V. The Social Nature of Human Beings
1. Introduction: According to Marx, any description of human nature in terms of separately existing individuals distorts reality with disastrous consequences. It creates the delusion of an egoistic independent individual functioning apart from other persons or the community and as a result it produces a social structure in which alienation is the common human experience.
Such individualism allows us to presume, as the starting point for the construction of civil society, egoistic individuals with private interests, needs, work objectives, and values, which then become the basis for asserting fundamental rights such as freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom to do whatever does not harm others, freedom to engage in trade, freedom to acquire, hold, ad dispose of private property.
Society “appears as a framework exterior to individuals, a limitation of their original self-sufficient.” (On the Jewish Question). The citizen is taken to be an abstraction in contrast with egoistic individual who has a sensuous immediate, individual existence.
2. Alienation: Given the social structure based upon this distorted description of human nature, or more particularly, given the subsequent institutionalization of private property, alienation enters into human experience. The freedom to acquire, hold, and dispose of private property overtime leads to existence of a relatively small class of wealthy persons and of a much larger class composed of the great mass of people in the society. In an industrialized society, capitalists constitute the relatively small class and the workers or proletariat constitute the large one. The workers sell their labor to the capitalists who in turn own and dispose of the products of their labor. As a result of this process according to Marx, workers experience four types of alienation:
• Alienation from the products of labor.
• Alienation from the laboring activity,
• Alienation from themselves.
• Alienation from other human beings.
Alienation from the products of labor occurs because the objects produced by labor do not belong to the workers and because their power and importance decrease in proportion to the increase in the objects produced. In the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 18444:
. . . the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world which he creates over against himself, the poorer he himself – and his inner world becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the objects, but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the greater is the worker’s lack of objects. Whatever the product of labor is, he is not. The greater this product, the less is he himself. (EPM)
Alienation from the products of labor entails alienation from laboring activity as well:
. . . labor is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy, but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work=, and his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague . . . . Lastly the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his work, but someone else’s’, that it does no belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. (EPM)
To the extent they produce objects viewed to be alien to them and to the extent they regard their laboring activity as a means to subsist rather than as the satisfaction of an internal, essential need, workers experience alienation from the laboring activity itself. They feel that they are only truly human and themselves when they are not working. Since their work constitutes probably the major part of their activity in life while awake however, workers cannot experience alienation from laboring activity without also experiencing alienation from themselves.
Finally, when workers conscious activity becomes merely a means to subsist that is, a means to preserve their physical existence, they experience alienation from other human beings because their consciousness, the essential species characteristic that differentiates humans from other animals, becomes too confined to express the full range of its potentialities, for reflection, for evaluation, for beauty, for envisioning non-immediate, diverse interests. IN effect, this severe reduction in workers conscious activity alienates them from their own essence as human beings, and in so doing, alienates them from other human beings as well.
The solution to the problem of alienation for Marx requires the elimination of private property that in turn requires a correct description of human nature, one that stresses the social, not the individualistic nature of human beings.
3. Social Relationships: According to Marx, “. . . the essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in each individual. The real nature of man is the totality of social relations.” (Theses on Feuerbach) Thus nothing is truly human until it is understood through its social relationships. Language, thought, freedom, and crime are all social products rather than properties of an egoistic individual. In effect, the individuals’ thoughts and feelings constitute a subjective expression of society’s existence. Marx writes:
[Even] when I am active scientifically, etc, when I am engaged in activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others, then I am social, because I am active as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being. (EPM).
Thought is not the private prerogative of feeling willing, individual persons. Thought and the products of thought, such as religious, ethical, scientific, and legal ideas, instead are a reflection of material 9physical), social existence. Accordingly for Marx, we do not find human nature through introspection; rather we find it by observing the physical activities of human beings functioning in social relationships. When the social relationships change, the description of human nature changes as well.
This is elaborated upon in the next post.
