Marx and the Category of Individuality' in Communist Society*

Marx was one among the great humanist philosophers who, like the humanists from the Renaissance up to those of our day, have stressed the idea that all social arrangements must serve the growth and the unfolding of man; that man must always be an end and never a means; that each individual carries within himself all of humanity; that human progress in science and in art depends upon freedom; that man has the capacity to perfect himself in the process of history…. It is an ironical fact that the main accusation against Marxism in the capitalist countries has been his “materialism”; this is ironical because it was precisely Marx's aim to fight the materialism engendered in bourgeois life and to create a society in which man—the creative, “self‐active” human being—is the summon bonum, in which the rich man is the one, as Marx put it, who is much, and not the one who has much.