“DIGNITY” is a strange term. Often associated with the upper classes, it can conjure up images of royalty or aristocracy. Indeed, until the mid-19th century “dignity” usually carried some connotation of “merit” (in both senses of the word). 

It has also been applied to the poor, bravely enduring their deprivation, perhaps in a care home, or in one of those TV adverts (paid for, of course) by charities appealing for our donations for the “wretched of the earth.”

“Classical” philosophers have often associated dignity with intangible moral standards. Kant, for example identified dignity with a commitment to value which cannot be measured in money terms: “What is related to general human inclinations and needs has a “market price”; that which, even without presupposing such a need, conforms with a certain taste has a “fancy price”; but that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself has not merely a relative value, that is, a price, but an inner value, that is, dignity… Morality, and humanity insofar as it is capable of morality, is that which alone has dignity.” 

Dignity is often associated with rights – and the lack of the latter often implies the denial of the former. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) opens with the recognition of “inherent dignity” and the “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Its first article proclaims that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

That definition itself has difficulties. Several states mention dignity in their constitution. The constitution of Germany opens with the assertion: “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” A 1975 law legalising abortion was declared unconstitutional because the court held that embryos had human dignity. A new law on abortion was developed in the 1990s which allows abortions provided they are preceded by counselling.

As those who today suffer deprivation, war, torture and humiliation know only too well that dignity is often, sometimes deliberately, denied.

Engels, for example, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), writes of how under industrial capitalism: “It is not only the worker’s physical conditions that are degraded but his moral character and his sense of human dignity.” 

For both Marx and Engels, dignity was important and it was linked to one of the defining features which characterise humans and their social and economic development – labour. “Wuerde” (dignity) or related concepts such as self-respect feature prominently. “Die Wuerde der Arbeit” can be translated as “the dignity of labour” or “the grandeur of labour”. From their early days, Marx and Engels linked human dignity to the conditions of labour and human self-realisation. 

Dignity, they argued, lies in the ability of humans to express themselves freely through conscious, creative activity. William Morris, a communist, developed this argument in his 1893 essay Useful Work versus Useless Toil. He used the phrase “sham dignity” to describe the pompous prestige and empty social status with which wealthy and professional people cloak their unproductive, commercial jobs.

Capitalism, by turning labour into forced, alienated work, robs humans of their dignity. That applies to slavery, old and “new.” It applies increasingly today to the conditions under which many working people have to earn their living, from production-line working. whether in manufacturing or in an Amazon “fulfilment centre,” to the driver of a commercial or public-service vehicle forced to pee into a bottle.

In his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx describes how under capitalism, the worker becomes alienated from their labour, their “species-being” or “human essence.” He writes: “In degrading spontaneous, free activity to a mere means of physical existence, alienated labour deprives humans of their species-life, their real objectivity as a member of the human race.” 

In Capital (1867), Marx analyses the way that capitalist production treats human labour as a means, not an end – the opposite of Kant’s moral principle. “Capital cares nothing for the length of labour-power. Its only concern is to reduce the cost of production of labour-power to the minimum. Hence the degradation of the worker to the level of a machine.”

If humans do have “inherent dignity” it’s clear that under capitalism this is denied. 

One definition of dignity could be “human self-realisation;” within capitalism this is usually defined on an individual level and permitted only to a few. Marx and Engels were clear that the “full and free development of every individual” could only be secured on a collective basis – within communism, or in the struggle to secure it. 

Here’s one of today’s prominent Marxists, Vijay Prashad, writing in the (highly recommended) journal Monthly Review:

“The concept of dignity is widely shared across human history… But dignity is not an a priori fact of humanity (as humanism or liberalism argues); it must be produced as we exit the wretchedness of deprivation (poverty, illiteracy) and form dignified lives (as socialism argues).

“There is, in other words, a material force that must shape our dignity. A politics to produce dignity is a socialist politics, although others might adopt this or that element of the socialist programme. There is no evidence in the world that the capitalist system can emancipate all people from a life of indignity: capitalism inherently generates forms of inequality and indignity. Therefore, all undertakings that seek dignity for all are socialist projects.” 

In the Communist Manifesto, communism is presented not as a rigid blueprint, but rather as the “real movement” that abolishes the conditions of alienation created by capitalism. Its goal is to create a society where individuals are no longer controlled by external economic forces (like the market) but can consciously shape their own lives and social relations.

“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” 

Marx declared that the journey to this goal would depend on the degree to which the working class as a “class in itself” defined by its relationship to the means and processes of production, becomes conscious of its shared interests and forms an organised, conscious social and political force – a “class for itself.” 
Locally or globally, that is the basis for collective dignity.

More Q&A — including on nationalism, the state, imperialism, neo-colonial dependency and on fascism and communism, can be found on the Marx Memorial Library’s website or the Morning Star online — links on https://tinyurl.com/FullMarxList/