“…If union, the intelligent cooperation of different individuals, in short, if life in love, the organic life, is the only true and real life, you will understand that it is only after a long series of struggles that union, that this understanding between men, was able to be achieved. As long as men did not have this understanding they had to struggle amongst themselves, and history up till now has only been a recital of these struggles. From very early on they were obliged to enter into intercourse with each other. As they learned to know the produce of nature and the man-made productions which surrounded them, needs were awakened in them and the exchange of products became all the more necessary; no single country, no single people, no single individual, is able to produce everything itself. However, in the beginning the exchange of products consisted uniquely in this: when then the strongest entered into contact with the weakest he fought him and robbed him. The first form of exchange of products was precisely this robbery with murder. And just as the first form of exchange of products or of intercourse was robbery with murder, so the first form of production or labour was slavery. The victors did not content themselves with stealing products, they also wanted to seize hold of the producers; so they soon realised that it was more advantageous to reduce the surviving conquered to slavery, and to exploit them in this way, than to consume them by indulging in cannibalism. Egoism thus became more and more refined. It is on this historical basis, gentlemen, that production and intercourse have developed to the stage of free competition, in which we now live, even though we refuse to admit to ourselves that this intercourse still rests on the same egoistic basis of mutual exploitation which was its origin. However, a glance at our situation clearly shows us that, today as yesterday, we sell ourselves and exploit each other. This exploitation has no doubt become more refined over the ages, but it has not thereby become more human; rather has it become more inhuman since at the present time the more we are forced to sell ourselves willingly and mutually, the less we are able to escape from this traffic in men, the more universal has this become. So we all have to peddle our life-activity in order to buy in exchange the life-activity of other men – and what is the sum total of all our faculties and of all our forces, which we throw on the market and which we must turn into money, but our own whole life? It is not our body, which we only touch from the outside, but its real force that constitutes our life. When we sell this force of ours we ourselves sell our very life. Money is the mark of slavery; is it not therefore but human value expressed in figures? But men who can be paid, men who buy and sell each other, are they anything but slaves? How can we begin to escape from this traffic in men as long as we live in isolation and as long as each person has to work for himself on his own account in order to gain the means of existence? Who gives us the means of life, the means of our physical and social activity if we don’t gain them by buying and selling our own life? We are living in the midst of an eternal contradiction, of a perpetual struggle. It is the contradiction of intercourse in constant expansion in the midst of isolation. We are separated from each other, each one of us lives and works only for himself, yet none of us can for an instant do without each other. Whereas each person needs the production of the whole accessible human world, from China to North America, in order to live and act as a human, they are limited to their own isolated force to obtain all that they need. It is not useful activity, real physical and intellectual energy, fair work that decides the lot of individuals – for what is the greatest force of an individual in face of the world? – but chance and common trickery: he who in this gamble is able to pocket as quickly as possible the most human value expressed in figures, money. These are the blind and immoral powers which determine the destiny of man!
When the live life-consciousness has awakened in man, the perverted nature of our social relations has of course been felt; but it was not also understood that the perverted life-consciousness, from which men were just beginning to free themselves, was just as much a product of the perverted life, the perverted world within which men have lived until now, as inversely this perverted world was a product of life-consciousness that has not yet attained maturity. The interaction between real social life and the life-consciousness was not seen as well. The latter, religion, politics, Church and State, the theoretical expression of practical egoism were criticised and it was thought that the world could be reformed in this manner, without realising that this would be just as fruitless as a doctor wanting to cure a disease by suppressing its external symptoms. Perverted consciousness and its manifestations, Church and State, are nothing but the symptoms of a perverted life – the picture of a real body which will not change just because a different and more beautiful picture is made of it.
Gentlemen, the era of political and religious revolutions has, however, come to an end. People realise that the egoist life-consciousness and its forms of existence, the Church and State, will disappear of their own accord, but not before the egoist life, working for one’s private account, the traffic in humans disappear. As long as this practical egoism has not disappeared talking to man about philosophy, freedom, reason and love will be fruitless. The mass of men will not believe that human life and life in general is love, truth and freedom. They will see in egoism with its whole train of misfortunes the fundamental characteristic of human nature, which in fact it is as long as men are separated, living and working for themselves. Perhaps you are thinking that I contradict myself and that it is sometimes love and sometimes egoism that I take for the real life, the life of natural man. But, gentlemen, human nature is not a monolith, a single body which is and remains unchanged; human nature has to develop and, at present, it is as little developed as society. You cannot draw any conclusion about human nature from judging the mass of our contemporaries. One thing however is certain: if one man can have a true life-consciousness, then all men can – and if they do not, this is not the fault of human nature, otherwise all of us who are meeting here would not have the slightest idea of the real life since we are ourselves only men – but of external circumstances that have not yet allowed all men to completely develop their nature.
When it is said that communism, as an idea, is a very fine thing but is unrealisable, no more is being said than what the theologians and philosophers, priests and statesmen have always said. This is to consider oneself as superior to the mass of men. If you, gentlemen, consider communism to be a good thing in itself that is because you consider that life in love and reason constitutes the true life. However, you believe that your life-consciousness will not be able to develop in all individuals. Why do you believe this? Because you cannot envisage this consciousness developing other than by theoretical instruction – such as all the priests and philosophers have practised until now without for that banishing brutality and ignorance, wickedness and foolishness from the world. But the development of human nature can also take place in another, in a practical way, and not only can it take place in this way but it will in fact come about only or mainly or essentially in this way. So let us abandon the theoretical form, let us not imagine that we will convert the world by our ideas. Communism is not a theory, not some philosophical system which will be taught us. Communism is the end-result of the historical genesis of society.”
– Moses Hess, “Speech on Communism, Elberfeld, 15 February 1845.”
Rheinische Jarbücher zur gesellschaftlichen Reform, Darmstadt, 1845.
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