by Michael A. Lebowitz

With the introduction of the UN Human Development Reports and the

development of the Human Development Index (published annually by the UNDP

since 1990), much-needed attention was directed to measures specifically related to

the welfare of human beings rather than to statistics on income and production. In

particular, levels of health and education were added to income measures as indicators

of the relative ability of particular societies to provide people with an environment in

which they could develop their potential. And, the results of these measures

demonstrated that societies such as Cuba, Kerala and Costa Rica rank much more

highly in providing these conditions than states with comparable income levels. In this

respect, here (as in the case of an earlier emphasis upon ‘basic needs’) the focus

shifted from economic growth as such to human beings.

Yet, the Human Development Index (HDI) is an example of a model which is

impoverished relative to the theory which underlies it. The Human Development

Reports draw upon the work of Amartya Sen— in particular, his emphasis upon the

development of human capabilities as the condition for people to function in many

ways and to take advantage of opportunities for well-being (Sen, 1992:40). The HDI,

however, does not attempt to measure human capability as such but primarily tells us

about the effect of government priorities for expenditures. Thus, while statistical

measures of characteristics such as health, education, security and human rights may

identify preconditions for the ability of people to develop, in themselves they serve

only as proxies for the potential growth of capabilities and do not demonstrate the

realisation of that potential. Neither do these studies focus closely upon the precise

process by which human capabilities develop.

Marx and Human Capacity

Emphasis upon both the development of human capability and the process by

which this occurs, though, was always at the core of Marx’s perspective. Right from

the outset of his work, he rejected the preoccupations of the political economists of his

time and envisioned a ‘rich human being’—one who has developed his capacities and

capabilities to the point where he is able ‘to take gratification in a many-sided way’–‘

the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses’ (Marx, 1844b: 302). ‘In place

of the wealth and poverty of political economy,’ the Young Marx proposed, ‘come the

rich human being and rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the

human being in need of a totality of human manifestations of life— the man in whom

his own realisation exists as an inner necessity, as need (Marx, 1844b: 304).

It was not only the Young Marx, however, who spoke so eloquently about rich

human beings. In the Grundrisse, Marx returned explicitly to the conception of human

wealth that he had articulated earlier. “In fact,’ he asked, ‘when the limited bourgeois

form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs,

capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange’

(Marx, 1973: 488)? In envisioning a rich human being— ‘as rich as possible in needs,

because rich in qualities and relations— … as the most total and universal possible

social product’, Marx (1973: 409) revealed his understanding that real wealth is the

development of human capacity. And, this concept of capacity involved more than

simply development of ‘capabilities of production’; it encompasses as well the

development of ‘the capabilities as well as means of consumption’ because the

development of the ability to enjoy is ‘the development of an individual potential’

(Marx, 1973: 711).

For Marx, in short, there was no contradiction between saying, on the one

hand, that ‘real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals’ and, on

the other, that ‘regarded materially, wealth consists only in the manifold variety of

needs’ (Marx, 1973: 527, 708). Rather than thinking of a being with simple needs and

simple productive powers, Marx looked to the ‘development of the rich individuality

which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption’ (Marx, 1973: 325).

This is what Marx’s conception of communism was all about— the creation of

a society which removes all obstacles to the full development of human beings. He

looked ahead to that society of associated producers, where each individual is able to

develop his full potential— i.e., the ‘absolute working- out of his creative

potentialities,’ the ‘complete working out of the human content,’ the ‘development of

all human powers as such the end in itself’ (Marx, 1973: 488, 541, 708). In

communist society, the productive forces would have ‘increased with the all-round

development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more

abundantly’ (Marx, 1875: 24). The result, in short, would be the production of rich

human beings. ‘What is the aim of the Communists,’ Frederick Engels asked in a draft

for the Communist Manifesto? He answered, ‘To organise society in such a way that

every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete

freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.’ In the

final draft of the Manifesto, Marx presented this goal as necessarily indivisible— as

an ‘association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free

development of all.’

Production of Human Capacity as a Labour Process

But, how does this development of human capacity occur? Marx had one

consistent answer. Human beings develop through all their activities. As the French

Marxist Lucien Sève (1978: 304, 313) commented, ‘Every developed personality

appears to us straight away as an enormous accumulation of the most varied acts

through time’, and those acts play a central role in producing human ‘capacities’–‘

the ensemble of “actual potentialities”, innate or acquired, to carry out any act

whatever and whatever its level.’

