![]() ![]() Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and whim and no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch – the producer – in order to sneak for himself a few pieces of silver, in order to charm the golden birds, out of the pockets of his dearly beloved neighbours in Christ. Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need. ![]() Subjectively, this appears partly in the fact that the extension of products and needs becomes a contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites. Excess and intemperance come to be its true norm. Just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to quantitative being. The quantity of money becomes to an ever greater degree its sole effective quality. ![]() The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces. The power of his money declines in inverse proportion to the increase in the volume of production: that is, his neediness grows as the power of money increases. Man becomes ever poorer as man, his need for money becomes ever greater if he wants to master the hostile power. The increase in the quantity of objects is therefore accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and mutual plundering. Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. Under private property their significance is reversed: every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence and to seduce him into a new mode of enjoyment and therefore economic ruin. ||XIV| (7) We have seen what significance, given socialism, the wealth of human needs acquires, and what significance, therefore, both a new mode of production and a new object of production obtain: a new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature. Human Requirements and Division of Labour, Marx, 1844Įconomic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 ![]()
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