KARL MARX

KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
Marx devoted most of the rest of this section to drawing a picture of
unalienated man, man whom he called 'total' and 'multi-sided'. One
should not, he said, have too narrow an idea about what the supersession
of private property would achieve: just as the state of alienation totally
vitiated all human faculties, so the supersession of this alienation would
be a total liberation. It would not be limited to the enjoyment or possession
of material objects. All human faculties - Marx listed seeing,
hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring,
acting, loving - would, in their different ways, become means of appropriating
reality. This was difficult for alienated man to imagine, since private
property had made men so stupid that they could only imagine an object
to be theirs when they actually used it and even then it was only employed
as a means of sustaining life which was understood as consisting of labour
and the creation of capital.
Referring to Hess's work on this subject, Marx declared that all physical
and mental senses had been dulled by a single alienation - that of having.
But this absolute poverty would give birth to the inner wealth of human
beings:
The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipation
of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation
precisely in that these senses and qualities have become human, both
subjectively and objectively. The eye has become a human eye when its
object has become a social, human object produced by man and destined
for him. Thus in practice the senses have become direct theoreticians.
They relate to the thing for its own sake, but the thing itself is an
objective human relationship to itself and to man and vice versa. (I can
in practice only relate myself humanly to an object if the object relates
humanly to man.) Need and enjoyment have thus lost their egoistic
nature and nature has lost its mere utility in that its utility has become
human utility. 162
This cultivation or creation of the faculties could be achieved only in
certain surroundings.
For it is not just a matter of the five senses, but also the so-called
spiritual senses - the practical senses (desiring, loving, etc.) - in brief:
human sensibility and the human character of the senses, which can
only come into being through the existence of its object, through
humanized nature. The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all
previous history. 163
For plainly a starving man appreciated food in a purely animal way; and
a dealer in minerals saw only value, and not necessarily beauty, in his