Both within an organised labour process as well as away from such a process,

people develop their capacities. ‘It goes without saying,’ Marx (1973: 712)

commented, ‘that direct labour time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to

free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy.’ ‘Time for

education, for intellectual development, for the fulfillment of social functions, for

social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of his body and his mind’ is time

when people are engaged in different kinds of production (Marx, 1977: 375). ‘Every

kind of consumption,’ Marx pointed out, ‘in one way or another produces human

beings in some particular aspect;’ thus, when ‘attending lectures, educating his

children, developing his taste, etc,’ the worker expands his capacities in different

dimensions (Marx, 1973: 90-1, 287; Lebowitz, 2003a: 66-72). In short, those who

have this opportunity to develop their capacities differently transform themselves and

enter ‘into the direct production process as this different subject.’ From this

standpoint, free time can be regarded as ‘the production of fixed capital, this fixed

capital being man himself’ (Marx, 1973: 712).

People also produce themselves, however, when the development of their

capacities is not their preconceived goal. ‘The coincidence of the changing of

circumstances and of human activity or self-change’— here is the essence of Marx’s

view of ‘the self-creation of man as a process’, an understanding he drew initially

from Hegel but which always remained central to his perspective (Lebowitz, 2003a:

178-81). Marx was most clear on this point when talking about the struggles of

workers against capital and how this revolutionary practice transforms ‘circumstances

and men’, expanding their capabilities and making them fit to create a new world

(Lebowitz, 2003a: 180-3). His point, though, was not at all limited to the process of

struggle. In the very act of producing, Marx noted in the Grundrisse, ‘the producers

change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in

production, transform themselves, develop new powers and new ideas, new modes of

intercourse, new needs and new language’ (Marx, 1973: 494). The worker as outcome

of his own labour, indeed, enters into Marx’s discussion in Capital of the labour

process— there the worker ‘acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way

he simultaneously changes his own nature’ (Marx, 1977: 283).

In short, every act of production, every human activity, has as its result a joint

product— both the change in the object of labour and the change in the labourer

herself. Of course, there are obvious differences between a labour process in which

development of human potential is the goal and one in which changes in human

beings appear as a residual effect of the process of capitalist reproduction. The social

relations characteristic of the labour process necessarily shape the changes in the

capacity of the producers. Thus, in capitalist production, human capacity develops as

an unintended consequence, a joint product, of capital’s attempt to drive beyond all

barriers to its growth. The ‘ceaseless striving’ of capital to grow, Marx (1973: 325)

argued, is why, compared to its predecessors, the rule of capital ‘creates the material

elements for the development of the rich individuality.’ The daily activity of people in

pre-capitalist societies— ‘the traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted

satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life’ restricted the

expansion of human capacities. Capital’s civilising mission, thus, was to destroy these

barriers to human development:

It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down

all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the

expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation

and exchange of natural and mental forces (Marx, 1973: 410).

Similarly, capital creates the material elements for expanded human capacity

insofar as it transforms the existing mode of production into one appropriate to its

needs. New forms of cooperation among producers introduced by capital provide

conditions in which the worker ‘strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops

the capabilities of his species’ (Marx, 1977: 447). Further, with development of large-

scale industry, capital’s need for ‘the fitness of the worker for the maximum number

of different kinds of labour’ provides historical conditions for the emergence of ‘the

totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different

modes of activity he takes up in turn’ (Marx, 1977: 618). Indeed, the capitalist drive

for surplus value ‘spurs on the development of society’s productive forces, and the

creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real

basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of

every individual forms the ruling principle’ (Marx, 1977: 739). However, while Marx

(1973: 325, 409-10) understood that capital strives in this way toward universality,

producing ‘this being as the most total and universal possible social product,’ he was

very clear that capital produces its own barriers to the production of rich human

beings.

The Production of Poor Human Beings

Within capitalist relations of production, people are subjected to ‘the powerful

will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose.’ The creative

power of the worker’s labour in this case ‘establishes itself as the power of capital, as

an alien power confronting him’ (Marx, 1977: 450; 1973: 453, 307). Thus, fixed

capital, machinery, technology, all ‘the general productive forces of the social brain’,

appear as attributes of capital and as independent of workers (Marx, 1973: 694; 1977:

1053-4, 1058). As a by-product of its drive for surplus value, capital produces people

who are dependent upon capital and who are conscious of that dependence— ‘a

working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of

that mode of production as self-evident natural laws’ (Marx, 1977: 899; Lebowitz,

2003a: 156-58). And, with the development of capitalist production, that dependence

grows: ‘the world of wealth expands and faces him as an alien world dominating him,

and as it does so his subjective poverty, his need and dependence grow larger in

proportion’ (Marx: 1977: 1062).

