Humanism vs. Marxism: A Key Point About Marxism and the 1844 Manuscripts
I. Humanism Is, of Course, Part of Marxism
Marxism is clearly humanist: it holds that human nature is good, that people possess innate wholeness, and that we should pursue human freedom and liberation and return to the beauty and naturalness of human nature. Communism means laboring naturally and enjoying life naturally. The Marxist psychologist Fromm offers an excellent, clear interpretation of this. Humanism is the inner dimension of equality for all; communism is its outer dimension.
Marx’s original words in the 1844 Manuscripts:
“Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self-alienation, and therefore the genuine appropriation of the human essence through and for human beings; it is thus the return of human beings to themselves as social—that is, human—beings. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism, equals naturalism. It is the genuine resolution of the conflict between human beings and nature and between human beings themselves; it is the true resolution of the struggle between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, the individual and the species.”
The preface to Capital also speaks of “suffering”: “We suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. We suffer not only from the living, but also from the dead.”
II. Yet Some Soviet-Style Interpretations Often Set Marxism Against Humanism
The first aspect concerns the history of philosophy and ideology.
- Deliberately setting Marxism against the “humanist communism” of Feuerbach and Hess
Put crudely, the latter seeks to achieve communism through publicity and education, calling on people to rediscover their humanity and love one another. This remains petty-bourgeois idealism and elitism, rather than a materialist conception of history and a view of the masses as the makers of history.
To be sure, the young Engels moved from his Feuerbachian phase toward proletarian revolution and historical materialism, a crucial transition in 1842–1844. But later interpreters exaggerated Feuerbach’s influence on Marx himself, consciously or unconsciously projecting parts of Engels’s experience onto Marx. They overlooked Marx’s own humanist and materialist foundations and their development: Epicurus, French materialism, and Hegel’s objective idealist dialectics. This is a crude and mistaken understanding of Marx himself.
In criticizing Feuerbach, they discarded Marx’s humanist thought as “humanist communism.” They “threw the baby out with the bathwater.”
- Opposition to Western Marxism
Western Marxism can be roughly divided into three types. The first is the Leninist current of violent revolution following the October Revolution, including the Communist Parties of Western and Eastern Europe. Some followed Soviet-style Marxism more closely, becoming aligned with the Third International, subordinate, and revisionist, while others returned to orthodox Marxism. The second is the current of permanent revolution, typified by the Trotskyists and the decades-long struggle between the Fourth and Third Internationals. The third consists of Western European ivory-tower sociologists, represented by the Frankfurt School, with a more petty-bourgeois orientation, especially after the Frankfurt School went into exile in the United States during the Nazi era; its members were primarily German and Austrian Jewish intellectuals. This current places considerable emphasis on the 1844 Manuscripts. On the one hand, it regards Marx’s theory of alienation as the key to understanding contemporary society; on the other, it is actually implicitly opposed to violent revolution, seeking to use the young Marx against Marxism-Leninism.
Soviet-style Marxists rejected all three types, even to the point of rejecting the 1844 Manuscripts themselves.
The second aspect concerns petty-bourgeois opposition to violent revolution.
What the petty bourgeoisie dislikes about Marxist-Leninist theory is violent revolution. Thus, they use a petty-bourgeois Marx to oppose Marx the proletarian revolutionary, which is why so many articles claim that Engels abandoned violent revolution in his later years, and so on. As Mao put it in his Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan: “Some people say it is excellent; others say it is terrible.” The petty bourgeoisie often criticizes violent revolution and “excesses” as “inhumane.” To this day, how to understand the “excesses” of the French Revolution and other revolutions remains a popular question on Zhihu. Even Zhihu has some very good answers on this point. Put simply, billions of proletarians want humanity, while a hundred million petty bourgeois want “humaneness”; billions of proletarians want fairness, while a hundred million petty bourgeois want “justice.”
The third aspect is the dark side: Soviet-style bureaucracy suppresses human nature.
Doctrines of obedience, treating people as tools, domestication, indoctrination, opposition to absolute egalitarianism, and so forth distort Leninism, suppressing normal human needs as “petty-bourgeois.”
To sum up, all three aspects above target the petty bourgeoisie, so, consciously or unconsciously, Soviet-style interpretations often set Marxism against humanism.
II. Humanity Has Never Seen Humanism in Its Full and Complete Form
Within the theoretical system of Marxism, humanism is an important “hypothesis,” rather than an “axiom.”
Human civilization is still in its early stages. Humanity has never experienced a society that allows most people to develop fully, enabling most people to attain a general state of “human freedom and the full development of the goodness of human nature.” So it is indeed only a “hypothesis,” for which “no evidence can be produced.” Yet in education that nurtures goodness of heart, the nourishment of love, animals’ acts of kindness, the radiance of humanity, and especially the simple truth, goodness, and beauty of ordinary working people, as well as in the practice of humanistic psychology, education, and management, humanism “can be seen” everywhere. That is, the “hypothesis” of humanism is confirmed everywhere, while the hypotheses that human nature is evil and that some people are superior are refuted everywhere.
