ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Karl Marx's discussion in the manuscript on communism. His conception of communism is fundamentally philosophical or religious. It is part and parcel of the total philosophy of world history that he elaborates in the manuscripts on the model of Hegel's Phenomenology. The infinite degradation under raw communism is pictured by Marx as a short stage of purgatory on the ascent of alienated man to his post-historical destiny in ultimate communism. This he discusses under the heading of 'positive humanism' or the humanization of mankind. The human negation of the negation produces only 'unthinking' or 'raw communism', in which man remains more than ever a negation of himself. This is the immediate post-revolutionary transitional stage that Marx later designated as the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx's 'unthinking' communism is to prevail on the morrow of the world revolution.
