The Sexual Question

Let us return to the passage on crude communism where he said: «One wants to abstract from talent by force, etc.».

It was this etc. in Marx’s own handwriting that we have taken the liberty of developing above.

«Immediate physical POSSESSION is seen as the main purpose of life and existence. The workers’ activity isn’t suppressed (our postulate) but extended to everyone. The relationship of private property still defines the community’s relationship to the world of things».

Is it not the same thing and the same crudeness in the Muscovite “property of the whole people”?

To confirm this and allow the argument of the sexes, let’s look at a key passage: «The community is a labor community, with equal wages paid by the common capital, which is managed by the community as the general capitalist». Both parts of this relationship are universalized: labor as the role everyone is assigned, and capital as the collective power and authority of the community.

This passage clearly highlights a radical contrast to the Russian economic structure. In communist and socialist society, there must be no property belonging to everyone, to the community, to society, or to the people. There also must be no wage or paid work, and no community, capital, etc.

Here Marx himself underlines the words wage, community, work, capital.

In the society described in our revolutionary program, paid labor, property, and capital must not be made common. Instead, they must be suppressed. They must disappear.

Anyone who does not understand this is a crude communist. Today, he is someone who is trying to turn the wheel backwards.

Now we can freely quote: «Finally, this movement (always referring to crude communism), which opposes general private property to private property, shows itself in its animal form. Marriage (undoubtedly a form of EXCLUSIVE private property) is replaced by the COMMUNITY OF WOMEN, where women become the property of the COMMUNITY, a COMMON property. This idea of the community of women can be seen as the REVEALED MYSTERY of this still crude and material communism. Just as a woman moves from marriage to general prostitution, the entire world of wealth – man’s objective essence – shifts from exclusive marriage with the owner to general prostitution with the community».

It would be truly enormous to create such theoretical and programmatic confusion. Imagine exchanging Marx’s categorical condemnation of the community of women for a defense of monogamous marriage and the institution of the family. This confusion is the clear intention of pro-Russian editors. They want to establish that the Russian structure can pass itself off as communist. This is despite the fact that it has marriage and the hereditary transmission of property.

Generalized private property, as Marx has shown, is not much different from exclusive (personal) private property. It only holds historical interest as the first negation of private property. Every initial attempt at negating a historical form begins to resolve by universalizing it. This process ultimately becomes a reaffirmation. To clarify, this does not mean we are reaffirming exclusive private property like the one we started with.

The criticism of the common ownership of women as an inadequate concept does not mean that male private ownership is justified. Our modern, developed communism strongly condemns the monogamous family and marriage, which Marx calls a form of exclusive private property. Marx compares the relationship between a man and his private property (part of wealth) to the relationship between a man and a woman in marriage. The private owner, for example, of a field, is likened to the “husband-man” of the “wife-field”.

In the first case, property rights mean the owner can stop others from sowing and reaping his land. In the second case, the marital relationship gives a man the right to prevent other males from being with his same woman. It would be hard to stomach any attempt to justify marital law based on this comparison, especially considering the Russian legal code, which still upholds such laws (except for divorce, a practice known to both bourgeois and pre-bourgeois societies for centuries).

When Marx criticizes the concept of communal ownership of women (which we don’t defend, unlike our stance on war against the educated), he makes an insightful comparison. He calls it the “general prostitution of wealth by the community”. This refers to a system where private property isn’t abolished, only generalized, turning into the “property of the whole people”, as is said today in Russia (though they haven’t fully achieved this yet).

Degradation of man and woman

When quoting these passages, it’s necessary to use “man” for both sexes and “male” for men specifically. There’s no need to use the harsher term “female” in Italian. Half a century ago, when feminism – seen as a petty bourgeois reaction to the brutal subjugation of women in property-owning societies – was being discussed, the Marxist Filippo Turati responded simply: «The woman... is a man». He meant that in communism, women would be equal, but in bourgeois society, they are treated as animals or objects.

«In the relationship between the male and the woman, who is both servant and prey to his desires (and her own), the infinite degradation of human life in today’s society is expressed. This applies to all people, regardless of their sex. The mystery of human relationships within bourgeois society finds its UNEQUIVOCAL, incontestable, MANIFEST, and revealed expression in the relationship between the male and the woman. The way this relationship is understood in today’s society reflects the immediate and natural life of the species».

