MUST EMBRACE A COMMUNIST VISION OF VALUES

MUST EMBRACE A COMMUNIST VISION OF VALUES

1. HUMAN VALUES MUST CELEBRATE COMMUNITY

Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, 1948, p. 40.

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve their condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society.

In the West, political and economic freedom generally mean the absence of coercion or limitations on individual choice. The Soviet view of freedom, originating in Marx and Engels, means freedom from autonomous forces and is a freedom that comes with the ability to control society’s destiny. In the Marxian scheme, once men’s lives are no longer subject to control by the market, society is no longer subject to the drift of history. It is man’s control over things that signifies “the end of prehistory.”

Alasdair Maclntyre. Professor of social philosophy at the University of Essex, A SHORT HISTORY OF ETHICS, 1966. p. 212.

For Marx in his early systematic writings the key contrast in bourgeois society is between what bourgeois philosophy and political economy reveal about human possibility and what the empirical study of bourgeois society reveals about the contemporary human activity. The freedom is destroyed by bourgeois economy, and the human needs which bourgeois industry fails to meet stand in judgment on that economy and industry; but this is not merely an appeal to the ideal against the real. For the goals of freedom and human need are the goals implicit in the struggle of the working class in bourgeois society. Both the goals have to be specified in terms of the achievement of a new form of society in which class division--and with it, bourgeois society--would be abolished.

MUST REJECT VALUES THAT ARE BASED IN CAPITALIST ECONOMIES

1. VALUES MUST EXCLUDE BUYING AND SELLING

Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, 1948, p. 25.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” or our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communist abolition of buying and selling of the bourgeois conditions of production and of the bourgeoisie itself.

Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, 1948, p. 23.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism. All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions. The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property. The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
3. COMMUNISM REJECTS PRIVATE PROPERTY

Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, 1948, p. 23.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity, and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

CAPITALISM AND MARKET FORCES PERPETUATE ALIENATION

1. MARKET FORCES PERPETUATE ALIENATION

Paul Craig Roberts and Matthew A. Stephenson, NQA, MARX’S THEORY OF EXCHANGE, ALIENATION, AND CRISIS, 1973, p. 72-73.

In both works alienation is said to occur when men are mutually independent and engage in market exchange, and when men are subject to the market--something over which they have no control--as to an alien force. The lengthy discussion of the nature of commodities and the commodity mode of production in CAPITAL is prefigured in the 1844 Manuscripts, in which Marx says that he has “considered the act of estranging practical human activity, labor, in the two of its aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object exercising power over him.. .[sic](2) The relation of labor to the act of production within the labor process.

Paul Craig Roberts and Matthew A. Stephenson, NQA, MARX’S THEORY OF EXCHANGE, ALIENATION, AND CRISIS, 1973, p. 93.

Marx’s concept of alienation serves as a weapon in his battle against capitalism; it is used in keeping with his dictum that criticism is a weapon whose object is to destroy an enemy. In Marx’s scheme, alienation is not overcome until capitalism is destroyed and planned production for direct use takes the place of production for the market. When exchange ceases, so does alienation.
3. RISE OF CAPITALISM PERPETUATES ALIENATION THROUGH GENERATIONS Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, 1948, p. 10.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the middle ages.