he calls even this life human life and existence. (2) By counting the lowest possible level of life (existence) as the standard, indeed as the general standard-general because it is applicable to the ma** of men. He changes the worker into an insensible being lacking all needs, just as he changes his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. To him, therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need-be it in the realm of pa**ive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity-seems to him a luxury. Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of denial, of want, of thrift, of saving-and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made an abject art in which to clothe this its pet idea: they have presented it, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy-despite its worldly and wanton appearance-is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-denial, the denial of life and of all human needs, is its cardinal doctrine. The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance, hall, the public¬house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power -all this it can appropriate for you-it can buy all this for you: it is the true endowment. Yet being all this, it is inclined to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant. And when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All pa**ions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have [enough]. Of course a controversy now arises in the field of political economy. The one side (Lauderdale, Malthus, etc.) recommends luxury and execrates thrift. The other (Say, Ricardo, etc.) recommends thrift and execrates luxury. But the former admits that it wants luxury in order to produce labour (i.e., absolute thrift); and the latter admits that it recommends thrift in order to produce wealth (i.e., luxury). The Lauderdale-Malthus school has the romantic notion that avarice alone ought not to determine the consumption of the rich, and it contradicts its own laws in advancing extravagance as a direct means of enrichment. Against it, therefore, the other side very earnestly and circumstantially proves that I do not increase but reduce my possessions by being extravagant. The Say¬Ricardo school, however, is hypocritical in not admitting that it is precisely whim and caprice which determine production. It forgets the "refined needs"; it forgets that there would be no production without consumption; it forgets that as a result of competition production can only become more extensive and luxurious. It forgets that it is use that determines a thing's value, and that fashion determines use. It wishes to see only "useful things" produced, but it forgets that production of too many useful things produces too large a useless population. Both sides forget that extravagance and thrift, luxury and privation, wealth and poverty are equal. And you must not only stint the immediate ",ratification of your senses, as by stinting yourself of food, etc.: you must also spare yourself all sharing of general interest, all sympathy, all trust, etc.; if you want to be economical, if you do not want to be ruined by illusions. You must make everything that is yours saleable, i.e., useful. If I ask the political economist: Do I obey economic laws if I extract money by offering my body for sale, by surrendering it to another's lust? (The factory workers in France call the prostitution of their wives and daughters the xth working hour, which is literally correct. ) -Or am I not acting in keeping with political economy if I sell my friend to the Moroccans? ( And the direct sale of men in the form of a trade in conscripts, etc., takes place in all civilized countries.) -Then the political economist replies to me: You do not transgress my laws; but see what Cousin Ethics and Cousin Religion have to say about it. My political economic ethics and religion have nothing to reproach you with, but- But whom am I now to believe, political economy or ethics? The ethics of political economy is acquisition, work, thrift, sobriety-but political economy promises to satisfy my needs. The political economy of ethics is the opulence of a good conscience, of virtue, etc.; but how can I live virtuously if I do not live? And how can I have a good conscience if I am not conscious of anything? It stems from the very nature of estrangement that each sphere applies to me a different and opposite yard¬stick-ethics one and political economy another; for each is a specific estrangement of man and focuses attention on a particular round of estranged essential activity, and each stands in an estranged relation to the other. Thus M. Michel Chevalier reproaches Ricardo with having abstracted from ethics. But Ricardo is allowing political economy to speak its own language, and if it does not speak ethically, this is not Ricardo's fault. M. Chevalier abstracts from political economy in so far as he moralizes, but he really and necessarily abstracts from ethics in so far as he practises political economy. The reference of political economy to ethics, if it is other than an arbitrary, contingent and therefore unfounded and unscientific reference, if it is not being put up as a sham but is meant to be essential, can only be the reference of the laws of polit¬ical economy to ethics. If there is no such connection, or if the contrary is rather the case, can Ricardo help it? Besides, the opposition between political economy and ethics is only a sham opposition and just as much no opposition as it is an opposition. All that happens is that political economy expresses moral laws in its own way. Needlessness as the principle of political economy is most brilliantly shown in its theory of population. There are too many people. Even the existence of men is a pure luxury; and if the worker is "ethical," he will be sparing in procreation. ( Mill suggests public acclaim for those who prove themselves continent in their s**ual relations, and public rebuke for those who sin against such barrenness of marriage.... Is not this the ethics, the teaching of asceticism?) The production of people appears in the form of public misery. The meaning which production has in relation to the rich is seen revealed in the meaning which it has for the poor. At the top themanifestation is always refined, veiled, ambiguous-a sham; lower, it is rough, straightforward, frank-the real thing. The worker's crude need is a far greater source of gain than the refined need of the rich. The cellar-dwellings in London bring more to those who let them than do the palaces; that is to say, with reference to the landlord they constitute greater wealth, and thus (to speak the language of political economy) greater social wealth. Industry speculates on the refinement of needs, but it speculates just as much on their crudeness, but on their artificially produced crudeness, whose true enjoyment, therefore, is self-stupefaction¬this seeming satisfaction of need-this civilization contained within the crude barbarism of need; the English gin-shops are therefore the symbolical embodiments of private property. Their luxury reveals the true relation of industrial luxury and wealth to man. They are therefore rightly the only Sunday pleasures of the people, dealt with at least mildly by the English police. We have already seen how the political economist establishes the unity of labour and capital in a variety of ways:- (1) Capital is accumulated labour. (2) The purpose of capital within production -partly, reproduction of capital with profit, partly, capital as raw material ( material of labour) , and partly, as itself a working instrument (the machine is capital directly equated with labour)-is productive labour. (3) The worker is a capital. (4) Wages belong to costs of capital. (5) In relation to the worker, labour is the reprod¬uction of his life-capital. (6) In relation to the capitalist, labour is an aspect of his capital's activity. Finally, (7) the political economist postulates the original unity of capital and labour in the form of the unity of the capitalist and the worker; this is the original state of paradise. The way in which these two aspects in the form of two persons leap at each other's throats is for the political economist a contingent event, and hence only to be explained by reference to external factors. (See Mill.) 4 The nations which are still dazzled by the sensuous splendour of precious metals, and are therefore still fetish-worshippers of metal money, are -not yet fully developed money-nations.-Contrast of France and England. The extent to which the solution of theoreti¬cal riddles is the task of practice and effected through practice, just as true practice is the condition of a real and positive theory, is shown, for example, in fetishism. The sensuous consciousness of the fetish-worshipper is different from that of the Greek, because his sensuous existence is still different. The abstract enmity between sense and spirit is necessary so long as the human feeling for nature, the human sense of nature, and therefore also the natural sense of man, are not yet produced by man's own labour. Equality is nothing but a translation of the German "Ich=Ich" into the French, i.e., political form. Equality as the groundwork of communism is its political justification, and it is the same as when the German justifies it by conceiving man as universal self-consciousness. Naturally, the transcendence of the estrangement always proceeds from that form of the estrangement which is the dominant power: in Germany, self-consciousness; in France, equality, because politics; in England, real, material, practical need taking only itself as its standard. It is from this standpoint that Proudhon is to be criticized and appreciated. If we characterize communism itself because of its character as negation of the negation, as the appropriation of the human essence which mediates itself with itself through the negation of private property-as being not yet the true, self-originating position but rather a position originating from private property, [ ... ]5 Since in that case8 the real estrangement of the life of man remains, and remains all the more, the more one is conscious of it as such, it may be accomplished solely by putting communism into operation. In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will come to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very severe and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have gained beforehand a consciousness of the limited character as well as of the goal of this historical