"...the key to the understanding of the whole history of society lies in the historical development of labor". - F. Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
Labor has been decisive in the evolution of man.1 Historical materialism traces a progressive development in the course of human ascendancy from the lower to the higher stages, which has asserted itself through all seeming accidents and temporary retrogressions. The driving forces of history have not been great men, but great masses of people, who were set into motion by the incongruity between productive forces and production relations, that is to say, by the antagonism between the development of the material means of production and the relations of people in production. They liberated the new productive forces fettered by the outlived mode of production and production relations, created the conditions for a new method of production and thus laid the basis for a new social order.
The evolution of man from lower to higher stages takes place by means of the developing process of labor. Labor has transformed the natural conditions of human existence into social ones. In primitive communism labor was a mode of self-activity, the creative function of man, which stemmed from his natural capacities and further developed his natural talents. In his contact with nature, primitive man, despite the limitations of his knowledge, exercised not only his labor power but his judgment as well. He thus developed himself and nature. The method of increasing the productivity of nature through human activity resulted in the further development of man. But freedom and historic initiative of man could not further the progress of mankind until man had learned to master nature. It is true that under primitive communism the producers were masters of production and of the products of their labor, but production was carried on in such narrow limits as merely to procreate barely self-subsisting units. So limited a production could not thrust humanity forward. The social division of labor was the necessary prerequisite in molding nature to man’s will and creating new productive forces. However, this undermined the collective nature of production and appropriation. Producers no longer consumed directly what they produced, and they lost control over the products of their labor.
With the division of labor - the most monstrous of which is the division between mental and manual labor - class societies arose. The separation of intellectual and physical labor stands in the way of man’s full development. Hence labor in class societies - whether that be slave, feudal, or capitalist order - no longer means the free development of the physical and intellectual energy of man. The product of his labor is alienated from the laborer, and his very mode of labor becomes an alien activity. Labor is no longer voluntary but compulsory. It has ceased to be "the first necessity of living" and has become a mere means to life. It has become a drudgery man must perform to earn a living, and not a mode of activity in which he realizes his physical and mental potentialities. He is no longer interested in the development of the productive forces, and, in fact, the productive forces seem to develop independently of him. Labor has become a means of creating wealth and "is no longer grown together with the individual into one particular destination".2
Labor in class societies has taken the form of one of three types of servitude: (a) outright slavery, (b) serfdom, and (c) wage slavery. The mode of labor corresponds to the mode of production. Slave labor used the rudest and heaviest implements and wasted the soil. Improved methods of cultivating the land led to the substitution of serf for slave labor. However, both under slavery and serfdom the development of the productive forces was on a low level, the economy was stagnant, and the mode of activity of the direct producer was limited by a crude instrument of production. Hence, any liberation achieved by an individual slave or serf could not emancipate him from the limitation of that crude instrument of production. Even in freedom they remained bound by the restricted mode of activity imposed by that crude instrument. Each man’s particular labor and necessary tools of his craft became his own property but the necessity to protect the laboriously acquired skill led to the formation of guilds. Hence the social relations in the city where the refugee serfs escaped imitated the feudal form of organization prevailing in the country. "Their instrument of production became their property", Marx sums up, "but they themselves remained determined by the division of labor and their own instrument of production".3
The multitude of productive forces available to men determines the nature of their society. Man is essentially a tool-making animal and the process of the production of his material life, the process of labor, means the process of the growth of the productive forces and his command over nature. "Industry", explained Marx in his Private Property and Communism, "is the actual historical relation of nature, and consequently of the science of nature, to man". The industrial revolution, the progress of natural science and the general technological advance so revolutionized the mode of production that finally there arose a basis for a true freedom, not only freedom from exploitation, but freedom from want. Tremendous progress has been achieved, but the productive forces which have been developed by the bourgeois mode of production have also been harnessed and fettered by bourgeois production relations which have resulted in labor’s enslavement to capital. Technology has progressed so far that general want does not reign out of the nature of production but because of the production relation. It becomes necessary to put an end to that relationship to make it possible for the nature of production to assert itself.
Production is no longer limited by a crude instrument, nor does a crude instrument restrict the activity of man as it did in pre-capitalist societies, even when it was his property. Were man to appropriate the modern machines of production, that would open up limitless vistas for the development of man himself, for it would be on such a high material base that the intellect of the masses could combine with their physical powers and truly lay the basis for a new mode of life. Thus, the appropriation of the totality of the instruments of production "is nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments is for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves".4 That is the heart of the problem, because the development of man’s capacities means the re-establishment of self-activity on a gigantically higher historical scale and the "abolition" of labor.
