Every thoughtful socialist will have publicly or inwardly asked himself the painful question: isn't there a kernel of truth in our opponents’ objection that modern socialism only addresses the meeting of economic needs, that at best it represents a demand for justice but cannot claim to be an outlook on life, a Weltanschauung?
We would like to look this question squarely in the eye here, without fear of the consequences. Is socialism a Weltanschauung and, if it is, what is its meaning and content? That is the question we are facing.
There is a succinct formulation of socialism's final goal, which derives from Friedrich Engels. It is the notion of the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. This formulation may seem like a mere catchphrase to some. And to some extent it would be if this leap were to be understood in the epistemological or dialectical sense. Epistemologically, we cannot see why the course of development, seen to be necessary – that is, determined by natural law – should simply cease to be determined – that is, necessary – exactly on the day in which socialism celebrates its victory. In the same way, it would also not mean much if freedom were thought of here merely in the sense of the dialectical movement of the Spirit up to the stage of freedom à la Hegel. But Engels's formulation has a different meaning. He expresses a social insight, an insight into the character of mutual human relations, indeed in a way intended to highlight the ethical implications of this insight. We should begin by developing this sociological insight.
The necessity that socialism overcomes in favour of freedom is, as we know, the necessity of the historic laws of the capitalist economy, which operate as the natural laws of this society. The overcoming of these necessities is tied to the dissolution of those spiritual realities that, having arisen due to capitalism, are part of the true essence of this socio-historical stage.
There are a whole series of spiritual realities in capitalist society that exist and operate independently of the will of each individual in society and thus have an objective existence. The way in which they operate is likewise independent of the will of the individual; for him, their operation represents a sequence of events governed by objective laws.
This is above all the case with the economy. ‘Capital’ and ‘labour’ have an objective existence here. They confront each other independently of the will of individual capitalists and workers. What is more, capital bears interest, supply and demand meet each in the markets, and crises interrupt the course of production. We continually see that, despite the existing machines and raw materials, the available labour power and urgent, unsatisfied needs, the productive apparatus is idle and paralysed, with no earthly power able to set it in motion. Not human will but prices decide how labour is deployed. Not human will but interest rates command capital. The capitalist is just as powerless in the face of the laws of competition as the workers are. Capitalists and workers alike, human beings in general, appear as mere players on the economic stage. Only competition, capital, interest, prices and so on are active and real here, objective facts of social being, while the free will of human beings is only a mirage, only a semblance.1
Marx spotted a problem in this state of affairs. He asked: how can lifeless objects like machines and natural resources master living beings? How can the prices of commodities, which do not adhere to them by nature, become properties of these commodities, like the material of which they consist? How can machines bear interest as if they were trees whose fruit one can pick? Or, more generally, what is the essence of this ghostly process that appears to us as reality under capitalism? And what explains the laws according to which this reality proceeds?
Putting it in this form was tantamount to answering the question; those feigned extra-human realities are ultimately nothing other than the effects of certain relations in the human world. They are effects of relations between persons, specifically of those relations in which human beings face each other as economic actors, in other words: the relations of production.
Why does ‘capital’ exist? The machine, which in a human sense represents nothing other than past labour, is able to confront living labour, the workers, as a power independent of him or her, as capital, only because past labour, the product of labour – machines or tools – was alienated from present labour by becoming the property of others. Without this alienation of past labour – that is, without private ownership of the means of production, which deprives the present worker of his control of his own past labour – present labour would be a simple continuation of past labour. That it is otherwise in capitalism is a consequence of the fact that here the interrelationship of the economic actors is not the cooperative relation of the joint workers who use the joint product of their past labour, the means of production, as tools for their current labour but is the capital relation between the workers – whose past labour (the means of production) has been alienated from them – and those who are in possession of that past labour, that is, the capitalists.
Un-freedom therefore is part of the moral essence of the ‘capital relation’: the un-freedom of the wage workers, the proletarians, who depend on means of production in possession of others. They work under external command. It is not degrading to work under orders: any collective work requires its coordination through orders. What is degrading is the fact that under the given conditions the power to command, to which the workers are subjected, is an alien power, although it should be the workers’ own since, from the social point of view, it rests on the product of their own labour, the machine. However, this un-freedom is also degrading because it curtails the individuality of those who are subjected to it.
Being separated from his product, the worker is in a sense separated from himself. A part of himself – his past work – is being alienated from him. The worker is in part alienated from himself. And, in the end, this part of his life, which is alienated from him, is in control of the remaining part of his life.
What is a ‘commodity’? What is ‘price’? Why do these things exist?
The ‘prices’ that appear as ‘properties’ of ‘commodities’ are also ultimately no more than relations between human beings, actually between the persons who have produced these commodities. The relation of producers to each other, in a society with a division of labour based on private ownership, is a unique one: They produce goods for each other without knowing about each other. They do not work in a cooperative way but in isolated groups, isolated from one another through the private property of the owners of the firms, and thus allocation of the total labour to the individual workers is impossible to plan in advance. This allocation takes place retrospectively since the prices in the market show whether too much or too little of a commodity was produced. Therefore, what appears to be price, that is, the relation of exchange between commodities, is nothing other than the relation of the different persons producing within the division of labour. The relation of the owners to those who are propertyless (the capital relation), and the relation of the workers to each other in a society based on a division of labour in which workers are separated from each other through the private ownership of the owners – these relations of people make up the ultimate basis of social realities in capitalism such as capital, commodity prices, interest and so on. If the worker's past labour (the means of production) were not alienated from him, there would be no ‘capital’; if the workers were not alienated from each other through the private capital of the owners of companies, and if they only produced in a cooperative way, there would be no ‘commodity price’. The estrangement of man from man and the estrangement of things (‘commodity’, ‘capital’) from man are both thus consequences of private ownership in a society based on a division of labour. ‘Capital’ and ‘prices’ only appear to dominate human beings; in reality, human beings are being dominated by human beings here. This is true not only of the economy but also of the state.
