Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,
The signet of its all-enslaving power
Upon a shining ore, and called it gold:
Before whose image bow the vulgar great,
The vainly rich, the miserable proud,
The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings,
And with blind feelings reverence the power
That grinds them to the dust of misery.
But in the temple of their hireling hearts
Gold is a living god …
All things are sold: the very light of Heaven
Is venal; earth’s unsparing gifts of love,
The smallest and most despicable things
That lurk in the abysses of the deep,
All objects of our life, even life itself,
And the poor pittance which the laws allow
Of liberty, the fellowship of man,
Those duties which his heart of human love
Should urge him to perform instinctively,
Are bought and sold as in a public mart
Of undisguising selfishness, that sets
On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.
Even love is sold; the solace of all woe
Is turned to deadliest agony, old age
Shivers in selfish beauty’s loathing arms …
But hoary-headed Selfishness has felt
Its death-blow, and is tottering to the grave:
A brighter morn awaits the human day,
When every transfer of earth’s natural gifts
Shall be a commerce of good words and works;
When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,
The fear of infamy, disease and woe,
War with its million horrors, and fierce hell
Shall live but in the memory of Time,
Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start,
Look back, and shudder at his younger years.
(Shelley: Queen Mab)
I
Life is the exchange of productive life-activities. The body of every living thing, plant, animal or man, as the mediumthrough which the productive life-activity of that thing is exchanged, is its indispensable means of existence, the medium of its life; consequently those parts of the body that are the centres of exchange are its noblest and most indispensable organs, as for instance the brain and the heart. What is true of the bodies of small units is also true of large, and equally true of inanimate celestial bodies, so-called, as of conscious, social ones. The atmosphere of the Earth is the indispensable medium for the exchange of earthly products, it is the earthly life-element; the sphere in which men exchange their social life-activities–i.e. intercourse in society–is the indispensable social life-element. Here men relate as conscious and consciously acting beings to the sphere of exchange of their social life, just as they relate unconsciously, as bodily units, to the sphere of exchange of their bodily life-activities, to the atmosphere of the Earth. If separated from the medium of their social life they can no more live than they are able to exist physically if separated from the medium of their physical life, that is, if the life-giving air is denied to them. They are related to the whole social body as the individual members and organs are related to the individual body. They perish if they are separated from each other. Their real life consists only in the mutual exchange of their productive life-activity, only in cooperation, only in their connection with the whole social body.
II
The reciprocal exchange of individual life-activity, intercourse, the mutual arousal of individual forces: such cooperation is the real essence of individuals, their real potentiality. They cannot realise their powers, cannot utilise, actualise, manifest or bring them to life at all–or if they have done this, will again find them dying–so far as they do not mutually exchange their life-activities in intercourse with fellows of the same community, or members of the same body. As the terrestrial atmosphere is the workshop of the Earth, so the intercourse of men is the human workshop wherein individual men are able to realise and manifest their life or powers. The more vigorous their intercourse the stronger also their productive power and so far as their intercourse is restricted their productive power is restricted likewise. Without their life-medium, without the exchange of their particular powers, individuals do not live. The intercourse of men does not originate from their essence; it is their real essence, and is indeed both their theoretical essence, their true life-consciousness, and also their practical real life-activity. Thinking and acting come into being only through intercourse, through the cooperation of individuals–and what we speak of mystically as ‘spirit’ is in fact this life-giving air, this workshop, this cooperation. Every free activity–and there is no other but free activity, because what a being does not do from himself, that is freely, is no act at all, or at least not his own but another’s–every real life-activity, therefore, either practical or theoretical–is an act of the species, a cooperation among different individuals. Such cooperation first realises the productive power, and hence the real essence of each individual.
III
The essence of man, man’s intercourse, develops like every other, in a historical process through many struggles and disturbances. Like everything authentic, the true nature, the cooperation of individuals constituting the human species, has a history of its development or origin. The social world, the organising of men, has its own natural history, its genesis, its creation story, like every other world, and like every other organic body. The natural history of mankind however began when the Earth’s natural history had come to completion, when the Earth, that is, had already brought into existence its last and highest organism, the human body, and with it the sum-total of its bodily organisms. The natural history of the Earth which in the opinion of geologists probably lasted several million years, stopped and came to a close several thousands of years ago; the Earth is complete. On the other hand the natural history of mankind has not yet come to an end; we are still immersed in the struggle. Mankind is not yet completed but it is close to its completion. We already see in the distance the vaunted land of organised mankind; already we can reach it with our eyes, this promised land to which all man’s previous history points, though we cannot yet set foot upon it. It is false to see in the completion of nature’s history, in the end of man’s creation-history, the end, the ‘doomsday’, of mankind itself: an optical illusion which has ever imposed itself upon those who could think of no reality save the existing one–though that did not satisfy them and they therefore wished for another–and who therefore saw in the downfall of their evil world and the coming of a better, the end of this world and the beginning of the next. So likewise are they victims of the ‘doomsday’ illusion who expect no better afterworld, but also no better world than that now existing–who accept the Christian dogma of the imperfection of this world, but without the consolation of a hereafter–who dream of infinite progress, but suppose no other end or completion for it save death, or some lifeless phantom they call ‘spirit’. The philosophers, likewise, are among those who can think of no other reality than the present evil one–are among the antediluvian creatures who see in the downfall of the old world their own destruction, and nothing but death in the completed organism of mankind–because a correct instinct tells them that they themselves form an integral part of the old, decaying evil reality. If the monsters before the flood–which were spawned by the Earth, while still in its ‘raw youth’, before it had ripened and reached maturity–if these monsters had possessed consciousness they would have argued and speculated precisely in the manner of our philosophers, theologians and priests. They too would not have believed in any higher creations, in any completed product of Earth, in any man; they too would have fancied they saw in the destruction of the primeval fauna the approaching destruction of the world. However, just as the completed pattern of Earth makes, not the end, but rather the beginning of its real life, so the completed pattern of mankind, its perfection, that is, makes, not the end of man, but rather his true beginning.
