György Márkus - Marxism and Anthropology - The Concept of Human Essence in The Philosophy of Marx

DIALECTIC AND SOCIETY
Lawrence Krader, Editor
Board of Editors
Agnes Heller, Budapest
Cyril Levitt (Assistant Editor) , Hamilton, Canada
Angel Palerm, Mexico D, F,
Peter Stadler, Ziirich
Editorial Consultants:
Y. S. Brenner, Utrecht David McLellan, Kent
Alessandro Casiccia, Turin Claude MeillassQux, Paris
Stanley Diamond, New York Ikenna Nzimiro, Nsukka
Margrit Eichler, Toronto J M. Ripalda, Madrid
Andre Fabregas, Mexico, D.F. Peter Skalnik, Leyden
Ernest Gellner, London Earl Smith. Connecticut
Maurice Godelier. Paris Jacob Taubes, Berlin
Manfred Hinz, Bremen Charles B. Timmer, Amsterdam
Ma"rlis Krueger, Bremen Bianca ValotaMLavalotti, Milan
J R, Uobera, London Barbel Wallisch·Prinz, New York
Guido Martinotri, Milan
1. Lawrence Krader, THE ASIATIC MODE OF PRODUCTION:

Sources, Development and Critique in the Wrirings of Karl Marx
2. Lawrence Krader, DIALECTIC OF CIVIL SOCIETY
3. Jose Maria Ripalda, THE DIVIDED NATION.
The Roots of a Bourgeois Thinker: G. W. F. Hegel
4. George Markus, MARXISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY .
The concept of 'human essence' in the philosophy of Marx.
GEORGE MARKUS
Marxism
and
Anthropology
The concept of 'human essence'
in the philosophy of Marx
Translated by E. de Laczay and G. Markus
1978
VAN GORCUM ASSEN, The Netherlands
© 1978 Van Gorcum & Camp. B.V., P.O.Box 43, 9400 AA Assen, The Nerherlands
No parts of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm
or any other means without writren permission from the publisher.
ISBN 90 232 16 156
Printed in The Netherlands by Van Gorcum, Assen

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Introduction ....................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ............ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ................. 1
Man as universal natural being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ........ .......... 3
Man as a social and conscious natural being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ........................ . 15
Human essence and history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..... .............. . . . . . . . 36

INTRODUCTION
May one speak legitimately of a Marxian "philosophical anthropology"

and if so, what is the relationship between it and the materialist conception
of history? One encounters this question more and more frequently not
only in the works of the critics and bourgeois interpreters of Marx, but in
those of Marxist philosophers as well. The following eassay intends to
contribu te to the answer of this question on the basis of an analysis of the
concept "human essence",' which plays a prominent role especially in
Marx's early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844).
Though our analysis will first of all be based on the text of the Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts, in justification of the method of interpretation
to be employed, we must state already here our conviction that this early
formulated philosophical conception of human essence and, more gener
ally, of man and history is present and finds its continuation in the later,
"mature" writings of Marx as well. The later works contain undoubtedly
some specific changes and corrections as against the first elaboration of the
problems in the Manuscripts, but on the other hand they cannot even be
fully and correctly understood without ·taking into account the philo
sophic ideas which were extensively discussed and formulated only in the
writings of the young Marx. If we disconnect the historical materialism of
Marx from his philosophical, or if one likes: "anthropological", concep
tion of human essence (following Georg Lukacs we may perhaps call this
later problem-complex in its totality the Marxian social ontology), then we
become entangled in unsolvable antinomies which are constantly repro
duced in the history of Marx-criticism and Marxist philosophy itself. So we
see on the one hand the Marxian theory of communism interpreted as a
kind of moral postulate derived anthropologically from the "true nature"
of man,' or, in the worse case, considered as an eschatologic faith or
transcendent goal. On the other hand we hear just as frequently the
accusation that Marx has radically dissolved man in history and history -
both in its material and intellectual aspects - in a simple succession of
strictly determined events, epochs, socio-economic formations, making
thereby all values relative and consequently any universally valid, non
pragmatic (but e.g. moral) judgment upon historical phenomena impos
sible. And indeed this is again the way in which many Marxists did and do .
1
Introduction
understand the materialist conception of history, the theoretical "anti
humanism" of L. Althusser and his school being in this respect only one of
the latest (and undoubtedly one of the most consequent) variants of a very
common trend of Marxist thought.
In Marx himself, however, these two approaches to human history,
which in standard interpretations appear as rigid contradictions, form a
unity - and our task consists just in finding out and showing up the
possibility and the sense of this unity. So communist society is charac
terized by him on the one hand as the historic-practical solution of the
objective and subjective contradictions brought about by the social con
ditions of capitalist development and in this sense as a "necessary" stage in
human development. And the salient point of his polemics against the
"true socialists" (among them the friend of his youth, Moses Hess)
consists just in a criticism of the attempts to "deduce" the necessity of
communism from considerations concerning the true and eternal nature of
man. On the other hand one cannot doubt that communism means for
Marx not only a "higher" stage succeeding capitalism with a "historical
necessity'" - the relationship between these two forms of social life is not
only that of causal-temporal succession, but also of a historiosophica! and
mora! contrast. Marx opposes communism to all antagonistic epochs of
"prehistory" as a morally affirmed form of human social development -
among others on the ground that in it men will realize their metabolism
with nature "under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their.
human nature", and this quotation comes - against all the appearances -
not from some early work of his, but from the Capita!'
To justify our contention concerning the continuity between the young
and the late Marx in regard to the philosophical-"anthropological" ideas,'
we shall refer at appropriate occassions not only to the text of the 1844
Manuscripts, but also to Marx's later, mostly economic works and manu
scripts.
2
MAN AS UNIVERSAL NATURAL BEING
What is man? Marx starts to answer this age-old philosophical question

departing from the premise of a materialist naturalism: "man is a part of
nature",l i.e. he is a sensuous, material, natural being, brought into
existence by non-conscious, causal processes of nature. Furthermore man is
a living natural being, who subsists only through a constant metabolism
with nature, realised and secured by his own life-activity: he is "an active
natural being".' As all the natural entities, man is also a finite, limited
being. This means on the one hand that he is a dependent-conditioned and
suffering being: "The objects of his drives, that is to say, exist outside him as
independent, yet they are objects of his need, essential and indispensable to
the exercise and confirmation of his essential capacities".' These objects,
existing independen tly of him and being indispensible for his own exis
tence, constitute, so to say, his inorganic body, (tthe objective, nature-given
inorganic body of his subjectivity'" (in this general form the relationship
holds equally true both for man and animal). On the other hand man is
limited also in the sense that as a natural-biological creature he is endowed
with a multitude of needs and drives, natural powers and capacities.
Generally speaking Marx takes in his analyses man as a natural
biological being as a datum and he is not concerned with the process of
anthropogenesis leading to the formation of homo sapiens as a biological
species. It is definitely not the natural, but the socio-historical develop
ment of man which stands in the focus of his interests. On that basis some
have, however, maintained that Marx regarded the first process - and
generally all evolutionary processes in nature, occurring independently of
human activity - to be principially incomprehensible. So writes e.g. K.
Axelos: "The question about the absolute beginning of human history
remains unanswered. Marx regards this question as senseless, since it
cannot be solved in the domain of sense-experience; therefore history has
no absolute beginning . . . He declares the logically incomprehensible to
be at the same time ontically non-existent". '
This is, however, a definite misrepresentation of Marx's view. Marx
states the following and only the following: "The first premise of all
human history, of course, is the existence of living human individuals. The
first fact to be established, then, is the physical organization of these
3
Man as universal natural being
individuals and their consequent relationship to the rest of nature. Of

course, we cannot discuss here the physical nature of man or the natural
conditions in which man finds himself - geological, orohydrographical,
climatic, and others. All historiography must proceed from these natural
bases and their modification in the course of hisrory through the actions of
men".6 The later enthusiastic reception of the Darwiniar theory by Marx
can serve in all probability as an indication of his earlier theoretical
predispositions in this matter. 7
"But man is not only a natural being; he is a human natural being'" It
is JUSt the analysis of these specifically human features of man, the charac
terization of him as a Gattungswesen, roward which Marx philosophical
efforts are primarily directed.Uilforrunatelly the accepted English term for
Gattungswesen: "species being", looses one aspect of the German expression
as employed by Marx: the opposition implied in it between man and
animal. For in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx speaks eve
rywhere about animals as members of some species, belonging ro, and
falling under, some genus (Gattung). Man, on the other hand, is a
Gattungswesen - one may say: a being of the genus, a generic being -,
whom an ever increasing multitude of natural kinds and species belong
to.Sa
This opposition between man and animal is, however, not only indi
cated by the choice of terminology, but is also explicitly discussed by Marx.
The cause and at the same time the essence of this difference has to be
The
�r sought in the respective life activities of man and animal. "In the mode of
life activity lies the entire character of a species, its generic character
(Gattungscharacter); and free conscious activity is the generic character of
man"" Both animal and mali can satisfy their needs only through their
own activity. But animal activity is confined to seizing and consuming the
given natural objects of needs, it directly coincides with the process of active
needfu!filment. Therefore it is a limited life activity. First, there is only a
limited, more or less sharply circumscribed range of environmental objects,
which can become non-incidentally involved in the behaviour of the
animal - in general only those things, whose physical, chemical etc.
properties correspond to its genetically fixed needs, common to the whole
species.In a different formulation, for the animal the objects of needs tend
to coincide with the objects of direct consumption. Second, not only the
objects as "targets", but also the simple constituents of this activity, the
elementary "capacities" of the animal are fixed, determined by its
biological constitution and essentially unchangeable - so it is only an (in
principio) limited range of natural regularities around which the behaviour
of the animal is organized and which can be built in its life activity.
".. . the place of the animal, its character, mode of life is directly inborn ro
4
M'an'as ,universalnaturalcbeing
it . . ".'0 Naturally, animal activity cannot be simply reduced to native,

.
instinctive forms of behaviour, since they will be overlayed by a web of

individually acquired adaptative habits and responses during the life-his
tory of the given organism. But the bio-physiological constitution of the
species always keeps these learned reactions between definite and constant
limits.
Marx recapitulates this difference between animal and man in the
following way: "The practical creation of an objective world, the working
upon inorganic nature, is vindication (Bewahrung) that man is a conscious
generic being, that is, a being which is related to its genus (Gattung) as to
its own essence or is related to himself as a generic being. To be sure
animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwelling places, like
the bees, beavers, ants etc. But the animal ptoduces only what is immedi
ately necessary for itself or its young. It produces in a one-sided way while
man produces universally. The animal produces under the domination of
immediate physical need while man produces free of physical need and
only genuinely so in freedom from such need. The animal only produces
itself while man reproduces the whole of nature. The animal's product
belongs immediately to its physical body while man confronts freely his
product. The animal builds only according to the standard and need of the
species (der species) to which it belongs while man knows how to produce
according to the standard of any species and knows how to apply every
where the intrinsic standard to the object"."
So man differs from animal in, and by, his specific life activity and this
specifically human life activity is work in the broad, philosophical sense. I2
"Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or
anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves
from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistance, a
step required by their physical organization. By producing their means of
subsistance men are indirectly producing their material life itself"l, And:
"It is JUSt this work upon the objective world, therefore, that man first
really proves himself to be a generic being". I4 Work constitutes the real,
historical relation of man to nature and at the same time it determines the
fundamental relations between man and man, so it forms the basis of
whole human life.
Work is first of all an activity which is aimed not directly, but only
through mediatiom at the fulfilment of needs. Work makes its object
suitable for human use by changing, forming it with the help of some
other - nature-given or (usually) also man-made - object as instrument.
"Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and nature
participate, and in which man through his own action mediates, regulates
and controls the metabolism between himself and nature"l'
5
This mediation appears 1. as the mediating activity, the living labour itself
which preceeds and makes possible the human use (the "consumption") of
the object of labour; and 2. as the instrument of labour which man inter
poses between himself and the potential object of his needs, and which
serves as the conductOr and transformer of his activity. D' While the
animal's instruments of labour, i.e. its organs'6 evolve and change only in
the uncontrolled milleneal process of biological evolution, man himself
creates his increasingly complicated means of production in the form of
separate, independent objects. And in the Capital Marx reproduces the
Franklinian definition of man as a "tOol-making animal".
Now what is involved in, and what follows from, this characterization
of the specifically human life activity as work (as materially mediated
activity), first in regard to its object, i.e. nature, and second in regard to its
subject, agent,. i.e. man?
1. Since the specifically human form of behaviour consists not in the
immediate satisfaction of the needs by readily given objects, but in the
useful transformation of the material form of natural substances, it con
stantly increases the range of environmental things and materials, which
can be included into this activity, can become its object. On the one hand,
work makes things suitable for human consumption and so effects the
widening of the scope of consumable objects. On the other hand, objects
which cannot be individually consumed even in a transformed form, may
find a useful application as means of the productive activity itself. So in
human society beside and above individual consumption ("the con
sumptive production of the individual", as Marx calls it later) emerges and
develops a "productive consumption", i.e. "consumption of the means of
production, which become worn out through use" as well as "con
sumption of the raw material, which loses its natural form and
composition by being used Up".'7 Therefore, the categories of "use" and
"consumption", undifferentiated in animal life, histOrically acquire diver
gent meanings in the case of man; with the development of social pro
duction the set of individually consumed objects becomes a progressively
diminishing part in the totality of objects effectively used by man. Already
in his material life, in his activities of subsistence the human being
appropriates (aneignen) nature in a growing degree, his "inorganic body"
shows a historical tendency to growth, his interrelations with nature
become more and more complex and many-sided, less rigidly determined
by biological constraints.
2. " . . . this reproduction (Le. of human individuals in the historical
process of production - G.M.), although it appears as appropriation of the
objects by the subjects in one respect, appears in another respect also as
formation, subjugation of the objects to a subjective purpose; their trans-
6
formation into results and repositories of subjective activity"1' Work,