Society creates an organ to safeguard its common interests against internal and external enemies. This organ is state power. As soon as it arises, this organ assumes an independent existence in the face of society. […] And what goes for the economy and state is also true of the other entities, organs, reifications and ‘pseudo-natural laws’ in the realm of society.
Between the realms of nature, where necessity reigns, and the human realm, where freedom reigns, there is, ‘up to now’ as Engels says, ‘the realm of history’. Or, according to Marx, between being and consciousness there is the world of ‘social being’. The relation of flesh and blood individuals to one another is the only real relationship in society; those ostensibly real relationships can be theoretically resolved into relations between human beings.2
In capitalism, this resolution can only be achieved in thought; it remains a theoretical insight of sociology. To turn it into a reality, to carry it out practically, is the task of socialism. Socialism resolves on the practical level the ghostlike and feigned realities of society controlling us today into what Marx, on the theoretical level, resolved them into: the direct relation of human being to human being.3
Freedom and humanness are equivalent for Marx. Instead of a bourgeois society, he wants a ‘human society’. The more directly, the more meaningfully, the more lively the human essence emerges in social relations, the freer is the human being and the more human is his society. No estranged ‘will’, which in essence is his own alienated will, no lawfulness that is not dominated by him because it emerged, so to speak, behind his back – none of this any longer limits his conscious, responsible and therefore genuine human will.
We see that not only is an unjust order to be overcome here in favour of a just one but that humanity, through the manner in which it overcomes this, is to climb to a new, hitherto undreamed of stage of freedom. The socialist ideal goes beyond the demand for justice, which had already been raised by the bourgeois revolutions; they had originally demanded permanent equality and justice, a goal only later occluded by the economy. However, the outward recognition of the equality of human beings, that is, justice, represents an indispensable precondition of a social order based on human beings. Precisely the impossibility, for constitutive reasons, of realizing economic justice in capitalism – because in it men cannot become masters over the law of value (the law of the accumulation of capital) – is a basic reason why socialists demand the socialization of the means of production. However, even a just condition of society can remain an ethical-external condition because it does not necessarily have to be founded on the freedom and responsibility of individuals. There can also be dictatorial justice, and if justice, when realized through democracy, really is to mean ethical progress, this is not due to the nature of justice but to that of democracy, which is inseparable from the responsibility, however small, of the individual.
Socialism, however, does not limit itself to the demand for the external equality of people, that is, the demand for justice. Since it extends the demand for justice to the economy, it faces a social situation in which injustice prevails as an economic necessity but in which men do not control their economy and thus the requirements of this economy. The struggle for economic justice leads to the struggle against a state of society in which man does not have control over the effects of his will; it leads to the struggle to overcome social necessity as such in favour of a new freedom, the social freedom of man.
This idea of social freedom is a specifically socialist one. Both the sociological knowledge of the purely human conditionality of social being and the drive to give this knowledge a historic material form originate from proletarian life. Since the proletarian recognizes himself as what he is, as the lowest element of social existence, he recognizes the social being as a purely human-conditioned construct of which he himself, the human being, is quite simply the lynchpin.
The proletarian can only free himself from the capital relation by replacing it with the purely human relation of human beings to human beings – the cooperative relation of working people. With this, not only does the dominion of man over man cease but at the same time men become masters of themselves, no longer servants of the social laws that are apparently independent of them but directly carry out their own will.
However, the impulse towards a form of life – the cooperative form – in which this conditionality of social being would resolve itself directly in his own life, arises from his struggle against the capital relation, which can only be overcome by that form of life. Just as he needs no scientific re-education to arrive at this knowledge, he also needs no ethical re-education to arrive at this impulse: science and ethics only open his eyes to that segment of his mental existence which is conditioned by his class position.4
However, neither proletarian sociology nor proletarian ethics arise historically from nowhere. As we know, just as Marxian sociology came into being through the analysis of the economic categories of classical political economy, therefore as the continuation of Physiocratic-Ricardian sociology, so the proletarian ethic is the continuation of ethics beyond its bourgeois possibilities. Not only the objective but also the ethical preconditions of a new social order develop in the womb of the old society because, just like the objective possibilities, the ethical requirements of an outlived social order also point beyond its own limits. And so it is with the idea of freedom, which in its highest bourgeois form leads to an irresolvable contradiction, for to be free means to be accountable to my conscience and only to my conscience. Responsibility to myself – this is the material out of which freedom is realized. My personality passes the test when it itself weighs the responsibilities which present themselves to it. No other subject can or should take this decision from me. The state and society must not be accepted as moral subjects. When it comes to feudal corporative powers, the church, the guild and the dynasties, the citizen may well inwardly hold onto this negative attitude. But he cannot do this with regard to his own society, bourgeois society, for he can neither deny his share in it nor come to terms, within and with himself, with the responsibilities that arise from his participation. And he also cannot give up the demand for unlimited self-responsibility. […] The heroic shaping of this contradiction leads to Kant's categorical imperative, to the desperate adherence to an empty concept of duty as the social function of personality. Within bourgeois decadence, this heroic tension between ideal and reality dissolves either into a sceptical turn against the ideal of freedom – as in fascism – or into a petit bourgeois idyll of moral contentedness. Historically, the idea of responsibility as the basis of inner freedom appears in the West in its purest form in Calvinism. The latter's hostility to the state and society arises from this core of its essence: responsibility, which the individual seizes for himself, has to be attained at the cost of the traditional bearers of moral responsibilities, at the cost of the organic forms of medieval society. In the medieval world of God, responsibility is also in a sense a corporative monopoly. It rests with the organic-traditional communities, with family, the municipality, the guild, nobility and the church. To claim personal responsibility here means rejecting the collective forms of responsibility, denying the validity of the ‘social’ in the ethical realm. Souls cross the threshold of personality individually: for them the ‘others’, ‘society’, continue to cling to natural existence, to the dead responsibility from which the conscience of the newborn strives to break away. For them society – as far as they can conceive of the concept – remains a part of the creaturely realm, of unredeemed creation. Its authority – whether corporative, ecclesiastical or state – is the power of evil. However, even souls who are glad to accept responsibility do not form a social bond with like-minded individuals. The doctrine of predestination dissolves the world into solitudes. One's neighbour is, like lifeless nature, a mere means to one's own moral self-probation. The passionate religious obsession of Calvinists to limitlessly increase their own responsibility lends to the idea of inner freedom the force to affirm the personality as well as the resilience needed for an absolute rejection of society and state. The individual can assert this completely utopian, extra-social position only as long as he himself has no inner participation in the objective social powers. As long as the citizen is found as an isolated foreign element within a corporative society in the course of dissolution, he can believe that an extra-social existence is real. But bourgeois society, too, does not dissolve the formally extra-social existence of its members. Rather, it confirms it: ‘bourgeois society’ is, in its narrower meaning, not a society of its citizens but a simple reality that can only be understood to exist in contradistinction to the state. The existence of society – not of the extraneous corporative society but of his own bourgeois society and his share in it – this is the point at which the utopian extra-social aspect of the individual comes into conflict with itself.
