Communism as the Full Development of Human Potentiality

Thus the ancient conception in which man, in spite of his various narrow national, religious or political determinations, still nevertheless appears as the aim of production, seems to be very superior to the modern world where production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production. But in fact, when the narrow bourgeois form is cast aside, what is wealth other than the universality of the needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive forces, etc., of individuals that are generated by universal exchange? The complete development of human domination of natural forces, both those of so-called ‘nature’ as well as those of his own nature? What is it but the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions without any presupposition other than the previous historical development, which makes the totality of this development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such as not measured against any already established yardstick, into an end in itself? What is this, but a situation in which man does not reproduce himself in a determined form, but produces his totality? Where man does not seek to remain something that he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois economics — and the epoch of production that corresponds to it — this complete elaboration of the inner potential of man appears as complete depletion, this universal objectification as complete alienation and the destruction of all determined, one-sided aims as the sacrifice of his autonomy to a wholly external aim. Thus, on the one hand, the childlike ancient world appears to be the higher.