movement-and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it. When communist workmen a**ociate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this a**ociation, they acquire a new need-the need for society -and what appears as a means becomes an end. You can observe this practical process in its most splendid results whenever you see French socialist workers together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring together. Company, a**ociation, and conversation, which again has society as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies . When political economy claims that demand and supply always balance each other, it immediately forgets that according to its own claim ( theory of population ) the supply of people always exceeds the demand, and that, therefore, in the essential result of the whole production process-the existence of man-the disparity between demand and supply gets its most striking expression. The extent to which money, which appears as a means, constitutes true power and the sale end-the extent to which in general that means which gives me substance, which gives me possession of the objective substance of others, is an end in itself-can be clearly seen from the facts that landed property wherever land is the source of life, and horse and sword wherever these are the true means of life, are also acknowledged as the true political powers in life. In the middle ages a social cla** is emancipated as soon as it is allowed to carry the sword. Amongst nomadic peoples it is the horse which makes me a free man and a participant in the life of the community. We have said above that man is regressing to the cave dwelling etc.-but that he is regressing to it in an estranged, malignant form. The savage in his cave-a natural element which freely offers itself for his use and protection-feels himself no more a stranger, or rather feels himself to be just as much at home as a fish in water. But the cellar-dwelling of the poor man is a hostile dwelling, "an alien, restraining power which only gives itself up to him in so far as he gives up to it his blood and sweat"-a dwelling which he cannot look upon as his own home where he might at last exclaim, " Here I am at home," but where instead he finds himself in someone else's house, in the house of a stranger who daily lies in wait for him and throws him out if he does not pay his rent. Similarly, he is also aware of the contrast in quality between his dwelling and a human dwelling-a residence in that other world, the heaven of wealth. Estrangement is manifested not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that my desire is the inaccessible possession of another, but also in the fact that everything is in itself something different from itself-that my activity is something else and that, finally ( and this applies also to the capitalist ) , all is under the sway of inhuman power. There is a form of inactive, extravagant wealth given over wholly to pleasure, the enjoyer of which on the one hand behaves as a mere ephemeral individual frantically spending himself to no purpose knows the slave-labour of others (human sweat and blood) as the prey of his cupidity, and therefore knows man himself, and hence also his own self, as a sacrificed and empty being. With such wealth the contempt of man makes its appearance, partly as arrogance and as the throwing-away of what can give sustenance to a hundred human lives, and partly as the infamous illusion that his own unbridled extravagance and ceaseless, unproductive consumption is the condition of the other's labour and therefore of his subsistence. He knows the realization of the essential powers of man only as the realization of his own excesses, his whims and capricious, bizarre notions. This wealth which, on the other hand, again knows wealth as a mere means, as something that is good for nothing but to be annihilated and which is therefore at once slave and master, at once generous and mean, capricious, preumptuous, conceited, refined, cultured and witty-this wealth has not yet experienced wealth as an utterly alien power over itself: it sees in it, rather, only its own power, and not wealth but gratification [is its]7final aim and end. * * * Society, as it appears to the political economist, is civil society, in which every individual is a totality of needs and only exists for the other person, as the other exists for him, in so far as each becomes a means for the other. The political economist reduces everything ( just as does politics in its Rights of Man) to man, i.e., to the individual whom he strips of all determinateness so as to cla** him as capitalist or worker. The division of labour is the expression in political economy of the social character of labour within the estrangement. Or, since labour is only an expression of human activity within alienation, of the living of life as the alienating of life, the division of labour, too, is therefore nothing else but the estranged, alienated positing of human activity as a real activity of the species or as activity of man as a species being. As for the essence of the division of labour-and of course the division of labour had to be conceived as a major driving force in the production of wealth as soon as labour was recognized as the essence of private property-i.e., about the estranged and alienated form of human activity as an activity of the species-the political economists are very unclear and self-contradictory about it. * * * The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society If man's feelings, pa**ions, etc., are not merely anthropological phenomena in the [narrower] 8 sense, but truly ontological affirmations o-f essential being ( of nature ) , and if they are only really affirmed because their object exists for them as an object of sense, then it is clear: (1) That they have by no means merely one mode of affirmation, but rather that the distinctive character of their existence, of their life, is constituted by the distinctive mode of their affirmation. In what manner the object exists for them, is the characteristic mode of their gratification. (2) Whenever the sensuous affirmation is the direct annulment of the object in its independent form (as in eating, drinking, working up of the object, etc. ), this is the affirmation of the object. (3) In so far as man, and hence also his feeling, etc., are human, the affirmation of the object by another is likewise his own enjoyment. (4) Only through developed industry-i.e., through the medium of private property-does the ontological essence cif human pa**ion come to be both in its totality and in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a product of man's establishment of himself by practical activity. (5) The meaning of private property-liberated from its estrangement-is the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of enjoyment and as objects of activity. By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It therefore functions as the almighty being. Money is the pimp between man's need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person. "What, man! confound it, hands and feet And head and backside, all are yours ! And what we take while life is sweet, Is that to be declared not ours? Six stallions, say, I can afford, Is not their strength my property? I tear along, a sporting lord, As if their legs belonged to me." ( Mephistopheles, in Faust) 9 Shakespeare in Timon of Athens: " Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! . . . Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant. ... Why, this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides, Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads: This yellow slave Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed; Make the hoar l eprosy adored, place thieves And give them title, knee and approbation With senators on the bench: This is it That makes the wappen'd widow wed again; She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices To the April day again....Damned earth, Thou common who*e of mankind, that putt'st odds Among the rout of nations."1 And also later : "O thou sweet king-k**er, and dear divorce Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler Of Hymen's purest bed! thou valiant Mars! Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer, Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow That lies on Dian's lap! Thou visible God! That solder'st close impossibilities, And mak'st them kiss! That speak'st with every tongue, To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts! Think thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue Set them into confounding odds, that beasts May have the world in empire!"2 Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money. To understand him, let us begin, first of all, by expounding the pa**age from Goethe. That which is for me through the medium of money-that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy ) -that am I, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money's properties a re my properties and essential powers-the properties and powers of its possessor. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness-its deterrent power-is nullified by money. I, in my character as an, individual, am lame, but money furnishes me with twentyfour feet . Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and therefore so is its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am stupid, but money is the real mind of all things and how then should its possessor be stupid? Besides, he can buy talented people for himself, and is he who has power over the talented not more talented than the talented? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money therefore transform all my incapacities into their contrary? If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of divorce? It is the true agent of divorce as well as the true binding agent-the [universal]3galvano-chemical power of Society. Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money: (1) It is the visible divinity-the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and overturning of things : it makes brothers of impossibilities. (2) It is the common who*e, the common pimp of people and nations. The overturning and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternization of impossibilities-the divine power of money-lies in its character as men's estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind. That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not-turns it, that is, into its contrary. If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or willed existence into their sensuous, actual existence-from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, money is the truly creative power. No doubt demand also exists for him who has no money, but his demand is a mere thing of the imagination without effect or existence for me, for a third party, for the others, and which therefore remains for me unreal and objectless. The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need, my pa**ion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between the imagined which exists merely within me and the imagined as it is for me outside me as a real object. If I have no money for travel, I have no need-that is, no real and self-realizing need-to travel. If I have the vocation for studybut no money for it, I have no vocation for study-that is, no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for study but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it. Being the external, common medium and faculty for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image (a faculty not springing from man as man or from human society as society), money transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are m erely abstract conceits and therefore imperfections-into tormenting chimeras-just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras-essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual-into real powers and faculties. In the light of this characteristic alone, money is thus the general overturning of individualities which turns them into their contrary and adds contradictory attributes to their attributes . Money, then, appears as this overturning power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be essences in themselves . It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into l ove, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence and intelligence into idiocy. Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanges all things, it is the general confounding and compounding of all things-the world upside-dawn-the confounding and compounding of all natural and human qualities. He who can buy bravery is brave, though a coward. As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fraternization of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace. Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically¬cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you m ust be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return-that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent-a misfortune. Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole (6) This is perhaps the place at which, by way of explaining and justifying the ideas here presented, we might offer some considerations in regard to the Hegelian dialectic generally and especially its exposition in the Phenomenology and Logic, and also, lastly, the relation to it of the modern critical movement. So powerful was modern German criticism's preoccupation with the past-so completely was it possessed in its development by its subject-matter-that there prevailed a completely uncritical attitude to the method of criticizing, together with a complete lack of awareness about the seemingly formal, but really vital question: how do we now stand as regards the Hegelian dialectic? This lack of awareness about the relationship of modern criticism to the Hegelian philosophy as a whole and especially to the Hegelian dialectic has been so great that critics like Strauss and Bruno Bauer still remain wholly within the confines of the Hegelian Logic; the former completely so and the latter at least implicitly so in his Synoptics4 (where, in opposition to Strauss, he replaces the substance of "abstract nature" by the "self-consciousness" of abstract man) and even in Christianity Discovered.5 Thus in Christianity Discovered, for example, you get: "As though in positing the world, self-consciousness posits that which is different from itself, and in what it posits it posits itself, because it in turn annuls the difference between what it has posited and itself, inasmuch as it itself has being only in the positing and the movement.-How then can it not have its pur- pose in this movement?" etc.; or again: "They" ( the French mate- rialists ) "have not yet been able to see that it is only as the movement of self-consciousness that the movement of the uni- verse has actually come to be for itself, and achieved unity with itself." Such expressions do not even show any verbal divergence from the HegelIan approach, but on the contrary, repeat it word for word . How little consciousness there was in relation to the Hegelian dialectic dunng the act of criticism ( Bauer, The Synoptics), and how little little this consciousness came into being even after the act of material criticism is proved by Bauer when, in his The Good of Freedom,6 he dismisses the brash question put by Herr Gruppe¬ ''What about logic now?"-by referring him to future critics. But even now-now that Feuerbach both in his Theses in the Anecdotis and, in detail, in The Philosophy of the Future, has in principle overthrown the old dialectic and philosophy; now that that school of criticism, on the other hand, which was incapable of accomplishing this has all the same seen it accomplished and has proclaimed itself pure, resolute, absolute criticism-criticism that has come into the clear with itself; now that this criticism, in its spiritual pride, has reduced the whole process of history to the relation between the rest of the world and itself ( the rest of the world, in contrast to itself, falling under the category of "the ma**es" ) and dissolved all dogmatic antithesis into the single dogmatic antithesis of its own cleverness and the stupidity of the world-the antithesis of the critical Christ and Mankind, the rabble; now that daily and hourly it has demonstrated its own excellence against the dullness of the'ma**es; now, finally, that it has proclaimed the critical Last Judgement in the shape of an announcement that the day is approaching when the whole of expiring humanity will a**emble before it and be sorted by it into groups, each particular mob receiving its testimonium paupertatis;7 now that it has made known in print8 its superiority to human feelings as well as its superiority to the world, over which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, only letting -fall from time to time from its sarcastic lips the ringing laughter of the Olympian Gods-even now, after all these delightful antics of moribund idealism in the guise of criticism (i.e., of Young-Hegelianism)-even now it has not expressed the suspicion that the time was ripe for a critical settling of accounts with the mother of Young-Hegelianism-the Hegelian dialectic-and even h ad [nothing] to say about its critical attitude towards the Feuerbachian dialectic. Criticism with a completely uncritical attitude to itself! Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity With which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the reverse. Feuerbach's great achievement is: (1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thoughts and thinking expounded, and that it has therefore likewise to be condemned as another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man; (2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, since Feuerbach also makes the social relationship "of man to man" the basic principle of the theory; ( 3) His opposing to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively grounded on itself. Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies starting out from the positive, from sense-certainty) as follows: Hegel sets out from the estrangement of Substance ( in Logic, from the Infinite, the abstractly universal ) -from the absolute and fixed abstraction; which means, put popularly, that he sets out from religion and theology. Secondly, he annuls the infinite, and establishes the actual, sensuous, real, finite, particular (philosophy-annulment of religion and theology). Thirdly, he again annuls the positive and restores the abstraction, the infinite-restoration of religion and theology. Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself-as the philosophy which affirms theology ( the transcendent, etc. ) after having denied it, and which it therefore affirms in opposition to itself. The position or self-affirmation and self-confirmation contained in the negation of the negation is taken to be a position which is not yet sure of itself, which is therefore burdened with its opposite, which is doubtful of itself and therefore in need of proof, and which, therefore, is not a position establishing itself by its existence-not a position that justifies itself; hence it is directly and immediately confronted by the self-grounded position of sense-certanity.9 But because Hegel has conceived the negation of the negation from the point of view of the positive relation inherent in it as the true and only positive, and from the point of view of the negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and self-realizing act of all being, he has only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history; and this historical process is not yet the real history of man-of man as a given subject, but only man's act of genesis-the story of man's origin: We shall explain both the abstract form of this process , and the difference between this process as it is in Hegel in contrast to modern criticism, that is, in contrast to the same process in Feuerbach's Wesen des Christentums (Essence of Christianity), or rather the critical form of this in Hegel still uncritical process. Let us take a look at the Hegelian system. One must begin with Hegel's Phenomenology, the true point of origin and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy. PHENOMENOLOGY1 A. Self-Consciousness I. Consciousness. (a) Certainty at the level of sense experience; or the "This" and Meaning. (b) Perception, or the Thing with Its Properties, and Deception. (c) Force and Understanding, Appearance and the Super-sensible World. II . Self-Consciousness. The Truth of Certainty of Self. (a) Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness; Lordship and Bondage. (b) Freedom of Self•Consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, the Unhappy Consciousness. III. Reason. Reason's Certainty and Reason's Truth. (a) Observation as a Process of Reason. Observation of Nature and of Self-Consciousness. (b) Realization of Rational Self Consciousness through its own Activity. Pleasure and