The immediate, natural, necessary relationship of man with man is the relationship of male with woman.

The nature of this relationship (in its various historical forms) shows how much man has understood himself as a GENERIC being, as MAN. The idea here is that a person truly earns the title of “man” only from the moment when they no longer live as an individual, focused on their own interests, but instead live for the species, including all fellow humans.

Let us continue reading this eloquent text in its ellipses and its hammering repetitions.

«The relationship between the male and female is the most natural relationship between human beings. This is a stricter formula than simply saying ’between a human being and a human being,’ which carries an individualistic tone. In this relationship, it shows, in every era, to what extent man’s NATURAL behavior has become HUMAN. It also shows to what extent being HUMAN has become his way of being NATURAL. Lastly, it reveals how much HUMAN NATURE has become man’s own NATURE».

In different languages, terms like nature, essence, way of being, and being (as a verb transformed into a noun) may seem interchangeable. They may also appear to have a common meaning. As a result, these passages can tire the reader. The reader might not interpret them through the lens of a complex system of doctrines. These doctrines have developed over long periods of time and space. As a result the reader could see these passages as mere word games that do not contribute anything new to the original ideas.

We try to collaborate with the reader by adding our own development, which may become more graspable in historical and narrative form. Just above the text, it is mentioned that one can gauge the degree of development of man from behavior in relationships between the sexes. The Moscow translation refers to this as the “degree of civilization”, a term that is entirely Latin and absent from both German and Marxist language. We show that Marx did not use the pale equivalent “Kultur”, which is worthy of Hitler.

Beast or Angels ?

The human species, in its historical social forms, follows a path. For clarification, we will say this path goes from the animal state onwards. This is to avoid immersing ourselves in the quicksand of concrete presentations.

The banal conceptions of the dominant ideologies view this path as a continuous and constant ascent. Marxism does not share this vision. It defines the path as a series of alternating climbs and descents. These are interspersed with violent crises.

The bourgeois enlighteners boast of overcoming through gradual progressive advances, the instant where redemption occured, by the grace of God, where history marked the turn from animality to spirituality. We don’t mock the religious idea with the same smug tone as the way the bourgeois laugh it off. The progressive view is just as arbitrary and fictional, even if it aims to reflect the true conquests of our species it still contains more error and lies than the old mystical narratives.

In the animal state, survival of the species isn’t ensured through production but through a direct relationship with nature. In this state, an individual may momentarily secure their own life without concern for the species, finding in nature a way to meet their immediate and “natural” needs for themselves alone.

The bourgeois doctrine of production is exposed once Marx uncovers its vile secret. It appears to be more of a continuation of an animalistic beginning than a progression toward a divine end. This divine end is something we’ve been misled about for millennia. The stage we are moving toward rejects the natural but not degrading, bestial state. It doesn’t require models based on angels and spirits. Instead, it is simply human. We believe its characteristics can be predicted by the science of our species. This doesn’t require a miracle, but exists in the realm of visible and tangible reality. In today’s society, which has emerged from the liberal revolution, we find ourselves leaning more toward bestial nature than “human” nature.

Let us continue our digression. We don’t want it to have the opposite result. Let’s focus on the question of sex.

Here, the animal satisfies its need with a relationship similar to that of finding food. It discovers the complementary sex in the natural environment and joins with it. However, even at this point, the relationship is no longer individual. The same drive in each of the creatures panting for love is guided by a determination. This determination, without any finalistic fantasies, stems from the need to preserve and develop the species.

Let’s look carefully before deciding whether we’ve gone berserk or mad! The animal finds food immediately and naturally, not in exchange for money. Similarly, it does not find love in exchange for money. Even if it fights for food and love with others in certain cases, this does not change the deduction. According to Marx, man’s nature has not yet risen to the level of being truly human. Man finds food and love through money and exchange. He feeds himself while another is hungry. He may satiate himself with pleasure, while others endure worse than beastly pain in relationships.

This is the meaning of the human animal in the state of ownership, which we would like to call for a moment: homo insipiens proprius (a proper foolish man).

The so-called irrational animal, when it engages in the sexual function, it sets aside its own greed as an individual for the greater purpose of its species. This is often described as acting on instinct – an innate force of nature that the individual follows as if it understood and reasoned, though it lacks the ability to actually reason or know.