In this respect, capitalism does not produce a rich human being but an

impoverished one: a person with the need to buy things, a person with one real need–the

need for money. In capitalism, Marx commented, ‘this complete working-out of

the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification

as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of

the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end’ (Marx, 1973: 488). So long, too, as

they accept the logic of capital ‘as self-evident natural laws,’ workers are simply the

products of capital— ‘apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of

production’. However, Marx understood that struggles to satisfy their needs as

socially developed human beings were another product of capitalist production— i.e.,

capitalism produces class struggle on the part of workers. As workers organise to

struggle for themselves, i.e., engage in a process of purposeful activity and

subordinate their will to their preconceived goals, they transform themselves into

subjects with the capacity to build a new world (Lebowitz, 2003a: 179-84).

Marx’s Capital and Rich Human Beings

Unfortunately, Marx said very little about the specific characteristics of these

new subjects in this new world. Nevertheless, there is an obvious place to discover his

concept of rich human beings. Once we understand Marx’s consistent focus on human

development, it is clear that the premise of Marx’s Capital is the concept of

communism, that society in which the development of all human powers is an end in

itself. This ‘society of free individuality, based on the universal development of

individuals and on the subordination of their communal, social productivity as their

social wealth’— communism —is the spectre that haunts Marx’s Capital (Marx,

1973:158). Its presence can be felt right from the opening disparagement of capitalism

as a society in which wealth appears not as real human wealth but, rather, as ‘an

immense collection of commodities’ (Marx, 1977: 125). Indeed, the concept of

communism drops from the sky without any logical development in Capital when

Marx (1977: 772) evokes a society characterised not by the capitalist’s impulse to

increase the value of his capital but, rather, by ‘the inverse situation in which

objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development’.

We need to recognise that this ‘inverse situation’ that Marx introduces is the

perspective from which Marx critiques capitalism. Consider his description of the fact

that means of production employ workers as ‘this inversion, indeed this distortion,

which is peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production’. An inversion and

distortion of what? Simply, the ‘relation between dead labour and living labour’ in a

different society, one in which the results of past labour are ‘there to satisfy the

worker’s own need for development’ (Marx, 1977: 425).

Accordingly, by identifying the inversions and distortions that produce

truncated human beings in capitalism, we can get a sense of Marx’s idea of what is

‘peculiar to and characteristic of’ production in that inverse situation, communist

society. We can understand what the rich human being is by seeing its inversion. Not

only do we see Marx reject the mutilation, the impoverishment, the ‘crippling of body

and mind,’ of the worker ‘bound hand and foot for life to a single specialized

operation’ in the capitalist process of manufacturing but we also can see the horror

with which he views the further advance of capitalist machine industry which

provides a technical basis for the capitalist ‘inversion’, completing the ‘separation of

the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour’ (Marx,

1977:482-4, 548, 607-8, 614). Head and hand become separate and hostile, ‘every

atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity’ is lost. ‘All means for the

development of production undergo a dialectical inversion,’ he indicated; ‘they distort

the worker into a fragment of a man,’ they degrade him and ‘alienate from him the

intellectual potentialities of the labour process’— these are just some of the

distortions characteristic of capitalist production (Marx, 1977: 548, 643, 799). In

short, in addition to producing commodities and capital itself, the joint product of

capitalist production that Marx identified was the fragmented, crippled human being

whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things.

There can be no surprise, then, that Marx looked to the re-combining of head

and hand, the uniting of mental and physical labour, to restoring a situation in which

the individual worker calls ‘his own muscles into play under the control of his own

brain.’ By ‘combining education and gymnastics with manual labour’— here was ‘the

germ of the education of the future;’ it was ‘the only method of producing fully

developed human beings’ (Marx, 1977: 613-4, 643). The answer was ‘variation of

labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions’—- this is

what is meant by the development of human capacity. The partially developed

individual, he argued, ‘must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for whom

the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in turn’

(Marx, 1977: 617-8).