production means not only the appropriation of nature as object by man as
subject, but also the objectification (Vergegenstandlichung) of the subjec
tive agent and his activity: in the product "labour is objectified (ver
gegenstandlicht) and the object is processed. That which in the worker
appeared in the form of inquietude (Unruhe), now appears in the product
as a static (ruhende) property, in the form of existence (in der Form des
Seins)".!9 In the outcome of animal activity some environmental objects
become engorged, some others adapted to the physical body of the animal,
and the life-cycle of the species results in a stable equilibrium between itself
and its environment. Naturally, work is also directed, in the last end, at the
satisfaction of the multifarious human needs, but from production, man
made objects come forth constantly, becoming lasting elements of human
environment. So the surroundings of man is subject to change introduced
deliberately by man himself, and consequently the equilibrium between
man and his environment is not only secured and maintained by human
activity solely, but it is also constantly disturbed by it and then recreated
on a wider basis. In general, historical development replaces natural en
vironment by a socio-cultural milieu which is the result of the productive
activity of earlier and present generations and the elements of which
embody human abilities, represent the objectifications of the "essential
powers of man" (menschliche Wesenkrafte)). "This production is his (i.e.
man's - G. M.) active geJl%:ifi �.fe. Through it nature appears as his work
and his actuality. The � �f labour is thus the objectification of man's
generic life: he duplicates (verdoppelt) himself not only intellectually, as in
consciousness, but also actively in a real sense and sees himself in a world
he made"-'o The inadequacy of old materialism - points out Marx in his
criticism of Feuerbach - consists, among other, in its inability ro recognize
that the sensuous empirical world surrounding men is not a directly and
eternally given, self-identical abstract "nature", but even in its most simple
and common objects it is "the product of industry and of the state of
society in the sense that it is a historical product, the result of the activity
of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the
preceding one, developing further its industry and commerce, and modi
fying its social order according to changed needs".'!
This criticism of the pre-Marxian materialism naturally cannot be
reduced to the trivial truth that the world surrounding man bears the
marks of previous human activities. The Marxian concept of "objectifi
cation" points not simply to the fact that man uses artificial objects already
adapted to human needs, but to theprincipial change in the character of the
relationship to the environment involved in this fact: to the specific
manner, in which these objects function in real human life. All objects -
7
"Man, as univer.salrJaturat.beihg
natural as well as artificial - can be used, of course, in a multitude of ways

and manners, according to the requirements of the concrete situation, One
may drink from a glass, but may also hurl it a somebody or use it as a
paper-weight and even keep in it a butterfly, But while objects of nature
are, so to say, "neutral" in regard to the mode of their use, the products of
human labour as objectifications are not: in the real context of social life
they have a normal, a ''proper'' use which cannot be systematically violated
without invoking some kind of social sanction, A glass is intended for
drinking and, roughly speaking, something is a glass when it is sys
tematically and commonly used in this function, Human products exist in
a network of norms, of social rules of use (generally having the character of
"custOms") through which they acquire their identity, their "meaning",
and which circumscribes the proper aim and mode' of their employment,
And since the object is effectively created for this use and materially
adapted to it and only to it, the norm is, as it were, embodied in its physical
frame, It is in this sense that man-made objects are objectifications of human
abilities: they materially represent modes and ways of action which each
individual must "appropri.te" (in the sense of interiorizing the corre
sponding rules of use), at least in respect of the most common elements of
his en vironment, to be able to lead a (for his society) normal human life,
So, as against nature, social life, even in its most elementary forms, appears
as patterned by norms, and the products of labour function as material
vehicles of these norms:" they are not simply objects of use, but use values.
Only due to the fact that man lives in such a humanized world, that the
human abilities and needs, evolved in the past, confront him from his birth
on in a ready material form, and so he has at his disposal, in this objectified
fashion, the results of the whole preceding social development, it is only
because of all this that he is able not to begin anew, but to �ontinue this
development at the point reached by the earlier generations. In the process
of "appropriation" (Aneignung) of humanized objects (which constitutes
one of the main dimensions of socialization) the individual transforms
into living-personal needs and skills the histOrically created social wants
and abilities objectified in the elements of his milieu - and in this way a
material-practical transmission of ' tradition is realized in society, which
contitutes the basis of historical continuity and at the same time renders
social progress possible. So it is only work as objectification of human
essence that creates the possibility of history as such. "Men have history
because they must produce their life, and in a definite way . . . ". "
Work, however, changes not only the object at which it is directed, hut
also the labouring subject itself: it transforms not only the external nature,
but human nature as welL "Not only do the objective conditions change in
the act of reproduc.cion, e.g. the village becomes a town, the, wilderness a
8
cleared field etc., but the producers change, tOO, in that they bring out new
qualities in themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of
intercourse, new needs and new language",24
3. The histOrical creation of new human objects, be they means of
ptOduction or goods of consumption, implies not only that man extends
his activity over new realms of nature, but also - from the side of the subjec.
tive agen t - that he develops in himself new active powers. As new objects
of consumption mean simultaneously the emergence of new modalities
and potentialities of human pleasure and satisfaction (Genuss)" so new
instruments of labour mean the formation of new productive skills and
abilities. "The appropriation of these forces (i.e. forces of production -
G.M. ) is itself nothing more than the development of individual capacities
corresponding to the material instruments of production. For this very
reason, the appropriation of a tOtality of instruments of production is the
development of a tOtality of capabilities in the individuals themselves"."
Thus to the accumulation of the wealth of society on the one side there
corresponds an accumulation of human capacities on the other side.
"What is really 'accumulated', only not as a dead mass, but as something
living, is the skill of the workers, the rate of development of labour. (Of
course, . . . the current level of development of the productive force of
labour, from which men depart, is present not only as faculty, capacity of
the worker, but at the same time also in the objective organs which this
labour has created for itself and which it recreates each day). This is the
true prius, the starting point, and this prius is the result of a course of
development"." Generally we may say that man/orms and develops his =
abilities only by objectifying them. The historically first production of an
object is usually, as far as subjective skills are concerned, not yet adequate -
commonly it is due to ��fortunate accidents", [Q such a conjuncrion of
circumstances in which the object can be created by the help of the extant
imperfect capacities. (This "accident" can naturally occur without any
human intervention, but may be - on a higher stage - the result of active
human exploration, too). Only in the regularly recurring process of
production can man. master his own form of activity, the "play of his own
forces" and develop in himself the corresponding skill as an integral
ability.'"
What constitutes objectively the content of the newly acquired pro
ductive ability? The subjective appropriation of some means of production
implies the formation of an integral activity on the part of the.worker that
brings material and instrument of labour in a physical relationship
necessary to the realization of the intended aim. (On the problem of aim
and intention see later). The formed skill thus appears as the transposition
of some objective connection of nature into the activity of the subject. By
9
developing new productive abilities man mounts in his activity, converts

in the principles of his action laws of nature which are not laws of his own
(biological) nature. Labour (at least in its developed forms) "subjugates
the forces of nature and compels them to work in the service of human
needs . . "28. man is consequently able to turn an ever widening, principally
.
unlimited range of natural regularities and interconnections into the rule and
principle of his activity. It is in this sense that Marx names him (using a
Goethean metaphor) a being "inhaling and exhaling all of nature's powers
(Naturkrafte)".29
4. Every human action taken in itself presupposes the pre-existence of
some want'O determining the on-going activity. But in the continuous
historical process of social reproduction this relationship between wants
(needs)30. and productive activity is reversed.
Of course, the human activity of work also hIstorically presupposes a
given system of needs, fixed in the biological constitution of man, and
departs from it. Nevertheless, material production should not be under
stood as an activity directed at the satisfaction of these supposedly eternal,
unchangeable, "natural" needs (with the help of changing, more and more
complex, and so more and more effective, secure etc. means only). The
wants which really orient and determine the production are not these
"raw", abstract, biological needs, but social wants which themselves are
the products of a historical development, the results of an earlier progress
of material productive activity. ". . . needs are produced just as are products
and the different kinds of work skills . . . The greater the extent to which
historic needs - needs created by production itself, social needs - needs
which are themselves the offsprings of social production and intercourse,
are posited as necessary, the higher the level to whiCh real wealth has
become developed. Regarded materially (stofflich), wealth consists only in
the manifold variety of needs". " And only by materially creating, pro
ducing a new object man can evoke a new social-collective want in this
object.32
This historicity of wants is based on, and follows from, the characteris
tics of work as specific human life activity.
First: The objects of human need-fulfilment are not naturally given en
vironmental things, but objects first brought about in production, natural
substances modified and formed through the material activity of man. The
needs of concrete, historic individuals are thus directed not at things with
suitable physical, chemical etc. properties, but at products which them
selves have a socio-historic character. Even the "biological", genetically
fixed needs of man change their "form and direction" in the course of
history," so their concrete content cannot be adequately described in
10
{ian as universal natural being
terms of natural sciences. Marx. used to illustrate this fact on the example
of hunger as human need. He writes: ". . . production (gives) finish to
consumption. Firstly, the object is not an object in general, but a specific
object which must be consumed in a specific manner, to be mediated in its
turn by production itself. Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by
cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that
which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. Pro
duction thus produces not only the object but also the manner of con
sumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production thus
'
creates the consumer". 34
Second: In the continuous process of material reproduction there evolve

