TO be a Renaissance Man is To be a Man of Communism

Human beings are not born as "Renaissance men" or specialists. Every mode of production creates a particular type of human personality by shaping education, labour, leisure, and the social division of labour. The Renaissance first imagined the universally developed human being, but only communism can make that ideal universal.

As someone in my most formative years, a question confronts me: What will I become?
Not a question of morals about whether I will be a good person or bad. But of a different sort; the answer to this question will dictate most of my life, it will dictate my routine, my living condition and my social status. Since childhood this idea seems to be embroidered in our brains that we have to choose how we are going to make our living by doing a job till we simply can't do it. Since childhood, we are either pushed to look out for our passion or field of interests or sometimes they are imposed on us either by our family or caste and social structure.

As a personal anecdote, I was always scrutinized by my father for being a polymath, as he believed this would distort my potential, and those who do everything do nothing. But when I read about the Renaissance or read polymath characters from novels, such as José Arcadio Buendía. I felt a romanticism towards those late feudal and early capitalist times. I wondered how we can achieve a world where everyone can master and enjoy different sorts of  fields, not just gentlemen leaching on the blood of workers, not just people of imperial core leaching on the blood of the Third World. But humanity as a whole. As by a series of happy accidents, I came across Marx and the whole tradition of Marxism, and it exposed that: 

 A strange contradiction defines modern civilisation.

 Today we have satellites orbiting the planets that we didn't even know of a few years ago, artificial intelligence, machines that perform work in minutes that once required months of labour, and universities producing millions of specialists every year. Yet the individual appears increasingly fragmented. We have created a society of extraordinary knowledge but increasingly specialised human beings.

However, five centuries ago, in Florence artists moved effortlessly between different schools and works.

 The Renaissance Dream

1300s Europe celebrated a very different ideal. In the workshops, courts and libraries of Renaissance Italy there emerged a conception of the uomo universale: the universal human being. This was not simply a learned person or an accomplished artist. It was an individual whose intellectual life recognised no rigid boundaries between disciplines. Painting, anatomy, architecture, philosophy, music. etc. belonged to one continuous pursuit of knowledge. The Renaissance did not merely produce masterpieces of art; it produced a new conception of what a human being could become.

No one captured this ideal better than Leonardo da Vinci. Calling him just a painter feels ridiculous. His notebooks overflow with anatomy, mechanics, optics, geology, architecture, etc., all sitting right next to sketches for his greatest paintings. He didn’t separate art from science; to him they were part of the same search. Every branch of knowledge illuminated another because reality itself formed an interconnected whole.

Leonardo repeatedly rejected inherited authority as the source of knowledge. Instead, he insisted upon direct investigation of nature. As he wrote,

"Wisdom is the daughter of experience."

He also famously said,

"Experience never errs; it is only your judgements that err in promising themselves results which are not caused by your experiments."

These statements are more than methodological advice to painters. They express a new intellectual attitude towards the world. Truth was no longer received passively through tradition but something discovered through observation, experiment and labour. Knowledge became an active relationship between humanity and nature and humans and humans. Leonardo's artistic practice reflected precisely this outlook. To paint the human body required anatomy. To understand anatomy demanded dissection. Accurate perspective required geometry. Engineering required mathematics. The study of water informed mechanics. Every investigation opened the way to another. Knowledge do not expanded in isolation but through connection. The Renaissance ideal was fundamentally one of intellectual unity.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man often been regarded as the philosophical manifesto of Renaissance humanism. Unlike medieval conceptions that emphasised humanity's fixed place within a divinely ordered hierarchy, Pico described human beings as creatures without predetermined limits.Describing humanity as

"the maker and moulder of thyself."

These sentences capture the optimism of the Renaissance beautifully. Humanity was no longer understood simply as occupying a fixed station within creation. It possessed the capacity to cultivate itself through education, discipline and intellectual effort. The human being appeared as an unfinished project rather than a completed fact.