Because of the class content of the word, labor, Marx, in his early works, never used the term to describe the mode of activity in socialist society. He wrote, not of the emancipation of labor, but of its "abolition". In the historical circumstances of the complete separation of manual from mental labor, he stressed, man can become master of himself, not through the development of labor, but through its abolition. Hence the proletarian revolution is not only the revolutionary appropriation of the totality of the instruments of production, but is directed against the very mode of activity under capitalism, and "does away with labor".5
Marx did not abandon this concept of labor when he abandoned the use of the philosophical term, self-activity, and began, in his later works, to speak of the emancipation of labor. For labor in a socialist society was in no manner whatever to be the type of activity as under capitalism where man’s labor is limited to the exercise of his physical labor power. No, labor in socialist society would be the type of activity as in primitive communism. The division between mental and manual labor would be abolished and the two aspects of labor thus united would make it possible for "freely associated men" consciously to plan production, and what would assert itself would be the "free individuality of the laborer himself".6
The emphasis placed by Marx on the individual rather than on society in his late works thus consistently follows and develops the theoretic scope of his early works where he sketched the pattern of the social order to follow capitalism. It is true that the new mode of production does not appear full-blown on the morrow the bourgeoisie is overthrown. But whether the dictatorship of the proletariat will be transitional from capitalism to socialism will be judged by whether the socialized means of production serve social needs to an ever greater and greater degree. Marx had warned us, in his Civil War in France, that if cooperative production were not to prove to be a delusion, it must be under the proletarians’ own control. And in his earlier writings he had written significantly enough: "It is especially necessary to avoid ever again to counterpose ‘society’ as an abstraction, to the individual".7 This prophetic statement will be analyzed in greater detail in the section, "Is Russian Society Part of the Collectivist Epoch". Here we are only interested in tracing the general Marxian concept of labor, which, in primitive communism, was synonymous with the self-activity or the creative function of man but which has undergone a deterioration in class societies.
On the basis of a production of abundance, for which the highly developed productive forces have laid the groundwork, the further development of the productive forces means the all-rounded development of the greatest productive force, the laborer. Labor then will mean the unrestricted development and exercise of man’s physical and mental faculties. That is the basis for what Engels calls "humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom".
That is not Utopia. That is not the hereafter. That road has to be taken on the morrow the bourgeoisie is overthrown and the dictatorship of the proletariat established if the socialized means of production are to serve any better end than the privately owned means of production. For it is not the means of production that create the new type of man, but the new type of man that will create the means of production, and the new mode of activity will create the new type of human being, socialist man.
"All science would be superfluous if the appearance, the form, and the nature of things were wholly identical" - K. Marx: Capital, Vol. III
A great advance in the evolution of political economy as a science was made when the source of wealth was recognized to be not in objects outside of men - precious metals or the earth - but in the function of man, that is, the result of man’s labor was the source of private property. How is it, then, that that living embodiment of labor, the laborer, continues to remain poverty-stricken and the products of his labor are not his "private property?" Here the classical economists could offer no answer and merely tried to pacify the laborer by stating his condition was "temporary", and pointing to his "freedom". They were limited by their bourgeois horizon and labored "to purify economic relations from their feudal blemishes".8
"When one speaks of private property, one thinks of something outside man", wrote the young Marx in 1844. "When one speaks of labor, one has to do immediately with man himself. The new formulation of the question already involves its solution". But, as we saw, that new formulation of the question involved the solution not when the bourgeois economists tackled the problem, but when the revolutionist Marx did. The difference between the science of economics "as such", as a science of objective elements, wages, value, etc., and the Marxian science of economics is that for Marxism, all economic categories are social categories and thus in the science of economics it incorporates the subjective element, the receiver of wages, the source of value, in other words, the laborer. You cannot dissociate property forms from production relations. The laborer, whose function, labor, creates bourgeois wealth and his own impoverishment, is opposed to his predicament of being dominated by a product of his own labor. He rebels against the mode of labor and thus becomes the gravedigger of bourgeois private property. Private property thus contains within itself the seed of its own disintegration. It is for that reason that the classical economist, limited by the concepts of his class which blurred his vision as to the historic nature of the capitalist mode of production, could not probe the problem to the end, and failed to see that the living embodiment of the source of wealth, the laborer, would bring to a head and to an end all the contradictions inherent in private property.