new wants which are directly social in regard both of their origin and
content. Due to the mediated character of work, to the fact that human
activity is directed at its object through the mediation of some other
objects as insttuments, there emerge social wants for such products which
cannot be consumed by any individual, but are vitally necessary to the
society sihce only they make the continuation of the process of production
in its given form possible. The dynamics of these "productive wants"
constitutes, according to Marx, one of the main impelling forces of
historical development. "Most often wants arise directly from production
or from a state of affairs based on production. World trade turns almost
entirely round the wants, not of individual consumption, but of produc
tion"." And besides these social wants of production there are also "the
socially posited needs of the individual, i.e. those which he consumes and
feels not as a single individual in society, but communally with others -
whose mode of consull)ption is social by the nature of the thing . . . "36
Marx undoubtedly includes into this later category not only the social
demand in products which we now regard as elements of economic
"infrastructure", but also the social wants in such objects, the utilitity of
which "derives from their specific social functions" (as he tells about
money in Capita!) - e.g. the want of a society of commodity producers in
such a social object as money.
Third: From the specific character of the material life process of society,
first of all from the social and conscious nature of work itself, there arise
such new types of individual needs (or more generally: socially accepted
motives of activity) which cannot be regarded - at least in their real
human content - as simple humanizations of genetically given, biological
needs.37 Some of them, like the need for a meaningful, goal-posing and
goal-winning activity or that for personal contacts and recognition, may
characterize human existence in general, though their "form and direc-
11
tion" is, naturally, changing in the course of history. Some others are
historical in a more narrow sense of coming first into being at some
definite stage of historic development (as e.g. the motive of impartial
scientific curiosity) or of being effective only in some specific historical
epochs, social formations (this is e.g. the way Marx regards the religious
need)." Only the emergence of these qualitatively new wants and needs
out of the material life-process of society explains that besides material
production (and in the last end in conformity with its determinants), there
arise new modes of the human appropriation of nature and of man, new
"spiritual" Or "mental" (geistige) forms of production. "Religion, family,
state, law, morality, science, art, etc. are only particular forms of produc
tion and fall under its general law".39 Man's relation to nature becomes not
only more and more complex and free from fixed biological restraints, but
it loses progressively its one-sidedly utilitarian character as well.'o
Summing up his analysis of the interrelations between the various
spheres or moments of economic life - production, distribution, exchange
and consumption - Marx writes: "The conclusion we reach is not that
production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but
that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity.
Production predominates (greift iiber) not only over itself, but over the
other moments as well. The process always returns to production to begin
anew"" In this continuous processs of social reproduction all the inert
things and fixed determinations are dissolved and then re-created and
changed, they become moments in the never ending praxis of the histori
cally interconnected human individuals and of the generations of in
dividuals. "Everything that has a fixed form, such as the product etc.,
appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement. The
direct production process itself here appears only as a moment. The
conditions and objectifications of the process are themselves equally mo
ments of it, and its only subjects are the individuals, but individuals in
mutual relationships, which they equally reproduce and produce anew.
The constan t process of their own movement, in which they renew
themselves even as they renew the world of wealth they create"'2
But due first of all to the dialectics of production and wants, to the
historical production of human wants themselves, the process of work is
not only continually renewed in society, but it is renewed generally on a
widened basis, it becomes - both quantitatively and qualitatively - more
and more universal in respect of its impact both on nature and on man.
And if work constitu!es the essential activity of man, then man is essen
tially a universal natural being, in the sense that he is potentially able to turn
any object of nature into the subject matter of his wants and activity, and
also to "inhale and exhale" all natural powers, i.e. to turn a principially
12
unlimited scope of natural laws, regularities into the principles of his own
actions and so to transform his progressively expanding environment to an
ever increasing degree. "The universality of man appears in practice in the
universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body: 1.) as a
direct means of life, and 2.) as the matter, object, and instrument of his life
activity".43
But it has to be underlined: the universality of man in this sense
characterizes only a tendency inherent in work as specifically human activity.
This philosophical concept of work - as we have pointed out earlier - is
not reducible to merely technical action, but designates the material
activity of human self-transformation existing always in some social form.
And it is this social form in its historical concreteness - i.e. as some
historical type' of social relations of production - that determines the mode,
the rate and the limits of realization of this tendency towards universality in
each historical epoch, within any given socio-economic formation. Marx
definitely stresses that it is the relations of production that "determine the
whole character and the whole movement of production"" They do not
simply accelerate or decelerate, "promote or hinder" a supposedly irresistible
process of "technical" development, but they define the real social con
ditions of its materialization in general. First, it is the social conditions of
production that establish the direction, this development may and does
assume (it is in this sense that Marx speaks of the relations of production as
theforms ofdevelopment of productive forces). So e.g. he repeatedly poin ts to
the different character of development of production in the guild-system
of craft work and in capitalist industry: the first is essentially directed at the
artistic fashioning of the individual product as use value" (and so directs
the development in the last analysis into economically unproductive
channels), the second aims at the production of social wealth as such, i.e.
of value and surplus value, by such means as mass production, rationali
zation of the labour process, etc. - in general through a tendency which
heightens the objective forces of production boundlessly at the cost of
making "the main force of production, the human being" one-sided,
limited etc.'6 Second, it is the existing forms of relations of production
that determine the character and speed of accummulation (what can be
accumulated, to what extent and by whom) and through it the economic
possibility and compass of the extension of production itself. It is only in
capitalism that the qualitative and quantitative exten�ion of production
becomes a necessary precondition of the very functioning of economy. In
all other, precapitalist socio-economic formations the long range historical
tendency of universalization in work asserts itself only spontaneously, and
what is more, it runs into barriers set by the economic organization itself:
in these societies there exist various social mechanisms that nOt only
13
decelerate, but in some historical cases (as that of "Asiatic stagnation"

frequently discussed by Marx) durably arrest the progressive development
of subjective and objective facrors of labour'7 "Capital posits the produc
tion ofwealth itself and hence the universal development of the productive
forces, the constant overthrow of its prevailing presuppositions, as the
presupposition of its reproduction". This "universalizing tendency of
capital . . . distinguishes it from all previous stages of production" which
"foundered on the development of wealth"''.
The hisrorical process of human universalization has a dual character. It
appears, on the one side, as the naturalization of man, as the growth of his
"inorganic body", the widening of the sphere of natural phenomena and
interconnections to which his activity become adapted: his becoming from
a limited to an ever more universal natural being. On the other side, this
process appears as the humanization of nature, as the "driving back of the
limits of nature (Naturschranke)": the transformation of nature by
human activity in the result of which more and more elements of the
progressively enlarged material envitonment of man become products of
earlier labour, objectifications of essential human powers. So the "unity"
of man and nature is realized in ptoduction as material social activity - it is
not a primordially given, stable ontic fact of human existence, but a
process that unfolds in, and through, the progress of history."The human
essence of nature exists only for social man . . . Thus society is the
completed, essential unity of man with nature, the true resurrection, the
flllfilled (durchgefuhrte) naturalism of man and humanism of nature" '9
Humanization of nature and naturalization of man are therefore two
aspects of the same process (though in the course of history they may
become temporarily and relatively divorced from, and opposed to, each
other). Their unity is expressed by Marx with the help of those sive, those
signs of equality which he uses with a special predilection in the Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts: "the human essence of nature or the natural
essence of man", �cotnmunism as completed humanism = naturalism50
etc. "History itself is an actual part of natural history, of nature's develop
ment into man".51
As it can already be seen from the last quotation, Marx views work in a
two-fold dimension and significance. He examines human productive
activity primarily as a process of anthropologic-sociological character, as that
of the self-creation and self-transformation of man in the course of history
"Since for socialist man . ..the entire so-called world history is only the
creation of man through human labour and the emergence (Werden) of
nature for man, he has evident and incontrovertible proof of his self-cre
ation, his own formation process"." But Marx also regards work as a
process of natural-evolutionary character, as the highest form and type of
14
Man aJ universal natural being
the evolution of nature. "Labour (Arbeit) is the living, form-giving fire; it

is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by
living time".5 3 Marx, of course, does not ascribe a cosmic importance to
work, or in general to man. It surely does not make any sense to speak
about the development of the universe as a whole. But as far as that
segment of the nature known to us is concerned, in respect of which we
can speak about the occurence of evolutionary processes, work, social
ptOduction appears as the most effective and pervasive form and mode of
natural development - and not simply as a purely external refashioning of
natural objects making them suitable to prefixed human needs and con
sumption.54
15
MAN AS A SOCIAL AND CONSCIOUS NATURAL BEING
The characterization of man as a working and therefore universal being

does not exhaust, however, the Marxian concept of �(human essence". The
above described traits of human existence themselves necessarily imply
some further attributes which partly complement them, partly are already
contained in them, so that they were � at least implicitly - presupposed in
our earlier discussion, too.
First of all man is a social being, i.e. he is a communal (Gemeinwesen)
and generic being (Gattungswesen). "As human essence (menschliches
Wesen) is the true community (Gemeinwesen) of man, men through the
activation of their essence create and produce the human community, the
sociality (gesellschaftliches Wesen) which is no abstractly universal power
opposed to the single individual, but is the essence of every single in
dividual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth". '
This characterization of man as a social being contains twO closely
interconnected moments. It means on the one hand that the individual
cannot become a truly human being and cannot live a human life, unless
he maintains contacts and has intercourse with other men. The conception
of man as a kind of socio-metaphysic atom (implied, among others, by the
theory of social contract), as a being definable - at least in its essential
nature - irrespective of its community, is for Marx a philosophical illusion
which only expresses (and justifies) in an ideologically distorted way the
life-conditions of individuals who find themselves enmeshed in the reified,
purely functional, impersonal relations of a commodity producing
society.' (This aspect of human sociality - the communal character of
man's existence - is usually designated by Marx by the term Gemeinwesen).
On the other hand the individual is a human being only through, and due
to, the fact that he appropriates, incorporates into his life and activity (to a
larger or lesser extent) abilities, wants, forms of behaviour, ideas etc. which
were created and objectified by other individuals of earlier generations or
those contemporary to him. So the human individual in its concrete
personality is even in itself, taken in isolation a product of social inter
course and history. "Social activity and satisfaction (Genuss)3 by no means
exist merely in the form of an immediate communal activity and immediate
communal satisfaction . . . Even as I am scientifically active etc. - an activity
16
Man as a social and conscious natural being
I can seldom pursue in direct community with others - I am socially active

because I am active as a o/an. Not only is the material of my activity - such
as the language in which the thinker is active - given to me as a social
product, but my own existence is social activity . . . The individual is the
social being. The expression of his life - even if it does not appear
immediately in the form of a communal expression carried Out together
with others - is therefore an expression and assertion of social life. The
individual and the generic life (Gattungsleben) of man are not distinct,
however much - and necessarily so - the mode of existence of individual
life is either a more particular or more general mode of generic life, or
generic life is a more particular or general individual life'" (Marx usually
expresses this aspect of human sociality by the term Gattungswesen -
though his use of terminology never is very consistent).
Both these dimensions of the social character of man's life are already
presupposed in, and posited by, work as specifically human activity. On the
one hand production is possible only as a collective-cooperative activity
(realized directly or through mediations). As long as the social productive
forces of the individuals - both in objective and in subjective sense - are
relatively undeveloped, as long as they face a nature relatively untrans
formed by human activity, their labour generally is of directly collective
character, labour done in personal cooperation with others inside some
social group, or at least it is work strictly regulated and determined by their
membership in some "naturally given" community. "The community
itself appears as the first great force of production . . ." and "the greater the
extent to which production still rests on mere manual labour, on use of
muscle power etc., in short on physical exertion by individual labourers,
the more does the increase of the productive force consist in their collabo
ration on a mass scale".' With a higher development of productive forces a
process of "particularization and individualization" of labour may and
does indeed take place - work is now accomplished by relatively in
dependent, isolated producers whose activity is no more subjected to a
directly communal regulation and control. But this process of individu
alization is made possible only by the development of the division of
labour and that of exchange, so men can produce not in collaboration with
each other only because they begin to produce for each other: the directly
communal form of production is superseded due to a historical process
which makes its internal COntent determined by, and dependent on, an
expanding network of reified socio-economic relations.". . . human beings
become individuals (vereinzelen sich) only through the process of hisrory.
He appears originally as a generic being (Gattungswesen), clan being
(Stammwesen), herd animal - although in no way whatever as a �wov
'ITOf..VrLXOV in the political sense. Exchange itself is a chief means of this
17
Man aI a social and comcioUf natural being
individualization (Vereinzelung). It makes the herdlike existence super
fluous and dissolves it. Soon the matter has rurned in such a way that as an
individual he relates himself only to himself, while the means with which
the posits himself as individual have become the. making of his generality
and commonness (die Mittel aber . . . sein sich Allgemein- und Gemein
machen geworden sind)". 6 The capitalist development of industry again
reintroduces directly collective-cooperative labour on a large scale, but the
principle of collaboration now stands opposite to the workers in the form of
external, alien things - their cooperation is dictated by the machine and
system of machines in the capitalist factory, "The social spirit of labour
obtains an objective existence separate from the individual workers".'
On the other hand, the very activity of the working individual in itself
- disregarding his actual contacts with other men - is always of socio
historic character in the sense that the instruments of labour he employs
and his skill in their employment are themselves results of the appropri
ation of productive forces and objectified abilities brought into being by
other individuals preceding him. S It follows from the very definition of
work as materially mediated activity that living labour can be realized only
through the use and "consumption" of previous objectified labour (pro
duction as "productive consumption"),9 therefore every single-individual
act of production is a socio-histOrically determined act.
It is easy to see that the above mentioned two aspects of human sociality
(communal character and socio-historic determinateness) reciprocally
presuppose each other. The historically created and objectified material
and mental powers can be appropriated by the individual only within a
human community, thtOugh the intercourse with other human beings.
From the very beginning the child finds itself in a man-made, humanized
environment in which essential human powers are embodied, but the
"proper", human meaning of objects as elements of this milieu are not
given directly to it. "Neither nature objectively nor nature subjectively is
directly given in a form adequate to the human being". 'o The human
objects are not simply given for man, but posed to him as talks. One has to
develop in itself the ability of their use or reproduction, to be able to relate
to them practically as to human objects, to objectifications of human
powers. And as far as the basic forms of practico-social behaviour are
concerned, this "learning-process", the development of fundamental (to
the given type of society) human abilities can be accomplished only
through the mediations and with the help of "adults", i.e. of society,
within the actually present forms of human community (family etc.). This
explains why this process of "growing-up" is so protracted in human
beings in comparison with animals, and so short in comparison with the
real historical process of evolvement of those capacities the appropriation
18
f' Man aJ a social and conscious natural being
of which constirutes its content." On the other hand, the actual relations
between human individuals - disregarding noy" those primitive, semi-in
stinctive forms of coexistence which we may take as the starting point of
the historic evolution of man - are never direct-biological, purely "natu
ral" relations: as relations between concrete historical individuals they
always presuppose those forms of material and intellectual intercourse
which these men find set and ready-made, which they modify in their life
activity and which circumscribe the possible content and scope, the in
tension and extension of their contacts just as much as the specific
character of their individuality.
Of course, Marx does not Stop at such a general, philosophical descrip
tion and analysis of the social character of human material life activity.
What he aims at, is first of all to understand the socio-productive life of a
historically given concreteness (in a most general way: of a given "popu
lation") 12 simultaneously as a social totality capable of self-reproduction
and as a moment in the process of historical d(fIJelopment (which means also:
to understand it in its historical-practical possibilities). Even the method
of his analysis lies, however, outside the scope of this book. Here we can
only cursorily refer to the general scheme of his analysis of social produc
tion, since it is at several points related to questions discussed already by us
or to be examined later. Marx regards the economic structure of any
society as a system of relations and institutions ensuring the continuous
reproduction of the material elements and conditions of its own functioning
(Wirkungsbedingungen). In each viable society there must be first of all
social mechanisms securing the constant, recurrent unification of the basic
potential factors of production, of its objective and subjective conditions:
the unification of the means of production (in the first line instruments
and materials of labour, natural resources included) with the active, living
ability of labour, existing as a labour force of a given historic specification
and embodied in the population as a whole. "Whatever the social forms of
production be, workers and means of production remain always its factors.
Bu t in the state of their separation both the one and the other are such
factors only in possibility. For production taking place at all, they must
interlink (sich verbinden). It is the specific way and manner, in which this
connection is accomplished, that differentiates the various economic
epochs of social structure from each other".13 The social mechanisms
which realize this connection and unification of the parential elements of
production process are called by Marx the relations ofproduction. Their core
is constituted by "a distribution of the elements of production which
precedes the distribution of socialproducts and is presupposed by it",14 by a
"distribution, which is comprised within the process of production itself
and determines the structure of production"." This distriburion has a
19
Man as a social and comcious natural being
two-fold character: on the one hand it means the distribution of the means
of production among the different groups of population (property relatiom)
and on the other the distribution of the members of society among the
great classes of the means of production corresponding to the basic social
branches and kinds of production and economy in general (relatiom of
division of labour) 16 Through this two-fold "distribution" the population,
the living totality of society becomes divided, stratified into basic social
groups: the classes, so that the individuals belonging to them acquire
thereby a definite social character - they become particular historic agents
of production. So within some types of relations of production the im
mediate producer may appear as a serf, or an independent artisan, or a
wage labourer, existing only in relation and contradistinction to the feudal
lord, to the merchant or to the capitalist respectively. Thus men's relations
to things as objective factors and conditions of their production process
mediate the social relations among men. And through this mediation
these things themselves acquire some definite socio-economic quality -
they now appear in the character of this or that form of property and in <
other economic determinations connected with it (so the instrument may

