WE say that this description is perfectly valid — for capitalism. Nobody is born a carpenter, a businessman, or a doctor, but division of labour — whether traditional casteist or modern capitalist — makes him so. It crushes, stifles and distorts the individual's multi-dimensional potentials and creates in their stead certain narrow '”aptitudes” necessary for the allotted “job”. This is true not only for manual labourers tied to routine work, but also for today's over-specialised intellectuals, artists etc., who suffer under an unbalanced way of life and an alienation from broad social praxis.

All this will completely change under communism. With classes will be gone the crippling subjugation of the individual to the division of labour, and with that, the traditional antithesis between manual and mental labour. All the springs of cooperative wealth will flow abundantly, so that the individual will be free — and, thanks to universal advanced education, competent — to engage in several productive and creative activities :

“to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, cowherd, or critic.” (From The German Ideology by Marx and Engels)

Labour thus ceases to be a burden and becomes a pleasure, a self-expression of life. From a means of subjugation of the individual, it becomes a means of emancipation. The individual-collective dichotomy is solved and at last we have a harmonised society where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.