The ‘social contract’ and the categorical imperative represent two complementary attempts at resolving this contradiction. Rousseau resolves the share of the individual in the state into freedom through an agreed self-restraint. In Rousseau's formula, this self-restraint is still dictated by a motive, although it is a purposively rational one, in which the neighbour plays a certain role, though a formal one. Kant sensed the ignobility of this rationalistic motivation as well as the contradiction of accepting the restraint agreed upon with others as moral self-restraint. In his categorical imperative it seems as if both motivation and neighbour completely vanish from the picture. The relation of the individual to his own social function, to the state, also formally becomes, by way of an extraordinarily abstract concept of duty, an exclusive problem of the inner freedom of the individual. It is precisely the strict form of this solution that starkly lays bare the contradiction that it denies. Since the responsibility of the individual should include the social dimension, this responsibility loses humanly comprehensible meaning and any possible content.
The idea of being responsible for our personal share in the life of ‘others’, that is, in social realities, and incorporating it into the realm of freedom cannot be realized in the bourgeois world. But it is just as impossible to renounce and thus to arbitrarily limit our responsibility and thus our freedom. The bourgeois world's idea of freedom and responsibility points beyond the boundaries of this world.
The true concept of social freedom is based on the real relation of men to men. It forces this demand on us through the twofold insight that there is, on the one hand, no human behaviour that is completely without social consequences and that, on the other hand, there is no existing entity, no power, no structure and no law in society, nor can there be, that is not in some way based on the behaviour of individual human beings. For the socialist, ‘acting freely’ means acting while conscious of the responsibility we bear for our part in mutual human relationships – outside of which there is no social reality – and realizing that we have to bear this responsibility. Being free therefore no longer means, as in the typical ideology of the bourgeois, to be free of duty and responsibility but rather to be free through duty and responsibility. It is not the freedom of those who are relieved of the necessity to choose but of those who choose, not freedom of relief from duty but the duty which one assigns oneself; it is thus not a form of releasing oneself from society but the fundamental form of social connectedness, not the point at which solidarity with others ceases but the point at which we take on the responsibility of social being, which cannot be shifted onto others.
What we have to ask is: Does this kind of freedom cancel the concept of personal freedom? Not at all! Personal freedom – the freedom and responsibility of the individual in his nevertheless existing extra-social relations – is and remains the unalterable basis of inner life. Socialism does not mean the liquidation of personal freedom; it means a crisis out of which the concept of personality emerges more powerfully than ever before. The largest, essential part of a human life takes place within extra-social relations. The relation of a person to the world surrounding him, to his friends, his family, his life partner and his children, his relation to his own capacities and his works, his relation to himself, the consistency and honesty with which he confronts himself and his destiny, limited as it is by death – all this he answers in the face of his innermost conscience; this is where personal freedom prevails, through which a human being only becomes a human being. A ‘human society’ is unthinkable without it.
The fact of socialization obviously does not override this foundation of moral being. However, the awareness of this fact, that is, being conscious of one's social being, opens a new phase in the development of personal freedom. Before the awareness of socialization the individual in a sense lives in the paradisiacal innocence of extra-social existence. His freedom, however shallow and poor it may be in reality, appears to him as solidly founded and all-embracing. But the image darkens all at once as soon as he has eaten of the tree of social knowledge. The idyll becomes a problem; the naive, firm point of departure of moral existence becomes a goal to strive for.
It is precisely the socially feeling person, the ethical person, who is today in danger of having his inner personal freedom completely cancelled out by this ethical orientation itself. For his social feeling opens his eyes to the endless mutual entanglement of human life and thus a series of unforeseeable responsibilities which he unintentionally brings upon himself. He feels that he must, he can, indeed he should free himself from the destinies of others and, in a sense, reassert his personal freedom, despite the reality of general socialization; but the only way in which he can do so without damaging his own true personality – and he feels this no less clearly – is by paying the full price for it, that is, by taking full account of all responsibilities to which social being gives rise. But he sees no means of doing so, no path. Therefore he withdraws into himself, without being able to assign content to this retreat.
In the bourgeois world, which does not recognize socialization in the concrete sense, the personality is therefore not able to develop itself beyond certain narrowly set limits. The limits are determined by the personality's negative relation to society. For the individual of the bourgeois world, social knowledge, the highest source of humanization, is buried. Here penal codes, civil law and bourgeois convention ‘govern’ the relations of the individual to others. And within the boundaries, within these external determinations, the individual weaves the illusion of his freedom. However, those sensitive minds who nevertheless intuitively perceive the nature of socialization and their own unavoidable enmeshment in the lives of others flee from the flood of guilt feelings that overwhelm them and take refuge on the lonely island of religious delirium – because we must call that passive form of religious morality a delirium, which undertakes to endure its necessary indebtedness to external life without attempting to repay it.
