The Concept of Nature In Marx by Alfred Schmidt

Author:Alfred Schmidt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

In the years of his maturation and maturity, Marx devoted himself to the historical analysis of capitalist relations of production, unencumbered not only by Feuerbach’s ‘true man’, or by the nature-worship of the natural-scientific materialists of his century, but also by any metaphysical transfiguration of the proletariat as the bringer of salvation.20 In Capital, material investigation takes the place of the abstract talk of human self-alienation which has long since degenerated into the small change of present-day cultural conversation.

There is a certain current of thought today which interprets Marxian theory in line with imputed chiliastic and eschatological legends.21 Measured against this view, the content of what one could call Marx’s utopia of the relation of men to their own, and to external, nature is both more modest and more ambitious. More modest, because it takes seriously the inevitably finite nature of man and his possibilities in the world. More ambitious, because metaphysical declarations are replaced by a sober analysis of the possibility of concrete freedom. Concrete freedom, for Marx in close accord with Hegel, consisted in conceiving and mastering social necessity. The worker-philosopher Joseph Dietzgen formulated the meaning of the materialist conception of history very accurately in a letter to Marx:

You express for the first time in clear, irresistible, scientific form what will be from now on the conscious tendency of historical development, namely the subordination of the as yet blind natural power of the social process of production to human consciousness.22

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