Necessity. The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit. Virtue and the Course of the World. (c)The Individuality Which is Real In and For Itself. The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and the Deception, or the Real Fact. Reason as Lawgiver. Reason Which Tests Laws. B. Mind I. True Mind; the Ethical Order. II. Mind in Self-Estrangement-Culture. III. Mind Certain of Itself, Morality. C. Religion Natural Religion; Religion in the Form of Art; Revealed Religion. D. Absolute Knowledge Hegel's Encyclopaedia,2 beginning as it does with Logic, with pure speculative thought, and ending with Absolute Knowledge-with the self-conscious, self-comprehending, philosophic or absolute (i.e., superhuman) abstract mind-is in its entirety nothing but the display, the self-objectification, of the essence of the philosophic mind, and the philosophic mind is nothing but the estranged mind of the world thinking within its self-estrangement-i.e., comprehending itself abstractly. Logic ( mind's coin of the realm, the speculative or thought-value of man and nature-their essence grown totally indifferent to all real determinateness, and hence their unreal essence) is alienated thinking, and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and from real man: abstract thinking. Then: The externality of this abstract thinking… nature, as it is for this abstract thinking. Nature is external to it-its self-loss; and it apprehends nature also in an external fashion, as abstract thinking-but as alienated abstract thinking. Finally, Mind, this thinking returning home to its own point of origin-the thinking which, as the anthropological, phenomenological, psychological, ethical, artistic and religious mind, is not valid for itself, until ultimately it finds itself, and relates itself to itself, as absolute knowledge in the hence absolute, i.e., abstract mind, and so receives its conscious embodiment in a mode of being corresponding to it. For its real mode of being is abstraction. There is a double error in Hegel. The first emerges most clearly in the Phenomenology, the Hegelian philosophy's place of origin. When, for instance, wealth, state-power, etc., are understood by Hegel as entities estranged from the human being, this only happens in their form as thoughts . . . They are thought-entities, and therefore merely an estrangement of pure, i.e., abstract, philosophical thinking. The whole process therefore ends with Absolute Knowledge. It is precisely abstract thought from which these objects are estranged and which they confront with their arrogation of reality. The philosopher sets up himself (that is, one who is himself an abstract form of estranged man) as the measuring-rod of the estranged world. The whole history of the alienation-process and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e., absolute) thought-of logical, speculative thought. The estrangement, which therefore forms the real interest of this alienation and of the transcendence of this alienation, is the opposition of in itself and for itself, of consciousness and self-consciousness, of object and subject-that is to say, .it is the opposition, within thought itself, between abstract thinking and sensuous reality or real sensuousness. All other oppositions and movements of these oppositions are but the semblance, the cloak, the exoteric shape of these oppositions which alone matter, and which constitute the meaning of these other, profane oppositions. It is not the fact that the human being objectifies himself inhumanly,in opposition to himself, but the fact that he objectifies himself in distinction from and in opposition to abstract thinking, that is the posited essence of the estrangement and the thing to be superseded. The appropriation of man's essential powers, which have become objects-indeed, alien objects-is thus in the first place only an appropriation occurring in consciousness, in pure thought-i.e., in abstraction: it is the appropriation of these objects as thoughts and as movements of thought. Consequently, despite its thoroughly negative and critical appearance and despite the criticism really contained in it, which often anticipates far later development, there is already latent in the Phenomenology as a germ, a potentiality, a secret, the uncritical positivism and the equally uncritical idealism of Hegel's later works-that philosophic dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world. In the second place: the vindication of the objective world for man-for example, the realization that sensuous consciousness is not an abstractly sensuous consciousness but a humanly sensuous consciousness-that religion, wealth, etc., are but the estranged world of human objectification, of man's essential powers given over to work and that they are therefore but the path to the true human world-this appropriation or the insight into this process consequently appears in Hegel in this form, that sense, religion, state-power, etc., are spiritual entities; for only mind is the true essence of man, and the true form of mind is thinking mind, the logical, speculative mind. The humanness of nature and of the nature begotten by history-the humanness of man's products-appears in the form that they are products of abstract mind and as such, therefore, phases of mind-thought entities. The Phenomenology is, therefore, an occult critique-still to itself obscure and mystifying criticism; but inasmuch as it keeps steadily in view man's estrangement, even though man appears only in the shape of mind, there lie concealed in it all the elements of criticism, already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint. The "Unhappy Consciousness," the "Honest Consciousness," the struggle of the "Noble and Base Consciousness," etc.,-these separate sections contain, but still in .an estranged form, the critical elements of whole spheres such as religion, the state, civil life, etc. Just as entities, objects, appear as thought-entities, so the subject is always consciousness or self-consciousness; or rather the object appears only as abstract consciousness, man only as self-consciousness: the distinct forms of estrangement which make their appearance are, therefore, only various forms of consciousness and self-consciousness. Just as in itself abstract consciousness ( the form in which the object is conceived) is merely a moment of distinction of self-consciousness, what appears as the result of the movement is the identity of self¬consciousness with consciousness-absolute knowledge-the movement of abstract thought no longer directed outwards but going on now oniy within its own self: that is to say, the dialectic of pure thought is the result. The outstanding thing in Hegel's Phenomenology and its final outcome-that is, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle-is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-genesis of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man-true, because real man-as the outcome of man's own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species being, or his manifestation as a real species being ( i.e., as a human being ) , is only possible by his really bringing out of himself all the powers that are his as the species man-something which in turn is only possible through the totality of man's actions, as the result of history-is only possible by man's treating these generic powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement. We shall now demonstrate in detail Hegel's one-sidedness and limitations as they are displayed in the final chapter of the Phenomenology, "Absolute Knowledge"-a chapter which contains the concentrated spirit of the Phenomenology, the relationship of the Phenomenology to speculative dialectic, and also Hegel's consciousness concerning both and their relationship to one another. Let us provisionally say just this much in advance: Hegel's standpoint is that of modern political economy. He grasps labour as the essence of man-as man's essence in the act of proving itself: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is man's coming to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man. The only labour which Hegel knows and recognizes is abstractly mental labour. Therefore, that which constitutes the essence of philosophy-the alienation of man in his knowing of himself, or alienated science thinking itself-Hegel grasps as its essence; and he is therefore able vis-à-vis preceding philosophy to gather together its separate elements and phases, and to present his philosophy as the philosophy. What the other philosophers did¬that they grasped separate phases of nature and of human life as phases of self-consciousness, and indeed of abstract self-consciousness-is known to Hegel as the doings of philosophy. Hence his science is absolute. Let us now turn to our subject. Absolute Knowledge. The last chapter of the "Phenomenology." The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness-self-consciousness as object. ( Positing of man=self-consciousness.) The issue, therefore, is to surmount the ,object of consciousness. Objectivity as such is regarded as an estranged human relationship which does not correspond to the essence of man, to self¬consciousness. The re-appropriation of the objective essence of man, begotten in the form of estrangement as something alien, has the meaning therefore not only to annul estrangement, but objectivity as well. Man, that is to say, is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being. The movement of surmounting the object of consciousness is now described by Hegel in the following way: The object reveals itself not merely as returning into the self-for Hegel that is the one-sided way of apprehending this movement, the grasping of only one side. Man is posited as equivalent to self. The self, however, is only the abstractly conceived man-man begotten by abstraction. Man is egotistic. His eye, his ear, etc., are egotistic. In him every one of his essential powers has the quality of selfhood. But it is quite false to say an that account "Self-consciousness has eyes, ears, essential powers." Self-consciousness is rather a quality of human nature, of the human eye, etc.; it is not human nature that is a quality of self-consciousness. The self-abstracted and fixed for itself is man as abstract egoist-egoism raised in its pure abstraction to the level of thought. (We shall return to this point later.) For Hegel the essence of man-man-equals self-consciousness. All estrangement of the human essence is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness. The estrangement of