The socialist does not flee from the recognition of the socialization of his life. He stands up to this insight and strives, through his action, to reconcile himself to it. Trying to salvage his personality, in the traditional sense, would be futile. That unity of action which we call personality is something he is not able to produce for now. The recognition of the all-round human conditionality, that is, the socialization of his life, makes everything – including his innermost ego – appear to him as something derived from others, owed to others, borrowed from others.
[…]5 is there power over him? Nevertheless, who would deny that precisely this state of power could not exist against the conscious will of all participants? (As we know, anarchists draw the irrational conclusion from this state of affairs that the state must be ‘abolished’. What they mean by this remains open to question.) The socialist recognizes the state as what it is, as a social relation of people to one another, and sees his task as one of overcoming the state by resolving this social relation into a direct one that is no longer mediated by the state. And a similar thing happens with the objectification ‘value’ in the exchange economy. Like blinded slaves, we sense our fate from market prices, which in the end are nothing other than the parts of our consciousness that are alienated from ourselves.
The first requirement of social freedom must then be: mastery of the necessary consequences of socialization, that is, of power and of value.
The second requirement is: make humanity capable of universal goal setting and the solidary exercise of power towards the goals established. World history still presents the eerie image – to adapt a comparison made by H. G. Wells – of desperate children who, enclosed in a cage on a cart, are rolling towards an abyss. We are all grown-up children of this sort; but we have ourselves built the cage that makes us helpless, and we are also holding up the inclined plane on which the cart rolls, and we have created the gravity, which has become fatal for us. Humanity, even civilized humanity, does not represent a unity. It is not a subject, and if it were then its organization would not make possible a universal goal nor a development of solidary power. Not only do the segmentation into states and the confusing and antagonistic character of the economy exclude this; the confusing relation between the political state and the economy of society also excludes the setting of a universal and thus political-economic goal at the outset. However, we can only speak of humanity's freedom when it constitutes itself as a subject and is capable of expressing its will – indeed only if at the same time the condition of the earlier formulation of freedom is also met, that is, that this state embracing all of humanity, this economy of the whole of humanity or, better, the synthesis of the two, despite its enormity, come into existence as the immediate expression of living human volitions.
However, we will have only attained the highest stage of social freedom when the social relations of human beings to each other become clear and transparent, as they are in fact in a family or in a communist community. To directly track the repercussions of our life impulses on the lives of all the others and, in this way, on our own, in order, on the basis of this knowledge, to be able to assume responsibility for the social effects of our existence, this is the final meaning of social freedom. To work out for ourselves what our own share in social problems is, to establish a balance in ourselves between effect and counter-effect and to freely take on ourselves the task of drawing up an inevitable moral balance sheet of social being and doing so heroically or humbly but consciously – this is the most that we human beings can hope for. No apparent objective power outside us may any longer be charged with this responsibility. There is no longer a state, a market or an authority on which we can put the blame for human troubles, mutual dependency, the limitation of needs or common misfortune. It would then be we human beings alone who face not only nature but also each other. And not only the economy and our interaction with nature, but all with social life will become so transparent that in all matters we have the choice to do or not to do – with the consciousness that in so doing we have chosen between two sharply contrasting and decisive responsibilities that we cannot shuffle off onto others.
These are the three tasks that social freedom assigns to man. It is clear from the outset that its complete mastery exceeds man's strength and perhaps goes beyond the limits of man's nature. Nonetheless, the socialist has to measure his social ideal against this highest of goals.
In that highest ideal condition of social freedom, in which all three requirements are simultaneously fulfilled, both the mastery of the necessary consequences of socialization and the universal goal of humanity, which includes ultimate responsibility for all social effects of our existence – in this situation the personality is free in a way that it could never be either in ideal anarchy or in bourgeois anarchy. For it is not free through sheer denial of the ineluctable reality of socialization, as in the frivolous and dishonest freedom of the anarchists, nor is it free as in bourgeois society, in which the so-called personality, as a gambler and evader of responsibilities, obtains a clear conscience under false pretences; it is only truly free as someone is who has paid for everything that he has enjoyed at the cost of others and can say of himself: for me the life that is most my own is that for which I am responsible to no one in this world. Those other ‘free personalities’, which see the true liberation of their personality, their so-called Übermensch status, in the denial of this debt to others, are free of conscience, free of responsibility and thus free of any personality; and the illusion of freedom that may remain is simply proof of their moral frugality, their philistine un-freedom, their inborn slave disposition.