function as a use value which perhaps can be given away by the owner, but
cannot be exchanged; or as an exchangeable product which can be bought
on some fixed price, bu t only by persons fulfiling some social specification;
or as a fully marketable commodity having value and containing surplus
value etc.). So in the real process of social production the objects have not
only a "material content", a socio-historically created utility, but a "social
form", too. In connection with our earlier discussion we may perhaps say
that in social life human products function not only within a network of
rules that define the mode of their "technical" use (and thereby the char
acter of their utility), but also in a network of social relations which
define the conditions and character of their social employment. They are not
only objectifications of essential human powers, but also the bearers of
social relatiom, which are materialized and reified in them just as much as
they are personified in the living agents of productions. And in this way the
active-practical relation of living labour to its objects (the process of labour
in the narrow, economic sense) simultaneously is a process of production
and reproduction of definite historic social relations among men. "It is not
only the objective conditions of the process of production that appear as its
result, but JUSt as much its specific social character; the social relations and
consequently the mutual social position of the agents of production - the
relatiom ofproduction themselves are produced, are the constantly renewed
result of the process".'7
Of course, the social character of man is not confined to the sphere and
acts of production alone l' Sociality characterizes the whole individual,
20
tMan as a social and conscious natural being
permeates all the forms of his life activity. Marx also analyzes the historical
processes in the result of which there emerge specific and relatively
independent institutional spheres of social activity par excellence, domains
of social life which at the same time serve as substitutes fOr the real
community and direct association of men: in economy itself the sphere of
(market) exchange and within the social totality in general that of politics
with the institution of state in its center. The examination of the interre
lationship of these spheres with that of material production constitutes
one of the best known aspects of the materialist conception of history
which cannot be discussed here. One has only to underline once more that
these spheres cannot be conceived as something external to the individuals
involved in them. They develop their own, historically changing norms,
they make demands on the individuals concerned which are (again to a
historically and socially variable degree) internalized, accepted or actively
rejected by the persons involved in, or affected by, these activities. In this
way men acquire and develop historically determined abilities and needs of
social intercourse and communication in the narrow sense of the word.
Also the need for personal contacts which subsists in all forms of human
social life, is never present in this general, abstract form: man needs not
simply contacts with other human beings, but contacts the character of
which correspond to, and affirm, his own socially formed structure of
personality. So the general need for personal contacts always appears as
some historically specific demand for socio-personal recognition (in the sense
of the Hegelian "Anerkennung").
Marx characterizes the general relationship between the individual and
the society in the following summary way: "It comes out certainly here
that the development of the individual is conditioned (bedingt) by the
development of all other individuals with whom he stands in a direct or
indirect intercourse, and that the various generations of the individuals,
which enter into relations with each other, have an interconnection, that
the later ones are conditioned in their physical existence by their foregoers,
from whom they take over the accumulated forces of production and
forms of intercourse, being in that way determined (bestimmt) in their
own mutual relations. In short, it is revealed, that there takes place a
development and the history of no single individual can be in any way
divorced from the history of preceding and contemporary individuals, but
the first is determined by the second" l"
Two remarks are called for here. First, the socio-historical conditions
which determine the concrete individual are not to be conceived as fetters
alien to him and externally imposed upon his real, "primordial" impulses
and drives, thereby stifling and repressing his authentic self.19 They are the
real, internal conditions of his individu�lity, i.e. conditions approprieted
21
Man as a socia! and conscious natura! being
and internalized by him, turned into constituents of his own personality.

" . . . man is not an abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the
world of men, the state, the society".20 The objectified and hence objec
tively-materially existing human abilities, wants, forms of contact and
behaviour are again re-transformed through appropriation into character
istics of the living personality, into elements and components of the
subjective world and life of the individual. The concrete, unique perso
nality of each man is formed in this way, through the active participation
in the man made social world and through its appropriation in some
specific manner. In certain hisrorical epochs and for certain classes of
individuals - and this is a general tendency during the whole period of
�lienation - the social conditions and the forms of life determined by
diem really appear to the concerned individuals as external and accidental
barriers, alien powers impeding and deforming the manifestation of their
personality. But this is only so, because the given social conditions, the
specific form of historical existence and the active participation in it
develop in the individuals such wants, aims, abilities and potentials the
realization and attainment of which is foreclosed (or permitted only
one-sidedly) by the very same conditions. The internal discord and split of
the individual, in the result of which he does not feel his life to be his own
authentic existence, but apprehends it as an accidental fate, expresses the
split and the self-contradiction of that social reality in which he lives and
by which he is conditioned: "The difference between the individual as a
person and what is acciden tal to him (zwichen personlichem Individuum
und zufalligem Individuum) is not a conceptual difference but a historical
fact. This distinction has a different significance in different periods, for
example, the estate as something accidental to the individual in the
eighteenth century and the family more or less accidental too. We do not
have to make this distinction for each age; rather, each age itself makes it
from the different elements which it finds in existence, not according to a
concept but compelled by material collisions of life. That what appears
accidental to a later age in comparison with an earlier one - including the
elements handed down by the earlier age - is a form of intercourse which
corresponded to a particular stage of productive forces. The relation of
productive forces to the form of intercourse is the relation of the form of
intercourse to the occupation or activity of the individuals . . . The con
ditions under which the individuals interact so long as the contradiction is
still absent are nothing external to them but are conditions pertaining to
their individuality, conditions under which these particular individuals
living in particular circumstances can alone produce their material life and
what is connected with it. They are the conditions of their self-activity and
are produced by this self-activity. In the absence of contradiction the
22
particular condition under which they produce thus corresponds ro the

actuality of their conditioned nature (Bedingtheit), their one-sided exis
tence, the one-sidedness of which shows only when contradiction enters
and thus only exists for later individuals_ Then this condition appears as an
accidental fetter, and the consciousness that it is a fetter is imputed to the
earlier age".2 1
Second, it would be a gross error to identify the Marxian conception of
the socio-historical determination of individual with the presupposition
according to which each concrete human personality can be fully resolved
into, and reduced to, a multitude of sociological (or sociological and
biological) determinants, that it has to be understood as the simple
resultant of their interaction." Man is not a passive tabula· rasa which
simply suffers and registers the impressions made upon him by his social
milieu. The material and ideal "elements" of his objective social world
become transformed into constituents of his own personality, as we have
tried to show earlier, only through a process of appropriation, Le. only
through, and due to, his own selective activity. And it is first of all this
activity and its social comequences that directly form the specific, irreducible
individuality of every human being. Each concrete individual finds a more
or less strictly circumscribed scope of historically possible forms of be
haviour and activity as something set by, and with, his historical situation,
class position etc. This is why one can make at all rational "predictions"
about the possible trends of conduct, about the historical potentialities of
great social groups. But no investigation of social environment, however
detailed it be, would allow to deduce the "necessity" of any individual
aCtion or of a given personal character. A concrete walk of life, the personal
history of an individual is determined in the incessant interplay, give
and-take of his own actions and the "reactions" of his social environment.
Human personality evolves - to use the fitting expression of L. Kola
kowski" - in a constant dialogue between man and world, between
subjective activity and objective social reality. Man can make his life only
from a material with which he is furnished by the historical circumstances,
by his society. But even in the period when the tendencies of alienation
dominate, it is the individual himself who makes his own life - though
perhaps within very narrow confines - out of this material.
If in our earlier discussion of the Marxian concept of work historical
development appeared as'a process in which man progressively becomes a
universal natural being, then now this same process appears in the character
of man's becoming a universal social being. As production develops, it
acquires a social character not only in its abstract form (in respect of which
every act of labour is always social, since it presupposes the appropriation
of historically created means and abilities through the intercourse of the
23
individuals) , but also in its concrete content, in the sense that the in
dividuals begin to produce lor each other, their products supplement each
other, their labour becomes in reality only a component part of the rotal,
integral production and reproduction process of the whole society. Person
al collaboration, directly cooperative work in small, independent local
communi ties is replaced by a division and combination 0/ labour the scope of
which progressively comprehends the whole world. The individuals thus
become members of a "combined working personnel", though the com
bination of their labours does not result from their conscious and volun
tary association subject ro their own control, but it is the objective
outcome of the existence of a network of reified social ties which are
established behind their backs. In this way the life of every and each
individual becomes dependent on the activity of a growing circle of other
individuals with whom he no more stands in personal contact and com
munication, but at the same time each human being thereby acquires - at
least in principio - the possibility ro make use not only of human ex
periences, of objective and subjective wealth accumulated in his particular
community, but of those accumulated by the whole mankind. The world
history only gradually evolves from the hisrory of clans, tribes, nationalities
and nations and in this process men themselves become world-hisrorical,
socially universal individuals: " . . . only with this universal development of
productive forces is a universal commerce (Verkehr) among men esta
blished which . . . replaces local individuals with world-historical, empiri
cally universal individuals".24
This process of progressive broadening of the range of human inter
course at the same time coincides - as regards to the general trend of
human history - with a process of the growth of men's autonomy in
relation to their immediate environment and social group, with the
development of human subjectivity based on this autOnomy, in short:
with the emergence of individuality. "The more deeply we go back into
history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing
individual, appear as belonging to a larger whole . . . "" - the small and
closed local communities which dominate the primitive-archaic stage of
human history appear as the social substance of which the individuals are
mere accidents '6 Human beings become individuals in the real sense of
the word only in a historical process that through the growth of social
contacts - first of all through the advance of exchange - disolves these
communities which have functioned as the natural preconditions of the
life of individuals, i.e. as something set and unchangeable. The universali
zation and individualization 0/man constitutes in this sense a single integral
process, even if its unity - as we shall see later - is realized during a whole
great epoch of history only through constant, deep antinomies (univer-
24
,fran as a social a,,!d conscious natural being
salization as the unity of individualization and depersonalization in the
period of alienation), 26a
+ +
+
A further characteristics of human essence discussed by Marx is conscious

