‘We are not communists who want to destroy personal freedom and transform the world into one great barracks or one great sweat-shop. As a matter of fact there are communists who do not care for and want to suppress personal freedom, which in their opinion bars the way to harmony; but we do not want to buy equality at the expense of personal freedom’ (Frederick Engels, Kommunistische Zeitschrift, September 1847). To liberals no freedom is higher and more precious than the freedom of the individual. Marxists wholeheartedly agree that it is the individual human being who achieves freedom, and not humanity in general. They agree that society as a whole cannot free itself unless every individual is freed. But they take issue with the use of the watchword of individual liberty in opposition to socialism and socialist planning. For they do not think there is any contradiction between the interests of the individual and the interests of a society whose fundamental aim is the satisfaction of people’s material and cultural needs and the enrichment of their lives. They take the view that only under communism will the individual human being be able to develop his potentialities and abilities to the utmost. Under capitalism the great majority of people have neither leisure, money nor education to develop as all-round human beings. Nor are they encouraged so to foster their individuality. The capitalist system of production, the bourgeois educational system, the barrage of advertising and ready-made ‘culture’ to which the individual is subjected from the cradle to the grave, are not designed to fan into flame the sparks of talent and creative ability that are possessed by all but a tiny proportion of human beings. They are designed to make competent wage-slaves. Capitalist relations of production—the private ownership for private profit of the means of production—cannot bring to the individual wage-worker the freedom that comes through leading a full life, a life packed with many-sided activities and giving the fullest scope to every physical and mental aptitude. They block the way to a full life for the exploited. Capitalism devastates human nature, dulls and extinguishes the senses, corrupts and brutalizes men as it sucks out profit from their work, rends men into fragments, into half-men, makes labour a burden instead of a joyful and indispensable part of life. It robs men of their heritage of happiness, beauty and knowledge. It takes the warmth and colour out of human relationships and measures every emotion, every delight and every virtue by the yardstick of gold and silver and bits of printed paper and entries in account books. [1]The individual is not, and cannot be, free under capitalism because he cannot leap out of the world of the market, the world where everything moral and spiritual is bought and sold for cash. It is a world of universal venality, of cynical self-interest. Human labour power; works of art; knowledge; the very conscience and honour of men; truth itself: [2] all become commodities, measured in terms of their market value, accessible to those with money. To the profiteer the object he is buying or selling, its meaning and importance to human beings, are in themselves of little or no importance compared with the object’s abstract expression in monetary terms. This barren outlook determines and taints every relationship, not only between man and object, but between man and man. Money becomes a fetish: the cash nexus becomes the only significant bond between people. The questions that matter about a fellow human being are not ‘Is he happy?’ or ‘Is he hungry?’ or ‘Is he a good man?’ but ‘Is he rich?’ and ‘Can we do business together?’ and ‘What advantage can I get out of him?’ Those who have this outlook cannot be said to enjoy life: what they enjoy are deals and transactions and money-making. ‘Life’ in bourgeois society means ‘making a living’. Nor can the wage-worker remain wholly unaffected by this outlook. The very fact that he is forced to sell his labour power, that he must work for someone else in order to live, drains his labour of its sweetness, makes it a dreary burden instead of an essential and beneficial part of living. The life of the individual worker is chopped and divided: there is the part of his life that is not his own, but the boss’s, spent in the factory, where the boss is the aristocrat; and there are the looked-forward-to oases of leisure, the time that belongs to the worker himself.... ‘Taylor, of Bethlehem Steel Works fame, has declared that in order to get pig iron loaded most efficiently it is necessary to get men as near like oxen as possible. But men do not grow so: they have to be made. An important part of scientific management is this scientific degradation of men.’ [3] The individual is stunted, warped, chained for life to one particular calling, to one particular function, often to one particular tool. In capitalist society what matters is not man as such but particularized man, restricted and conditioned by his special skills: the division of labour is the division of the individual labourer himself. And this means that men are subjected to their instruments of production, that instead of the producers using and controlling the means of production, the latter use and control the producers. Nor have men control over the disposal of the products which result from their labours; these products become independent forces which overpower their makers in booms and slumps according to the ‘blind’ laws of the market. The means of production are utilized in such a way as to enslave men and atrophy their faculties. And the exchange of products for profit leads to the concentration of enormous wealth in the hands of a few and the impoverishment of the majority, to economic anarchy and periodical economic ‘blizzards’. Thus men are not free to determine their own destiny. It is determined for them by forces over which they have no control. In the process men’s individuality is forfeited, is crushed. They lose their individuality because they are dependent on capital. ‘In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. ’[4] ‘An economic individualism of motives and aims,’ echoes [American bourgeois philosopher John] Dewey, ‘underlies our present corporate mechanisms, and undoes the individual. [5]Defenders of and apologists for the capitalist system of society have as little right to speak of the freedom of the individual as they have to speak of any other freedom. Under capitalism human individuality ‘becomes at once a commercial article and the fabric in which money operates’. Capitalism ‘estranges man from nature, from himself, his own active functioning... It is the alienation of man from man.’ [6] Capitalism stifles men’s creative spirit, condemning the majority to a life of monotony, drudgery and ugliness—to life in a cage. It puts out the eyes of the painter and cuts out the tongue from the poet who is within each one of us. It butchers human nature on the altar of the machine and calls that progress....
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 08:32:31 +0000
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