Many who have got used to imagining socialism as an economic ‘wishing-table’ and a moral automaton, as a pre-established harmony of ethics, will ask: ‘Won't these problems resolve themselves automatically in socialism?’ The answer is ‘no’! On the contrary, those responsibilities, which are today only felt by the more ethically gifted, the more highly developed personality, will be felt generally in that more highly organized society and weigh more heavily than they do now. As long as responsibilities exist, as they now do, only on this side of the market, it is easy to belie the fact that the satisfaction of every need is bought through the toil of other human beings and the workplace danger, tragic accidents and illnesses they suffer. Moreover, in so far as this situation is connected with the dreadful fact that it brings personal advantage to a minority of human beings, the feeling of indignation and the explosiveness of the indictment arising from it distracts us from clear consciousness of our own responsibility for stunted and destroyed human life. Under socialism, after the overcoming of the relations of exploitation, this emotional veil of resentment disappears, and we must learn to see that, even in the most justly organized economy, people's struggle with the elements of nature and consequently the technical problem of production still costs toil and trouble, un-freedom and murderous agony, health and often life itself. Whoever wants to look squarely at the facts cannot be blind to this. The highest wisdom of the bourgeois philistine is: ‘Everything costs money in this world.’ But the socialist insight is: ‘Every good costs labour, renunciation, and human life!’ Today, private property stands between one human being and another, and the fact that some selfishly enrich themselves in the production process covers up the fundamental connection that exists between consumers and producers, which comes directly and starkly into view with the abolition of private property, that is, that through the satisfaction of our wants, through their magnitude and direction, we take onto ourselves the responsibility for their social costs. You have probably all heard of the philosopheme of the murdered Chinese, which goes as follows:6 If we were given the possibility of immediately having every wish granted by simply pressing a button, but on condition that at each press of the button one of 400 million Chinese people would die in far-off China, how many people would abstain from pressing the magic button? The cynical Frenchman, from whom this philosopheme originates, thinks he would practise finger exercises on the blessed button. And he was a humanist of high standing, who would probably never have harmed a fly, as long as the fly was not in China but had to kick the bucket painfully before his own eyes. This odd philosopheme gives us a true allegory of the situation in which even the best person finds himself in relation to his co-citizens. Anyone who is able to offer an appropriate price on the market can promptly conjure up everything that humanity can create. The consequences of this trick take place on the other side of the market. He does not know anything of these; he cannot know anything of them. Today, for every single one of these human beings, all humanity consists of nameless Chinese whose life he is ready, without batting an eye, to snuff out in order to fulfil his wishes, and this is what he in fact does. Here, moreover, we see the importance of an attitude that is unconsciously immanent in socialism but has never been clearly expressed. This is the finiteness of the human world and thus the limitlessness, but finiteness, of the task that socialism confronts. This is where the essential progress of the socialist conception of humanity over the bourgeois conception resides. The task of realizing social freedom can only be formulated in relation to a finite community; here, too, however, it remains a qualitatively unlimited task that at the same time becomes a quantitatively limited one. For in a finite community, responsibilities for actions are always feasible because those effects for which our action makes us responsible are at least logically locatable: they no longer evaporate into the twilight of the indefinite boundaries of the allegedly infinite mass of people and goods; instead, from an unnameable quality they become a concrete quantity in that this quantity must affect every last member of society.
In any case, a world in which we would have to consciously bear the human effects of our existence must today seem frightening to us weak human beings. Indeed, this is also the reason why so many socialists prefer to flee from capitalism to state socialism in order at least to keep the impersonal state, which apparently exists independently of us, as the general scapegoat for all suffering. For the more transparent this state becomes, the more it becomes unavoidable to face ourselves beyond the glass wall of this state – for it is only we who stand behind that reification – the more forcefully is the fatal recognition imposed on us that each workplace accident has occurred for our own well-being, and the coal that we have just thrown onto the stove, the light with which we now see, contains a part of a human life. However, this recognition is the price that we have to pay for our freedom. So even after we fully overcome the shameful injustice of our condition, our full freedom will not drop into our laps. The more organized a society becomes, however, the smaller the circles in which cohesiveness in production, consumption and communal life lets individuals become solidary, the closer is the hour in which the only choice that remains is to either close one's eyes in a cowardly way and abjure in favour of various self-erected powers, the true connection between human life and freedom or, on the other hand, boldly face reality in order finally to acquire the new freedom along with the new responsibility. If one sees more in socialism than an economic question, more than a mere demand for justice, if one hails in it the final programme of humanity's emancipation, one cannot and must not shy away from this highest of freedoms!
As ineluctably as these last goals impose themselves, so mighty, so frightening are the obstacles on the road to their achievement.
These obstacles arise from the nature of the social objectifications of the will of which we spoke above, from the innermost nature of the phenomenon of power and of the phenomenon of value or, put differently, of law and economy. If we suppose a democratic society, the law is then based on the volitions of individuals; but at the moment that it arises, it cancels out these volitions in favour of a new essence, precisely that of law, which now opposes these individual volitions as an independent entity. The past of our will, that which we previously wanted, confronts the present will like an immutable event. Even if we have strong will and also the power to want something different by now, we cannot eliminate the fact that we earlier had a different will. This is where the individual and the social problem of freedom most strikingly part ways. For personal – that is, inner – freedom, bygone will only gives rise to an inner but sometimes tragic problem: the problem of consistency or inconsistency. However, its solution occurs within the individual himself. But we have to ask why the same does not apply to the social phenomenon of will in regard to what is willed in common. We would like to point only to one cause for this, which arises from the difference between the individual will and the common will or common decision; this is the necessity of summing up individual wills in a socialized situation. The summation of individual wills, the integration of individual volitions is the necessary process without which a collective will cannot emerge. Volitions that are in alignment with each other can, however, be reduced to a common denominator only if the common content of the will can be wrested free of the personally different motives out of which they arise. This severing of the motive for the will, whether it occurs through unconscious development of customs or conscious election, makes our innermost impulses, our ‘volition’, into something external, addable, then into something added, which has thus become lifeless, into a fact alienated from ourselves, from social environment, from the human external world. The socialized form of the will is thus necessarily something objectified, something alienated from what was originally wished, a substance that confronts him from outside.
The same phenomenon, as we know, can also be seen in the sphere of the economy in a society based on division of labour, and indeed for related reasons, as we would like to show. The needs of isolated individuals can only cause the relative size of the productive sectors in society to correspond to these individual needs when these needs are added together to form a composite need, which sums up the infinitesimal fractions of all imaginable feelings of needs, by way of an integration process, to specific quantities of composite needs or, more correctly, to the total need. In the course of this process, which however today occurs unconsciously, in contrast to the formation of law and similar to the formation of customs (though by way of a quite different psychic process), the need ceases to be an inner psychological fact and constitutes itself as a composite need, an objective quantity in relation to individual needs. In the market, total demand and total supply, or, more correctly, total need and total stock, meet; and the price, which emerges as a result, is almost completely independent of the will of individuals. They have to accept it in the way that primitive man accepted a natural event or the slave the diktat of his master. The personal freedom of individuals does not figure here at all. Through the reality of socialization of an individual's work and his needs, his personal freedom has been cancelled. As long as we imagine him as an isolated ‘individual’ – which is where the subjective or marginal utility school often still leaves the matter today – his needs, as well as the toil through which he could satisfy these needs, are the current, living contents of his soul, whose balance is indeed necessary but always only occurs within his own self. The integration of needs into the total need disappears, just as does the integration of the psychologically available labour powers into the total stock of these labour powers and, due to the lack of this external twofold integration, in his consciousness the needs and work impulses confront each other directly; and he mediates the struggle of these competing motives within himself in the framework of personal freedom under his own responsibility. He is and remains master in his own house.