IV
Human development, its genetic or natural history, the story of the creation of man, requires as a necessity its mutual destruction, proceeding from the contradiction of their intercourse in the context of their isolation. The developmental history of human nature or of mankind appears primarily as a self-destruction of this nature. Men were already sacrificing themselves to their heavenly and earthly gods long before there was a heavenly or earthly, religious or political economyto justify it. They destroyed each other because at first they subsisted only as isolated individuals, because they could not cooperate in harmony as members of one and the same organic whole, as members of mankind. If an organised exchange of products, organised activity, the cooperation of all, had already existed beforehand, then naturally there would have been no necessity for men to wrestle or work for their mental and material needs as isolated individuals, by their own efforts, with brute force and cunning deceit; they would not have needed to seek their mental and material goods outside of themselves; they could have developed themselves through themselves, that is, could have exercised their capacities in common. But this would have amounted to saying that human beings would have come into existence as developed human beings, and in this case they would not have had to go through their development history. In other words: if mankind had not begun with isolated individuals it would not have needed to fight out its egoistic struggles for the goods that were still alien and external to them. By now, at the end of this brutal struggle for our nature, once that nature–in theory anyway–has been formed, we can at least think of a human society without self-destruction and carry it into practice, a rational, organic human society, with manifold, harmoniously cooperative forms of production, with manifold, organised spheres of activity, which would correspond to the varying proclivities, the manifold activities of men, so that every mature individual can freely exercise his capacities and talents in society, as calling and inclination suggest. This we can do now; for human capacity, human nature (production and dissemination of the propensity to consume products, for the sake of further production) are now developed to excess. The forces of nature no longer confront man as alien and hostile; he knows and uses them for human purposes. Men themselves draw daily closer together. The bounds of space and time, of religion and nationality, the bounds of individuality, are falling asunder, to the horror of narrow minds and the joy of all men of good will! We have only to hail the dawn of freedom, to banish the guardians of night, and we can all clasp hands in rejoicing. Yes, now man has come of age; nothing prevents him from entering at last into his heritage, the fruit of so many millennia of slavish toil and primitive endeavour! His present misery is indeed the most striking proof of this; for it is not a consequence of want, but of superfluity, in productive capacity. England is pressing into the Earth’s remotest corners to seek consumers; but already, or before long, the whole Earth will be too small a market for her products, which continue to multiply in geometrical progression, while her consumers increase only in arithmetical progression, so that Malthus’ theory–whereby consumers grow in geometrical, and production in arithmetical progression–is really the very opposite of truth. Yes, now indeed are men ripe for the full enjoyment of their freedom, or their life. This was not so in the beginning. The human productive powers had first to be developed, the human essence evolved. At first there were merely raw individuals, simple elements of mankind, who had either not yet come into mutual contact and drew their sustenance and bodily needs directly from the earth as plants do, or had made only such contact with each other as to join forces in the brutish warfare of animals. Hence the first form of product-exchange, of intercourse, could only be murder-for-gain, the first form of human activity the labour of the slave. On this basis of historic right, as yet uncontested, no organised exchange could take shape, and only a bartering of products was possible–which was what in fact occurred. The laws that rest on this historical basis have merely regulated murder-for-gain and slavery, have merely erected into a rule or principle what at first occurred by chance, without consciousness or will. Past history till now is no more than a history of the regulation, justification, execution and universalisation of murder-for-gain and slavery. We shall show in what follows, how we have at last reached the point where we all, without exception and at every moment, traffic in our activities, our productive powers, our potentialities and our very selves; how the cannibalism, mutual murder and slavery with which human history started have been elevated into a principle–and how out of this general exploitation and universal vassalism the organic community can first be born.
V
The individual elevated to an end and the species debased to a means: that is an absolute reversal of human and natural life. Man consciously sacrifices his individual life for the life of the species if there is a conflict between the two. Even the as yet unthinking creatures, the animals who only feel, forget their instinct of self-preservation, their drive to self-maintenance if it clashes with their drive to self-propagation, their nature as a species or productive instinct. Love, wherever it may appear, is mightier than egoism. The hen takes up a quite unequal fight if it has to defend its chickens from an attack. Cats will allow themselves to starve if they must, in order to satisfy their sexual desires, or in their sorrow when wicked men take away their kittens. Nature is always concerned with the preservation of the species, with the real life-activity. Individuals always die in the natural order of things and begin to do so, indeed, the moment they have ceased to be able to reproduce. For many members of the animal kingdom, the very day of their mating is the day of their death. In man, who can also do service to his species by means of thought, feeling and will, the gradual decline of his mental powers is the sure presage of his natural death. On this order of things is based the natural world-outlook which sees life itself in the species and regards the individual only as the means to life. In the state of egoism, however, the inverted world-outlook rules because it is itself the state of an inverted world. For our philistines, our Christian shopkeepers and Jewish Christians, the individual is the end, while the life of the species is the means to life. They have created for themselves a world apart. In theory the classical form of this inverted world is the Christian heaven. In the real world the individual dies; in the Christian heaven he goes on living; in real life the species is active in the individual and by means of him; in heaven the essence of the species, God, lives outside individuals, and they are not the medium whereby God works, whereby the essence of the species lives, but on the contrary, it is individuals who live by means of God. Here the essence of the species is reduced to a means for the life of the individual; the Christian ‘self’ needs his God, needs Him for his own individual existence, for his holy immortal soul, for his spiritual salvation! ‘If I did not hope to partake in immortality, I should care nothing for God, nor for all the creeds.’ These few words, uttered by a man of great piety, contain the whole essence of Christianity. Christianity is the theory, the logic of egoism. The classic basis of egoistic practice, on the other hand, is the modern Christian commercial world–another heaven, another fiction, another imagined, suppositious benefit to the life of the individual, sprung from the morbid egoistic craziness of corrupt mankind. The individual, who does not wish to live through himself for the species, but through the species for himself alone, has also to create for himself in practice an inverted world. Practically, therefore, in our commercial world, as it is in theory in the Christian heaven, the individual is the end, the species only the means of life. Here likewise the life of the species is not at work in the individual and by means of him; here, just as in heaven, it is placed outside individuals and reduced to a means for them; here, in fact, it is money. What God is for its theoretical life, money is for the practical life of this inverted world: the alienated potentiality, the bartered life-activity of men. Money is human value numerically expressed–it is the seal of our slavery, the indelible brand of our servitude–men who can buy and sell themselves are in fact slaves. Money is the congealed bloody sweat of the wretched who bring to the market their inalienable property, their most intrinsic powers, their life-activity itself, so as to exchange it for its caput mortuum, a so-called capital, and to dine like cannibals off their own fat. And all of us are wretches such as these! We may emancipate ourselves theoretically from the inverted world-consciousness as much as we please, but so long as we have not escaped it in practice, we are obliged, as the proverb has it, to hunt with the pack. Yes, we are obliged continually to alienate our nature, our life, our own free life-activity in order to sustain our miserable existence. We continually purchase our individual existence by the loss of our freedom. And of course it is not just we proletarians but also we capitalists who make up these wretches who suck their own blood and feed upon themselves. We none of us are able to live our lives freely, to create our work for each other–all of us are able merely to eat up our lives, to prey simply upon each other, if we do not want to starve. Because money, which we live off and for whose acquisition we work, is our own flesh and blood, which, in its alienated form we must struggle for, grab and consume. All of us–and we should not hide it from ourselves–are cannibals, predators, vampires. And remain so as long as we are not all working for each other, but are each obliged to fend for ourselves.
VI
According to the principles of political economy, money is held to be the universal means of exchange, and hence the medium of life, the power of man, the real force of production, the real treasure of mankind. If this externalised treasure really corresponded to the internal one, every man would be worth just so much as the amount of cash or credit he possesses–and as a consistent theology values a man solely according to the measure of his orthodoxy, so a consistent economics ought to value him only according to the weight of his moneybags. In fact, however, neither economics nor theology cares anything about human beings. Political economy is the science of the earthly acquisition of goods, as theology is the science of their acquisition in heaven. But men are not commodities! For the strictly ‘scientific’ economists and theologians people have no value at all. But where these two sacred sciences are applied, in the practice of our modern world of commerce, man is indeed valued only according to his moneybag–just as in the practice of the Christian Middle Ages, which to some extent still flourishes, he was valued according to his profession of faith.
VII
Money is the product of men mutually alienated, of the externalised man. Money is not ‘precious metal’–we have now more paper money, state- and banknotes than metal coinage–money is what does duty for human productive power, the real life-activity of mankind. Capital, therefore, according to the economists’ definition, is accumulated, stored up labour–and insofar as production comes about through the exchange of products, money is exchange value. What cannot be exchanged, cannot be sold, has no value. In that men can no longer be sold, they are now not worth a rap–though they certainly are so insofar as they sell or ‘commodify’ themselves. The economists maintain, indeed, that a man’s value increases to the extent that he can no longer be sold and is therefore obliged to sell himself in order to live; and concludes from this that the ‘free’ man is ‘worth’ more than the slave. This is quite correct. Hunger is a stronger motive to work than the whip of the slave-owner and avarice is a stronger incentive for the private owner to do his utmost than the gracious smile of the satisfied master. What the economists forget, however, is that the ‘value’ of ‘freedom’ must again decline, the more widespread it becomes. The more ‘free’ men flock into slave-labour, the more available, and thus the cheaper, they are or become. The bane of competition lowers the price of ‘free’ men–and the truth is that on the basis of egoistic private ownership, there is no other way of increasing their ‘value’ again but by the re-establishment of slavery.
VIII
Ancient slavery is the natural form of the social order based on murder and robbery; it is also its most human form. It is natural and human to allow oneself to be sold only against one’s will. It is, however, unnatural and inhuman to sell oneself freely. Only the modern commercial world, through Christianity, the epitome of the unnatural, has been able to attain to this supreme degree of baseness, unnaturalness and inhumanity. Man had first to learn to despise human life in order to cast it freely away from him. He had first to cease regarding real life and freedom as priceless values, in order that he might offer them for sale. Mankind had first to go through the school of serfdom so as to pay homage, in principle, to slavery. — Our modern traders are worthy descendants of the medieval serfs, as these latter, the Christian slaves, were worthy descendants of the pagan slaves. As medieval serfdom is ancient slavery raised to a higher power, so the modern Christian commercial world is a similarly enhanced form of medieval serfdom. The ancients had not yet turned the alienation of human life into Christian self-alienation, were not yet conscious of the decadence of human society, had not yet made a principle out of this fact. The ancients were naive; they accepted uncritically what lay in the nature of the world they moved in (and in which we still move today)–the alienation of man. As religion took over from the ancients the human sacrifices it demanded, so politics did the same, without trying to provide any ‘scientific’ justification for this barbarism, or to excuse it hypocritically to their still unawakened consciences. — When the latter awoke, Christianity came into existence. Christianity is the sophistical expression of depraved mankind’s awakened bad conscience, the desire to be freed from its reproaches. But the Christian does not free himself from remorse by freeing the wretched of the earth from their misery; he persuades himself rather, that this human wretchedness is not crazy but right and proper, that real life is by right the external form of life, that the alienation of life is the normal condition of the world as such. — The Christian distinguishes between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ man, that is, between the real and the unreal. The human soul, that is, the remainder, left over when everything corporeal is taken away–and this remnant is invisible because it is actually nothing–the human soul is the sacred and inalienable life of man; the human body on the other hand is an unholy, bad, contemptible, outer and therefore alienable life. The unreal man cannot sell himself as a slave; but the real man is in any case a depraved being, so he not only can but ought to be wretched; the poor shall inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. — The immediate consequence of this teaching was to leave the reality of slavery as it was, and even to regard it as justified, save only that it was no longer men but mere bodies that were sold–a great step forward–but a step yet further into the morass. Once the principle of saleability had triumphed in this fashion, the road was open for universal serfdom, for the general, mutual and free self-bartering of present-day commerce.
