It is not a difficult matter to continue noting the similarities between Marx and Freud. The list could easily be extended, but there is nothing useful to be gained by the exercise. The problem is to relate the various common themes to the equally important contradictions between them.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was in no position to defend it. 66
In the process of individual development, as we have said, the main accent falls mostly on the egoistic urge (or the urge towards happiness); while the other urge, which may be described as a “cultural” one, is usually content with the role of imposing restrictions. 67
The function of education, therefore, is to inhibit, forbid and suppress, and it has at all times carried out this function to admiration. 68
Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their agressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus . 69
It is just as impossible to do without government of the masses by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization, for the masses are lazy and unintelligent, they have no love for instinctual renunciation, they are not to be convinced of its inevitability by argument, and the individuals support each other in giving full play to their unruliness. 70
It is quite impossible to understand how psychological factors can be overlooked when the reactions of living beings are involved; for not only were such factors already concerned in the establishment of these economic conditions, but even in obeying these conditions, men can do no more than set their original instinctual impulses in motion. . . . For sociology, which deals with the behavior of man in society, can be nothing other than applied psychology. 71
The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world. . . . 72 The sole quality that rules in the id is that of being unconscious. Id and unconscious are as intimately united as ego and preconscious; indeed, the former connection is even more exclusive. . . . 7i In popular language, we may say that the ego stands for reason and circumspection, while the id stands for the untamed passions. . . . 74 Thus in its relation to the id [the ego) is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider seeks to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. . . . 75 We can come nearer to the id with images, and call it a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement. We suppose that it is somewhere in direct contact with somatic processes, and takes over from them instinctual needs. . . . These instincts fill it with energy, but it has no organization and no unified will. ... 1 he laws of logic—above all, the law of
38 Marx and Freud: Convergence and Antagonism
contradiction—do not hold for the processes in the id. . . . There is nothing in the id which can be compared to negation, and we are astonished to find in it an exception to the philosopher’s assertion that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts. In the id there is nothing corresponding to the idea of time, no recognition of the passage of time, and ... no alteration of mental processes by the passage of time. 76
This final goal of all organic striving can be stated too. It would be counter to the conservative nature of instinct if the goal of life were a state never hitherto reached. It must rather be an ancient starting point, which the living being left long ago, and to which it harks back again by all the circuitous paths of development. If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic, we can only say “The goal of life is death,” and casting back, “The inanimate was there before the animate.” 77
Only in community do the means exist for every individual to cultivate his talents in all directions. Only in the community is personal freedom possible. In previous substitutes for the community, in the state, etc., personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the ruling class and only insofar as they belonged to this class. The illusory community, in which individuals have come together up till now, always took on an independent existence in relation to them and was at the same time not only a completely illusory community but a new fetter. 78
It is but in the eighteenth century, in “bourgeois society,” that the different forms of social union confront the individual as a mere means to his private ends, as an outward necessity. . . . Man is in the most literal sense of the word a zoon politikon, not only a social animal, but an animal which can develop into an individual only in society. 79 In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. 80
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness, for those of its members who work acquire nothing and those who acquire anything do not work. 81
It can be seen that the history of industry and industry as it objectively exists is an open book of the human faculties, and a human psychology which can be sensuously apprehended. . . . No psychology for which this book, i.e., the most tangible and accessible part of history, remains closed, can become a real science with a genuine content. 82
In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the^existence of the laborer.
Convergence 39
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in communist society the present dominates the past. . . , 83 Once a need is satisfied, which requires the action of satisfying and the acquisition of the instrument for this purpose, new' needs arise. The production of new needs is the first historical act. 84
For labor, life activity, productive life, now appear to man only as means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to maintain his physical existence. Productive life is, however, species-life. It is life creating life. In the type of life activity resides the whole character of the species, its species-character; and free, conscious activity is the species character of human beings. 85
It will be seen from this how, in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy, we have the wealthy man and the plenitude of human need. The wealthy man is at the same time one who needs a complex of human manifestations of life, and whose own self-realization exists as an inner necessity, a need . 86
In fact, however, when the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers, etc., of individuals produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature—those of his own as well as those of so-called “nature”? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which makes the totality of this evolution— i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such unmeasured by any previously established yardstick—an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce himself in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is the absolute movement of becoming. 87
It is not merely that these statements can be arranged as pairs of contradictions. They originate from wholly different conceptions of human nature and society; their sense of lived dimension is as contrary as the theoretical perspectives from which they derive and in which they articulate their vision. Life and death, time and movement, hope and despair—the fundamental experiences of men and women are so differently lived through and defined. And yet, the similarities we noted have their own reality. To reconcile this apparent discrepancy we must turn to a more detailed account of the structure of Marxist and Freudian theory.
CHAPTER TWO