ness. "Conscious life activity distinghuishes man immediately from the life
activity of the animal. Only thereby is he a generic being. Or rather, he is a
conscious being - that is, his own life is an object for him - since he is a
generic being".27
An animal, within the framework of its limited life activity, stands in a
direct relation with the objects of its biologically determined, constant
needs. Since the scope of environmental elements which it is able ro build
into, and connect with, its behaviour is restricted, only few objects and
objective characteristics have for it an orientative significance and thus serve
as objectives of its psychic activity (as far as we can speak of the latter
which is undoubtedly the case in regard to species of higher order). Even in
respect of those objects which have a survival value for the animal con
cerned, only those of their properties have for it a significance which either
transmit or "signal" their biologically relevant effects. Thus, an animal
does not only act upon its environment - as Marx formulates - according
ro the "standard" and needs of its species, but it is also able to orient itself
in it only to this extent. Further, the "pictures" of the world existing in the
"mind" of a man and of an animal (to use this naiv-representationalist way
of expression) do not merely differ from one another in terms of their
wealth of detail, in a purely qualitative way: the have a different structure.
Since the life activity of the animal is of direct character, i.e. is an activity in
which the motive (that what induces the act) and the object (that what
the act is directed at) as a rule coincide, the object never appears indepen
dently of the actual need, but always in fusion with it. The articulation of
the perceived environment always depends on the momentary needs and
bodily state of the animal, more generally on the features of the actually
present subjective and objective situation as a whole - it lacks objective
permanence. The world as something objective, as something apart from,
and independent of, needs, does not exists for an animal and neither does
the animal itself exist as a &ubject independent of its object, that is, it has no
consciousness. "Where a relationship exists, it exists for me. The animal has
no 'relation' with anything, no relations at all. For the animal, its relation
to others does not exist as a relation".28
Work as materially mediated human activity is no more characterized
by such a direct coincidence of the motive and the object of action. Since
25
the act of labour is not identical with the direct satisfaction of a need, for it
does not mean the seizure of a ready-found environmental thing suitable
for consumption, but rather aims to transform it (often through nu
merous intervening steps), work therefore by necessity develops and pre
supposes the separation of need and its object, of subject and object, i.e. the
emergence of consciousness and self-consciousness. In fact, specifically human
productive activity is only possible when a contraposition and comparison
can be made between the aim, the desired ideal form of the object to be
brought about, and the actually present and perceived thing itself; that is,
when activity is guided and controlled by an intention, by the objective to
be attained. "At the end of the labour process, we get a result that already
existed in the imagination of the labourer, that existed already ideally at its
commencement. The labourer not only effects a change of form in the
natural material on which he works, but he also realizes in it an aim of his
own that gives the law to his modus operandi (Art und Weise seines Tuns),
and to which he must subordinate his will".'9
In this way there appears for man an external, objective reality of
permanent things existing independently of the individual's relationship
to them, and as opposed to it, emerges the subjective awareness of human
desires, intentions and needs, the inner intellectual and emotional life of
man. Work itself, as a result of its intentional, purposeful character, is the
joint action of the hand and the mind, and the product of work is the
simultaneous objectification of physical and intellectual capacities. "A
single man cannot operate upon nature without calling his own muscles
into play under the control o f his own brain. As in the natural body
(Natursystem) head and hand wait upon each other, so the labour process
unites the labour of the hand with that of the head".'o
In characterizing human consciousness Marx constantly emphasizes its
interltionatity. Consciousness is always the consciousness of something, it is
object-directed. On the one hand, it is the "mental reproduction" of
reality, i.e. the cognizance of the surrounding world, of other persons and of
the active, material subject itself. "The representations (Vorstellungen)
which these individuals form are representations either about their relation
ro nature , their mutual relations, or their own nature (Beschaffenheit)".31
On the other hand, consciousness appears as the "mental production" of'
aims, ideals and values which await their realization through practice.
Precisely because of its character of being object directed - be it present in
the form of "representation" ("reflection") or as the endeavour to objec
tify subjective intentions - consciousness is entirely open, according to
Marx, to linguistic expression and communication. Thus there �xist for
him no specifiC problem of intersubjectivity. The conception of
consciousness as an inner, non-communicable experience and feeling of
26
Man aJ a locial and conscious natural being
pure subjectivity is totally alien to Marx.31• This conception itself is
nothing else for him but the necessary result and distorted reflection of
social conditions under which the individual is incapable of fully mani
festing and realizing his or her own personality.
It is because of this that the fact of intentionality is not attested and
proved through a "phenomenological reduction" or through the intuition
of the directly experienced and given data of consciousness (as allegedly
the only data that can be directly given). The "immediacy" of the phe
nomena of consciousness, though it may appear as an indubitable fact of
introspection, is only an appearance in the Marxian sense of the word, that
is, a superficial characteristic which, if fixed in isolation, only obscures the
deeper determinants and essence of these phenomena. Consciousness - in
spite of its introspectively attested immediate givenness and absolute
distinctness from all other manifestations of life - is actually only a
part-moment in the life and activity of material-social man and its character
is determined by the function it fulfills in this life activity. All the
examinations of consciousness which disregard its actual subject, the
concrete, historically determined individual and the material activity of
such individuals, that is, all examinations which "bracket" them,
necessarily fetishize certain characteristics of it by assigning to them a
superhistorical relevance and making them independent of their real
subjects, the socially concrete individuals. " . . . . ideas are the conscious
expression - real or illusory - of their (i.e. individuals' - G.M.) actual
relationships and activities, of their production and commerce, and of their
social and political behaviour. The opposite assumption is possible only
if, in addition to the spirit of the actual and materially evolved individuals,
a separate spirit is presupposed . . . Men are the producers of their concep
tions, ideas, etc., but these are real, active men, as they are conditioned by a
definite development of their productive forces and of the relationship
(Verkehr) corresponding to these up to their highest forms. Consciousness
can never be anything else except conscious existence (das bewusste Sein),
and the existence of men is their actual life process"." In other words,
consciousness is nothing other than ((consciousness of exiscing practice"33
and its object directedness is a result of the material-objective character of
human practice.
At the same time, the Marxian concept of consciousness is opposed not
only to the idealist hypostasis of mental phenomena,33' but to the con
ception of old, bourgeois materialism as well (a conception that was
accepted and adapted by the Stalinist interpretation of Marxism in its
totality). The epistej\b.1ogy of pre-Marxian materialism departed from the
unquestioned presupposition of a cleavage and principial opposition be
tween material reality and individual consciousness, and then tried to prove
27
I1.•·.
that there exist a relationship of 'similarity' or 'correspondence' between
the two. Leaving aside the difficulties involved in this type of represen
tationalist theory of knowledge, this materialism could only preserve the
1
.1
unity of the 'physical' and the 'intellectual-moral' man by turning
consciousness, the 'inner world' into some sort of secondary, ontologically
unreal 'shadow world', an epiphenomenon. As against it, the Marxian
conception unequivocally emphasizes the ontological reality and 'this-word
liness' of consciousness conceiving it as a constitutive aspect of human
life activity which in the course of historical development becomes gra
dually differentiated in relatively independent and separate types of social
activity (forms of intellectual 'spiritual' production) and is externalized
through the various forms of 'mental' objectification (language, writing,
the higher forms of cultural expression). Consciousness is not simply an
inevitable concommitant of human life, but a creative and formative factor
in all social activity. The historically developed and socially transmitted
forms of correct or incorrect perception, conceptualization and evaluation
of reality, through which the world is comprehended and interpreted by
men and which therefore motivate them in their actions, are themselves
'material forces', not passive reflexes of social existence, but constitutive
factors and co-determinants in the reproduction and transformation of
existing social relations. This thought runs throughou t the entire oeuvre of
Marx and it is already present in his doctoral dissertation." But this idea
gains a specific importance and clarity later, in the Marxian concept of
'fetishism'. For the theory of fetishism cannot be reduced to the idea that
in the consciousness of the agents of capitalist production their own social
relations necessarily take distorted, reified forms which are then constantly
reinforced and reproduced by the circumstances of their everyday life; this
theory also reveals how this 'false' consciousness is a necessary factor in,
and a precondition of, the total social process of the reproduction of
capital. Thus Marx writes in connection with the characterization of the
Mercantilist System as a specific historical form of money fetishism the
following: ' . . . it is inherent in the attribute (Bestimmung) in which it
(i.e. the money - G.M.) here becomes developed that the illusion about its
nature, i.e. the fixed insistence on one of its aspects, in the abstract, and the
blindness towards the contradictions contained within it, gives it a really
magical sig nificance behind the backs of individuals. In fact, it is because
of this self-contradictory and hence illusory aspect (Bestimmung), because
of this abstraction, that it becomes such an enormous instrument in the
real development of the forces of social production'." I t is precisely for this
reason that the critique of these fetishistic notions of everyday conscious
ness (a critique to which the subtitle of Capital refers) is not simply
identical with the elaboration of some scientific theory which replaces false
28
Man as alsocial and comcious natural being
notions with true ones through a correct, verifiable etc. description of a
given reality, independent from the subjects, but it demands and means
the creation of such a revolutionary theory which aims to change the
consciousness of the subjects and through this also the conditions of
existence of the social reality it deals with, i.e. it demands such a theory
which itself is part of, and a creative factor within, the practical revo
lutionary struggle for the change of the existing order of things.
It is perhaps clear already from the above that consciousness, even in its
simplest forms, may not be conceived of as a passive reception, as the
simple 'recording' of the impacts made by external objects upon the
human organism. As the objects of material life and consumption, so the
objects of consciousness are not 'given' to man: the human being must
prepare for assimilation his mental-intellectual intake, toO.'6 As a con
stituent of human life activity, consciousness itself is a particular type of
activity directed at the 'appropriation' of reality in a specific way. 'Man
appropriates to himself his manifold essence in all sided way, thus as a
whole man. Every one of his human relations to the world - seeing,
hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, perceiving, sensing, wishing,
acting, loving - in short, all the organs of his individuality, . . . are in their
objective relation (Verhalten) or in their relation to the object, the appro
priation of that object. This appropriation of human actuality (Wirklich
keit) . . . is the activation (Betiitigung) of human actuality'." Even sen
suousness (Sinnlichkeit), commonly regarded as passive contemplation, is
tpractical, human sensuous activity',38 in the course of which man tselects'
out of the continuous flow of stimulation reaching his organs from the
environment those stimuli with the help of wilich he can recognize and
identify the object as a definite perceptual object ofsocialpractice.
This activity itself, like all other forms of specifically human activity, is
socially determined both in its character and origin. ' . . . immediately
sensuous nature (sinnliche Natur) is for man, immediately, human sense
perception (Sinnlichkeit) (an identical statement) as the other man im
mediately sensuous (sinnlich vorhandne) for him. His own sense percep
tion only exists as human sense perception for himself through the other
man'.'. Man must learn to see, hear, think, etc., and the results of this
learning are posited to him (as tasks, as something to be mastered) already
before this process begins: in the form of human language, or rather in the
form of an existing social consciousness the main structural outlines of
which are fixed in the syntactic-semantic characteristics of a given langu
age. To be able to participate in social life, the individual must develop and
acquire, as the result of this 'learning' or appropriation, a relatively con
stant phenomenal articulation of reality, the structure of which corre
sponds to the articulation and structure that are given independently of
29
him in language as externalized social consciousness.'o Only by breaking

down the concrete situation effecting the senses into such elements which
correspond to this articulation fixed in the semantic structure of language,
i.e. into elements each of which has a socially determined, constant and _
general meaning, independent of one's individual experiences and needs,
only in this way can man become conscious of the surrounding world as
something independent of himself, as an objective reality consisting of
permanent elements, 'things'. Thus the articulation of the world in human
perception and, with it, the emergence and actual development of man's
factual-empirical knowledge concerning the various aspects and elements
of his natural and social environment cannot be understood, if we take
account solely of the physical-physiological interaction between man as a
natural being and his surroundings. These are historical-societal products,
determined - at least in the final analysis - by man's material practice, by
social production. '. . . music alone awekens man's musical sense and the
most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear - is no object for
it, because my object can only be the confirmation (Bestatigung) of one of
my essential capacities . . . - for this reason the senses of social man differ
from those of the unsocial. Only through the objectively unfolded wealth
of human essence is the wealth of the subjective human sensibility (Sinn
lichkeit) either cultivated or created :i musical ear, an eye for the beauty
-
of form, in short, sensei-capable of human satisfaction, confirming them

selves as essential human capacities (Wesenskrafte) . For not only the five
senses but also the so-called spiritual and moral senses (will, love, etc.), in
a word, human sense and the humanity of senses come into being only
through the existence of their object, through nature humanized. The
development (Bildung) of the five senses is a labour of the whole previous
history of the world' "
For Marx, however, the historicity of consciousness does not only mean
the constant and continuous change of its forms as determined by practice.
This change itself appears as a process with definite direction, as progress,
which, as may be seen already from the above quatation, Marx charac
terizes in the Manuscripts as the 'humanization of senses'.
As man's material-practical activity progresses and becomes more uni
versal, practically encompassing an ever expanding range of objects and
objective relations, so more and more objects, their properties, etc. become
consciously known to him, too. Those characteristics of objects which bear
no significance as far as the direct effect of the thing on the organism is
concerned, and which therefore, while the interaction is immediate, are
not apprehended subjectively either, may gain essential significance in the
relationship of the object to some other object as an instrument, and as a
result of this they may turn into proper objects of cognitive interests, of
30
Man-:tf a s�cial and conscious natural being
conscious knowledge claims. As a necessary result of his becoming practi