The Renaissance therefore represented far more than a rediscovery of classical antiquity. It was the cultural expression of a society undergoing profound material transformation. The Renaissance ideal of the universal human was born within these changing historical conditions.

Yet herein lies the central contradiction.

The Renaissance proclaimed the limitless potential of humanity while restricting this realisation of that potential to a privileged minority. 

Leonardo appears exceptional precisely because the conditions necessary for his development were themselves exceptional.
Renaissance humanism discovered an extraordinary possibility of comprehensive development of the individual, but it lacked the social conditions required to transform that possibility into a universal reality. It described what human beings might become but not why such development occurred only under particular historical conditions. Its language remained that of human dignity, education and genius. Missing was a theory capable of explaining how societies themselves produce different kinds of human beings.

History Creates Human Beings

The Renaissance gave Europe one of its most enduring ideals: the complete human being. 

But how do we answer the question about the reason for existence of Renaissance.

It is precisely at this point that Marx tried to explain the historical origin. He rejected the view that human beings possess a timeless essence unfolding independently of society. Instead, he argued that every epoch creates characteristic forms of human life through its organisation of production. Human beings do make history, but they do so within definite material conditions inherited from previous times.

This very insight forms the foundation of what Marx and Engels called the materialist conception of history. In The German Ideology, they reject the idealist assumption that history is driven primarily by ideas, religion or philosophy. Instead, they begin from a much simpler observation:

"The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals."

Humans must eat, drink, clothe themselves, and get shelter before they can produce philosophy, religion or art. Every civilisation therefore rests upon the way people produce the necessities of life. Production is not simply an economic activity; it is the foundation upon which every social institution, political order and intellectual tradition develops.

Marx therefore reverses the conventional understanding of history. Ideas don't create society; society creates the conditions in which particular ideas become possible. As he and Engels wrote:

"Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life."

Although it does not deny the importance of ideas. Leonardo's notebooks, Pico's philosophy and Machiavelli's political thought unquestionably mattered. Rather, Marx insists that ideas themselves arise within concrete historical conditions. Philosophy, science, art and religion are not suspended above society; they develop through humanity's practical engagement with nature and with each other.

Marx develops this argument further in The Poverty of Philosophy, where he criticises Pierre-Joseph Proudhon for treating economic categories as eternal realities (which they are not). There he writes:

"In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations."- Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Chapter II: The Metaphysics of Political Economy, Section 1: The Method)

It is a theory of human development. New productive forces alter the organisation of labour. Changes in labour transform social relations. New social relations reshape everything from education, politics to culture and even how individuals understand themselves. Humans are therefore neither biologically fixed nor spiritually predetermined. They are historical beings whose capacities develop within changing forms of social life.

The Renaissance itself illustrates this principle. The growth of economy and urban production did not merely increase wealth; it transformed the entire intellectual landscape of Europe. Classical texts circulated more widely. Merchant families financed artists and scholars. Workshops combined technical skill with artistic innovation. Cities brought together merchants, craftsmen, architects and philosophers in ways impossible within the largely localised economy of old Europe. Under these conditions a broader conception of human ability became conceivable. Leonardo could only devote years to anatomical research because patrons supported his work. Humanists were able to master Greek and Latin because they possessed education unavailable to most people. Merchants' sons went to academics while peasants remained tied to agricultural labour. Workshops produced artistic masterpieces, but they also depended upon apprentices whose lives rarely resembled that of the celebrated masters. Even in Victorian England we saw how gentlemen engaged with art and culture, while commoners struggled for food.

No one invented the Renaissance in isolation; the Renaissance produced the world in which Leonardo could emerge.

 Therefore, Marx's analysis undermines what historians often call the "Great Man" theory of history. Great individuals undoubtedly exist, but they cannot be understood apart from the historical conditions that produce them. Julius Caesar presupposes the Roman Republic. Napoleon presupposes the French Revolution. Leonardo presupposes Renaissance Italy. Genius is real, but genius itself develops within definite social relations.