Let us now go one step further in the analysis of the most important objectifications. The social relation of people to each other, which both in the political as well as the economic sphere leads to the integration of the impulses of the soul [Seelenregungen] and thus to alienation, to fetishization of the reifications, that is, the objectifications that have arisen outside of ourselves – these social relations are in reality still much more complex than we have so far suggested. We cannot trace them here in all their ramifications. We would like simply to mention yet one more social relation, that between law and economy. And we must do this in order to make clearer the obstacles that stand in the way of that universal goal of social freedom that we have postulated.
As we have explained, law and price are both results of the social integration of individual juridical volitions, of impulses of needs. What now is the relation between the reifications ‘law’ and ‘price’?
Marx expressed this relation as follows: the relations of property are the legal forms of the relations of production; on these relations of production the bourgeois exchange economy is built. In brief: private property leads to market economy and market price. We would like to emphasize here that the social relations of the economy already presuppose the other relations that are established in law. And so the market and price represent a kind of compressed, denser and less transparent reification, one of a higher level than property law is. Even if ultimately prices have to be thought of as resolvable into simple social relations between people, those relations that constitute themselves in price are of a higher order and more complex nature than those contained in law as a reification. Or put more simply: the law is more dependent on our will than is price because price is also determined by the law, especially by property law. Market price, this sibylline manifestation of the fetish of commodity, thus represents, as Marx correctly saw, the true Gessler's hat of our social un-freedom. The main obstacle to the mastery of the necessary consequences of socialization, and to laying bare the mutual relations between human beings, thus consists in the great complexity of these relations and the nature of the reifications and their apparent natural lawfulness, on which social freedom founders. The person who is willing to accept responsibility, who seeks a higher freedom, appears condemned to play the tragicomic role of futilely expressing his self-sacrifice. Most things are done without him, and he everywhere announces his readiness to assume responsibility ex post facto. It is as if one lived in a bewitched world where, in Marx's words, everything important in fact is determined behind the backs of the human world.
What can socialism, which wants to achieve social freedom for all, do against this creation of circumstances? Through what means is it possible to dissolve the social reifications and integrate them into our own lives, from which they arose, and to take the social decisions made behind our backs into our own hands – not into the hands of any sort of state power?
Put differently: is it possible to have a direct, inner overview of all our relations within society, that is, both the economic and non-economic relations?
The answer is staring us in the face, bringing us to the heart of the positive part of our deliberations. It is that social freedom is mediated in socialism through social awareness, through the concrete understanding of the real interconnections between individual human lives. This knowledge is certainly not an individual, abstract, Tolstoyan insight, that inner idea which in the social realm must lead to the unreal and empty anarchist position. In contrast to individual knowledge, social knowledge can only become effective if mediated by the real reshaping of the interrelated life of people. Indeed, this requires a real restructuring in the sense of larger, increasing and continuously clearer oversee-ability in certain areas of life of a certain dimension. The real restructuring of society in the sense of increasing oversee-ability is thus part of socialism's innermost nature. For where there is no overview there is no freedom because without knowledge there can be no choice.
‘The real experience of real social mutual relations’ cannot therefore be accomplished in a small study room. The purely cognitive aspect of social knowledge is very limited. But that small part of social knowledge nevertheless does have to be acquired. Socialists working in theoretical sociology should have this orientation. Instead of developing the supposed laws, which govern everything human, this science would instead principally have the task of expanding the limits of human freedom within society by showing these laws to be the unintended result of intentional human actions and by therefore extending the domain of free will. Only when, after reaching its limits, after being able clearly to understand that we necessarily have to choose between various unintentional consequences of intended actions, only then will we be in a position to take the consequences of the chosen actions upon ourselves, to be responsible for them and thus to incorporate them into the realm of freedom. Not the ‘laws’ but the freedom of man in society would be the principal subject matter of this sociology.
But it is not theory we are dealing with here. The solution to the problem of overview, which socialism can be said to be, can only be reached through a concrete restructuring of the interrelated lives of human beings.
Before turning to the question of what kind of restructuring – the organization problem – we must take a closer look at the problem of overview [Übersichtsproblem].
Theory can only prove the possibility of a form of life that provides overview by showing the mutual economic relations of people to each other to be the real basis on which the superstructure of political, economic and other objectifications are built. In reality, however, this overview can only develop within concrete social relations as the latter connect individuals with one another in a way that offers an unmediated, truly lived overview, one that reveals a certain segment of the lives of others and is offered to each specific individual so connected. From the point of view of economic performance, the concentration and centralization of production represent such moments facilitating overview, hence their great importance for the socialist interpretation of capitalist development. Management overview in production is certainly immensely increased by those kinds of unification. However, management overview is only the first precondition of a socialist overview. Even in a classless society, an economy that is managed by a central administrative office represents only an external socialist solution, for the overview that underlies the managerial overview only concerns external aspects of the economy, that is, the external things: the means of production and the material goods, on the one hand, and, on the other, the human elements of the economy, the needs and work-effort expended, but only in its external aspects in so far as this can be apprehended by a quantifying and measuring administrative apparatus through statistics. As important as this external apprehension of needs converted into the form of ‘past need’ as well as work-efforts expended in the ambiguous aspect of ‘skilled labour power’ must be for an overview of the social economy, it is no less certain that the human element of the economy – needs and labour expended – in reality has not at all been apprehended but that instead some ambiguous objectifications, such as magnitude of need and labour powers, would have to serve as substitute. Thus even managerial overview does not relate to what it should relate to (needs and current toil) but to something else (the need and availability of labour power). For this, a true managerial overview would not suffice even to realize the socialist goal. Alongside managerial overview, membership overview would be required, for in order that every producer may produce with ‘species-consciousness’ (Engels) and every consumer consume with species-consciousness, it is clearly not enough that the directors of the economy issue orders on the basis of a general overview. Only if each individual at every moment directly perceives his place within total production, if he really experiences the connection between the satisfaction of his own needs and those of others, only if, finally, the actually existing real connection between his own consumption and production activity on a social scale is constantly before his eyes, or can at least potentially be, can we justifiably speak of an economy with overview, socialism at its highest stage. In a family, these conditions are all present. Socialism, however, must always be thought of as the solidary life form, as the living family extended to humanity.