IX
The essence of the modern commercial world, money, is the realised essence of Christianity. The mercenary state, the so-called ‘free’ state, is the promised Kingdom of God, the commercial world the promised kingdom of heaven–just as, conversely, God is but idealised capital, and heaven merely the commercial order in theoretical form. — Christianity discovered the principle of saleability. It did not worry yet however about the application of its principle. Since reality for it was evil and transitory, it could have no concern for reality at all, and so none for the realisation of its principle. It was therefore quite indifferent whether people really became alienated, that is, became serfs, bodily slaves. It left this ‘outside’ practice to the ‘outside’, ‘worldly’ powers. And so long as these too were still in a state of theoretical alienation, were more or less in the grip of Christian belief; and so long as they had not yet arrived at practical Christianity, the real serfdom in spite of its theoretical justification remained something purely accidental. Christianity did not in reality change anything in classical slavery to begin with; the existing slavery remained–it was merely enriched with a principle. A new principle, however, is not yet a new existence, a distinction with which our newest Christians, the most recent philosophers, are very familiar. Can anyone, indeed, be surprised at such acumen? If only a theory is given,–and Christianity, like philosophy, has merely provided a theory–then its relationship to the praxis of life becomes a matter of indifference; the theory is a ‘truth’ which is taught and learned, offered and accepted ‘for its own sake’, not for the sake of its application. For this reason in the Middle Ages as in the ancient world, it was just as much a matter of accident whether a man actually became a slave or remained free in the real ‘world’. The difference between medieval serfdom and ancient slavery lies only in the idea involved. In their reality on the other hand there was not a hair’s breadth of difference between them. Neither was better or worse. Neither in the Middle Ages nor in antiquity could one lay claim to real freedom on the ground of one’s nature–for in antiquity they did not recognise this nature and for this reason did not acknowledge it, while in the Middle Ages the nature of man was acknowledged only in ‘spirit’ and in ‘truth’, in the divine hereafter, and for this other reason did not acknowledge it in real life;–but still there was no more intention in the Middle Ages that there was in antiquity to enslave man as such, that is, to turn every man into a real slave. Thus in both cases there was some freedom; in the Middle Ages as in antiquity, there were in fact, that is, accidentally, besides those ‘certain’ people who as Aristotle thought, were ‘born’ to be slaves, also ‘certain’ others who were born free, ‘well-born’, ‘very well-born’, ‘of noble birth’. Thus serfdom was still in reality the natural form of the order based on robbery and murder. Medieval serfdom in reality was not a self-alienation of men, nor could it have been so; for man cannot turn himself directly into a natural serf on his own account. Man’s immediate life, his natural body, can be appropriated only by other men. Direct serfdom required other people who were not serfs. The medieval serf could not possess serfs, he had nothing–he did not possess even his own body as his property–so how could he possess other bodies? Had Christians cared about the legislation of this world, they must soon have seen that ‘worldly’ circumstances still contradicted their principle, that far too much ‘naturalness’ still held sway there. But they did not worry about this since Christians were theoretical egoists. But when in course of time people became enlightened and practical, and wanted to realise Christianity also in this world; when they sought to apply ‘pure’ Christianity and to realise its ‘idea’; they then came to see that the ‘spiritual’ freedom and equality proclaimed by Christianity was still not realised at all. In order to carry the clever distinction between body and soul into life as well, one had to go about it very much more cleverly than the purely theoretical egoists had done. One had to find a form of social life in which the alienation of men was effected just as universally as in the Christian heaven. Free disembodied spirits had also to appear in this world–a truly colossal absurdity, but one which the cleverness of our modern, Christian-educated legislators and political economists has brought into existence. Christianity is realised in the contemporary commercial world.