self¬consciousness is not regarded as an expression of the real estrangement of the human being-its expression reflected in the realm of knowledge and thought. Instead, the real estrangement-that which appears real-is from its innermost, hidden nature (a nature only brought to light by philosophy) nothing but the manifestation of the estrangement of the real essence of man, of self¬consciousness. The science which comprehends this is therefore called Phenomenology. All re-appropriation of the estranged objective essence appears, therefore, as a process of incorporation into self-consciousness : The man who takes hold of his essential being is merely the self-consciousness which takes hold of objective essences. Return of the object into the self is therefore the re-appropriation of the object. The surmounting of the object of consciousness, comprehensively expressed, means: 4 (1) That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something vanishing. (2) That it is the alienation of self¬consciousness which establishes thinghood. (3) That this externalization5 of self-consciousness has not merely a negative but a positive significance. (4) That it has this meaning not merely for us or intrinsically, but for self-consciousness itself. (5) For self-consciousness, the negative of the object, its annulling of itself, has positive significance-self-consciousness knows this nullity of the object-because self-consciousness itself alienates itself; for in this alienation it establishes itself as object, or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for-self, establishes the object as itself. (6) On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process, that self-consciousness has also just as much annulled and superseded this alienation and objectivity and resumed them into itself, being thus at home with itself in its other-being as such (7) This is the movement of consciousness and in this movement consciousness is the totality of its moments. (8) Consciousness must similarly have taken up a relation to the object in all its aspects and phases, and have comprehended it from the point of view of each of them. This totality of its determinate characteristics makes the object intrinsically a spiritual being; and it becomes so in truth for consciousness through the apprehending of each single one of them as self or through what was called above the spiritual attitude to them. As to (1): That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something vanishing-this is the above-mentioned return of the object into the self. As to (2): The alienation of self-consciousness establishes thinghood. Because man equals self-consciousness, his alienated, objective essence, or thinghood, equals alienated self-consciousness, and thinghood is thus established through this alienation (thing hood being that which is an object for man and an object for him is really only that which is to him an essential object, therefore his objective essence. And since it is not real Man, nor therefore Nature-Man being human Nature-who as such is made the subject, but only the abstraction of man-self-consciousness-thinghood cannot be anything but alienated self-conciousness ). It is only to be expected that a living, natural being equipped and endowed with objective (i.e., material) essential powers should have real natural objects of his essence; as is the fact that his self-alienation should lead to the establishing of a real, objective world-but a world in the form of externality-a world, therefore, not belonging to his own essential being, and an over¬powering world. There is nothing incomprehensible or mysterious in this. It would be mysterious, rather, if it were otherwise. But it is equally clear that a self-consciousness can only establish thinghoodthrough its alienation-i.e., establish something which itself is only an abstract thing, a thing of abstraction and not a real thing. It is clear, further, that thinghood is therefore utterly without any independence, any essentiality vis-à-vis self-consciousness; that on the contrary, it is a mere creature-something posited by self-consciousness. And what is posited, instead of confirming itself, is but a confirmation of the act of positing in which is concentrated for a moment the energy of the act as its product, seeming to give the deposit-but only for a moment-the character of an independent, real substance.1 Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, establishes his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalization, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers whose action, therefore, must also be something obfective. A being who is objective acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He creates or establishes only objects, because he is established by objects-because at bottom he is nature. In the act of establishing, therefore, this objective being does not fall from his state of "pure activity" into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, establishing his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being. Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism distinguishes itself both from idealism and materialism, constituting at the same time the unifying truth of both. We see also how only naturalism is capable of comprehending the act of world history. Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand furnished with natural powers of life-he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities-as impulses. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his impulses exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects of his need-essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous, objects as the objects of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing. Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant-an indispensable object to it, confirming its life-just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun's objective essential power. A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for some third being has no being for its object; i.e., it is not objectively related. Its being is not objective. 1 An unobjective being is a nullity-an un-being. Suppose a being which is neither an object itself, nor has an object. Such a being, in the first place, would be the unique being: there would exist no being outside it-it would-exist solitary and alone. For as soon as there are objects outside me, as soon as I am not alone, I am another-another reality than the object outside me. For this third object I am thus an other reality than it; that is, I am its object. Thus, to suppose a being which is not the object of another being is to presuppose that no objective being exists. As soon as I have an object, this object has me for an object. But a non-objective being is an unreal, nonsensical thing-something merely thought of (merely imagined, that is)-a creature of abstraction. To be sensuous, that is, to be an object of sense, to be a sensuous object, and thus to have sensuous objects outside one¬self-objects of one's sensuousness. To be sensuous is to suffer.8 Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being-and because he feels what he suffers, a pa**ionate being. Pa**ion is the essential force of man energetically bent on its object. But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species being, and has to confirm and manifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing. Therefore, human objects are not natural objects as they immediately present themselves, and neither is human sense as it immediately is-as it is objectively¬human sensibility, human objectivity. Neither nature objectively nor nature subjectively is directly given in a form adequate to the human being. And as everything natural has to have its beginning, man too has his act of coming-to-be-history-which, however, is for him a known history, and hence as an act of coming-to-be it is a conscious self-transcending act of coming-to-be. History is the true natural history of man (on which more later) . Thirdly, because this establishing of thinghood is itself only sham, an act contradicting the nature of pure activity, it has to be cancelled again and thinghood denied. Re. 3, 4, 5 and 6. (3) This externalization of consciousness has not merely a negative but a positive significance, and (4) it has this meaning not merely for us or intrinsically, but for consciousness itself.9 (5) For consciousness the negative of the object, its annulling of itself, has positive significance-consciousness knows this nullity of the object because it alienates itself; for in this alienoation it knows itself as object, or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for•itself, the object as itself. (6) On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process, that consciousness has also just as much annulled and superseded this alienation and objectivity and resumed them into itself, being thus at home with itself in its other-being as such. As we have already seen: the appropriation of what is estranged and objective, or the annulling of objectivity in the form of estrangement ( which has to advance from indifferent foreignness to real, antagonistic estrangement) means equally or even primarily for Hegel that it is objectivity which is to be annulled, because it is not the determinate character of the object, but rather its objective character that is offensive and constitutes estrangement for self-consciousness. The object is therefore something negative, self¬annulling nullity. This nullity of the object has not only a negative but a positive meaning for consciousness, for such a nullity of the object is precisely the self•confirmation of the non• objectivity, of the abstraction of itself. For consciousness itself this nullity of the object has a positive meaning because it knows this nullity, the objective being, as its self-alienation; because it knows that it exists only as a result of its own self-alienation.... The way in which consciousness is, and in which something is for it, is knowing. Knowing is its sale act. Something therefore comes to be for consciousness in so far as the latter knows this something. Knowing is its sale objective relation. Consciousness; then, knows the nullity of the object (i.e., knows the non-existence of the distinction between the object and itself, the non-existence of the object for it) because it knows the object as its self alienation; that is, it knows itself-knows knowing as the object-because the object is only the semblance of an object, a piece of mystification, which in