Abstract

Soviet Diamat and historical materialism are based on an anthropology of scarcity, according to which the real nature of human beings is primarily a physical-corporeal one, fundamentally generic and aimed at taking possession of the natural world through human work, in order to satisfy our primary needs. Communism is consequently understood in theory and practice as a social organization in which the criterion of equality constitutes the primary and supreme value, while the criterion of difference and inequality constitutes the negative value par excellence. This led to a radical contraposition between a new humanity, characterized by the practice of the "common", and the old bourgeois-liberal humanity, characterized by the exaltation of the "private" and individual subjectivity. Writing The German Ideology and the Parisian Manuscripts of 1844, Marx and Engels removed the dialectical anthropology of Hegel but fell into a new anthropological deficit whose consequences still reach us today. On the other hand, thanks to this removal, the mature Marx will give us a non-anthropomorphic and non-abstract conception of capital, as a merely quantitative factor of systemic integration in a society in which people are worth masks, personifications of economic categories and incarnation of certain relationships and class interests.