cally universal, man develops an intellectual universality, i.e. his historical
development is characterized by a tendency directed at surpassing of all the
existent, concrete barriers to human cognition. This universality, however,
should not merely be understOod in an extensive sense as a purely quan
tirative expansion of the body of knowledge. In this process of univer
salization consciousness itself, the character of mental activiry is trans
formed and this change concerns its relation both to the subject knowing
and to the object to be known.
'Primitive' consciousness as it had emerged in the course of anthro
pogenesis was still completely undifferentiated both in itself and in its
relation to practico-material activity. On the one hand, it actually con
stituted only a part-moment of the originally undifferrentiated everyday
life (meaning by the latter the sum-total of all the socially non-specialized
forms of material activity and social intercourse ensuring the day-to-day
reproduction of individuals) : This consciousness as an activity occured, in
a way similar to elemental, animal 'thinking', within the sphere of actual
objects, of directly perceived or remembered, manipulable things and their
relations. 'The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness is at
first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material inter
course of men; it is the language of actual life. Conceiving, thinking, and
the intellectual intercourse of men appear here as the direct result (Aus
fluss) of their material behaviour'." On the other hand, the aspects and
elements of this activity of consciousness - cognition, volition, emotional
attitude, etc. - appeared here also in an unarticulated unity. Their dif
ferentiation, the articulation and 'elaboration' of various mental capacities
is again a historical process which depends, in the last end, on the changes
in everyday life, in material life activity. As with the development of . the
division of labour the all-encompassing unity of everyday life is btOken, as
there emerge from it the specific and specialized institutions and in
stitutional spheres of production (and economy in general), of politics,
etc. with their socially differentiated types of activity, so there emerge also
spheres of 'intellectual' activity per se, with their institutions and first of all
with their specific systems of objectification. Beyond the emergence of
conceptual thinking which in its elemental form has taken place in the
course of antropogenesis parallel to, and inseparable from, the early evo
lution of work, language and first forms of society, the development of
human consciousness means first of all the emergence and the historical
unfolding of those independent systems of objectification which become
differentiated and at the same time separated from everyday thinking as
particular areas of mental-intellectual, 'spiritual' production (geistige
Production). It is in this way that in the course of histOry the 'higher'
31
forms of intellectual achievement differing from each other in their objects

and in their relationship to their objects - the artistic, the religious and the
scien tific-theoretical ways of appropriation of reality - evolved from the
everyday 'practico-mental' appropriation of the world " And as they
develop, they make new social demands on the individuals involved in
them and thereby make these individuals to cultivate in themselves new
psychic capabilities and wants. So, e.g., the emergence of theoretical
science in classical antiquity meant, among others, the separation of the
ability to demonstrate something logically from that of artistic-poetic evo
cation and of rhetoric persuasion, and this ability unfolds itself historically
in the course of scientific evolution, following the changes in the very
meaning and criteria of �logical proof', (evidence', !exactness', etc., as
applied in actual science. Similarly, the emergence of theoretical thinking
meant also the appearence of disinterested scientific curiosity as a relatively
independent and socially accepted motive of activity (the 'thaumadzein' 0:
Platon and Aristotle) - and analogical processes assert itself in the fields 0
arts, religion, law etc. If the sharp and radical separation of the variou:
forms of intellectual production from one another and from everyda:
material life (which never means a total break and parting, but merely th
fact that their interrelations become contradictory, the demands made b
them on men mutually exclusive) is considered by Marx to be one of th
products of alienation and a decisive factor in the development c
'ideologies', then their differentiation into various forms of activity (wit
the corresponding unfolding of human mental capacities) is regarded b
him - at least in his later writings - as one of the essential marks an
constituents of historical progress and he presupposes the continuation (
this process in the future communist society as well."
The universalization of human consciousness as a process implic
however, not only changes in its form, in its relation to the subject, b,
also a transformation of its content, of its relation to the object. F,
primitive man dependent on nature . objects exist only in so far as th
prove themselves useful, and they ar� grasped intellectually only in th(
utilitarian characteristics." This consciousness is abstract and one-sid
since it disregards the specificity of the object, all of its properties al
relations which have no pragmatical relevance at the given stage of soc
development. However, as objects become involved in human producti,
and intercourse in a more and more multi-sided manner, they become a
conceived in a multi-dimensional way, too. This means not only a qUI
titative enrichment of the corresponding abstractions, but also a change
the cognitive attitude. The historically developed social individual even
his empirical, everyday consciousness, or as Marx calls it in the Manuscr�
in his 'sensuousness' (Sinnlichkeit), transcends the standpoint of m
32
Man'l!:l a s�cial and conscious natural being
utility and tries to apprehend the object in its (inexhaustible) individuality
and specificity; he assertS his own individuality (among others) in this rich
and multi-dimensional way of comprehension of reality. The object of the
'humanized senses' is thus the concrete object, existing in-itself and for
itself, in its own specificity which is never given, but must be striven for.
'Sense (Sinn) subordinated to crude, practical need has only a narrow
meaning (bornierten Sinn). For the starving man food does not exist in its
human form but only in its abstract character as food. It could just as well
be available in its crudest form, and one could not say wherein the starving
man's eating differs from thatof animals. The care-laden, needy man has no
mind (Sinn) for the most beautiful play. The dealer in minerals sees only
their market value but not their beauty and special nature;, he has no
mineralogical sensitivity (mineralogischen Sinn). Hence the objectifi
cation of the human essence, both theoretically and practically, is necessary
to humanize man's senses and also create a human sense corresponding to
the entire wealth of humanity and nature" 6 Through the objectification
of human essence and as a result of the universalization of human social
practice 'the senses have . . . become theoreticians immediately in their
praxis. They try to relate themselves to their subject matter (Sache) for its
own .sake . . . '47 This (theoreticization' of sense-consciousness and
consciousness in general means therefore a change in the terminal objec
tive of cognitive activity from the view-point of fixed utility to the
view-point of the 'object-in-itself and for the sake of itself. So the 'uni
versalization' of consciousness implies a transformation of cognitive
attitudes and a corresponding development from that what.is abstract and
subjective to that what is concrete and objective. To which we must definitely
add that for Marx the objective narure of a thing never means some
unknowable Ding-an-sich, a substance or substrate forever concealed be
hind the apprehensible properties and relations. The 'special nature' of a
thing is nothing else than the totality and unity of all its characteristics and
relations revealed in the process of its actual and potential material inter
actions. 'The concrete is concrete because it is. the summation (Zusam
menfassung) of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse (Einheit
,
des Mannigfaltigen) .48 Thus the universalization of human consciousness
signifies not only the historical tendency for the extensive growth of
knowledge, but also a tendency of disantropomorphization (in the termino
logy of LuHcs) toward the apprehension of reality as it exists, indepen
dently of particular wants, of the particularities of the human receptive
apparatus, etc., i.e. a tendency toward objectivity. 49
Numerous interpreters of the Marxian epistemology represent, how
ever, a view directly opposite to the one proposed here. They maintain that
for the author of the 1844 Manuscripts a reality existing independently of
33
man cannot be the object of knowledge, and indeed the very notion of
'nature in itself is completely meaningless for him. For example,]. Calvez
in his lengthy investigation and critique of Marx writes the following: 'To
assert that the foundation of reality is constituted by a primary dialectical
nexus between man and nature, that means to exclude the possibility of any
dialectics of nature independent of human existence. Nature without man
has no meaning and no movement, it is chaos, undifferentiated and
indifferent matter, consequently in the last end nothing'.'o This stand
point is represented also by L Kolakowski. According to him in the
Marxian conception nature exists for man and can be made the objeCt of
human cognition only as the undifferentiated external resistance and
opposition encountered by human drives and activity; it is therefore only
man who dissects this 'chaos' in correspondence with his given needs and with
the help of the socially furnished and historically changing instruments of
language and abstraction, artificially articulating it into a world of in
dividual things divided into species and genera."
Indeed, Marx states in the Manuscripts that ' . . . nature too, taken ab
stractly, for itself, and fixedly isolated from man, is nothing for man'." And
really,jor man, that is, as an object of human consciousness, nature exists
only in SO far as man enters into a practical relationship with his environ
ment. But JUSt because human praxis, work (in its 'anthropological'
meaning) 'reproduces the whole of nature', because 'man knows how to
produce according ro the standard of any species and at all times knows
how ro apply an intrinsic standard to the object"", man is also able to
apprehend the world not only through the subjective prism of some fixed
needs, but also - since his wants are extensible an d in their tendency
universal - objectively, i.e. according to the 'intrinsic standard' of the
object concerned. For Marx the idea of the practico-social determination of
knowledge is not opposed to the view-point of an epistemological realism.
The counterposing of the pragmatic effectiveness of knowledge to it�
epistemic function, that of 'usefulness' to objective trurh - a presuppositior
which, perhaps from Nietzsche on, characterizes almost all the trends 0
modern bourgeois philosophy (and the rootS of which reach back to th.
early Catholic apologetics directed against the emerging natural science,
see e.g. Osiander's famous interpretation of Copernicus) - iS fompletel
alien to Marx's thinking. Naturally, human knowledge is limited in an
given historical moment both in its extension and intension, disanthrc
pomorphizarion always remains only a forward going process, the quest fc
objectivity is a human social endeavour and enterprise, the fate of whic
depends, in general, on the course of history. But just in their re:
historical tendency and development, the 'sense-impressions' (Empfi,
dungen) of man - as Marx emphasizes - are 'not merely anthropologic
34
Man� a social and conscious natural being
determinations (Bestimmungen) in the narrower sense, but truly onto
logical affirmations of being (of nature)',"
35
HUMAN ESSENCE AND HISTORY
So far we tried to survey and concisely analyze the main attributes of the
Marxian concept of 'human essence'. As we have seen, according to this
conception the 'essence of man' is to be found in work, sociality, and
consciousness,' and in that universality which embraces these three mo
ments and expresses itself in each of them. Now we must address ourselves
primarily to the question of what is meant by this concept of 'human
essence', what is designated by this notion within Marx's philosophy. In
answering this question it will be possible to explicate some features of the
Marxian conception of history and, at the same time, to throw light on
some further important traits of 'human essence', primarily on the
definition of man as a free natural being.
The most natural answer to our question is offered in the assumption
that Marx meant by 'human essence' the ensemble of those fundamental
traits which remain untouched by the historical development of mankind,
which are inseparable from man as such and are characteristic of every
human individual in any form of social life. This is essentially the position
represented, for example, in the interesting study addressed to this ques
tion by the Polish philosopher M. Fritzhand: 'That is to say, the "essence
of man" can include solely such elements which not only are characteristic
exclusively of men, but also remain invariable constituent parts of the
repertoire of human traits, i.e. which are inseparable from men in any fom
of their social existence." And from this interpretation he drews the
conclusion: 'The "nature" of the proletariat coincides with the "huma!
essence" in no small degree, since, according to Marx, under capitalis
conditions the proletariat possesses not much more that that simpt
humanit., that 'human essence', whose full and free manifestation in lif
and activity is foreclosed JUSt by capitalism for the great masses of th
proletariat'.2
This interpretation, however, cannot be reconciled with Marx's text
First of all, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, where he discus�
the problem of'human essence' in the greatest detail, Marx expressly stat'
that as a result of alienation it is precisely 'human essence' which
alienated and taken . away from the proletariat (in the sense that rI
proletariat cannot realize it in own life), so that it can only be regain,
..... Human essence and history
through the revolutionary transformation of the whole society - and this
surely does not mean that the proletariat lacks that simple humanit., i.e. the
ensemble of human traits that belong to, and characterize, each and every
man. 'Alienated labour hence turns the generic essence (Gattungswesen) of
man, the nature as well as his mental generic capacity, into an essence alien
to him, into the means of his individual existence. It alienates from man his
own body and the external nature, as well as his spiritual essence, his
human essence'.' And Marx's broader, general formulation, in the Theses on
Feuerhach, also contradicts this interpretation. 'Feuerbach resolves the
religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no
abstraction inherent in each single individual. The human essence in its
reality is the ensamble of social relations.
Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is
consequently compelled:
1. to abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious
sentiment as something by itself and to pressupose an abstract - isolated -
individual.
2 . The human essence can therefore be comprehended by him only as
'genus' (Gattung), as an inner, dumb generality which in a natural way
unites the multitude of individuals'.'
This critique, in my opinion, is not solely directed at the concept of the
individual as an isolated, natural being. It is at the same time a critique of
the concept of 'human essence' as a sum total of abstract traits existing
independently of the historical process, characterizing every man of every
age, and presumed to dwell in each individual. Marx presupposes
throughout a historical process in the course of which the human essence
becomes the nature of men,' becomes 'natural' for men: and this process
only gains adequate realization in communism: 'Communism as positive
overcoming ofprivate property, of human selfalienation, and therefore as the
actual appropriation of the human essence by and for man . . . "
We come to the same conclusion if we examine the specific (and above
analyzed) content of Marx's notion of human essence. What concerns the
universality of man, it can hardly be understood at all as a constant feature
or conditiOh of either individual men or single social formations. And even
if we so conceived it, it would be absurd to attribute it to every age. But, as
we have seen, universality figures in Marx as a characteristic, as a particular
tendency of the overall historical development.
The case is somewhat different with the other constituents of human