its essence, however, is nothing else but knowing itself, which has confronted itself with itself and in so doing has confronted itself with a nullity-a something which has no objectivity outside the knowing. Or: knowing knows that in relating itself to an object it is only outside itself-that it only externalizes itself; that it itself appears to itself only as an object-or that that which appears to it as an object is only it itself. On the other hand, says Hegel, there is at the same time this other moment in this process, that consciousness has just as much annulled and superseded this externalization and objectivity and resumed them into itself, being thus at home in its other-being as such. In this discussion are brought together all the illusions of speculation. First of all: consciousness-self-consciousness-is at home with itself in its other-being as such. It is therefore-or if we here abstract from the Hegelian abstraction and put the self-consciousness of man instead of Self-consciousness-it is at home with itself in its other-being, as such. This implies, for one thing, that consciousness (knowing as knowing, thinking as thinking) pretends to be directly the other of itself-to be the world of sense, the real world, life-thought over-reaching itself in thought (Feuerbach).1 This aspect is contained herein, inasmuch as consciousness as mere consciousness takes offence not at estranged objectivity, but at objectivity as such. Secondly, this implies that self-conscious man, in so far as he has recognized and annulled and superseded the spiritual world (or his world's spiritual, general mode of being) as self-alienation, nevertheless again confirms this in its alienated shape and pa**es it off as his true mode of being-re-establishes it, and pretends to be at home in his other-being as such. Thus, for instance, after annulling and superseding religion, after recognizing religion to be a product of self-alienation, he yet finds confirmation of himself in religion as religion. Here is the root of Hegel's false positivism, or of his merely apparent criticism: this is what Feuerbach designated as the positing, negating and re-establishing of religion or theology-but it has to be grasped in more general terms. Thus reason is at home in unreason as unreason. The man who has recognized that he is leading an alienated life in politics, law, etc., is leading his true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation, in contradiction with itself-in contradiction both with the knowledge of and with the essential being of the object-is thus true knowledge and life. There can therefore no longer be any question about an act of accommodation on Hegel's part vis-à-visreligion, the state, etc.,since this lie is the lie of his principle. If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness, but my alienated self-consciousness confirmed in it. I therefore know my own self, the self-consciousness that belongs to its very nature, confirmed not in religion but rather in annihilated and superseded religion. In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of the true essence, effected precisely through negation of the pseudo-essence. With him the negation of the negation is the confirmation of the pseudo-essence, or of the self-estranged essence in its denial; or it is the denial of this pseudo-essence as an objective being dwelling outside man and independent of him, and its transformation into the subject. A peculiar role, therefore, is played by the act of superseding in which denial and preservation-denial and affirmation-are bound together. Thus, for example, in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Private Right superseded equals Morality, Morality superseded equals the Family, the Family superseded equals Civil Society, Civil Society superseded equals the State, the State superseded equals World History. In the actual world private right, morality, the family, civil society, the state, etc., remain in existence, only they have become moments of man-state of his existence and being-which have no validity in isolation, but dissolve and engender one another, etc. They have become moments of motion. In their actual existence this mobile nature of theirs is hidden. It first appears and is made manifest in thought, in philosophy. Hence my true religious existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion; my true political existence is my existence within the philosophy of right; my true natural existence, existence in the philosophy of nature; my true artistic existence, existence in the philosophy of art; my true human existence, my existence in philosophy. Likewise the true existence of religion, the state, nature, art is, the philosophy of religion, of nature, of the state and of art. If, however, the philosophy of religion, etc., is for me the sole true existence of religion, then, too, it is only as a philosopher of religion that I am truly religious, and so I deny real religious sentiment and the really religious man. But at the same time I a**ert them, in part within my own existence or within the alien existence which I oppose to them-for this is only their philosophic expression-and in part I a**ert them in their own original shape, for they have validity for me as merely the apparent other-being, as allegories, forms of their own true existence ( i.e., of my philosophical existence) hidden under sensuous disguises. In just the same way, Quality superseded equals Quantity, Quantity superseded equals Measure, Measure superseded equalsEssence, Essence superseded equals Appearance, Appearance superseded equals Actuality, Actuality superseded equals the Concept, the Concept superseded equals Objectivity, Objectivity superseded equals the Absolute Idea, the Absolute Idea superseded equals Nature, Nature superseded equals Ethical Objective Mind, Ethical Mind superseded equals Art, Art superseded equals Religion, Religion superseded equals Absolute Knowledge.2 On the one hand, this act of superseding is a transcending of the thought entity; th us, Private Property as a thought is transcended in the thought of morality. And because thought imagines itself to be directly the other of itself, to be sensuous reality-and therefore takes its own action for sensuous, real action-this superseding in thought, which leaves its object standing in the real world, believes that it has really overcome it. On the other hand, because the object has now become for it a moment of thought, thought takes it in its reality too to be self-confirmation of itself-of self• consciousness, of abstraction. From the one point of view the existent which Hegel supersedes in philosophy is therefore not real religion, the real state, or real nature, but religion itself already become an object of knowledge, i.c., Dogmatics; the same with Jurisprudence, Political Science and Natural Science. From the one point of view, therefore, he stands in opposition both to the real thing and to immediate, unphilosophic science or the unphilosophic conceptions of this thing. He therefore contradicts their conventional conceptions.3 On the other hand, the religious man, etc., can find in Hegel his final confirmation. It is now time to lay hold of the positive aspects of the Hegelian dialectic within the realm of estrangement. (a) Annulling as an objective movement of retracting the alienation into self. This is the insight, expressed within the• estrangement, concerning the appropriation of the objective essence through the annulment of its estrangement; it is the estranged insight into the real objectification of man, into the real appropriation of his objective essence through the annihilation of the estranged character of the objective world, through the annulment of the objective world in its estranged mode of being-just as atheism, being the annulment of God, is the advent of theoretic humanism, and communism, as the annulment of private property, is the justification of real human life as man's possession and thus the advent of practical humanism (or just as atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the annulment of religion, whilst communism is humanism mediated with itself through the annulment of private property). Only through the annulment of this mediation-which is itself, however, a necessary premise-does positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being. But atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction; they are not a losing of the objective world begotten by man-of man's essential powers given over to the realm of objectivity; they are not a returning in poverty to unnatural, primitive simplicity. On the contrary, they are but the first real coming-to-be, the realization become real for man, of man's essence-of the essence of man as something real. Thus, by grasping the positive meaning of self-referred negation (if even again in estranged fashion) Hegel grasps man's self¬estrangement, the alienation of man's essence, man's loss of objectivity and his loss of realness as finding of self, change of his nature, his objectification and realization. In short, within the sphere of abstraction, Hegel conceives labour as man's act of self¬genesis-conceives man's relation to himself as an alien being and the manifesting of himself as an alien being to be the coming-to-be of species-consciousness and species-life. (b) However, apart from, or rather in consequence of, the perverseness already described, this act appears in Hegel: First of all as a merely formal, because abstract, act, because the human essence itself is taken to be only an abstract, thinking essence, conceived merely as. self-consciousness. And, secondly, because the conception is formal and abstract, the annulment of the alienation becomes a confirmation of the alienation; or again, for Hegel this movement of self-genesis and self¬objectification in the form of self-alienation and self-estrangement is the absolute, and hence final, expression of human life-of life with itself as its aim, of life at rest in itself, of life that has attained oneness with its essence. This movement, in its abstract form as dialectic, is therefore regarded as truly human life, and because it is nevertheless an abstraction-an estrangement of human life-it is regarded as a divine process, but as the divine process of man, a process traversed by man's abstract, pure, absolute essence that is distinct from him. Thirdly, this process must have a bearer, a subject. But the subject first emerges as a result. This result-the subject knowing itself as absolute self-consciousness-is