At the core of all this is the importance of variety, variety of activity— people

develop their capabilities only through their own activity. Through new acts which

allow for the growth of their specific capacities, through that ‘accumulation of the

most varied acts through time’ to which Sève refers. In this way, they produce in

themselves the potentialities to carry out other acts which reproduce and expand their

capabilities. When they are denied the opportunity to exercise these potentialities,

however, they do not develop— which is precisely what Marx recognised was

inherent in a society in which human beings exist as means for the expansion of

capital.1 Where the interconnection of workers in production ‘confronts them, in the

realm of ideas, as a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and, in practice, as his authority’,

workers cannot develop their potential as human beings. Without ‘intelligent direction

1 Sève (1978: 358) identifies another problem—the negative effect upon the development of the

personality where capacity is developed but is underutilized. of production’ by workers, without

production ‘under their conscious and planned control,’ their own power becomes a power over them.

It is not accidental, accordingly, that Marx indicated that the ‘revolutionary

ferments whose goal is the abolition of the old division of labour stand in diametrical

contradiction with the capitalist form of production’ (Marx, 1977: 619). Just as with

the capitalist state, the ‘systematic and hierarchic division of labour’ characteristic of

capitalist production, with its own ‘trained caste’ above workers (‘absorbing the

intelligence of the masses and turning them against themselves in the lower places of

the hierarchy’) does not permit the ‘all-round development of the individual’ (Marx,

1977: 173, 450, 482; Lebowitz, 2003a: 193-96). Just as with the concept of the self-

government of the producers that workers ‘at last discovered; during the Paris

Commune, rich human beings are the product of a labour process which is

characterised by ‘the people—acting for itself by itself’ (Lebowitz, 2003a: 196).

The ‘Becoming’ of Communism

What are the implications of this conception for the building of communism?

In both communism as an organic system and also communism in the process of

becoming, every labour process produces joint products— particular use-values and

particular producers. Certainly, once it develops upon its own foundations,

communism would produce the human beings who are the premises of the system

itself. Once the idea of producing directly for the needs of others becomes ‘by

education, tradition and habit’ common sense, the activity of people no longer is

‘dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the

fulfillment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty’; at that point it

becomes free activity— ‘the creative manifestation of life arising from the free

development of all abilities of the “whole fellow”’— i.e., ‘life’s prime want’ (Marx,

1971: 257; Marx and Engels, 1976: 225) People produce here in the knowledge that

their activity is important to others in the society and they are thus affirmed in their

selves. They produce not only use-values but also themselves as social human beings,

as rich human beings— the premises of communism as an organic system (Marx,

1844a; 1973: 278).

Just as certainly, however, communism as it first emerges does not

spontaneously produce its own premises. In particular, as discussed in my paper for

the conference last year (and published in Marx Ahora), the initial defect of

communism, the self-interested behaviour rooted in the private ownership of labour-

power, inherently endangers solidarity within the society. The claim of associated

producers upon society’s output in accordance with ‘the labour they supply’ rather

than by their membership in society not only generates inequality but also carries

within it the tendency toward the disintegration of the common ownership of the

means of production (Lebowitz, 2003b). Insofar as producers view their work

primarily as a means to secure desired use-values (i.e., are driven by consumerism),

the nature of the people produced in the process is that of people for whom other

people are mere means to get money. Precisely because human consciousness cannot

change as rapidly as the property rights to things, overcoming the private ownership of

labour-power is more difficult than overcoming the private ownership of the means of

production.

For this reason, the ‘becoming’ of communist society must be understood as a

process which challenges the spontaneous tendencies present in communism as it first

emerges. There are a number of aspects to this. Firstly, recognition that every labour

process generates joint products — both the change in the object of labour and the

change in the labourer herself— points to the error in the assumption that the

development of rich human beings is the project for some distant realm of freedom,

the error of assuming that everything depends upon development of the productive

forces. In contrast to earlier periods when ‘the development of human abilities and

social potentialities (art, etc., science)’ had as its premise the surplus labour of the

masses and ‘free time on one side corresponds to subjugated time on the other side,’

the organisation of production by the associated producers themselves permits the

development of a mode of production which provides the opportunity for the

development of human abilities and which, by reducing alienation, reduces the need to

possess things (Marx and Engels, 1988: 190-92).

Of course, the associated producers will choose the length and intensity of a

workday which will leave them time and energy for their own personal development.

However, the ‘time at society’s disposal for the intellectual and social activity of the

individual’ is not limited to time away from production (Marx, 1973: 706; 1977: 667).

If the nature of the labour process is such as to fragment and cripple the producer, she

is distorted, fragmented and crippled away from that labour process as well. By ending

the separation of ‘the intellectual potentialities of the labour process’ from the

producers, communist society breaks with the old pattern in which ‘the development

of the human capacities on the one side is based on the restriction of development on

the other side’ (Marx, 1973: 711; Marx and Engels, 1988: 190-92).

