Ted Winslow wrote:
Like the sadism to which they are closely linked, envy and insatiable greed are protean. Marx points to them as the psychological basis of "crude communism".
General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which greed re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way. The thought of every piece of private property as such is at least turned against wealthier private property in the form of envy and the urge to reduce things to a common level, so that this envy and urge even constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism is only the culmination of this envy and of this levelling-down proceeding from the preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited standard.
How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it.
The community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages paid out by communal capital - by the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality - labour as the category in which every person is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm>
I'm in awe. Really. This is sublime stuff. I haven't read this in years, so thanks for the reminder.
Doug