This does not reduce the individual to a passive product of society. Man actively transforms the world through labour. They make history through practical activity. Yet they never do so under conditions of their own choosing. Every generation inherits productive forces, institutions and social relations created by previous generations. Freedom therefore operates within history rather than outside it.

The Renaissance not simply an age of remarkable individuals; it was an age in which changing productive forces created new possibilities for human development. But those possibilities remained profoundly limited. Merchant's baby capitalism could produce it precisely because it concentrated wealth, education and leisure within a narrow elite. It enlarged human potential while simultaneously restricting access to that potential.

Capitalism Creates Specialists

Immense expansion under capitalism carried a profound contradiction. The very society that created unprecedented wealth simultaneously narrowed the development of the individual.

Its greatness lay in developing the productive forces to an unprecedented degree; its tragedy lay in subordinating those productive forces to the pursuit of profit rather than human development. Capitalism not only organised production differently from previous societies. It reorganised human beings themselves.

The key to understanding this transformation is the division of labour.

So,

Division of labour is not unique to capitalism. Every complex society distributes different tasks among different people. Farmers grow crops, builders build houses and teachers educate children. Such differentiation is a practical necessity in any advanced civilisation. Criticism is therefore not directed against all forms of specialisation. Rather, he criticises a social system in which individuals become permanently confined within narrow economic functions and where the development of one capacity occurs at the expense of every other.

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels describe this process with remarkable clarity. Under existing society,

"As soon as labour is distributed, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape."

Hence, occupation ceases to be simply what one does; it increasingly becomes what one is. Society identifies individuals through their economic function: engineer, accountant, lawyer, mechanic, doctor, programmer. The social organisation of production gradually transforms specialised work into specialised personalities.

 Modern capitalism rewards increasing specialisation. Universities divide knowledge into departments. Occupations require ever narrower expertise. Professional success often depends upon mastering a single field while neglecting others. The individual may acquire immense knowledge within one discipline while remaining almost entirely excluded from others.

Capital explains why this occurs. In discussion of manufacture, he argues that capitalist production systematically decomposes complex labour into a series of simple repetitive operations. Instead of one craftsperson producing an object from beginning to end, production is divided among numerous workers, each performing a limited task. Productivity rises dramatically, but the worker's relationship to the labour process changes fundamentally. The labourer no longer develops comprehensive practical abilities. Instead, they become a "detail labourer": a person whose working life consists of performing one fragment of a much larger process.

The consequences extend far beyond the workplace. Repeating the same operation day after day does not merely produce commodities it produces a particular kind of human being. Skills outside immediate function gradually atrophy because the organisation of labour neither requires nor rewards their development. Capitalism increases collective knowledge while it fragments individual knowledge.

Therefore manufacturing simultaneously develops society and impoverishes the worker. our scientific understanding expands. Machinery becomes more and more sophisticated. Industrial productivity rises, but the individual producer exercises less and less control over the total labour process. Human capacities become distributed across the factory while each worker possesses only a fraction of the whole. This trend reaches its highest expression with machinery.

Under the factory system, the relationship between worker and tool is fundamentally reversed. In earlier forms of production, the craftsperson directed the tool. Under modern industry the machine increasingly dictates the rhythm, speed and organisation of labour. The worker has to adapt to the machine rather than the machine serving the worker. Marx wrote that the worker becomes "an appendage of the machine."- Marx and Engles (Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1)

Importance of this phrase extends beyond industrial technology it describes a broader historical transformation in which human beings become subordinate to economic mechanisms they themselves have created. Labour appears less as the free expression of human creativity more like an external necessity imposed by the demands of production. The work instead of developing the individual; the individual is reshaped to satisfy the requirements of work.

