31

p Every man is a biological being, but that does not comprise his essence. Naturally, to shape man, nature uses definite biological material, but the turning of this material into a human organism is the result of social factors, primarily of labour. Labour, Engels wrote, created man. It is incarnated in the organisation of the human body. Man is man not because he consists of organs, tissues and cells, and not because he breathes with his lungs and feeds his children with milk, but because he can work, think and talk, because he can produce imple ments of labour and, with their help, influence his surroundings, nature, because in the process of labour he can enter into social relations with other men.

p Marxism rejected the cult of abstract man, of man in general, regardless of time and space. Man has always been concrete, belonging to a historically definite social whole—a social system, a definite social group (class, nation, and so forth). He has always been a link in a definite system of social relations.

p Marx wrote: ”. . .The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.” This very ensemble of social relations, the social environment in which man develops, engenders the entire diversity of manifestations of his life.

p Thus, the material, production activity of society, the economic relations that form in the process of production, determine whether a man is a slave or a slave-owner, a peasant or a feudal lord, a worker or a capitalist. In other words, the economic life of a definite society engenders manifestations of the economic life of a concrete man and, therefore, his place in the system of social production. The manifestation of man’s life in the economic sphere comprises the foundation of all his other manifestations, 32 features and peculiarities. A definite collective- class, nation, and so forth—gives rise to the national, class and other features of man or, in short, to manifestations oi his social life. Lastly, intrinsic in man are manifestations of spiritual life, which mirror the economic, the production relations inherent in society.

p The social environment to which man belongs thus engenders in him definite “manifestations of life"—his diversity of features, behaviour and actions, thoughts and aspirations, needs, talents and other psychical qualities (character, temperament, feelings, habits, and so forth). In their totality and interaction all these features, these manifestations of life, form concrete man as a whole. Taken separately, they are specific manifestations of a definite social relation. Together they are a manifestation of the entire diversity of relations in society. In this context, the human essence is the sum total, the qualitative knot, an aggregate of social relations.

p Why, one may ask, is there such a diversity of human individualities in one and the same environment, in one and the same society? Why does one individual or another not embody all the features of the social whole, and why is there such a difference in the features that he does embody? The answer to this is that each person develops in a specific environment (“micro-environment”), i.e., his speciality, occupation, features of the production or other collective, family, “street”, and so on.

p One can easily appreciate that the “micro-environment” is the prism through which is refracted the influence of the general social surroundings—economic and other social relations, the spiritual life of society. Inasmuch as the factors comprising the “micro-environment” are extremely diverse, this diversity spreads to persons even though they live and work in one and the same society, in one and the same social environment.

p Thus, the features of each concrete person are determined by the general social environment through the medium of the “micro-environment”. This gives expression to the general law of human development, of man’s mode of existence, which, Marx wrote, “is a more particular, or more general mode of the life of the species".

p The individual constantly changes, develops in 33 accordance with the changes in the social environment. In the process of development he loses some of his old features, acquires new ones, and develops and toughens still others. It should be taken into consideration that the social environment itself is not homogeneous: in it there always are foundations of the present, survivals of the past and embryos of the future. It turns out that man represents the sum total of the social manifestations of the given environment (to it belongs the decisive role in forming the features of the individual), the environment that has receded into the historical past and the environment that is superseding the present.

p When we say that man is the product of his surroundings we mean that the individual does not dissolve in society. Man is not a weak-willed screw of the social mechanism but its key functional link. He is the product of society, of circumstances, but he forms society itself. One must not forget, Marx wrote, “that circumstances are changed by men”. Man moulds society and, together with it, he moulds himself by his labour and political activity, and his influence on the environment, on society, increases with social progress.

While bringing to light the social essence of man, the founders of scientific communism also showed the main trend of his development in the process of historical progress—the growth of the range of features, of manifestations of life, and their uninterrupted enrichment and development linked up with social progress, with the improvement of social relations, and the rise of the standard of material and spiritual culture. The achievement of free development and the fullest expression of all manifestations of human life, the achievement of their absolute harmony, their best and unconstrained (natural) utilisation in the interests of society and, thereby, of man himself, is the trend of the development of human history. This trend manifests itself fully only under communism, where, as Marx wrote, “begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom”, and conditions are created which are most worthy of and adequate to human nature. Communism moulds a new man, for whom material wealth is not an end in itself but solely a means for the fullest manifestation and 34 development of his creative capabilities. Here man himself, all sidedly, harmoniously developed, becomes the greatest social wealth. Under communism, in contrast to capitalism with its economic wealth of the ruling classes and Ihe poverty of the working people, Marx wrote, ”. . .come the rich human being and the rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human life-activities—the man in whom his own realisation exists as an inner necessity, as need".