To be a communist is not to become a better person, it is to cease being a “person” in the bourgeois sense altogether. The individual & its “personality”, as we know it today, is not an eternal essence but a historically produced artifact, born alongside private property, commodity exchange, and the fragmentation of the species into isolated selves for the objectification and sale of labor power within the capitalist marketplace. As Marx wrote in the 1844 Manuscripts, “Man is a species-being… because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being”. Yet under capitalism, the human is mutilated, alienated from its nature, others, and body, reduced to a juridical subject trapped in a psychologized shell.

Marx’s anti-individualism and materialist naturalism stem from the understanding that human history, like natural history, unfolds through impersonal material processes, not individual will. As he wrote to Engels in 1860, “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history”, affirming that the evolution of the species and of society alike follows physical laws beyond personal intention. Today, mounting empirical evidence confirms this: even bourgeois neuroscience increasingly reveals the fiction of a sovereign, metaphysical self. “There is no single brain center where it all comes together”, writes Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. “What we find instead is that the left brain interprets after the fact the behaviors and feelings that have already occurred, creating the illusion of unity” (Who’s in Charge?, 2011). The mind is not self-contained, it is post hoc, socially constructed, and materially dispersed. Yet regardless of the fiction of the coherent stable individual self, it is a social reality exploited laborers are violently coerced into accepting and conforming themselves to causing immeasurable social anguish and misery.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio affirms: “The mind is embodied, not just embrained. It arises from the interaction between the body’s interior, the organism’s motor system, and the external world” (The Feeling of What Happens, 1999). Thought is not an immaterial function but a product of breath, digestion, movement, and hormonal regulation. Decisions are not sovereign acts of will, but neurochemical reactions shaped by history and the traumas of class struggle. The soul, the ego, the inner life of the modern subject is simply the nervous system contorted by capital.

The human mind itself is a confluence of multiple, often competing neural networks that are shaped by social experience” (The Tell-Tale Brain, 2010). These physical and organic networks arise from language, labor, and social reproduction. They are not private phenomena or magic—they are historical and biological. Frans de Waal’s studies of empathy in primates and Sarah Brosnan’s research on inequity aversion reveal that social reciprocity are not moral constructs, but evolved instincts of the primate family. No animal clings to the delusion of individual autonomy—only capitalism manufactures this pathology.

This fragmentation is intensified under class society. Psychological trauma is not an individual flaw but the biological registration of systemic violence. Bessel van der Kolk, a researcher on post-traumatic stress disorder writes: “Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way the mind and brain manage perceptions… It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think” (The Body Keeps the Score, 2014). Chronic stress reshapes the autonomic nervous system—heart rate, digestion, immunity—and even gene expression. A study of Holocaust survivors by Yehuda et al. (2016) have shown that trauma alters methylation patterns in genes regulating cortisol. As biologist Eva Jablonka explains, “Environmental stressors, including trauma, can induce heritable epigenetic changes… shaping developmental pathways in response to ecological demands”. Biologist Massimo Pigliucci adds: “Organisms are not passive in evolution; they actively shape their own trajectories”. Capital’s violence does not just deform the psyche it inscribes itself in biology.

And yet, this same capacity for transformation lies at the heart of species evolution. The human mind evolved through embodied, cooperative labor tool-making, speech, and shared life. Neuroscience confirms that cognition thrives in active, social environments not in isolated intellectual tasks or mechanical repetition. But capitalism severs this evolutionary unity. It divides brain from hand, intellect from body, thought from labor. Mental labor is reserved for an ideologically loyal minority, while the vast majority are reduced to routine toil. The ruling class sustains this by promoting anti-intellectual resentment, scapegoating the academic “elite”, while liberal thinkers mystify class with jargon and moral relativism. Under communism, this split is abolished. Labor becomes the unified activity of the species-being: a collective, conscious reproduction of life.

Scientific inquiry only deepens this insight. Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran writes: “The very notion of a single self is an illusion. In fact even in the level of the mind it operates collectively. “Our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind. … Individuals rely not only on knowledge in our skulls but also on knowledge stored elsewhere: in our bodies, in the environment, and especially in other people”, writes cognitive scientist Dr. Steven Sloman in The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. To support this claim, Sloman draws on a range of cognitive science research demonstrating that individuals consistently overestimate their understanding of complex systems, a phenomenon the researchers call “illusion of explanatory depth”. In one experiment, participants were confident they understood how everyday objects like toilets or zippers worked, but when asked to explain the mechanisms in detail, their understanding quickly collapsed. This revealed that much of what we consider “knowledge” is not located within the individual brain, but is distributed across tools, language, institutions, and especially other people. Alongside co-author Philip Fernbach, Sloman argues that human cognition is not housed in isolated minds but emerges from a networked system of shared thinking—what they term the “community of knowledge”. Thus we can see here basic aspects of the Marxist anti-individualist thesis raised already nearly 200 years ago and precisely the exact purpose and need for the collective organ of the Party within the living biological life of the class.

Bourgeois society demands we internalize guilt, cling to personal redemption, and suffer in isolation. It offers romantic love rooted in the patriarchal family, legal justice, and self-help guides as substitutes for collective emancipation. “Love no one, love everyone” is not indifference—it is impersonal solidarity against personal despair.

In communism, there will be no “one” to forgive or condemn, no individual ledger of sin and merit. There will be no juridical soul to weigh, only the species in motion. Like all animals, humans are shaped by instinctual systems: attachment, fear, cohesion all evolved for collective survival. But capitalism forces us to suppress these and fabricate egos to endure exploitation. As neuroscientist Bruce Perry notes, trauma over-develops fear responses and stunts empathy, making us into defensive, fragmented organisms. What bourgeois psychology calls “personality” is often nothing more than the scar tissue of a damaged species-being.

Yet this defensive adaptation contains its own negation. When crisis breaks the ego’s shell, class instincts erupt. In the heat of uprising, the false self dissolves, and proletarian solidarity re-emerges—not from ideology but from life. The history of revolt shows this pattern: during summer heat, food crises, and repression, the individual disintegrates, and the instinctual class body awakens.

Communist theory is not therapy or spiritual refinement. It is the ruthless critique of class society and the false self it produces. It speaks to the proletariat not as a sum of persons, but as the species-becoming through class struggle and revolutionary warfare. The revolution is not a matter of better individuals—it is the destruction of the relations that produce them.

Activism, therapy, leisure, and intellectualism offer momentary shelter, but not escape. The catastrophe will come not because we fail to fix ourselves, but because capital can no longer reproduce its social relations. In that rupture, the false self will vanish. And in the aftermath, humanity may re-emerge not as a swarm of egos, but as a force of nature. It will be led by a collective “brain” of the Party the organ of the historical memory of the experiences and lessons of the class, bearer of the invariant communist program upon the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletarian and the subsequent elimination of the last vestiges of the capitalist mode of production, the species is finally fully able to obtain its real, material, and rational self-reproduction.