초록

AI-Helper

Marx was critical of the contemporary notion of socialism and communism as the ‘kingdom of equality’ and very emphatic on the values of ‘freedom’ and ‘individuality’, or ‘free individuality’. With regard to this, two major points could immediately be made. First, the universalist historico-philosophical premises underlying Marx’s materialism directly run into his emphasis on ‘freedom’ and ‘individuality’, and, second, the communist economic principle of collective ownership of the means of production inevitably undermines Marx’s ideas of ‘free individuality’.Since I have already addressed the first point elsewhere, I will examine Marx’s thoughts concerning the second in this paper. One peculiar aspect of Marx’s communist perspective is that he attributed to capitalism many of what is now generally associated with communism,such as ‘collective ownership’, ‘socialization of labor’, ‘realization of equality’ and so on. Only they are achieved at the expense of ‘free individuality’, or, to use Marx’s own terms, in their ‘alienated’ and ‘class’ form. In this respect, his problematic was to resuscitate individualism on a new level based on collectivised capitalist productivity. In this paper, I will explore Marx’s view of communism as ‘realization of individuality’, not of equality and as resuscitation of ‘individual ownership’ of the means of production.