therefore God-absolute Spirit-the self-knowing and self-manifesting Idea. Real man and real nature become mere predicates-symbols of this esoteric, unreal man and of this unreal nature. Subject and predicate are therefore related to each other in absolute inversion-a mystical subject¬object or a subjectivity reaching beyond the object-the absolute subject as a process, as subject alienating itself and returning from alienation into itself, but at the same time retracting this alienationinto itself, and the subject as this process; a pure, restless revolving within itself. First, the formal and abstract conception of man's act of self¬genesis or self-objectification. Hegel having posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness, the estranged object-the estranged essential reality of man-is nothing but consciousness, the thought of estrangement merely¬estrangement's abstract and therefore empty and unreal expression, negation. The annulment of the alienation is therefore likewise nothing but an abstract, empty annulment of that empty abstraction-the negation of the negation. The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativity-an abstraction which is again fixed as such and thought of as an independent activity-as sheer activity. Because this so-called negativity is nothing but the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content can in consequence be merely a formal content begotten by abstraction from all content. As a result there are general, abstract forms of abstraction pertaining to every content and on that account indifferent to, and, consequently, valid for, all content-the thought-forms or logical categories torn from real mind and from real nature. (We shall unfold the logical content of absolute negativity further on.) Hegel's positive achievement here, in his speculative logic, is that the determinate concepts, the universal fixed thought-forms in their independence vis-à-vis nature and mind are a necessary result of the general estrangement of the human essence and therefore also of human thought, and that Hegel has there-fore brought these together and presented them as moments of the abstraction¬process. For example, superseded Being is Essence, superseded Essence is Concept, the Concept superseded is ... the Absolute Idea. But what, then, is the Absolute Idea? It supersedes its own self again, if it does not want to traverse once more from the beginning the whole act of abstraction, and to acquiesce in being a totality of abstractions or in being the self-comprehending abstraction. But abstraction comprehending itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing: it must abandon itself-abandon abstraction-and so it arrives at an entity which is its exact contrary -at nature. Thus, the entire Logic is the demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that the Absolute Idea is nothing in itself; that only Nature is something. The absolute idea, the abstract idea, which "considered with regard to its unity with itself is intuiting,"4 ( Hegel's Encyclopaedia, 3rd edition, p. 222 ) , and which "in its own absolute truth resolves to let the moment of its particularity or of initial characterization and other-being-the immediate idea, as its reflection, go forth freely from itself as nature" (l.c.)-this whole idea which behaves in such a strange and singular way, and which has given the Hegelians such terrible headaches, is from beginning to end nothing else but abstraction ( i.e., the abstract thinker)¬abstraction which, made wise by experience and enlightened concerning its truth, resolves under various (false and themselves still abstract) conditions to abandon itself and to replace its self¬absorption, nothingness, generality and indeterminateness by its other-being, the particular, and the determinate; resolves to let nature, which it held hidden in itself only as an abstraction, as a thought-entity, go forth freely from itself: that is to say, abstraction resolves to forsake abstraction and to have a look at nature free of abstraction. The abstract idea, which without mediation becomes intuiting, is nothing else through-and-through but abstract thinking that gives itself up and resolves on intuition. This entire transition from Logic to Natural Philosophy is nothing else but the transition-so difficult to effect for the abstract thinker and therefore so queer in his description of it-from abstracting to intuiting. The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher forward from abstract thinking to intuiting is boredom-the longing for a content. ( The man estranged from himself is also the thinker estranged from his essence-that is, from the natural and human essence. His thoughts are therefore fixed mental shapes or ghosts dwelling outside nature and man. Hegel has locked up all these fixed mental forms together in his Logic, laying hold of each of them first as negation-that is, as an alienation of human thought-and then as negation of the negation-that is, as a superseding of this alienation, as a real expression of human thought. But as even this still takes place within the confines of the estrangement, this negation of the negation is in part the restoring of these fixed forms in their estrangement; in part a stopping-short at the last act-the act of self-reference in alienation-as the true mode of being of these fixed mental forms;5 and in part, to the extent that this abstraction apprehends itself and experiences an infinite weariness with itself, there makes its appearance in Hegel, in the formof the resolution to recognize nature as the essential being and to go over to intuition, the abandonment of abstract thought-the abandonment of thought revolving solely within the orbit of thought, of thought devoid of eyes, of teeth, of ears, of everything.) But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself-nature fixed in isolation from man-is nothing for man. It goes without saying that the abstract thinker who has committed himself to intuiting, intuits nature abstractly. Just as nature lay enclosed in the thinker in the form of the absolute idea, in the form of a thought-entity-in a shape which is his and yet is esoteric and mysterious even to him-so what he has let go forth from himself in truth is only this abstract nature, only nature as a thought-entity-but with the significance now of being the other-being of thought, of being real, intuited nature-of being nature distinguished from abstract thought. Or, to talk a human language, the abstract thinker learns in his intuition of nature that the entities which he thought to create from nothing, from pure abstraction-the entities he believed he was producing in the divine dialectic as pure products of the labour of thought forever weaving in itself and never looking outward-are nothing else but abstractions from characteristics of nature. To him, therefore, the whole of nature merely repeats the logical abstractions in a sensuous, external form . He an*lyses it and these abstractions over again. Thus, his intuition of nature is only the act of confirming his abstraction from the intuition of nature-is only the conscious repetition by him of the process of begetting his abstraction. Thus, for example, Time equals Negativity referred to itself (l.c., p. 238): to the superseded Becoming as Being there corresponds, in natural form, superseded Movement as Matter. Light is Reflection-in-Itself, in natural form. Body as Moon and Comet is the natural form of the antithesis which according to the Logic is on the one side the Positive resting on itself and on the other side the Negative resting on itself. The Earth is the natural form of the logical Ground, as the negative unity of the anti thesis, etc. Nature as nature-that is to say, in so far as it is still sensuously distinguished from that secret sense hidden within it-nature isolated, distinguished from these abstractions, is nothing-a nothing proving itself to be nothing-is devoid of sense, or has only the sense of being an externality which has to be annulled. &nb "In the finite-teleological position is to be found the correct premise that nature does not contain within itself the absolute purpose" (p. 225 ) Its purpose is the confirmation of abstraction. "Nature has shown itself to be the Idea in the form of other-being. Since the Idea is in this form the negative of itself or external to itself, nature is not just relatively external vis-à-vis this idea, but externality constitutes the form in which it exists as nature" (p. 227 ) . Externality here is not to be understood as the self-externalizing world of sense open to the light, open to the man endowed with senses. It is to be taken here in the sense of alienation-a mistake, a defect, which ought not to be. For what is true is still the Idea. Nature is only the form of the Idea's other-being. And since abstract thought is the essence, that which is external to it is by its essence something merely external. The abstract thinker recognizes at the same time that sensuousness-externality in contrast to thought weaving within itself-is the essence of nature. But he expresses his contrast in such a way as to make this externality of nature, its contrast to thought, its defect, so that inasmuch as it is distinguished from abstraction, nature is something defective. Something which is defective not merely for me or in my eyes but in itself-intrinsically-has something outside itself which it lacks. That is, its being is something other than it itself. Nature has therefore to supersede itself for the abstract thinker, for it is already posited by him as a potentially superseded being. "For us, Mind has nature, for its premise, being nature's truth and for that reason its absolute prius. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has resulted as the Idea arrived at being for-itself , the object of which, as well as the subject, is the con- cept. This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has become identical with itself. But it is this identity, therefore, in being a return out of nature" (p. 392 ). "As the abstract idea, revelation is unmediated transition to, the coming-to-be of, nature; as the revelation of the mind, which is free, it is the establishing of nature as the mind's world-an establishing which at the same time, being reflection, is a presupposing of the world as independently-existing nature. Revelation in conception is the creation of nature as the mind's being, in which the mind procures the affirmation and the truth of its freedom."7 "The absolute is mind. This is the highest definition of the absolute." Footnotes: * The cross-outs are indicated by pointed brackets in the complete text of the 1844 man*scripts as published in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (Marx and Engels: 1843-44) London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), pp. 249-346. I am indebted to Thomas Ferguson for bringing the crossed-out material to my attention. 