essence, with that of work, sociality and consciousness. These can indeed be
conceived as necessary and permanent traits of every human individual.
But if they are really conceived in this way, then their meaning is changed
37
Human essence and history
and they lose those philosophical characteristics which Marx took to be
their substance. So for Marx work does not mean simply the process of
metabolism between man and nature constituting a necessary precondi
tion of human life ; it is - in its "anthropological" sense - also free
self-activity in which man forms, develops and appropriates his own
capacities. But the work of the individual done under conditions of
alienation, i.e. wage labour, is a forced and externally imposed activity
resulting in the increasing one-sidedness and deformation of its subject,
the acting individual; it is therefore "only the semblance of an activity . .
. " 8 As Marx points out in the Ca pital, in capitalist facrory the worker is
but a "machine for the production of surplus-value", thus his activity is
not "work" in the "anthropological"-philosophical meaning of this term
but merely "abstract labour", in the sense in which Marx uses this
expression in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts9 (a sense not
identical with the later, economic use of the term) . The difference
between the philosophic notion of "work" and its everyday concept (as
wage-earning activity of the individual) which empirically generalizes its
concrete traits and conditions in capitalist society, is clearly shown in the
fact that Marx in the German Ideology repeatedly considers the "abolition of
. labour" (Aufhebung der Arbeit) in the latter sense to be one of the most
fundamental preconditions of a communist society. !O
The case is similar with man's sociality. Naturally, the individual is
always a 'social being', i.e. a being who can live only in and through
society, and whose existence and nature are determined by the subsisting
social relations. But in capitalism the dependence of the individual on the
social whole does not mean collective existence, his relations with other
men are not personal human relations constituting a foundation for such a
collective life, and the social determination of his existence does not mean
the many-sided appropriation of needs and capacities hisrorically created by
the whole mankind. As a consequence of the atomization and deperso
nalization characteristic of commodity production, 'the society of this
alienated man is the carricature of his real community (Gemeinwesen), of
his true generic life'." Finally, the situation is again analogous in the case
of consciousness. Consciousness is naturally an attribute belonging to
every human individual, to every normal member of the species homo
sapiens. Bu t ever since the emergence of division of labour, there have been
a separation and opposition between mental and physical labour, and as a
consequence of it, the empirical, everyday consciousness of individuals has
become increasingly divorced from the generic development of social
consciousness and self-consciousness, from the progress made in the social
spheres of intellectual production, i.e. in sciences and arts; it has become
fetishistic, a prisoner of socially conditioned appearances distorting reality
38
and thereby perpetuating the existing order of things. On the other hand,
and corresponding to this, on the level of intellectual production and
social consciousness proper, 'ideologies' have evolved, distorted-alienated
expressions of the separation and alienation of thought from praxis, from
reality. The significance of this question is manifested in the whole
Marxian problematic of 'jaLse consciousness'.
Summing up the above discussion, we may state that the concepts of
work, sociality, and consciousness, regarded as empirically constant and
shared characteristics of every human individual, are not identical with the
respective concepts used by Marx in the characterization of the con
stituents of 'human essence'. For under the conditions of alienation these
three determinan ts, applied to the individuals, are only partially, abstractly
valid, and not in their total 'anthropological'-philosophical sense. And it is
in this connection that Marx calls the man of alienated society an 'abstract
individual'.
On the basis of the above, therefore, the interpretation of 'human
essence' as the ensemble of fundamental and invariant traits found in every
human being' would seem to be unacceptable. This does not mean that
Marx would have denied the existence of essentially constant, historically
permenent traits in human development. (We can refer here, for exemple,
to the observation in The German ideology, where he speaks of those needs
and 'desires' which traverse every historical era and change only their
forms). But.he apparently did not consider these traits and characteristics to
be decisive for the understanding of man and human history; he did not
iden tify them with the 'essence' of man.
At the same time, already the fact of his acknowledging the existence of
such constant traits, and above all, his concern with the general charac
teristics of the �essence of man', indicates that Marx's conception cannot be
characterized as a radical historical relativism. The point here, however, is
not simply that there are certain abstract traits which remain invariant
through the historical transformation and change of the 'nature' of con
crete, real men, but above all, that this never-ceasing formation of ' human
nature' is itself a unified process which can be comprehended and charac
terized in its unity.
This last remark in a certain sense gives uS a key to the understanding of
the Marxian concept of 'human essence'. Marx meant, it seems, by 'human
essence' primarily those characteristics of the real historical existence of
mankind which make it possible to comprehend history as a continuous and
unifiedprocess that has a devehpmental tendency. The universality of �an �nd
(as we shall see) his freechm mark the general direction of the hIstoncal
progress of humanity, while the characterization of man as a consetOUS soetal
being engaged in material productive selfactivity refers to those necessary
39
traits, chose dimensions of this total developmental process on the basis of

which the above historical tendency unfolds and in the spheres of which it
becomes manifest.l2
Whoever would resolve the question of human essence, must indicate
characteristics that will establish the unity of human species, on the one
hand, and demonstrate its distinction from all the other species of the living
world, on the other. One of the distinguishing features of Marxian
thought is precisely that it does not consider this cask accomplished with
the setting forth of those conseant traits which, independent of actual
historical process, are characteristic of every man and characterize only man.
For, according to Marx, it is just ehe fact chat man has a history (in the strict
sense of the term) that constitutes the real specificiey of human existence,
and therefore to abstrace man from this historiciey would mean to disre
gard his mose essential craie. Naeurally, also ' . . . sheep and dogs in eheir
present form, bue malgre eux, are produces of a historical process'." Bue in
ehe case of animals their 'historiciey' is the resulc of whae is, in ehe final
analysis, only a selective accumulaeion of changes broughe aboue by
environmencal factors accidental and exeernal to, and independent of, ehe
given species (so animals have a hisrory 'in spice of themselves': malgre
eux). Wieh man, on the other hand, history does not simply 'happen';
mankind itself makes ie own history, man essentially forms and transforms
his own naeure by his own actions and deeds. For Marx the historical
process cannoe be conceived as the simple resulcant of a series of discon
nected and independent social changes externally andlor accidentally
imposed upon men. Rather history is the process of human 'self-creation',
a continuous process whereby man forms and transforms himself through
his own activity, through his own work, in the direction of an increasing
freedom and universality." And the principial characteristic, the 'erue
essence' of man lies precisely in the presence of this self-activity whereby he
creates andforms his own subjectivity. The individual becomes and is a human
individual precisely because he actively engages and participates in this
process, and this is possible only because he has appropriated some of the
objectified results and achievements of previous human progress within
the limits of his time and on the scale of his own social possibilities. Thus
the real unity of the human species itself cannot be truly comprehended
apart from this historical process, but only in and through it. This unity is
actually nothing else but the inner unity and continuity of the process of
human history. So if we mean by 'philosophical anthropology' some extra
or suprahistorical (or even simply ahistorical) characterization of human
traits, then Marx has no anthropology, and he would deny the usefulness of
sucll an an thropology for the understanding of man's essence. If, on the
other hand, we would understand by anthropology an answer given to the
40
question about 'human essence', an attempted resolution of the question:

'what is essentially man!', then there is a Marxian 'anthropology', only it is
not an abstraction from history, but rather an abstraction of history itself.
That is, Marx's conception is diametrally opposed to all those trends of
thought which sharply divide and counterpose anthropology and
sociology, which set the study of man's 'essence' in opposition to the
socio-historical study of man. For Marx the 'human essence' lies precisely
in the 'essence' or inner unity of the total social development of
humanity l '
A s can be seen ftom the above, the bearer or subject of the 'human
essence' for Marx is not the single individual, but human society ap
prehended in the continuity of its historical change and development. This
fact is utilized by all those who - like Karl Popper - accuse Marx of the
hypostazation of society into a super-individual, independent entity and of
the (direct or indirect) justification of totalitarianism. But nothing could
be more unjust than this charge. In the Marxian conception, society is
nothing else but the totality of the actual relations of real, concrete
historical individuals; it could not therefore exist externally to or above
those individuals, neither as a kind of 'super-entity' composed of them as
subordinaced elements, nor as a value (or goal) independent of, and
transcendent to, them. The separation of 'society' as such from the life
activity of the individuals who constitute it and the opposition of one to
the other is for Marx a typical ideological illusion occasioned by the
realities of the historical period of alienacion; it is the distorted reflection
of the facts of alienated society.'6 As Marx emphasizes, individuals always
start with themselves." But as he also points out, society is not merely a
mechanical agglomeration of the individuals who consticute it. 'Society
does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations and
relations within which these individuals stand'." So the Marxian concep
tion is juSt as much opposed to the nominalist-reductionist view of society,
as to its 'essentialist' hypostazation.
But we are here concerned not with the general question of the relation
between the individual and society. When Marx wished to resolve the
question of 'human essence', he sought primarily those traits which would
characterize human history as history, as the process of man's self-trans
formation constituting the most significant distinguishing feature of
human existence. But history can be apprehended as a unifiedprocess only
from the point of view of society. Because from this perspective it appears
not only as technological development but also as an 'anthropological' progress,
as the continuous progressive broadening and deepening of the range of
the abilities, needs, forms of intercourse and knowledge evolved by, the
whole of society. From the point of view of the social whole, history unfolds
41
itself as the process of man's gradual and unceasing transformation into a