In actual fact, wrote Marx, bourgeois private property is not private property at all, but is based on "the expropriation of the peasants, artisans, in general on the abolition of the method of production resting on private property of the direct producer, on his conditions of production" and "develops to the degree that this private property and the method of production based on it is abolished".9 Thus the very basis of capitalist production is expropriation of the self-earned private property of the direct producer. It is the "free", the propertyless laborer that creates the "private property" of the capitalist and it is he who sharpens the inherent contradictions of capitalist private property that will rend it asunder.
The machine age demanded the abolition of private property; the full development of the productive forces will achieve the true abolition of property, although, "in the first instance"* this has taken the contradictory form of capitalist private property. The juridical notion that this is really private property is at complete variance with the bourgeois production relations.
The legal concepts of private property, which sprawl across diverse societies, are as heterogeneous as the societies where they exist. Under capitalism, furthermore, every phase in the development of industry has altered the legal concepts of private property. The manufacturer thinks of it as the legal title he has to the factory he runs. The financier thinks of it as "a bundle of expectations which have a market value".10 It is not the legal concepts, not the appearances of property that interests us. It is the nature of private property, which scientific socialism has investigated to the end, that is of primary importance. In reducing private property to labor and labor to man, Marx got behind the legal fiction of property ownership to the hard reality of the activity of man and the relations of men in production.
The Marxian concept of property stresses the fact that from the very outset the division of labor has meant the division of the conditions of labor, of the tools and materials. From the moment that the product of his labor did not belong to the direct producer, man became an "object" for himself. That is to say, the object which he himself has created by his activity was something outside of him because it was appropriated by another who had power over him. As long as there exists "power over individuals", wrote Marx in The German Ideology, "private property must exist". Property is the power of disposal over the labor of others. Private property has developed so diversely under capitalism that one’s property is only "a bundle of expectations" in the form of stocks and bonds, yet power is still the power of disposing, or sharing in the disposition of, the labor of others.
It is impossible for a Marxist to discuss property forms, or even production relations without knowing the state of production. Marx attributed such great importance to the multitude of productive forces accessible to man that he practically discounted the forms of property ownership. In and of itself, that is to say, without a high stage of industrial development, a change from private to communal ownership would be barren of historic significance. "Lacking any material basis and resting on a purely theoretical foundation, it would be a mere freak and would end in nothing more than a monastic economy".11
So insistent was Marx in stressing that the mode of production was crucial, not the form of property, that he spoke of "communal private property" when he described ancient state ownership, for it was "only as a community that the citizens hold power over their laboring slaves, and on this account alone, therefore, they are bound to the form of communal ownership".12 Thus communal ownership in and of itself does not denote a new, non-private property epoch. It is only when collectivist property arises under highly developed industrial conditions that it can denote the new collectivist epoch where society will not be counterposed to the individual and the totality of the instruments of production will be controlled by all and made "subject to each individual".13**
For Marx the abolition of private property was not an end in itself but a means toward the abolition of the alienated mode of labor. He did not separate one from the other. He never tired of stressing that what was of primary importance was not the form of property but the mode of production; every mode of production creates a corresponding form of property. "But to see mystery in the origin of property; that is to say, to transform the relations of production into a mystery - is that not", asked Marx of Proudhon, "to renounce all pretensions to economic science? ... In each historic epoch, property is differently developed and in a series of social relations entirely different. Thus to define bourgeois property is nothing other than to explain all the social relations of bourgeois production".14
1 "… to socialist man all history is nothing else than the production of man through human labor". Marx: Private Property and Communism (Archives of Marx and Engels, Vol. III, in Russian; also to be found in German: Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I, Bd. III)
2 Marx, Critique of Political Economy, p. 299.
3 Marx, The German Ideology, p. 67.
4 Ibid., p. 66.
5 Ibid., p. 69.
6 Capital, Vol. I, 835.
7 Archives of Marx and Engels, Vol. III. Also Gesamtausgabe, Abt. Ibd. 3.
8 Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, p. 134.
9 Archives of Marx and Engels, II (VII), p. 263.
* Marx, Private Property and Communism, to be found in Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I, Bd. III; & in the Russian Complete Works of Marx, III.
10 Berle and Means, Modern Corporation and Private Property.
11 The German Ideology, p. 18, footnote.
12 Ibid., p. 9.
13 Ibid., p. 67.
** This will be dealt with in greater detail in the section "Is Russian Society Part of the Collective Epoch".
14 Poverty of Philosophy, p. 168.
Last updated on 09 January 2026