1.Particularly. 2. Marx refers here to the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, who had published in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung two long reviews dealing with books, articles and pamphlets on the Jewish question. Most of the quoted phrases are taken from these reviews in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, vol. 1, December, 1843; vol. 4, March, 1844. The expressions "utopian phrase" and "compact ma**" can be found in Bauer's article "Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?" published in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, vol. 8, July, 1844. Allgemeine Literatuf-Zeitung (General Literary Gazette), a German monthly, was published by Bauer in Charlottenburg from December, 1843, to October, 1844. 3. Pa**ages enclosed in brackets were crossed out by Marx in his man*script. 4. The full title of this collection of articles is Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Twenty-One Sheets from Switzerland), Erster Teil, Ziirich and Winterthur, 1843. 5. Engels' "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy." 6. Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsatze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future), Zurich and Winterthur, 1843. 7. Ludwig Feuerbach, Vorliiufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie (Preliminary Theses on the Reformation of Philosophy) published in Anek­dota, vol. II. 8. Marx's abbreviation for Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik (Unpublished Materials Related to Modern German Philosophy and Writing), a two-volume collection published by Arnold Ruge in 'Switzerland. It included Marx's Notes on the Latest Prussian Instruction to Censors and Luther-the Arbiter Between Strauss and Feuerbach, and articles by Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Koppen, Arnold Ruge, etc. 9. Marx has in mind Hauer and his followers, who were a**ociated with the Allgemeine Lite,atur-Zeitung. 1. "Moment" is a technical term in Hegelian philosophy meaning a vital element of thought. The term is used to stress that thought is a process, and thus that elements in a system of thought are also phases in a movement. 2. In Hegel, "feeling" (Empfindung) denotes a relatively low form of mental life in which the subjective and the objective are still confused together "Consciousness" (Bewusstein)-the name given by Hegel to the first major section of his Phenomenology of Mind-denotes those forms of mental activity where a subject first seeks to comprehend an object. "Self-consciousness" and "mind" denote subsequent, higher phases in the evolution of "absolute knowledge" or "the absolute." 3. Die Entjremdete Arbeit. See the Note on Texts and Terminology. p. xli. above. for a discussion of this term. [R.T.] 4. "Alienation"- EntiiusseTung 5. "Species nature" (and, earlier, "species being")- Gattungswesen; "man's essential nature"- menschlichen Wesen. 6. At this point the first man*script breaks off unfinished. 7. Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes-and the latter's abomination is still greater-the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head. [Marx] 8. For this reason it is just as highly priced as the determinations of human essence and activities. [Marx] 9. In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself to the human being humanly. [Marx] 1. "Essential powers"-Wesenskrcijte: i.e., powers belonging to me as part of my essential nature, my very being. 2. Spontaneous generation. 3. Forces of human nature: menschlichen Wesenkraft; human nature: menschlichell Wesens. 4. James Mill, Elements of Political Economy. 5. In the man*script the lower left corner of the page is torn off. Just the right-hand endings of the last six lines remain, making restorations of the text impossible. It is possible to surmise, however, that Marx here criticizes Hegel's idealistic "transcending" of estrangement ( the words that have survived are cited in the next footnote ) . 6. In "transcending" estrangement "in the old German manner-the manner of the Hegelian phenomenology," i.e., in transcending it exclusively in the "consciousness" of the subject. 7. The bottom of the page is torn. Three or four lines are missing. 8. This word is illegible. 9. Goethe, Faust, ( Part I-Faust's (Penguin, 1949 ) , p.91. Study, III), translated by Philip Wayne 1. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act 4, Scene 3. Marx quotes the Schlegel-Tieck German translation. ( Marx's emphasis .) 2. Ibid. 3. An end of the page is torn out of the man*script. 4. Bruno Bauer, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte de,. Synoptiker (Critique of the Synoptic Gospels), vol. 1-2 , Leipzig, 1 841; vol. 3, Braunschweig, 1842. In religious literature the authors of the first three Gospels are known as the Synoptics. 5. Bruno Bauer, Das Entdeckte Christentum. Eine Erinnerung des Achtzehnten Jahrhundert und eine Beitrag zur Krisis des Neunzehnten ( Christianity Discovered: A Memorial of the Eighteenth Century and a Contribution to the Crisis of the Nineteenth), Zurich and Winterthur, 1843. 6. Bruno Bauer, Die Gute Sache der Freiheit und meine Eigene Angelegenheit ( The Good of Freedom and My Own Affair), Zurich and Winterthur, 1842. 7. Certificate of poverty. 8. A reference to the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 9. Feuerbach views negation of negation, the definite concept as thinking surpa**ing itself in thinking and as thinking wanting to be directly awareness, nature, reality. [Marx] Marx is referring to Feuerbach's critical observations about Hegel in § 29-30 of his Grundsatze der Philosophie zer Zukunft. 1. What follows here are the main chapter and section-headings of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind. Here and in later quotations from the Phenomenology, the translator has followed Baillie's translation very closely, departing from it only on the few occasions where this was necessary to keep the terminology in line with that used throughout the present volume. 2. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopadie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften (Heidelberg, 1st ed., 1817, 3 rd ed., 1830). Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences is a single volume falling into three main parts : the subject of the first is Logic (c.f. The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace. 2nd ed., Oxford, 1892 ); the subject of the second part is the Philosophy of Nature (of which no English translation has been published) , and that of the third .the Philosophy of Mind. (Cf. Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace, Oxford, 1894.) 3. "The unhappy consciousness," etc.-forms of mind, and phases and factors in human history, distinguished and an*lysed in particular sections of Hegel's Phenomenology. 4. The paragraph which follows is a transcript of the second and third paragraphs of the last chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology, trans. Baillie, 2nd ed, p. 789. 5. "Externalization"-Entausserung 6. "Substance"-Wesen 7. "Being"-Wesen ; "nature"-Natur; "system"-Wesen; "be-ing"-Sein. 8. "To be sensuous is to suffer" -Sinnlich sein ist leidend sein. Here "to suffer" should probably be understood in the sense of "to undergo"-to be the object of another's action. Note the transition in the next sentence from Leiden (suffering) to leidenschaftlich (pa**ionate). 9. Here Marx has taken the impersonal pronounes es(it) to represent Bewusstsein (consciousness) ; but it seems that Baillie is more correct in reading this as standing for Selbstbewusstsein (self-consciousness). In the first quotation of this pa**age (p. 114) Marx simply uses es without specifying what it represents, and the translation has followed Baillie in interpreting it as "self-consciousness." In the present repetition of the pa**age, Marx's specification of the "it" as "consciousness" has been followed in the translation. 1. Marx refers to § 30 of Feuerbach's Grundsatze der Philosophie der Zukunft, which says: "Hegel is a thinker who transcends himself in thinking." 2. This sequence gives the major "categories" or "thought-forms" of Hegel's Encyclopaedia in the order in which they occur and are superseded. Similarly, the sequence• above from "private right" to "world history" gives the major categories of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in the order in which they appear there. 3. The conventional conception of theology, jurisprudence, political science, natural science, etc. 4. The Logic of Hegel, trans. Wallace, 244. "Intuiting" is here used to render Anschauen. In popular usage Anschauen means "to contemplate," but Hegel is here using the word, like Kant, as a technical term in philosophy meaning, roughly, "to be aware through the senses." "Intuiting," like-wise, should be understood here not in its popular sense but as the philosophical term which is the recognized English equivalent of Anschauen 5. This means that what Hegel does is to put in place of these fixed abstractions the act of abstraction which revolves in its own circle. In so doing, he has the merit, in the first place, of having indicated the source of all these inappropriate concepts which, as originally presented, belonged to disparate philosophies; of having brought them together; and of having created the entire compa** of abstraction exhaustively set out as the object of criticism, instead of some specific abstraction. (Why Hegel separates thought from the subject we shall see later: at this stage it is already clear, however, that when man is not, his characteristic expression also cannot be human, and so neither could thought be grasped as an expression of man as a human and natural subject endowed with eyes, ears, etc., and living in society, in the world, and in nature.) [Marx] 6. Time, Motion, Matter, Light, etc., are forms distinguished within Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. Becoming, etc., are of course categories of the Logic 7. Cf. Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, trans. Wallace, 381. But in rendering these pa**ages from the Encyclopaedia, the present translator has not followed Wallace closely.