Glimpses of Freedom in Marx

Marx is notoriously unwilling to describe what communist society will actually look like. (He famously quipped that it is not his place to write recipes for the cookshops of the future). In the German Ideology he gives us a glimpse, perhaps, of what an emancipated human life consists in: The freedom to hunt, fish, and critique just as we please. But that passage raises more questions than it answers.

Marx, of course, rejects the method of theorizing some ideal vision of society and then pushing practice to conform to theory. The theoretic understanding of human freedom will itself emerge from the struggle for emancipation. Still, here are two moments in which Marx gives us a fleeting look at what it might mean to be freed from capitalist exploitation.

The first comes from the third of the 1844 Manuscripts. Here Marx comments on (1) the relation between theory and practice, and (2) how socialist workers begin to experience freedom from the division of labor.

In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is quite sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will lead to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very rough and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have at the outset gained a consciousness of the limited character as well as of the goal of this historical movement--and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it. 

When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need--the need for society--and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together. Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies. 

What a lovely passage. The third 1844 Manuscript is Marx at his most humanist (indeed, as he says earlier "This communism, as fully developed naturalness, equals humanism ... it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature"). He has some slightly more fantastic things to say about how communism will transform human nature, but no need to comment on those here. The key mark of communist society is a human fraternity impossible under the slavery of capitalism.

Speaking of slavery, the second passage of note comes from the Grundrisse:

 The Times of November [21,] 1857 contains a most endearing scream of rage from a West Indian planter. With great moral indignation this advocate--by way of plea for the reintroduction of Negro slavery--explains how the Quashees (free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves to produce only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption and apart from this 'use value', regard loafing itself (INDULGENCE and IDLENESS) as the real luxury article; how they don't give a damn about sugar and the fixed capital invested in the PLANTATIONS, but rather react with malicious pleasure and sardonic smiles when a planter goes to ruin, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as a cover for this sardonic mood and indolence. 

They have ceased to be slaves, not in order to become wage workers, but SELF-SUSTAINING PEASANTS, working for their own meagre consumption. Capital as capital does not exist for them, because wealth made independent in general exists only either through direct forced labour, slavery, or through mediated forced labour, wage labour. Wealth confronts direct forced labour not as capital but as relation of domination. On the basis of direct forced labour, therefore, only the relationship of domination is reproduced, for which wealth itself has value only as gratification, not as wealth as such, and which can therefore never create general industriousness.

Freed from the terrors of slavery, these Quashees know better than to throw themselves straight into the slavery of the capitalist division of labor. Their own emancipation has helped them to see into the nature of economic domination and human freedom.

These examples are quite instructive--the socialist workers who understand themselves as human and the freed slaves who understand wage labour to be slavery. Two brief glimpses into the human emancipation Marx's communism offers.