Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

PARIS 101

capitalism - a proposal he called 'communism'. His conceptions obviously
reflected the first of many long debates with German workers and with
French socialists whose deficiencies he remarked on at the outset. Proud-
hon, for example, had advocated the abolition of capital; and Fourier and
Saint-Simon had traced the alienation of labour to a particular form of
labour. Fourier had consequently advocated a return to agricultural labour;
whereas Saint-Simon saw the essential solution in terms of the correct
organisation of industrial labour. Communism, however, went further
than these partial insights and represented 'the positive expression of the
over-coming of private property'.^150 Naturally, the idea of communism
had its own intellectual history and developed only by stages.
The first form to appear - what Marx called 'crude' communism -
was merely the universalisation of private property. 'This sort of commu-
nism is faced with such a great domination of material property that it
seeks to destroy everything that cannot be possessed by everybody as
private property; it wishes to abstract forcibly from talent, etc. It considers
immediate physical ownership as the sole aim of life and being.'^151 This
conception of communism had its counter-part in the proposal to abolish
marriage and substitute the community of women. For it was the relation-
ship between the sexes that was 'the immediate, natural and necessary
relationship of human being to human being....'

By systematically denying the personality of man this communism is

merely the consistent expression of private property which is just this

negation. Universal envy setting itself up as a power is the concealed

form of greed which merely asserts itself and satisfies itself in another

way. How little this abolition of private property constitutes a real

appropriation is proved by the abstract negation of the whole world of

culture and civilization, a regression to the unnatural simplicity of the

poor man without any needs who has not even arrived at the stage of

private property, let alone got beyond it.^152

I lere the only community was a community of (alienated) labour and the
only equality was one of wages paid out by the community as universal
capitalist.
The second form of communism that Marx branded as inadequate was
of two sorts: the first he described as 'still political in nature, whether
democratic or despotic', and the second as achieving 'the abolition of the
state, but still incomplete and under the influence of private property,
i.e., of the alienation of man'.^153 Of both these forms Marx commented
(rather obscurely):

Communism knows itself already to be the reintegration or return of

man into himself, the abolition of man's self-alienation. But since it has