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The ultimate humanism is indeed… Marxism
lundi 1er décembre 2025, par ,
The ultimate humanism is indeed… Marxism
The ultimate humanism is indeed… Marxism ! Even if the Stalinist caricature made people believe the opposite !
https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/1844/00/km18440000/index.htm
"Germany’s emancipation is practically possible only if one adopts the theoretical viewpoint that declares man to be the supreme essence of humanity."
Karl Marx
https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/1843/00/km18430000.htm
“Work is, first and foremost, an act that takes place between man and nature. Man himself plays the role of a natural force in relation to nature. He sets in motion the forces with which his body is endowed—arms and legs, head and hands—in order to assimilate matter, giving it a form useful to his life. At the same time as he acts upon external nature through this movement, modifying it, he modifies his own nature and develops the faculties that lie dormant within him. We will not dwell on this primordial state of work, where it has not yet shed its purely instinctive mode. Our starting point is work in a form that belongs exclusively to man. A spider performs operations that resemble those of a weaver, and the bee, with the structure of its wax cells, confounds the skill of many an architect.” But what distinguishes even the worst architect from the most skilled bee is that the architect has built the cell in their mind before building it in the hive. The result to which the work leads pre-exists ideally in the worker’s imagination. It is not that they merely effect a change of form in natural materials ; they simultaneously realize their own conscious goal, which determines their mode of action as a law, and to which they must subordinate their will. And this subordination is not momentary. The work demands, throughout its duration, in addition to the effort of the organs involved, sustained attention, which itself can only result from a constant tension of the will. It demands it all the more because, by its object and its mode of execution, the work engages the worker less, makes itself less felt by them as the free play of their bodily and intellectual forces ; in short, because it is less attractive.
“The labor process, as we have just analyzed it in these simple and abstract moments—the activity whose aim is the production of use-values, the appropriation of objects external to needs—is the general condition of material exchanges between man and nature, a physical necessity of human life, independent of all its social forms, or rather, equally common to all. We therefore had no need to consider the relations between worker and worker. Man and his labor on the one hand, nature and its materials on the other, were sufficient for us. Just as one cannot guess from the taste of the wheat that was cultivated, one cannot, from the data of useful labor, conjecture the social conditions under which it is performed. Was it carried out under the brutal whip of the slave overseer or under the watchful eye of the capitalist ? Are we dealing with Cincinnatus plowing his plot of land or with the savage felling game with a single blow of a stone ?” "There’s no indication of that."
https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/1867/Capital-I/kmcapI-7.htm
For Marx, the so-called economic relations between commodities are based on real relations between men, social relations :
https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/1867/Capital-I/kmcapI-I-4.htm
For Marx, man begins to distinguish himself from animals by producing his own conditions of material existence.
https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/1845/00/kmfe18450000c.htm
Marx on the division of labor in manufacturing :
A certain stunting of body and mind is inseparable from the division of labor in society. But since the manufacturing period pushes this social division much further, while simultaneously attacking the individual at the very root of their life through its own inherent division, it is this period that first provides the idea and the substance of an industrial pathology.
"To subdivide a man is to execute him if he has deserved a death sentence ; it is to murder him if he does not. The subdivision of labor is the murder of a people."
https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/1867/Capital-I/kmcapI-14-5.htm
Man is a social being, and it is bourgeois ideology that presents him as an isolated individual :
“The further back we go in history, the more the individual—and consequently the productive individual as well—appears in a state of dependence, a member of a larger whole. This state manifests itself first quite naturally in the family and the extended family, eventually forming the tribe ; then in the various forms of communities arising from the opposition and fusion of tribes. It was only in the 18th century, in ‘bourgeois society,’ that the different forms of the social whole appeared to the individual as a mere means of achieving their particular goals, as an external necessity. But the era that engenders this viewpoint, that of the isolated individual, is precisely the one in which social relations (taking on a general character from this perspective) have reached their greatest development.”
https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/1857/08/km18570829.htm
"The essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in the isolated individual. In reality, it is the sum of social relations."
https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/1845/00/kmfe18450001.htm
Marx denounces : capitalism, from its very beginnings, degrades man :
https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/1867/Capital-I/kmcapI-25-5-d.htm
Marxist humanism
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6709
Raya Dunayevskaya. 1963, "The Unique Character of Marxist-Humanism"
Raya Dounayevskaïa, 1965, "Marx’s Humanism Today"
Raya Dounayevskaïa, Marx’s Humanism and Mass Struggles Since the Second World War, December 1965
http://newsandletters.org/issues/2006/June-July/FTA_June-July_06.htm
Raya Dounayevskaïa, From Marx to Marxist-Humanist
Capitalism rejects all humanism