A second aspect to the process of the ‘becoming’ of communism, though, is

that it is essential to recognise that the labour process should not be confused with

production of specific use-values. In a society which focuses on human beings,

something that could only be revealed in capitalism by analysis is here transparent–all

specific products and activities are mere moments in a process of producing

human beings, the real result of social production. As Marx commented about

capitalism:

When we consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the

final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself,

i.e., the human being itself in its social relations. Everything that has a fixed form,

such as the product, etc appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this

movement (Marx, 1973: 712).

Thus, not only production of specific material commodities (in the so-called

‘productive sector’) but also educational and health services, household activity which

directly nurtures the development of human beings, community maintenance— all

these are recognised as integral parts of the process of producing the social beings

who enter into all these activities (Lebowitz, 2003: 200-202). And, that points to the

importance not only of making each moment a site for the collective decision-making

and variety of activity that develops human capacities but also for building relations of

solidarity in all these moments. The act of solidarity has joint products— it both

provides support for the needs of others and produces rich human beings. Acts of

solidarity express the indivisibility of the development of human capacity in that

‘association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free

development of all.’

The process of producing the premises of communism as a reproducing,

organic system, in short, removes the veil that mystifies the organic links between the

limbs of the collective worker. The associated producers, Marx commented, expend

‘their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social

labour force’ (Marx: 1977, 171). We see the rationality of solidarity between all those

limbs of the collective worker to the extent that this production by freely associated

human beings ‘stands under their conscious and planned control’ (Marx, 1977: 173).

And that necessity for conscious and planned control points to an essential aspect of

that process of becoming: if the plan is to be their power rather than a power over

them, then the goals of the labour process must be transparently, in the realm of ideas,

the result of their own plans and, in practice, their own authority. The starting point of

the communist labour process, in short, is the democratic conception of the plan; and

the essential joint product of this process is production of the capacity for ‘intelligent

direction of production’— a premise of Marx’s notion of rich human beings.

Real Human Development

Real human development for Marx went far beyond anything that the UN

Development Program attempts to measure in its Human Development Reports. The

idea of human capacity that Marx advanced was one that stressed the actual

development of human ability— the idea of ‘the totally developed individual, for

whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in

turn.’ Variation of labour, mobility of the producer in all directions, points to

capacities which, once developed, can be applied to new challenges, to the

overcoming of new obstacles which is ‘in itself a liberating activity’ and, thus, a

process of self-realisation (Marx, 1973: 611).

But, what kind of activities produce this rich human being whose ‘own

realisation exists as an inner necessity, as need?’ How are these capacities produced?

For Marx, it is from the process of co-operation itself. As he indicated, ‘when the

worker co-operates in a` planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his

individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species’ (Marx, 1977: 447). In short,

the process of collective decision-making, of collective problem-solving, of ‘self

working and self-governing communes’ (Lebowitz, 2003a: 194) produces real human

development.

No one could ever suggest, however, that data on variables such as literacy,

life expectancy, etc at all approach the richness of Marx’s concept of human

development. However useful they may be, these are not the measures of the rich

human beings of communist society. Where is the measure for the self-confidence in

people that is created through the conscious development of cooperation and

democratic problem-solving in communities and workplaces? How can we measure

the sense of solidarity with others that comes from the simultaneous changing of

circumstances and self-change when activity is focused on the needs of people?

If we share Marx’s vision of rich human beings, we need to promote his

concept of human capacity rather than speak about human capital, which obscures the

nature of capital as a social relation based upon exploitation. Further, we face two

challenges— that of working to develop measures which reflect this concept of human

capacity and, especially, that of working to create the conditions which permit the

self-development of those rich social beings.

REFERENCES

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the Working Class (revised edition). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lebowitz, Michael A. 2003b. “El pueblo y la propriedad en la construccion

del comunismo,” Marx Ahora: Revista Internacional. Havana, No. 16

Marx, Karl (1844a) ‘Comments on James Mill’, in Marx and Engels (1975b),

Collected Works, Vol. 3.

Marx, Karl (1844b) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx and

Engels (1975b), Collected Works, Vol. 3.

Marx, Karl (1971) Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. III (Moscow: Progress Publishers).

Marx, Karl (1973) Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books).

Marx, Karl (1977) Capital, Vol. I (New York: Vintage Books).

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Works, Vol. 30 (New York: International Publishers).

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