The system of views which makes the human being its central value, as opposed to abstract notions such as God, religious or political ideals, abstractions like History or Reason, or sectional interests such as race or gender. In the theory of knowledge, Humanism holds that concepts are human products (rather than coming from God or Nature) and regards social relations as more fundamental than concepts like ‘Laws of History,’ or ‘Matter’ which ought to be explained in terms of human relations, rather than explaining humans through a given set of ideas. Humanism has its origins in the Renaissance and reached its zenith in the Enlightenment.
In his Private Property & Communism, Marx wrote: “... communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solutionâ€..