X
The modern legislators, who as enlightened and practical Christians could not rest content with legislating for the next world but wanted to realise the Christian world, their heaven, on earth, had to make the spirits of heaven appear in this world. Such a conjuring of ghosts was not witchcraft however; everything was already prepared for it and the modern legislators, though no sorcerers, were thus able to bring about this piece of magic conjuring act. All that was needed was to canonise and sanctify the already available private man of the medieval bourgeois society which had evolved from serfdom–to sanctify this abstract ‘personality’, this dead remnant of the real man, who had stripped and divested himself of everything belonging to the life of his species, abstracted it and offered it in heaven, i.e. in theory, to God, and on earth, i.e. in practice, to money. Thus was the neuter, emasculated individual of the Christian heaven made real also in this world. In other words: it needed only to happen to practical life from the political and economic point of view what had already happened to theoretical life from the point of view of religion and theology–it was necessary only to elevate into a principle not merely the theoretical but also the practical alienation of life; and the egoism of heaven was also achieved on earth. This in fact was done. Practical egoism was sanctioned by declaring men to be single individuals, by asserting abstract bare persons to be the true men, by proclaiming human rights, the rights of independent men, and hence alleging men’s independence of each other, their separation and individualisation, to be the essence of life and freedom, and so making out isolated persons to be the free, true and natural men. These monads, naturally, could no longer enter into traffic with each other, which in our kind of trade, based as it is on robbery and murder, amounts to this: they are no longer to be brought to market to be bought and sold directly. This direct trading, this immediate dealing in men, this outright slavery and serfdom had to be abolished, for otherwise people would have still depended on each other; but in place of immediate serfdom there had to be a mediate kind; in place of serfdom in fact there had to be serfdom in principle, which makes all men free and equal, i.e. isolated and done to death. — With the abolition of actual slavery, it was not murder and robbery that were abolished, but direct murder and robbery. That which now did away with ancient and medieval slavery was nothing else but the application of logical egoism. Only now could the principle of slavery–the externalisation of human nature by the isolation of individuals and the degradation of this nature into a means for their existence–be generally realised in life. The thoroughgoing egoism of the modern commercial world abolishes all direct relationships, all direct life, in theory as in practice, in this world as in the next, and permits this life only as a means to private existence. But where all human relationships, all human activity is directly abolished and can still be exercised only as a means to egoistic existence; where from the most natural love, from the relationship of the sexes, to the exchange of ideas in the whole cultural world, nothing can be done without money; where there are no other practical men but those who are cashed and traded; where every heartbeat has first to be turned into money before it can come to life: there the heavenly souls wander on earth, there the dehumanised man exists also in this world, there the ‘blessedness’ of the next world has become the ‘good fortune’ of this, there theoretical egoism has become practical egoism, the mere fact of actual slavery has been elevated into a principle and is systematically put into effect.
XI
The distinction between private man and member of the community, between domestic and public life, has always existed in fact; for it is nothing else but the distinction between person and property. The abstract ‘personality’, separated from all the means of his existence, this bodiless and lifeless ghost, has been seeking his lost body from the beginning of history, and has sought it at times in the heavenly otherworld, in God, the purveyor of ever-distant, never-attainable blessedness, and at times in the earthly otherworld, in money, the purveyor of ever-distant, otherworldly, never-attainable happiness. This separation of person and property, which has existed in fact ever since religion and politics have existed, needed only to be recognised in principle and to be sanctioned, and it was thereby asserted that money alone was the essence of the community or the state, while man was merely its paid servant, and indeed a mere ragged purse-bearer. In the modern state, therefore, not man but the moneybag is the lawgiver, and just as the private man replaces the holy ‘personality’, so the functionary replaces the holy ‘property’. Just as in old times the legislators received their authority from God, so they now receive it from property, from money. The sanctity of abstract ‘property’ divorced from persons and people presupposes no less the sanctity of the abstract, naked, empty ‘personality’, divorced from its property, as this latter presupposes the former. The abstract, alienated, external and alienable ‘property’ can only appear in its holy purity, separated from everything human, if ‘personality’ likewise appears in its holy purity, separated, that is, from all genuine property. So a sharp boundary-line was drawn round every individual, within which the holy personality was to be located. These holy personalities are the blessed spirits of heaven walking on earth; they are the bodies of these shadows–their boundary-line is their outer skin. The objective atmosphere of men however, which in heaven is God, the superhuman good, is on earth the extra-human, non-human, tangible good, the object, the property, the product divorced from the producer, its creator, the abstract essence of relationships: money. This is how the ‘person’ came to be declared holy, not indeed because it is a human essence–on the contrary its essence is completely separated from it; in egoism the universally human is left out of account–but because it is an ‘I’. — On the other hand ‘property’ came to be declared holy, again not because it is human–for it is indeed only an object and not even a superhuman one, like God in heaven, but something extrahuman–it is holy, rather, because it is the means of egoistic existence, because the ‘I’ uses it (in practice the egoism of the next world becomes tangible). But egoism, which seeks to preserve only the naked person, removed from or independent of its natural and human environment, separated from its physical and social atmosphere, and endeavours to maintain that person in a lifeless, inorganic, inactive, stony existence–egoism which cannot feel beyond its outer skin and cannot see beyond its nose–this narrow-minded essence is in fact destructive of the real life of the individual himself. It simply did not occur to the wise Christian lawgivers that one cannot separate man from the atmosphere in which he breathes without miserably suffocating him in his isolation; that his natural or physical life includes not only what lies within the boundaries of his body which they had drawn, but the whole of nature; that his spiritual or social life-activity includes not only the products, thoughts and feelings that remain within him, but all the products of social life. It did not occur to them that the man cut off from his environment is an emasculated, flayed being with no more life in him than raw meat with the hide off, or a breathing creature deprived of air. They took all life-giving social atmosphere away from man, and left it to him instead to create a vapour around himself, and if possible to preserve himself with money, the materialised Christian spirit of God. And this spiritualised holy corpse they declared to be the free man, the untouchable, holy, infinite personality! — What do these holy corpses do in order to preserve themselves? They try to take away from each other this spirit, their discarded essence, without which they would rot; they rob each other in order not to be without property–they murder each other to live, that is, in order to exist in misery. Thus human freedom and equality were taken to be established by systematically realising the freedom of beasts of prey, based on the equality of death. This freedom was called man’s natural freedom! What enlightened lawgivers! They spoke to poor men somewhat as follows: ‘you are free by nature, and your natural freedom, your naked personality, are to remain your untouchable, inalienable property. But as to that which pertains to your social life (and of course everything belongs to this; you cannot even sustain your natural life if you do not acquire the food produced by society), you must wrest it individually from each other. You must use your natural freedom to obtain the means for life. And you obtain these by alienating your natural freedom–but by alienating it voluntarily. Nobody is forced to alienate his natural freedom, to sell, hire, or commodify himself, if he prefers to starve. But take care not to disturb others who understand better how to cash and convert their natural freedom; do not disturb these worthy folk in their acquisition! If you want to acquire, you have to surrender voluntarily your natural freedom and offer it for sale, as the other worthy people do. In return, however, when you have acquired something, you can buy and use the natural freedom of other people.’