Man wouldn’t be much more advanced than animals if, in order to act as a species and society and have a history (unlike animals, as our text sets out), he needed some kind of supernatural inspiration.

This was a naive embryonic attempt to explain the mysterious process.

Religion is a historical bridge. It leads from the instinct of the brute to an awareness of the laws of species behavior.

But woe betide if this bridge had never been built with its mythical arches! This text of ours has many arrows against the pettiness of bourgeois atheism. It shows how questionable evolution has been from transcendentalism to immanentism. This is another bridge that history could not avoid building.

The strength of our materialism lies in the idea that progress is made without leaving nature – by returning to it after briefly stepping away to resolve mysteries and imagine an immaterial Prime Mover. Humanity, with its vast range of relationships, is part of nature, and no aspect of these relationships exists outside nature’s laws. There’s no realm governed by a God or Spirit, a solitary idol that is unnatural and inhuman. Our ascent from a living species to a reasoning one, guided by science rather than instinct, if it has a secret, is this: knowledge of nature, of which humanity is a part – not above or below – is not gained from the individual thinker or passed like a torch. Instead, it is realized through the revolutionary leap from so-called history made by individuals to the identification of each person with the future human collective. In a dialectical sense, the Marxist party and its doctrine are an anticipatory projection of this future collective.

Marx described love as a thermometer of the brilliant advance of human discovery. Love will no longer be driven by uncontrollable, primitive instincts but will instead reflect a collective achievement of awareness and enlightened joy.

Love, everyone needs it

Excuse me for our humble rambling. We can read another passage.

«It is equally shown in the historical evolution of the relationship between the sexes how much man’s NEED has become a HUMAN need. This shift moves from the need for love, seen as a key measure, to all other needs, which in the era of mercantile individualism are called economic. We have harshly criticized how these needs have been reduced to a single, miserable need: money. This reduction, worsened by the influence of drugs, strips away the broader range of human needs. It shows to what extent man’s needs have become truly human, and to what extent OTHER people, as humans, have become necessary to him. Even his most individual experiences, from physiological functions to hormonal fluctuations, have become tied to the existence of the community».

The idea that, for human beings, true satisfaction and joy come from fulfilling the needs of others – rather than seeing those needs as a burden – is explored further in this treatise. This concept is drawn from our doctrine on Earth, imagining a future like something out of science fiction, not a sterile paradise of angels. It is clearly discussed in the marginal commentary by Mill, which we reviewed at the Parma meeting (see no. 21 of 1958, paragraph “great schemes of future society”).

Marx’s conclusion in this passage is harsh toward crude communism, especially regarding the flawed idea of the community of women. This view clearly reflects a proprietary mindset that treats women as the passive property of men. It worsens the flaws of individualistic society rather than eliminating them. The notion of male ownership over women mirrors the idea of the people owning national goods, which does not solve the problem.

The idea of all men having ownership over all women reflects the same dynamic where individual men see women as prey and commodities. This shows that simply overcoming private property is not enough. As long as both men and women remain wage earners under a capitalist system that controls society, true change cannot occur.

Just as those who work for money remain alienated and “passive” in crude Russian communism, so too does the woman in this basic formula of shared community of all women. She remains as much a slave and passive as in the monogamous family. In bourgeois society, the relationship between the sexes forces the woman into a passive position. She makes an economic calculation every time she has access to love. Meanwhile, the male makes this calculation from an active position. He balances a sum allocated for a satisfied need. In bourgeois society, all needs, including the need for love, are translated into money. For the woman, the need for money kills her need for love. The key of the social sexual relationship is used to evaluate the disgrace of a historical form.

Civilization still views love as a passive role for women, much like when they were subjected to practices like jus primae noctis (the right of the first night) or the rape of the Sabine Women. Yet, in nature, women are the active sex, with love as the foundation of species reproduction. The monetary systems imposed on this natural dynamic are clearly unnatural.

In non-monetary communism, love is treated as a shared need with equal importance for both sexes. The act of love reflects a social principle: the other person’s needs are my needs, as a human being. This is because the needs of one sex are also the needs of the other. This isn’t just a moral or physical relationship; the difference lies in the economic reality. Raising children and their associated responsibilities are not just the concern of the two parents but of the entire community.

