'The only true Bolshevist writer'

Whilst in Yorkshire, I’ve been returning to certain passages of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. My old pencil marks and underlinings suggest a preoccupation with Marx’s concept of ‘the human’, in particular the ‘human’ as a possibility as opposed to an establishes fact. Also, the exemplary and utopian humanity of the writer:

The writer does not regard his work as a means to an end, they are an end in themselves. So little are they a ‘means’ for himself, and for others, that he will, if necessary, sacrifice his own existence to their existence.

The writer, even the most isolated writer, such as a Kafka, establishes him/her self as one concrete cell of a potential social reality in which the means>end relation of our current economic rationality has been reversed. Here, in the writer’s garret, is the organisation of life towards the endless end of creative self-fulfilment glimpsed.

This is what makes someone like Kafka – superficially the most a-social, isolated figure – deeply ‘political’. Kafka permits nothing to divert him from his writing, even ‘his own existence’. Certainly, he does not allow even an intimate relation (that between himself and Felice) to obstruct his writing, ingeniously and demonically diverting the relationship into an epistolary one. The relation exists only in and through writing, its creature, its theatre. But this inversion of the standard means-end relation arguably leaves its structure in tact: in doing this, the flesh and blood individual Felice becomes only a means to serve his writing.


At various points, Marx suggests that ‘humanity’ consists in going beyond and negating Nature – i.e., ‘Nature’ in the sense of the realm of necessity:

Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For a man who is starving the human form of food does not exist.

Once pleasures and desires are not subservient to immediate need (ie immured in the realm of necessity, of the basic re-production of life) they can be ‘cultivated’, developed as ends in themselves. Sex as reproduction, food as negation of hunger: these are not-yet human. For most of history, the majority of the species has had most of its energy consumed in - and confiscated by – reproducing its basic conditions of existence. However, in certain places, among certain classes, groups of people were able to devote energies – surplus energies - to pleasures and activities which were enjoyed as ends in themselves. (Eg, once there is no longer the imperative to reproduce, sex can be divorced from utility and its inherent pleasures explored. This is human sexuality).

Indeed, the problem has always presented itself to societies of how to have energy left over for free creative activity. The ‘solution’ to this problem, hitherto, has been to divide society up into classes. One class is largely confined to the realm of necessity; the other can devote its time to the free play of the faculties.


However, the ‘free play’ available to the dominant class is invariably distorted and compromised by the exploitation through which it has been purchased. The price paid by others in immiseration and suffering means that the leisure and creativity of the dominant class is prevented from being fully human.


Now, when Marx comes to industrial society, it is clearly no longer merely a case of this division between the ‘inhuman’ realm of necessity and reproduction and the higher realm of creative fulfilment (albeit compromised and necessarily ‘ideological’ because of the price to be paid for its realisation). So, as a final fascinating pointer, this passage:

Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and whim; and no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch – the producer – in order to sneak for himself a few pieces of silver… He puts himself at the service of the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses – all so that he can demand the service of love. (Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other’s being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the gluepot. General exploitation of communal human nature, just as every imperfection in man is a bond with heaven – an avenue giving the priest access to his heart; every need is an opportunity to approach one’s neighbour under the guise of the utmost amiability and to say to him: Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the condition sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.

*The title of the post is (apparently) Brecht's intriging description of Kafka.