The trade in human beings, the trade in human freedom and human life, has become too universal nowadays for it to be noticeable at first sight. Indeed one cannot see the wood for the trees. It is by no means only the propertyless who barter away their freedom for the means of their existence; the more a person has ‘acquired’ already, the more he wants to go on ‘acquiring’ until in the end he would like to drain the whole world for his private purpose. Yes, we get so used to trading with our own and other people’s freedom that finally we are hardened to it and are left with no idea or memory of free activity and real life. If slavery is more visible among the propertyless, among the propertied it is all the more a state of mind. But for this generation of born slaves, even visible slavery is invisible! Our working men and women, our day-labourers, servants and maids who are happy to have found a master, these are free workers according to our modern notions, and the master who keeps many hands busy and feeds many mouths is ‘respectable’ (usually also extremely enlightened), and is a ‘useful member of civil society’ … But what about those blacks in ‘free’ North America who work for a master exactly as our ‘free’ workers do; for slave-owners, who exactly resemble our worthy, enlightened, useful members of civil society, in keeping many hands busy and many mouths fed? — Oh, how unchristian! But at any rate there is a difference between the ‘infamous’ human trade on the coast of Africa and the respectable human trade at our doorsteps! There is even an essential difference between the modern slavery of the Christian North America and the ancient slavery of pagan Greece. The Greeks kept slaves so that they could devote themselves to public life, live in freedom, and cultivate the arts and sciences in a free manner; the ancients still had no machines which might have made the slaves, the human machines, superfluous, but had they possessed the new discoveries, then, as Aristotle clearly stated, they would have had no slaves to labour for their greed. The moderns on the other hand, the Christians, buy human beings only because it is cheaper to work with bought rather than with hired men, but yet they declare infamous this trade in human beings, as soon as it threatens to become less profitable or even dangerous to the trader’s existence. And now what of the human trade at our doorsteps! What an essential difference! With us slavery is no longer one-sided but mutual: not only do I make you, but you make me, a slave, not by directly robbing each other of our freedom, for this cannot be done, but by mutually taking away the means to our freedom and our life. Thus we can no longer be sold against our will; we have to sell ourselves voluntarily! We cannot even sell ourselves any more; no, we must simply hire and make a commodity of ourselves–as I said, we must simply give up our freedom in a wholly voluntary fashion. Yes, our modern lawgivers have distinguished well between selling and putting on the market. Such cleverness is frightful! But alas! The cleverness of our modern lawgivers is only the slave mentality. — As I said, to the modern commercial world even visible slavery is invisible.
XII
The world of commerce has solved the problem of realising Christianity. This is the task of taking away absolutely all and every kind of ability from men, not only in fantasied theory, but in genuine real life and practice, and conferring all this on an imaginary chimerical Being; it is the task under pretence of turning the earth into a palpable heaven, of converting it into a equally palpable hell–of depriving men of all the life-giving human air of social life and putting them into the air-pump of egoism, and then representing the death-struggle of these miserable beings as the normal life-activity of men. — Compared with our social relationships, not only antiquity but even the Middle Ages were still human. Medieval society, with all the accursed appendage of its barbaric laws and institutions, did not disfigure men through and through as modern society does. In the Middle Ages, beside the serfs who were nothing and had nothing, there were also people who had a social position, and social character, people who were something. The estates and guilds, merely egoistic associations as they were, had a social character, and a social spirit, however limited; the individual could enter into his circle of social activity and be absorbed into the community, in however limited a way. — It is quite different now, when the formula has been found for universal serfdom. The social life of man is now completely devoid of any noble motives. There is no social property or living possession; no man who may really have or be something. This general trash, in which people fancy themselves to possess something, is a phantom we pursue in vain! — What does genuine social property consist of? It consists in the means of living and functioning in society. Property is the body of social man and as such is his first requirement for living in society, just as the natural body, our natural property, is the first requirement of living at all. But what is our social property? — This general trash, money, is not an organic, living body. Yes, it is supposed to represent the social body, the organic species-life and our social relationships; but it cannot do this because by its very nature it is inorganic and without articulation or inner differentiation; it is nothing else but dead matter, a sum or number. How can the value of a living being, the value of man and his highest life and activity, how can the value of social life be expressed in sums and numbers? We were able to arrive at this absurdity only by robbing the real life of a man’s soul, dividing and dismembering it and placing one half in the other world and the other half in this. Let us imagine on the one hand a world of spirits without bodies, a chimera, and on the other a bodily world without spirit, without life, a dead world of matter, and thus another chimera–and now let us suppose these bodiless spirits rushing after this soulless matter in order to grab hold of smaller or larger bits of it and make off with them: we then have a faithful picture of the chimerical world in which we live. However much we seize and acquire of this dead, soulless and inorganic matter, this general trash that we pursue as ghosts hunt for their lost bodies, we still do not gain from it any genuine living property or social possession, nor anything which would determine and make possible our life and function in society, our social activity; we gain only the materialised Christian God, the ghost or spirit in which we can preserve and maintain our earthly corpses in a dead stony existence. Money can never in any way be property [Eigenthum]; on the contrary, to anyone whose nature is not yet corrupted it must appear so alien, so improper to man [dem Menschen nicht Eigenthümliches betrachten werden], that precisely what is characteristic of all genuine and real property, the internal fusion of owner and owned, appears here as the most repulsive and contemptible vice. The man of honour, the genuine man, is so wholly identified with his property, with his real social possessions, that he is fused into and absorbed in it as his soul is with his body; he fills his post so completely that it is quite impossible to think of him as separated from his sphere of activity–a phenomenon that is now the exception since the content of all social endeavour nowadays is money. For what makes a man man is not the Christian and philosophical aloofness from ordinary life, but the mutual devotion of living and working for each other. The fusion of possessor and possession is thus what characterises genuine property, the social no less than the natural, as such. Everything that I have really appropriated, which is thus my living property, is intimately fused with me; must be, and therefore ought to be. — But what is he who has become fused with our so-calledproperty? Who so far identifies himself with his money that he cannot be separated from it? A miserable creature! — And yet we have to regard this general trash as the first requirement of our lives, as our indispensable property, because without it we cannot preserve ourselves. Hence you must strive eternally to appropriate something which cannot be appropriated, which eternally remains remote and inaccessible to you. In your money you can own only a soulless body that you can never animate, that can never become your property. You must count yourself lucky to have a body that does not belong to you; lucky to be able to exchange your own flesh and blood, your life-activity for this trash, and thus to be able to sell yourself–a thing that in the Middle Ages and in antiquity was at least still considered a misfortune,–whereas now you must count yourself lucky to be a modern serf. For you are constantly exposed to the danger of lapsing into that original state of the blessed spirits which our legislators conjured down from the Christian heaven and have declared to be the normal state of ‘natural’ men; you are constantly exposed to the danger of becoming a pure, free, naked person.