Marx's earlier reflections in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. There he argues that under conditions of alienated labour,

"The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself."- Marx, (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Estranged Labour)

Labour which should be humanity's most creative activity, becomes external and compulsory. Instead of affirming oneself through productive activity, one experiences labour as a means of survival. Here the tragedy; is not merely economic exploitation. It is the separation of ours from our own creative capacities.

Marx expresses this idea as he writes:

"The more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless he becomes."- Marx (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Estranged Labour)

Capitalism therefore generates a peculiar inversion. Society accumulates enormous wealth while the individual experiences increasing impoverishment not only materially, but intellectually and spiritually. Productive forces expand comprehensive human development contracts.

This is the contradiction that defines modern civilisation. As I mentioned in the beginning.

Yet contradictory to many Luddites, this outcome is not the inevitable consequence of technological progress. It is the consequence of organising technology under capitalist social relations. Machines themselves are not the enemy. Science is not the problem. Marx admired capitalism because it revolutionised production and developed the productive forces. The problem lies in the social purpose these productive forces serve. Under capitalism technological progress is directed primarily towards increasing profitability and accumulation. Human development remains subordinate to economic imperatives.

 Historical comparison with the Renaissance shows us. Renaissance Italy lacked the productive capacity to educate every individual as some were educated. Capitalism by contrast, possesses the resources to make broad education and intellectual development available on an unprecedented level. Yet instead of universalising this Renaissance ideal, it reproduces new forms of fragmentation through increasingly specialised labour.

The irony is profound. The society that has created the greatest material abundance in history has also created conditions under which the Renaissance ideal appears impossible for a layman atleast. Leonardo's breadth of knowledge inspires admiration precisely because modern life increasingly trains us to become experts in one field rather than fully developed human beings.

However, this contradiction is not the end of history. It is the beginning of a new historical possibility. Capitalism develops the productive forces that make universal human development materially conceivable while simultaneously preventing their realisation. In doing so it creates the conditions for its own transcendence. The question is not whether humanity possesses the capacity to become universally developed. The question is what kind of society could organise productive powers for that purpose.

The Communist Resolution

If Marx's critique ended with this observation that capitalism fragments human beings it would have been a theory of decline. But Marx's work does not culminate in pessimism. His central insight is that capitalism is a contradictory system.

"It is no contradiction at all on this self-contradictory basis that there should be an excess of capital simultaneously with a growing surplus of population."- Marx (Capital, Volume III, Chapter 15)

It simultaneously creates the material conditions for unprecedented human development while preventing that development from becoming universal. The factories, machines and scientific advances that subordinate workers also create the possibility of liberating humanity from labour organised purely for its survival.

This is why Marx regarded communism not merely as a new form of property ownership but as a new stage in human development.

Perhaps the greatest misconception surrounding Marx is the belief that his political project concerned economics alone. In popular imagination, communism is often reduced to nationalisation, state planning or the abolition of private property. These were undoubtedly key factors and economic base is pivotal, but they are not ends in themselves. They were means towards a far more ambitious objective: the free development of the individual.

This becomes clear in a passages from The German Ideology. Imagining a society beyond the capitalist division of labour, Marx and Engels write:

"...nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes... to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner... without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic." - Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Chapter 1 (Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks)

This passage is not utopian fantasy. However, it says something much more profound. Marx is not proposing that everyone literally divide every day between hunting, fishing and literary criticism. His point is that no human being should be imprisoned within a single, permanent social function. The individual should possess the freedom to cultivate multiple capacities throughout life rather than having identity dictated by economic necessity.

Marx in the Grundrisse, reflects upon machinery and the future of production. Unlike many critics of industrialisation, Marx did not regard technology as humanity's enemy. On the contrary, he believed that modern industry had created productive capacities beyond anything previously imagined. Machines could dramatically reduce the amount of labour required to satisfy material needs. But under capitalism these gains appeared not as freedom but as unemployment,.

