Marx and the New Individual (Rle Marxism) by Ian Forbes

Author:Ian Forbes [Forbes, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317503217
Google: xnVKCAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 55411007
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Development: human nature and capitalism

The task is to examine individuals ‘not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions’ ([1845–6] 1970, pp. 47–8), understood as a developing capitalist society. The link between the abstraction, human nature and the empirical reality of an individual life under concrete circumstances is not short or taut, reflecting easily and automatically the practical promptings entailed in the abstractions of human nature and society.

As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production. (Marx, [1845–6] 1970, p. 42)

Marx, in the way that he presented this fundamental methodological argument, was setting out the limits not of determinism, but of human potential. This is a view supported by O’Neill:

The evolution of human nature proceeds in terms of the interaction between man and nature and the technology and social relations of production which mediate that process. In this sense the potentiality of human nature may be regarded as a function of the means of production. (1969, p. xix)

For individuals to be determined narrowly by the mode of production, it would have had to exist prior to the individuals who produced, just as the method of production would logically have to precede individuals qua individuals. Now in one sense this can be accepted: the mode of production, and the entire superstructure, exists for the new-born child and really does precede it. Yet Marx could not take this argument seriously, since it entails a static abstraction of the kind employed in consent or contract theory. For him, how that reality came to be remains a part of what it is. Therefore, the mode of production is now, as it ever was, rooted in the activity of individuals within a wide range of interactions, without which it has no existence.

Thus it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a material connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old as men themselves. This connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a ‘history’ independent of the existence of any political or religious nonsense which in addition may hold men together. (Marx, [1845–6] 1970, p. 42: italics added)

This means that Marx’s conception of human nature stands above, or is distinct from, the environmental variation of specific societies in their particular stages. Moreover, it is Marx’s conception of human nature which prescribes the quality of potentiality. The ability to alter and develop is not something which is reliant on or reducible to a specific set of concrete circumstances. Only the form that alteration and development takes is dependent upon those circumstances. The different notions of human nature, then, can be understood as functions of production, leading to new forms of development.

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