PARIS 103revolutionary movement 'finds not so much its empirical as its theoretical
basis in the development of private property, and particularly of the
economic system'.^1 " This was so because the alienation of human life
was expressed in the existence of private property, and it was in the
movement of private property, in production and consumption, that man
had hitherto attempted to realise himself.
Religion, family, state, law, morality, science and art are only particular
forms of production and fall under its general law. The positive abol-
ition of private property and the appropriation of human life is therefore
the positive abolition of all alienation, thus the return of man out of
religion, family, state, etc., into his human, i.e. social, being.^158
The basic alienation, Marx went on, took place in the economic sphere:
religious alienation only occurred in the consciousness of man, whereas
economic alienation occurred in his real life and thus its supersession
involved the supersession of all alienations. Of course, the preaching of
atheism might be important where religion was strong, but atheism was
only a stage on the path to communism, and an abstract one at that; only
communism proposed a doctrine of action that affected what was real.
Secondly, Marx emphasised the social character of communism and
extended the reciprocal relation of man and society to man and nature:
... only to social man is nature available as a bond with other men,
as the basis of his own existence for others and theirs for him, and as
the vital element in human reality; only to social man is nature the
foundation of his own human existence. Only as such has his natural
existence become a human existence and nature itself become human.
Thus society completes the essential unity of man and nature: it is the
genuine resurrection of nature, the accomplished naturalism of man
and the accomplished humanism of nature.^159(This passage, and other similar ones, show Marx very much under the
influence of Hegel, to such an extent that he almost said that nature was
created by man).^160 As regards the social aspect, Marx showed that the
capacities peculiar to man were evolved in social intercourse. Even when
a man was working in isolation, he performed a social act simply by virtue
of his being human. Even thought - since it used language - was a social
activity.
But this emphasis on the social aspects of man's being did not destroy
man's individuality (and this was Marx's third point): 'However much he
is a particular individual (and it is precisely his particularity that makes
him an individual and a truly individual communal being), man is just as
much the totality - the ideal totality - and the subjective existence of
society as something thought and felt'.^161