KARL MARX

0
280 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
sarily bring with it the alienation of the individual: it afforded the opportunity
for society to become composed of 'social' or 'universal' individuals
- beings very similar to the 'all-round' individuals referred to in the '1844
Manuscripts'. This is how Marx describes the transition from individual
to social production:
Production based on exchange value therefore falls apart, and the
immediate material productive process finds itself stripped of its
impoverished, antagonistic form. Individuals are then in a position to
develop freely. It is no longer a question of reducing the necessary
labour time of society to a minimum. The counterpart of this reduction
is that all members of society can develop their artistic, scientific, etc.,
education, thanks to the free time now available to all. . ..
Bourgeois economists are so bogged down in their traditional ideas
of the historical development of society in a single stage, that the
necessity of the objectification of the social forces of labour seems to
them inseparable from the necessity of its alienation in relation to living
labour. 30
It is noteworthy that here (as throughout the Grundrisse) there is no
allusion to the agent of this transformation - namely, the revolutionary
activity of the proletariat.
The 'universal' individual - a notion that Marx returns to almost ad
nauseam in the Grundrisse - is at the centre of his vision of Utopia; the
millennial strain is no less clear here than in the passage in the '1844
Manuscripts' describing communism as 'the solution to the riddle of
history'. The universal tendency inherent in capital, said Marx, created
as a basis, a development of productive forces - of wealth in general -
whose powers and tendencies are of a general nature, and at the same
time a universal commerce, and thus world trade as a basis. The basis
as the possibility of the universal development of individuals; the real
development of individuals from this basis as the constant abolition of
each limitation conceived of as a limitation and not as a sacred boundary.
The universality of the individual not as thought or imagined, but as
the universality of his real and ideal relationships. Man therefore
becomes able to understand his own history as a process, and to conceive
of nature (involving also practical control over it) as his own real body.
The process of development is itself established and understood as a
prerequisite. But it is necessary also and above all that full development
of the productive forces should have become a condition of production,
not that determined conditions of production should be set up as a boundary
beyond which productive forces cannot develop. 31
Marx very rarely discussed the form of the future communist society:
in his own terms this was reasonable enough - for he would thereby have