XIII
The commercial world is the practical world of appearances and lies. Under the appearance of absolute independence, absolute necessity; under the appearance of the most lively communications, the deadly isolation of each man from all his fellows; under the appearance of an untouchable property assured to all individuals, an actual deprivation of all their powers; under the appearance of the most universal freedom, the most universal servitude. No wonder that in this realised world of lies fraud is the norm and honesty an offence; that baseness achieves all the honours and the lot of the honourable is misery and shame; that hypocrisy rejoices in triumph while truthfulness is held indecent; that the half-hearted half-hold a majority while firmness is firmly in the minority; and finally, that the freest vision is the most destructive while the crassest servility is the most conservative element.
XIV
A man torn off from his life-giving roots and from his life-element, like a rotten fruit fallen from the tree of life, and thus a dying, isolated individual, can only artificially be preserved from decay. A living being does not conserve himself but is active and creates himself anew at every moment. But in order really to live, that is, to be able to bestir or create oneself, the different individual members of the self-same greater organic body must be inseparably connected with each other as well as with their communal life-element or life-material; they and their bodies and their life-atmosphere must not be separated from each other. This separation, isolation and disintegration of individuals is the characteristic feature of the animal world and egoism, and the reason why mankind have hitherto had this animal characteristic is that they were still developing; for the animal world itself is nothing else but mankind caught in the process of development. Mankind, in fact, have a two-fold history of development: one, their first history, represents the development of their still unconscious or bodily existence, and this we find in the natural animal world; the other, their second history, which follows from and after the first, and whereby they first exist in a completed, developed and perfect form, consists in the development of their conscious, spiritual or social existence, and this we encounter in the social animal world. We find ourselves now on the peak, at the culminating point of the world of social animals; and hence we are now social predators, complete, conscious egoists, who sanction in free competition the war of all against all, who uphold in the so-called rights of man the rights of the isolated individual, the private person, the ‘absolute personality’, who condone in the freedom of trade the mutual exploitation of each other, the lust for money, which is nothing else but the blood-lust of the social beasts of prey. We are no longer herbivores like our guileless ancestors who, though also social animals, were not yet social predators, in that most of them, like good-tempered domestic animals, only required to be fed: we are bloodsuckers who mutually flay and devour each other. As the animal enjoys in blood his own life merely, though in a bestial, brutal fashion, so man enjoys in money his own life in a brutal, bestial, cannibal manner. Money is social blood, but blood externalised, blood which has been shed. The Jews, whose world historical mission in the natural history of the world of social animals was to evolve the predator out of mankind, have at last fulfilled the work they were called to. The mystery of Judaism and Christianity is revealed in the modern Jewish-Christian world of shopkeepers. The mystery of Christ’s blood, like that of the veneration of blood in ancient Judaism, appears here at last quite openly as the mystery of the predator. In ancient Judaism the blood cult was only a prototype; in medieval Christianity it became theoretically, ideally, logically realised: one really consumed the externalised, poured-out blood of mankind, but only in imagination, the blood of the God-man. In the modern Jewish-Christian world of shopkeepers this besetting urge of the world of social animals has at last appeared, no longer symbolically or mystically, but in wholly prosaic form. In the religion of the social predators there was still poetry. Even if not the poetry of Olympus, it was still the poetry of Walpurgisnacht. The world of social animals became ordinary and prosaic only when nature again reasserted its rights and the isolated man, this poor slave of antiquity and serf of the Middle Ages, was no longer content with heavenly food; he began to strive, not for spiritual but for material treasures, and wished to juggle his alienated life, his shed blood, no longer into his invisible belly but into his visible pocket. Then the sacred conjuring trick became profane, the heavenly fraud an earthly one, the poetic contest of gods and devils a prosaic animal struggle, the mystical God-eating [Theophagie] an open devouring of man [Anthropophagie]. God’s church, the heavenly tomb, where the priest, the hyena of the social animals, conducted an imaginary funeral feast, has now been transformed into the money state, a worldly battlefield where predators with equal rights guzzle each other’s blood. In the money state, the state of free competition, all privileges and differences of rank are at an end; here, as we said, there prevails an unpoetic freedom of the predator, based on the equality of death. Against money, kings have no more title to command because they are the lions among human animals, than does the black-garbed priest still have the right among them to regale himself upon the odour of death because he is their hyena. On the contrary, they have their rights, like other human animals, only by virtue of their common right of nature, their common quality as predators, blood-suckers, Jews and wolves of money.
