The Unifying Element in All Struggles Against Capital Is the Right of Everyone to Full Human Development

Abstract

[In my] examination of struggle…from the side of workers.… I constantly came back to the Marxist concept of revolutionary practice, that simultaneous changing of circumstance and human activity or self-change—how people transform themselves through their struggles. But not only through struggles; they produce themselves through their daily activity. People are formed by what they do. So, for example, a person who is a wage laborer under capitalism is produced and produces himself in a certain way, as a person who is alienated, as a person who simply wants to consume because of the emptiness of capitalist production. We always have to ask the question, "what kinds of people are produced under particular relations of production?" What kinds of people are produced in an exchange relationship, which is "I will do this for you, if you do that for me" as opposed to functioning in a communal society in which people act in solidarity? You produce certain kinds of people under those conditions.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.