Freed from capitalist social relations, technology acquires an entirely different meaning.

The "disposable time" becomes the true measure of wealth. A society will not judge itself by the quantity of commodities it produces but by the amount of time it makes available for the development of its members. Thus leisure is not idleness. It is the condition under which science, philosophy, art, music and intellectual curiosity cease to be luxuries for a privileged few and become ordinary dimensions of human life.

This idea fundamentally reverses capitalist values. Where, productivity is generally measured by output, profit and economic growth and proposes another standard altogether: the richness of developed human capacities. A civilisation is advanced not because it produces more commodities but because it produces more fully developed human beings.

Engels expresses a similar idea in Anti-Dühring when he defines freedom not as the absence of all necessity but as "the recognition of necessity."

"Freedom is the recognition of necessity.

'Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood.'  

Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends."- Engles, Anti-Dühring, Part I, Chapter IX ("Moral and Law. Freedom and Necessity")

Freedom does not consist in escaping the material conditions of existence. Human beings will always need to produce food, construct shelter and organise collective life. Real freedom begins when these necessary activities are consciously organised for human purposes rather than imposed by blind economic forces. When production ceases to dominate humanity; humanity consciously directs production.

The culmination of this vision appears in Critique of the Gotha Programme. There he imagines a higher phase of communist society in which

"...the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour... has vanished..."

and labour itself has become

"...not only a means of life but life's prime want."*

Here he is not claiming that people will suddenly enjoy exhausting or meaningless work. Rather, he distinguishes labour as creative activity from labour imposed on us by economic compulsion. When productive activity becomes the expression of human capacities rather than the mere price of survival, work's character changes itself. Painting, scientific research, engineering, teaching, composing music or cultivating the land cease to appear as economic functions. They become forms of self-development.

The Renaissance discovered that the human being could become far more than a specialist. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello demonstrated this possibility through their own lives. Yet Renaissance society lacked both the productive capacity and the social organisation to make such development widely accessible.

Capitalism solved the first problem while intensifying the second. At the same time, it deepened the division of labour, producing a society of increasingly specialised individuals and the wealth inequality made acquiring just for the sake of acquiring impossible and the seeking of knowledge and skills that won't give economic gain is considered wastage.

Communism, resolves this contradiction. It does not reject modern technology; it appropriates its productive achievements for a different end. Technology ceases to serve accumulation and begins to serve human development. Education stops preparing individuals just for employment and instead cultivates their diverse capacities. The measure of wealth shifts from commodities to human flourishing.

Conclusion

The Renaissance in my opinion gave humanity its most interesting ideals.

An image of the complete individual whose curiosity sees no boundaries between art, science, philosophy and practical life.

Yet the Renaissance could only imagine this possibility. It could not universalise it. Its greatest achievements rested upon conditions available to only a privileged minority.

Marx's historical materialism transforms our understanding of this legacy. It explains that human capacities are not simply gifts of nature but products of definite historical conditions. Capitalism, despite revolutionising the productive forces, fragments those capacities through rigid division of labour and wage slavery. But in creating unprecedented material abundance, it also creates the conditions under which comprehensive human development can become a universal reality.

The communist project, therefore, is not merely economic. It is profoundly humanist. Its ultimate ambition is not simply the abolition of private property, but the abolition of social conditions that reduce individuals to fixed economic activities.

The Renaissance asked what a human being could become.

To be a Renaissance man, in this sense, is not to imitate Leonardo. It is to imagine a society in which Leonardo is no longer an exception.

Thanks for reading....

 

Books Referred To...

• Leonardo's Notebooks — Leonardo da Vinci
• Oration on the Dignity of Man — Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
• The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy — Peter Burke
• The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects — Giorgio Vasari
• The Prince — Niccolò Machiavelli
• The German Ideology
• The Poverty of Philosophy
• Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
• Capital
• Grundrisse
• Critique of the Gotha Programme
• Anti-Dühring