In everyday life, humanism is a relatively advanced understanding, rarely found among the petty bourgeoisie. Socialists are not necessarily humanists, as with early socialists such as Fourier and Owen, but humanists are necessarily socialists, as with the utopian communism of Hess and Feuerbach. This shows that humanism is an understanding one level higher than socialism. True humanists necessarily place little emphasis on so-called effort or talent, focusing instead on the external factors that restrict people’s full development. An example is the “sociocultural school” of psychology represented by Fromm and Horney: “It is not people who are sick; it is society.”
We cannot clearly define what perfected human nature would look like, but we can clearly identify what is anti-human and oppressive. Only when humanity has overthrown everything that oppresses, enslaves, and constrains people—at present, chiefly private ownership—can we hope to “see true human nature.” Perhaps by the 25th century, the Internationale will be realized, and humanity will see its fullest flourishing.
III. Marx Speaks Directly About Humanistic Psychology
What follows consists of excerpts and summaries from the 1844 Manuscripts, with relatively little elaboration of my own.
(1) Marx on “the Usefulness of the Useless” (Zhuangzi)
Under communism, with the positive supersession of private ownership, the sensuous appropriation by human beings of the human essence and human life, of objective human beings and human products, should not be understood merely as immediate, one-sided enjoyment or possession. It is the realization of human actuality, human activity and human receptivity, because receptivity, understood in human terms, is a form of human self-enjoyment. Human beings appropriate their comprehensive essence in a comprehensive way—that is, as whole human beings.
Private ownership has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only when we use it, either directly or by possessing it as capital. Private ownership regards all of this merely as a means of living, and only as a means serving capital and labor under private ownership. Thus, all physical and mental senses have been replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses: the sense of having. The human essence had to be reduced to this absolute poverty so that it could bring forth its inner richness from within itself.
The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities. Yet it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and qualities have become human, both subjectively and objectively. The eye has become a human eye: the narrow eye has become the eye of an emancipated, fully developed human being. Need and enjoyment have lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost its mere usefulness, because usefulness has become human usefulness. (Marx on “the usefulness of the useless.”) The senses and enjoyment of other people have also become my own appropriation. Thus, in addition to these immediate organs, social organs develop in the form of society. (Altruism, the unity of society.)
(2) Marx on the Hierarchy of Human Needs (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs)
As objective reality everywhere becomes for human beings in society the reality of human essential powers, all objects become for them the objectification of themselves: objects that affirm and realize their individuality, their own objects, which is to say that the objects become themselves. Only then do people cease to lose themselves in their objects. This is possible only when the object becomes a social object for them, when they themselves become social beings for themselves, and when society becomes essential to them in this object.
For an ear with no sense of music, the most beautiful music has no meaning. The meaning any object has for me extends only as far as my senses can reach. Thus, the senses of social human beings differ from those of non-social human beings. A sense confined by crude practical need has only a limited meaning. A careworn person in poverty has no feeling even for the most beautiful scenery; a dealer in minerals sees only their commercial value, not their beauty and distinctive qualities. He has no mineralogical sense.
The formation of the five senses is the work of all world history up to the present. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of the human essence is the richness of subjective human sensibility—a musical ear, an eye that appreciates beauty of form, in short, senses capable of human enjoyment, senses that affirm themselves as human essential powers—partly developed and partly brought into being. For not only the five senses, but also the so-called mental and practical senses—will, love, and so forth—in a word, human sense and the humanity of the senses, come into being only through the existence of their objects, through humanized nature.
Thus, both theoretically and practically, the objectification of the human essence is necessary: on the one hand, to make human senses human, and on the other, to create human senses corresponding to the full richness of the essence of humanity and nature.
Through the movement of private property, with its wealth and poverty, the emerging society finds all the materials needed for this formation. We see that subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and receptivity—the question of freedom—lose their opposition to one another, and thus their existence as such opposites, only in a social condition.
The resolution of theoretical oppositions themselves is possible only through practice, only through human practical powers. It is not merely a task of knowledge, but a task of real life.
(3) Marx on “One-Sided Psychology” and “Fully Developed Psychology” (Scientific Humanistic Psychology)
The history of industry is an open book of human essential powers, a human psychology laid out before us in sensuous form. Until now, people have not understood this psychology in its connection with the human essence. People operating within the alienation of private ownership understand the human essence only through one-sided, alienated phenomena, including politics, art, and literature; the objectified human essence appears before us in an alienated form. Such a psychology cannot become a rich and genuine science, because it leaves out this enormous part of human labor.
Note: This time, I read the 1844 Manuscripts on my knees in awe. This is what it means to be one of humanity’s greatest philosophers. Marx and Zhuangzi always give me this experience. I could not understand them before because my own level was too low. The 1844 Manuscripts are not only about alienation. They are also a complete, systematic exposition of the dynamics of capitalism, humanism, communism, naturalism, ontology, dialectics, and more. Given the degree of philosophical completeness displayed in the 1844 Manuscripts, Engels must already have been awestruck. Before this, Engels—and the intellectual elite of the time, especially Feuerbach—seemed theoretically capable of standing on equal footing with Marx. From this point onward, they could no longer come close to him.