As will be clear to those who were present at previous lectures, asking this question is the same as posing the overview problem in its general form. We had the opportunity to exhaustively treat the problem of overview of the economy. What is at issue now is to generalize the overview problem beyond the boundaries of the economy and to extend it to all of the social relations of man to man. This is what we can call social insight. Freedom through social knowledge – this is the path of the human race. It is only possible through a true restructuring of society! The inner overview of needs and hard labour expended already took us a good distance further. The social process that integrates needs into the total need is here precisely no longer tied to a reification of needs, no longer tied to their alienation from need. And the same thing applies in the analogous case to labour expended. [In a solidary society,] individuals would directly experience everyone else's need-impulses and the hard labour they expend as if it were their own because of society's self-organization based on these motives. In particular, we have spoken of the unconscious and automatic, and yet living and direct, balancing of all value measurements of labour that the contemporary trade union undertakes. This follows precisely from the proposition that self-organization on the basis of specific motives represents a means of inner, true overview of those motives out of which self-organization arose. The objectification ‘total demand’ as well as the objectification ‘total toil’ are dispelled here and resolved into the living motives that had lain hidden behind them.
But let us go a step further. Let us imagine that those present in this room formed the members of a small society based on division of labour. Let us think of those present here as being organized on the basis of functional democracy: they have come together as consumers in a consumer cooperative; on the other hand, as producers they have formed a guild. For the sake of simplicity, let us say they all draw the same income. And now they negotiate the economic plan. ‘Who negotiates?’, you will ask. Well, everyone with everyone else. Everyone is simultaneously a consumer and a producer; it thus makes no difference how you would like to imagine the matter, but let us say that those who are standing to my right represent themselves and also the others, standing on the left, as producers, and those who are standing to my left represent themselves and all those sitting on the right as consumers. The main point remains that every person present is equally interested in both sides, although his assignment as a negotiating party places him on one side. And now the economic plan is negotiated: one side asks for better and cheaper goods, the other for shorter working times. In the end, they agree to a specific working time expressed in minutes and a product series expressed in prices.
How did this working time and this price come into being? It follows from the whole structure that they arose from the inner, direct decision of each individual. For each person is indeed at once consumer and producer. Here there is no longer a market outside of the consciousness of those present, no market factors, no supply, no demand – all of that plays out within each individual. The two sides of his own existence, the consumer and the producer, are confronting each other eye to eye here, within his own consciousness. The decision made by the individual treats the social problem in question as something given within his personality, within the moral autonomy of his ego, and in full freedom and responsibility. He has taken his economic fate into his own hands.
In a similar way, the idea of functional democracy, of functional representation – which moreover has much in common with the idea of soviets – leads to robbing the political objectification state power of its reified character to an extent that is up to now unimaginable and an approximation of the direct expression of the impulses of individuals towards the law. A complete abolition [Aufhebung]7 of the objectification law naturally does not occur here. It is not even thinkable. The congealed will, which we call law, remains forever as a wall between past impulses formulated as law and the fluid impulses to create law which are at work today. However, in a functional democracy this wall will be infinitely thin and completely transparent – which is the most that our fantasy of social freedom currently lets us imagine.
The idea of functional democracy in our conception takes us further by dissolving and displacing directly into the realm of freedom that nexus of objectifications which is represented by the mutual relations of law and economy.
I invite all present to think of yourselves as being divided into two further delegations: The representatives of the political state – let us call them the commune – who are elected on the basis of democratic suffrage, sit on the left; the representatives of the producers – we will call them the guild – sit on the right. Once again, both parties represent all present here. The commune representatives demand large investments in order to secure the healthcare interests of the community and the life interests of future generations. Thus in the name of ideals they demand sacrifices of the economy (because everything that costs human labour restricts human need). The producers defend their labour power and the satisfaction of their needs as such. In the end, they agree on a concrete tax figure that means a specific quantity of surplus labour, of restriction of needs. For this reason, social ideals are realized up to a point but only up to this point. Society has to abnegate things that lie beyond this.
This decision in turn means a direct, internal choice, for here ideals within people are confronted with their costs; here everyone has to decide what his ideals are worth to him. No state and no market intervene between the two sides of our consciousness; here there can be no shifting of responsibility, and nothing outside of ourselves can be made responsible for our fate. The individual only confronts himself because his fate is in his own hands.
Within politics, in dealing with state power as a reification, and within the economy, in dealing with the reifications market and price, as well as, finally, within the interplay between state and economy – that is, within the highest reification, which we call society itself – an inner overview of the reciprocal relations between people is possible. Self-organization is the key to this solution. In a classless society, the free association of working people, of those in need, of neighbours, leads to cooperative organizations that offer a living inner overview of the socialized motive inherent in them. And the decisions that are arrived at through negotiations between such associations are a direct expression of the relations of forces of the conflicting motives and so carry with them the highest level of responsibility, one that only presents itself to the truly free. One of these associations, the political state, the commune, however, is a territorial entity and thus not a free association but a compulsory organization. And it could not be otherwise.
