Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only as means of life; and the life they serve is the life of private property, labour and capitalization.
Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses - the sense of having. So that it might give birth to its inner wealth, human nature had to be reduced to this absolute poverty.
—
Karl Marx 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
This quote struck me because it’s kinda hilarious to hear Marx use the word ‘stupid’. It seems too simple, and yet, totally works.
Anyways Marx using the word ‘stupid’ is basically the high point of working through the E&P manuscripts. It’s heavy shit and requires crazy amounts of notes to understand the bounty of “negations of negations” to = communism.
