Image of Man in Marx

Abstract

citizen; when, as an indi vidual man, his everyday life, his work, his relationships he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organised his own powers as powers. . . .27 Alienation of Species The human species develops alien ation (Entfremdung). From animal ity of primitive communism, there arose a endeavour to combat scarcity and dominate nature on part of proto-man. The history of this endeav our is human 'pre-history'; only when productive forces which develop in womb of bourgeois (the most productive hitherto and also most universally socialised mode of pro duction) are unleashed and create the material conditions for solution to antagonisms attendant upon process of production, can pre history of human end, and real, human history begin.28 The fundamental alienation of man, then, is from nature. In process of overcoming this, mankind necessarily effects a of labour. As Venable notes, Marx (and Engels) distinguish between two kinds of of labour: social division and manufac turing division.29 Marx noted that these commence from opposite starting points: . . . within a tribe, there springs up naturally a of labour, caused by differences of age and sex, a that is consequently based on a purely physiological founda tion . . .30 . . . and is therefore anthropologically necessary. After development of cities and urban life, there then develops a separation between town and coun try31 and class stratification supervenes. The relations between freeman and serf, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, capitalist and proletarian designate history of all pre-human society as the history of class struggles.32 The starting point for unnatural of is class society. Classes within species develop within different modes of production built up to pacify nature. Classes only supervene when a surplus-product has been generated. These modes of production become creasingly more collective, inter-related, universal as process of defeating scarcity and humanising nature through out planet unfolds itself. The limits to being are always part limits of material existence. The manu facturing of labour is historic ally necessary, but only as a precursor to anthropological necessity. It is essen tial to man that he produce himself freedom from physical need—it is essential to him that he be segmented, compartmentalised and assigned specific life-tasks as particularised individuals once abundance has been created. The class that perpetuates manufacturing of labour, whilst it may have been historically progressive (in 27. Marx, Fruho Schriften, 1, p. 479; cited McClellan, op. cit., p. 104. 28. Citations from Marx, Preface to The Contribution to Critique of Political Econ omy (1859), Selected Works, op. cit., p. 183. 29. V. Venable, op. cit., p. 118 et seq. 30. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Moscow, 1961), p. 351. See whole section on Division of Labour and Manufacture. 31. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 352. 32. Marx and Engels, The Communist Mani festo (Moscow, 1965 ed.), p. 39. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.57 on Fri, 09 Sep 2016 04:25:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms IMAGE OF MAN IN MARX 75 sense of preparing material founda tion for realisation of human essence), becomes historically reactionary once it has laid that foundation yet per sists increasing productive forces its own interests and not terests of species. History is premised upon human ob jectifications. In other words, human his tory can only be conceived as history of human actions and experiences which constitute humanly-produced world of artifacts and relationships. But this objectification, taken as a general prin ciple, has not brought about species being. Why not? Because man's self production and world-production up to now has not been production of himself as a free, conscious being realising uni versal human needs (physical and cul tural) but, rather, production of himself as an unfree, unselfconscious being real ising sectional needs as a priority over those of whole species: . . . natural sense of man has not yet been produced through man's own labour.33 The manufacturing of la bour subsumes a myriad of activities pursued by particular individuals. The re-integration of particularised man into totality demands abo lition of of labour, which cripples the capabilities of species34 and separates interests of indi vidual from those of community as a whole, thus distorting his being. Let us summarize main effects of of labour within class so