Socialism as a leap into freedom must not be taken in the historical but in the logical sense. Beyond the demand for justice in a classless society the human race's true destiny only first opens up here: it is the realization of the highest social and personal freedom through the concrete conception of solidarity between man and man. The leap does not bring us to the end but only to the beginning of our task. We believe that we have shown that socialism is able to approach this task infinitely.
However, we can only come close to its accomplishment; its complete accomplishment is impossible, for it is an unlimited task that appears clearly only at the beginning of socialism, whose accomplishment however must remain an eternal task of humanity, an asymptotic goal to be approached and never completely reached. We can easily see from our presentation that humanity's life can never be completely reflected in all its facets in each individual life, that our final goal of living our own lives as something directly social can never be completely realized. Nor is the moral idea of socialism ever exhaustible through any specific state of affairs but only through continuously working at the eternal tasks of humanity. Freedom through social knowledge can never mean a specific state of affairs; rather, it is a programme, a goal which is constantly re-establishing itself. The history of humanity will not have reached its final point with socialism; humanity's history will, in its true sense, only begin with it.
Socialism's image of the world – its world of Being – and worldview – its world of Ought – constitute a unity. The gap that opens for logic between Being and Ought is overcome through the most inner disposition of human Being – and only of human Being. He who says Man, says Being and Ought in the same breath. As a thing, as an animal, Man simply is, he is simply Being; but as the measure and meaning of our world, the human world, he is the embodiment of the Being that Ought. The difference between Man and other living beings or things is one of mere Being. Even if being a human being had no meaning for him, Man would, as a species of animal, be different from all other species, a corporeal thing differentiated from other things. But if, in relation to one person, I assert that in contrast to another person he is more human than the latter, that he is more of a human being than the other, and that he is a Man in the truest sense, that the other person does not deserve this name, then something else is meant: a judgement not about Man as Being but Man as Ought. The meaning of the judgement is just as clear as that of the other [judgement]. This is the meaning of the judgement Marx has in mind when he wants ‘human’ society instead of ‘bourgeois’ society. They both consist of human beings, but today's society is not human. (Marx nowhere systematically developed a conception of the Being of the Human.)
Nevertheless, this socialist ideal of being human remains the backbone of the socialist critique of bourgeois society. Marx's entire work was one single condemnation of bourgeois society, which does not let Man become Man. His critique of the capitalist economy and its laws was a unique attempt to use a segment of the bourgeois world to demonstrate its essential dishonourableness, its inhumanity. The denunciatory literature of the period, the philosophies of misery and novels of poverty – many of which were authored by noble minds – fuelled outrage at the injustice of capitalist relations [and] at the monstrous misery of the masses. And, even before Marx, many of them also saw that in such a social order the life of the wealthy too would have to slide into nullity and falsehood. But what none of them saw was the inescapable necessity with which capitalist society has to make class division constantly re-emerge within itself despite any benevolent attempts to bridge these divisions. However, Marx saw still something more, and this constitutes his historic greatness. He understood that capitalist society is not just unjust but also un-free.
A social condition in which each individual life is dominated by apparent laws, which our faculty of reason can understand as in reality only facts of our own relations, lacks freedom. Not only the workers but also the capitalists, as Marx saw, are dependent on market laws whose subjects they remain, even if through them they keep themselves affluent and the workers in poverty. It is not that the capitalists have no inclination to allow more economic justice but that, even if they had, it would be impossible for them, the apparent lords of the economy, to do so […] In this, he saw the [abyss] of humanity's current predicament. Therefore, he preached not understanding or inclinations but the struggle for a society in which understanding could be effective.
Therefore he, himself an idealist, refused to [concede to] idealism its own intrinsic power. This is not because he saw human society just like a mere agglomeration of physical atoms without the capacity for its own goals but because in capitalist society, despite individual will, despite the possible honest idealism of individuals, people have to behave as if they were mere atoms without will and all their idealism meant nothing in the face of the silent, inevitable force of an overwhelming dependence on the external conditions. This was the deep and frightful insight from which our world appeared to him to arise as an inferno. How corporeally he saw those invisible threads of price figures looming, which would here throw the individual and whole masses out of the factory into the misery of unemployment and there drag them into exhaustion from overwork on the tilted plane of piecework, and then suddenly, in the midst of feverish recovery, clamorously whip up the dead in the factories amidst the wailing of the capitalists and proletarians. And at the same time he saw how all the moaners were themselves weaving the strands, tying the noose and tugging it as in a dream until they lay prostrate and shackled. He saw how people groped like blinded slaves deciphering their fate through a mysterious script of knots that they had unconsciously tied themselves.
In every large society based on division of labour (that is, large enough so that, with a limited lifespan and our limited mobility, direct and mutual attention on the part of all members of society seems unfeasible), no direct socialization of people is possible. The unity of the whole can only be perceived here if certain social phenomena continuously appear and are mediated between persons. These social phenomena form a kind of third realm that stands between the realm of Being and of Consciousness. Marx calls this the phenomenal world of the social Being. It is the actual object of sociology. Its wealth of phenomenal forms is no less than that of nature or of the human soul. Alongside near-corporeal organs like state and market, they include laws that assert themselves with causal inevitability, such as those which govern price formation in capitalism, the reifications of personal relations of people to become the material relations between objects, as represented for example in the fetish character of commodities, as well as the continuous forms of interaction between people, as represented for example by the relations of super- and subordination. The socialization of a large number of people is necessarily bound up with the existence of such objectifications of the human content of consciousness, with these social objectifications, as we would like to call them. From this arise consequences that are important in two kinds of ways for the individual lives so associated. Social objectification can tie people as a community only at the cost of, first, separating individual lives, which are connected in this way, from each other and, second, internally splitting each individual life. These two effects necessarily result from the nature of objectifications.
The result is the monstrous concept of two humanities as thing-like realities: of an egoistically active humanity that limits the other helplessly passive humanity in its freedom and pushes it into misfortune – without the ability of the theoretical knowledge to counteract against this semblance, that what is involved here is just two directions of intent of one and the same humanity.