When inheritance resolves this issue, private ownership takes full control. This can happen through the father or by entailment.

Primitive Communism

Marx’s condemnation of schools and programs that, along with the wage system and the general market, promoted the community of women refers to ideas from the late 18th century. However, the text we are studying sometimes links this criticism to the earliest form of crude communism, which was an alternative to the emerging capitalist system. In some references, this form is connected to the true historical period of primitive tribal communism, thousands of years ago. This idea is discussed in all Marxist literature and in key works by Marx and Engels.

While acknowledging that various forms of society developed between ancient communism and the communism advocated by the modern proletariat – forms characterized by private property, class structures, and cultural traditions – texts like “Capital” and “The Origin of the Family, Property, and the State” offer a clear appreciation of that original, elevated form of communism.

In examining our entire doctrine, we can explore its origins in relation to sexual structure. This reveals the matriarchal society where women, as the leading figures, guide both men and children. Here, women are active and in control, rather than passive or subservient. This tradition persists in Latin families; interestingly, while “family” originates from a word meaning “slave”, “woman” comes from a term meaning “mistress”. In this early societal structure, which was communal but not based on ownership or wealth, love held a higher value than during times of legendary conquests. It was the Mater who chose her partner for the purpose of continuing the species, highlighting her active role in both nature and society.

We will now conclude the section on the first type of communism discussed in the text and begin exploring integral communism.

“Crude communism is simply an extreme reaction to private property. While it tries to present itself as a positive community, it is actually the first attempt to actively eliminate private property”.

The earliest form of communism that emerged as a movement with its own program was essentially an effort to develop a blueprint for a “positive community”. This refers to a communal structure society would eventually transition to over time. These ideas can be better understood and explained by drawing upon the rich history of genuine Marxism. When we respect their original form, they underscore that without a clear understanding of the stage at which defining the framework of communist society becomes possible, there can be no revolutionary strategy, workers’ revolution theory, or Marxist doctrine. This pivotal moment, which we identify with the time of the Communist Manifesto, stands in contrast to later attempts at revision, which are dung.

Even before then, since the time of Babeuf, it’s been clear how repulsive capitalist property is. This criticism is inherent in crude communism, as it highlights the evident flaws in capitalist property. This realization marks a significant historical development.

However, the development of capitalism and the resulting class reactions were not enough to establish the ideas of capitalism’s end, a proletarian revolution, or a communist society.

The effort to outline the program for future society is still in its embryonic stages and may be flawed, but it marks the first clear rejection of private property, as noted in Marx’s manuscript. The crude communists understood what they wanted to destroy but couldn’t yet foresee the grand transformation that would arise from the destruction. We are the ones who now understand it.

The sorry state in Russia today doesn’t match what we were promised or what we expected. They were influenced by inadequate ideas that crude communism outlined as a plan. This plan meant to trigger only destruction and was a noble precursor; where those in Russia today are disappointing traitors.

The doctrine of communism stands between the two, understanding both the deep flaws of the bourgeois world and the admirable qualities of the communist world.

Couples at the top

A faithful application of the method carved out by Marx about the sexual relationship is well suited to explain the event of these days that is echoed by the highest idiotic clamors.

The states of the bourgeoisie not only in the form of monarchies, but also in that of the most democratic of republics, in their supreme parades are represented by the couple at the top of the state, King and Queen, President and First Lady, whose social function is only to mate (perhaps) with him in the alcove. Theorizable for monarchies, vomitive in full for republics, which our texts rightly assimilate.

How should we respond if a state, claiming to have moved beyond so many historical phases and to be torn between socialism and communism, engages in the same shameful behavior among countless admired fools?

“In a communist society, will there still be couples?” – some newcomers might wonder. Yes, there will be. If two people choose to be together by mutual consent, neither force nor money will separate them. Marx didn’t destroy love; in fact, he described himself as a model monogamist. However, our focus isn’t on Marx’s personal life.

Have idealists and poets written about love in a way that truly captures its meaning?

“Focus on seeing people as people and their connections with the world as human relationships. When you do this, love and trust become mutual. If you love someone and they don’t love you back – if your love doesn’t inspire love in return – then your love is impotent and leads to unhappiness”.