XV
Money is the means of exchange which has turned to a dead letter and kills life, just as letters are the means of communication which have turned to dead money and kill the spirit. The invention of both money and the alphabet is attributed to the Phoenicians, the same nation which also invented the Jewish God. A literary wit supposed, therefore, that he was making a very telling point against the elimination of money when in one of his writings, under the title of ‘The Movement of Production’, he compared the spiritual capital that we possess in writings (especially his own) to the material capital that we possess in money, and then went on to say: ‘The elimination of money would thus have the same significance as the elimination of writing: it would be a command to world history to return into its womb.’ But, to begin with, Herr Schulz has overlooked the difference between the material capital that we possess in money and the spiritual capital that we can appropriate through writing. This difference is nothing less than the difference between genuine and false property. Without doubt I can appropriate spiritual treasures through writing. But it would not occur to anyone to label the treasures that we appropriate through words and writing as the individual’s private property that he could in turn bequeath to private heirs. Of course I can inherit or acquire a library, a so-called treasury of literature; I can even obtain so-called revelations through holy writ; but the more this acquisition approximates to the acquisition of money, the more external and accidental it is, the more it is subject to loss and gain, the more valueless, the more spiritless, my ‘spiritual’ treasure becomes. Or does Herr Schulz think that I have already garnered the spirit with the letters and the books? Language is the living, animate means of communication but it is not the letters that count. Spiritual money has value only so far as it is organically interfused with man. Language can be organically fused with men because it is an organic, structured whole. But, as was already shown earlier, money cannot fuse organically with men, and therefore resembles writing, not in the sense of living language, but in the sense of dead letters. It is said–and it is indeed very significant–that letters, like money, were invented by those who invented Moloch. Language, however, was not invented in this place or that. If an invention is no longer needed or useable, and has even become harmful, then people no longer use it though without therefore needing to return to the ‘womb’. That the invention of letters and of coins were ‘useful’, and even ‘necessary’ discoveries is not in dispute. The question is simply whether they will therefore also be ‘useful’ and ‘necessary’ in the future. It is perfectly true that in the isolated condition and mutual alienation of men that has existed until now, an external symbol had to be invented to represent the exchange of spiritual and material products. During this period of alienation such an abstraction from genuine, spiritual and living relationships strengthened men’s capacity and productive power; for in this abstract means of relationship they had in fact a mediating essence of their own alienation; because they were themselves not human, that is, not united, they had to seek the uniting factor outside themselves, that is, in a non-human, superhuman being. Without this non-human means of relationship they would simply not have come into relationship at all. But as soon as men unite, and a direct relation can occur between them, the non-human, external, dead means of relation must necessarily be abolished. This dead and deadening means of relation cannot and will not be abolished by an act of choice; its abolition no more occurs by ‘command’ than its creation did. Just as, during the inner fragmentation of mankind, the need for an external means of unity brought spiritual and material idols into being, so the need for direct inner unification of men will bring these idols to nought again. The love which took refuge in heaven when earth was not yet able to comprehend it, will again have its dwelling where it was born and nourished, in the human breast. We shall no longer seek our life vainly outside and above ourselves. No foreign being, no third intermediary will again force itself between us to unite us externally and in appearance, to ‘mediate’, while internally and in reality it separates and divides us. Together with commercial speculation, philosophical and theological speculation will come to an end; together with politics, religion will also disappear. Driven by the inner necessity of our nature and the outer need of circumstances we shall once and for all finish with all the nonsense and hypocritical rubbish of our philosophers, learned men, priests and politicians which harmonises so beautifully with the inhumanity and baseness of our bourgeois society; and we shall do it by uniting ourselves into a community and by ejecting as alien bodies all these external means of relation, all these thorns in our flesh.
XVI
The organic community we envisage could come into being only through the highest development of all our powers by means of the painful spur of necessity and of evil passions. The organic community, the ripe fruit of human development, could not come into being so long as we were not yet completely developed, and we could not develop ourselves if we did not come into contact with each other. During the development of contact, however, we have continued to struggle with each other as isolated individuals. We have fought with each other over our spiritual and material means of contact because as isolated individuals we needed these means of contact in order to live. We needed them because we were not yet united; but the unification or cooperation of our powers is our life. We have therefore had to look for our very life outside ourselves and to attain it by mutual fighting. Through this fight however we have attained something quite different from what we were trying and hoping to attain. We had thought to attain an outside good, and we have merely developed ourselves thereby. But this madness was beneficial and useful to us only so long as it really helped to develop our powers and capacities. After they are developed we would only mutually ruin each other if we did not turn to communism. The struggle no longer develops our powers any further, if only because they are now developed. But we can also see daily that on the one hand we merely squander our powers fruitlessly and that on the other they simply cannot develop any further because of the superabundance of our powers of production. If the bourgeois liberals still regale us with the necessity of progress through the competitive struggle, it is only because they are thoughtless twaddlers, because they perpetrate anachronisms, or because egoism has made them blind and incapable of grasping truths apparent to anyone who merely opens his eyes. If we do not unite with each other in love, then at the stage of development that we have arrived at we can only go on mutually exploiting and devouring each other. Not centuries, as the unthinking liberals assume, not even decades will pass before the hundredfold increase in productive powers will have pushed into the deepest misery the great majority of those who must live by the work of their hands, because their hands will have become valueless; while those few who busy themselves with the accumulation of capital will revel in abundance and ruin themselves in vile pursuit of pleasure, if they have not first hearkened to the voice of love and reason or succumbed to force.
XVII
The history of the development of society is completed; soon the last hour will strike for the world of social animals. The clock of the money machine has run down and our political exponents of progress and reaction are trying in vain to keep it on the move….