“Species-being” and “human nature” in Marx

Abstract

It is generally recognized that Marx's account of human alienation (estrangement) presented in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is dependent upon his notion of a human species-being. Since that concept is almost totally absent from Marx's later writings, it is not generally acknowledged that this concept continues to play a central function in Marx's writing and, in particular, in his critique of capitalist society. In this paper, I shall try to show the full range of implications that Marx draws from his claim that "Man is a species-being... and free conscious activity constitutes the species -character of man" (Marx, 1974, pp. 327-328 ). In the first sec tion, I will show how Marx's use of the concept of a human species-being is a radical reconceptualization of the philosophic tradition's use of the idea of a human essence. I will then, in the second section, show how this concept functions to ground both Marx's critique of capitalist society as well as his view of socialism as a positive alternative to that society. Finally, in the third section, I will show that this view of the human being leads to a critique of various "ahistorial" theories of human nature present in the philosophic and economic tradition. As a result, we shall see that Marx's conception of the human species-being is a genuine theoretical innovation that functions as the centerpiece of Marx's view of human beings and their society.