universal free being. But thus far in history this process has not meant,
simultaneously, the emergence of increasingly universal and free in
dividuals. From the point of view of individuals there is no unified and
unequivocal criterion with the help of which we could comprehend
hisrory as 'development'. Of course, there is no total, absolute separation
between individual-personal and societal development, even in the age of
alienation. First, history is 'development' even from the point of view of a
succession of individuals if we understand this term in that broad, non
specific sense in which it designates simply all irreversible processes:
evidently, the individuals of a later hisroric era possess numerous attributes
which could not possibly characterize the previous generations. Further,
even in the era of 'prehistory' (in the Marxian sense of this term) there can
occur (especially in the progressive phase of development of some society)
shorter or longer historical periods when the conditions are created for a
relatively many-sided and harmonious development for relatively broad
groups of individuals. 19 Still, the above generalization stands, especially if
we consider not the representative but the average individuals of successive
epochs and generations. For from the individuals' point ofview, we cannot
characterize the hisrorical process with a single, definite direction - due to its
contradictory tendencies. That is, as regards individuals, there is no single
criterion which would make it possible to describe unambiguously succe
ding hisrorical eras as 'more advanced' or 'superior'. Can the men of
today's civilization, who clearly have both more extensive and more
variegated needs and broader possibilities of their satisfaction, set over the
individuals of previous historical epochs for whom the circle of these
possibilities was undoubtedly much more limited, but who were able, en
masse (albeit within definite limits), ro fulfill their need for creative and
meaningful work - which, as a general phenomehon, is impossible in our
days amidst capitalist social relations? Can the unlimited growth of the
compass of objective, functional social relations realized through market
and commodity production compensate for the dissolution of really per
sonal conracts, the dissolution of real communal life which appeared as the
other side of this very process? And one could go on ro formulate and ask
similar questions. This is not a renewal of the Rousseauan standpoint.
There is no question here of representing that what appears from the point
of view of the whole society as progress as some unified process of
regression on the side of individuals, as of the advance of the 'arts and
sciences' would have to be accompanied by the decline of 'morals'. For
from the point of view of the hisrorically successive, typical individuals,
hisrory appears neither as progressive nor as regressive, since it cannot be
characterized as a unified process at all. Evidently, the universalization of
42
the human genus does not necessarily mean the historical formation of
increasingly universal and many-sided individuals. This total historical
tendency can be realized thtough the diversification and extension of
relations and in tercourse between 'one-dimensional', limited and narrowly
particular, or as Marx would say: 'abstract' individuals as well.
And on this point Marx's 'anthropology' is closely related to his theory of
alienation. It is not our task here to discuss in detail the complex prob
lematic involved in the notion of alienation. Marx treats this problem in
his various works from various aspects: primarily from the point of view of
the individual in his early works (this holds true first of all of the Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts, which are characterized by a definite attempt
to employ the method of Hegel's Phenomenology reinterpreted in a
materialistic manner) and from the point of view of the society as a whole
in his later writings (principially in The German Ideology and the Grun
drisse). In the few observations which follow we rely primarily on these
later works and we build on the more comprehensive (and to some extent
more mature) treatment given therein.
In The German Ideology Marx characterizes the process of alienation in
the following manner: The social power, ie. the multiplied productive
force, which arises through the cooperation (Zusammenwirken) of dif
ferent individuals, as it is determined within the division oflabour, appears
to these individuals, since their cooperation is not voluntary but naturally given.
(naturwiichsig), not as their own united power but as an alien force
existing outside of them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant,
which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a
specific series of phases and stages independently of, nay even governing, the
will and the action of men. This [is) "alienation" - to express ourselves in
a manner comprehensible to the philosophers . . .'20 In capitalis society,
where the phenomenon of alienation becomes most predominant and
universal,2l it appears first in the economic sphere: The increased products
of labour, which are at the same time its objective conditions, the con
ditions of reproduction, continuously confront labour as capital, i.e. as
forces - personified in the capitalist - which are alienated from labour and
dominate it'. The producer is therefore controlled by the product, the
subject by the object, labour whiCh is being realized by the labour realized
in an object . . . The relationship of labour to the conditions of labour is
turned upside down, so that it is not the worker who make use of the
conditions of labour, but the conditions of labour make use of the
worker . . .'22 That is, 'all social powers (Potenzen) of production are
productive powers of capital, and it appears itself as their subject'.23 Which
means that the objective conditions of production, including the form of
cooperation of workers and the abstract knowledge on which the pro-
43
duction process in its rotality is based, become separated from concrete
living labour and from the working subjects and are transformed into
instruments for the appropriation and increase of surplus value, for the
exploitation of the workers, i.e., become the power of capital over labour. 24
A t the same time, the concept of alienation serves to characterize not
merely the economic sphere but the rotality of social life - it accentuates
just some common, interrelated features and traits of all spheres of social
existence in a definite period of human hisrory. So in political sphere it
refers to state as 'alienated public power' and 'illusory community', be
coming independent from the real (and privatized) life of individuals; as
regard to human relations in general to the reification of the intercourse
and commerce between individuals and to their ensuing atomization that
follows the dissolution of 'naturally given' communities; in the sphere of
intellectual production to the fetishization of everyday consciousness and
to the appearence of ideologies which translate the separation of mental
labour from the physical one into the sway of ideas over matter and
material life. And alienation is a 'total' socio-historical phenomenon in
another sense, too: it refers not only to the exploited classes but embraces
and affects all classes of society, although in a different, and even in an
antithetical way. 'The propertied class and the class of the proletariat
represent the same human self-alienation. But the former feels comfortable
and confirmed in this self-alienation, knowing that this alienation is its own
power and possessing in it the semblance of a human existence; the latter
feels itself ruined in this alienation and sees in it its impotence and the
actuality of an inhuman existence. The proletariat, to use Hegel's word, is
debased and indignant (Empiirung) at its debasement - a feeling to which
it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and
its situation in life, a situation that is openly, decisively, and comprehen
sively the negation of that nature' '''
In examining the historical origin and the 'necessity' of alienation
Marx, in The German Ideology, describes it as an aspect and constituent of
that total historical process which on the other side is defined by the
emergence and subsistence of the naturally given (naturwuchsig) division of
labour'6 and ofprivate property. 'And finally, the division of labour offers us
the first example of how, as long as man remains in naturally given
(naturwuchsig) society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the
particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as the division of
activity is not voluntary but naturally given, man's own deed becomes an
alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being con
trolled (beherrscht) by him . . . This fixation of social activity, this con
solidation of our own products into a material (sachliche) power above us,
44
growing our of our control, thwarting our exceptations, bringing ro
naught our calculations, is one of the chief aspects in the hisrorical
development up till now'." Further: 'Individuals have started always from
themselves; they always start from themselves. Their relations are the
relations of their actual life process. How is it that their relations become
independent of them, that the forces of their life become overly powerful
(iibermachtig) against them? In a word, the division of labour, the degree of
which always depends on the historical level of the force of production'."
And, 'Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical
expressions: in one the same thing is affirmed with reference ro activity as
is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity' 29
Marx further elaborates and specifies this idea of interconnection and
parallelism between the naturally given division of labour, private property
and alienation in his later economic works. In his examination of the
precapitalist social formations and forms of ownership Marx comes ro the
conclusion that the transformation of the 'natural' division of labour
within the family and band into traditional-hereditary, 'naturally given'
social division of labour (a transformation due to the expansion of social
contacts and the formation of larger social units) takes place still on the
basis of communal ownership of land. In this first and in a sense 'tran
sitional' (despite its great actual resistance to change) instance of class
society - in the Asiatic mode ofproduction'O there already emerged certain
-
traits of alienation, although in rudimentary, primitive, and consequently

rather crude and brutal form (as, for example, in the caste system)." The
private ownership of land, which first evolved in history in the conditions
peculiar to Greek antiquity, and the 'classical' path of development of class
societies based on private property, which eventally drew the entire popu
lation of the globe into this 'typical' line of development through the
creation of the capitalist world market, went hand in hand with the
deepening of alienation and its gradual extension into all spheres of human
activity. This tendency of alienation to become universal reaches its apex in
capitalist society. Only it must be emphasized again that 'in Marx's view
alienation is not a static condition but a historicalproass that has a definite
tendency, and also that the tendency of alienation to become universal does
not mean that it can in any time be total and absolute, annihilating all
traces of the autonomy and subjectivity of individuals who compose the
given society. What is more, since the historical development of alienation
coincided - as we will subsequently show - with the historical emergence
of human individuality, the growth of alienation in some respect meant
the simultaneous creation and formation of the subjective preconditions for
its elimination as well.
The naturally given division of labour, as it follows from its charac-
45
terization, already necessarily alienates the individual from his own pro
ductive activity_ In relation to the individual, work loses its quality of
self-activity, it ceases to serve the many-sided development of the agent and
does not evolve freely his abilities. On the contrary, the more the social
division of labour is developed, the more work becomes an external and
coerced activity resulting in the one-sided deformation of the labouring
individual, an activity in which he 'develops no free physical and mental
energy but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind'" (At the same time,
however, because of the mutual complementarity and exchange of one
sided activities implied in the very notion of social division of labour, with
respect to the social whole work preserves its character of an activity creating .
and developing new human wants and abilities) . The institution ofprivate
property separates the worker from the product of his labour, makes the
result of his own activity an alien object belonging to someone else, who
thereby has a command over this activity. In this way work as objectifi
cation is transformed into alienated labour, and on this basis the general
phenomenon of alienation spreads over all spheres and aspects of social life,
with the result that the individuals lose the control and power over their
own deeds and creations, over the social forces and products of human
activity, and these in turn became alien objective powers disposing over
their own lives. Capitalist production, as the most consummate form of
alienation, is nothing else but 'a special form of development of the social
productive powers of labour, which confront the labourer as powers of
capital rendered independent and stand therefore in direct opposition to
the labourer's own development'." Thus, under conditions of alienation,
the discrepancy between individual and social development, of which we
spoke earlier, necessarily ensues. To be more precise, alienation is nothing but
this discrepancy, whereby the historical progress of mankind is separated
from the development of single individuals, whereby the self-formative
and creative aspects of human activity appear only in the larger context of
the social whole, but are not present on the effects of the individual
activity upon the concerned individual himself. Alienation, therefore, is
nothing but the separation and opposition of man's essence and existence, in the
sense Marx has applied this terms. And transcending alienation means the
elimination of this disaccord and conflict between human essence and
existence - that is, the creation of the conditions for a historical develop
ment which ends the inverse and antagonistic relationship between the
wealth and many-sidedness of social life and the limitation and one
dimensionality of the lives of individuals. The end of alienation thus
means the creation of such social consitions under which it will become
possible to judge the general level of societal development, of human
progress by the developmental level of single individuals, when the uni-
46
versality and freedom of human genus will be directly expressed in the free
and many-sided lives of men. 'Communism as positive overcoming ofprivate
property as human se!fatienation, and thus as the actual appropriation of the
human essence through and for man; therefore as the complete and con
scious restoration of man to himself within the total wealth of previous
development, the restoration of man as a social, that is human being. This
communism . . . is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man
and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the
conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation,
freedom and necessity, individual and genus. It is the riddle of history
solved and knows itself as this solution'." Furthermore, ' . . . although at
first the development the human genus takes place at the cost of the
majority of human individuals and even classes, at the end it breaks
through this antagonism and coincides with the development of the single
individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved
by a historical process during which the individuals are sacrificed . . .' '' .
This line of thought shows that what Marx said about the relationship
of certain abstract-general socio-economic categories to social development
can be applied, in some sense, to the concept of 'human essence' as well.
Speaking of the general economic category of 'labour' (Arbeit), he
emphasized: 'The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economy
places at the head of its discussion, and which expresses a relation of
greatest antiquity, valid in all forms of society, nevertheless in this ab
stractness achieves practical truth only as a category of most modern
society'. l6 The general philosophical notion of 'human essence' is,
similarly, 'valid' for, and applicable to, the whole process of human history.
But it achieves practical truth only in communism, because only then does
the essence of man become the real 'essence' of men, only then does it
become the characteristic of concrete individuals. This concept is valid for
the preceding social epochs of 'prehistory' only if we abstract from the
actual life situation and activity of the concerned individuals, i.e. only if we
disregard all that is essentialfor them, and we examine the progress of society
as a whole. In the historical period of alienation this concept is, therefore,
valid only abstractly and 'in itself'. Its concrete validity and content is
achieved only with the actualization of that multidimensional and free
individuality which gradually unfolds in the practico-historical process of
communist development.
And this is the reason why the differentiation of capitalism and com
munism is for Marx not simply a distinction between twO successive social
formations but represents a difference within the order of values too. Man
is, by his essence, a universal free being who forms himself through his
own self-activity in the direction of an ever widening mastery of nature and
47
an ever more universal intercourse, autonomy and consciousness. This
tendency of human development asserts itself in every social form, but in
the general era of alienation it is valid only abstractly, 'in itself, as a
characteristic of the totality of social progress. Surely, the abstraction of an
over-all societal progress and that of human genus as its subject and bearer
are not empty ones; they have their objective, empirical correlates in the
systems of objectifications, of objectified social relations and in their
development. Nevertheless, as far as the foregoing ·history is concerned
these are abstractions, 'abstract determinations' not only in the trivial
logical, but also in the (Hegelian-Marxian) philosophical sense of this
word, since speaking of the successive historical change of objectifications
etc. as progress, we have to disregard just the most essential fact about
them, the fact due to which they are not simply dead objects, but human
objectifications, respectively social relations, i.e. the fact of their incorpo
ratedness - and its way and manner - in the life of the concrete historical
individuals, the ultimate and real subjects of social life. Only with the
historical-practical transcendence of alienation can the human essence
become a concrete determination 'for itself, characterizing the living
individuals and their real communities. And i t is for this reason that
communism wins Marx's moral affirmation as a society which makes
possible the simultaneous and interrelated free development of the human
genus and of individual men, and therefore the 'adequate' realization of
human essence. And this is what differentiates mankind's 'prehistory', that
is, that history which is not yet 'the actual (wirkliche) history of man as an
already posited (vorausgesetztes) subject but only man's act of creation
(Erzeugungsakt), the history of his origin'," from his future 'actual', real
history. For the concept of 'prehistory', which traverses Marx's whole life
work, is not to be understood as a simple metaphof. ,The process of human
genesis is, according to Marx, not completed with the formation of homo
sapiens as a biological species, a species to which organisms with definite,
constant and identical biological and anthropophysical characteristics be
long. Indeed, this is only the starting point and foundation from which
man's social-historical genesis, the genesis of man as a 'generic being' departs
and begins. This social genesis is the process of 'prehistory', which at the
end, gives rise to the human species as mankind, as a real and conscious
unity of globally interacting and interconnected individuals," on the one
hand, and to the concrete, many-sided and multidimensional human
individuality which truly represents the historically achieved stage of deve
lopment of the 'genus', on the other. And this twofold, but unified process
can be completed only through the revolutionary communist transfor
mation of the existing alienated system of social relations. 'Universally
developed individuals, whose social relations, like their own communal
48
(gemeinschaftlich) relations, are hence also subordinated to their own

communal control, are not a product of nature but of hisrory. The degree
and universality of the development of capabilities (Vermogen) where this
individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of ex
change values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only
the alienation of the individual from himself and others but also the
universality and comprehensiveness (Allseitigkeit) of his relations and
capacities'.'9 Alienation in this context is not merely a negative precondition
for the unfolding of human essence (as the earthly 'vale of tears' is to
salvation), but - in a contradictory form - also its positive formative
period. Only through the era of alienation and its mechanisms are the
purely 'naturally given', local and restricted communities dissolved, and
only thereby does an increasingly broader sphere of human intercourse
unfold, one which at the end virtually embraces the mankind as a whole
(world market). This process simultaneously appears as the transformation
of all those determinations of individuals (characteristics pertaining to
their social position etc.) which - although in themselves social - in earlier
stages of development appeared to them as unchangeable natural traits
inseparable from their concrete personality, into separable from, and ex
ternal to, them social determinations which they themselves may alter
through their own activity'O This is undoubtedly a process of deperso
nalization .and 'self-emptying' but only it creates the subjective precon
ditions for man's mastery over his own social relations and determinations.
Finally, although this is perhaps the most important factor, only through
the processes of alienation can that positive wealth of objectified human
wants and capacities emerge which constitutes the fundamental objective
precondition of human emancipation. And the grandeur and courage of
Marx's dialectics is shown precisely by the fact that he directly connects
this historically most 'progressive' and 'positive' aspects of alienation with
that what represents its most conspicious (and hated by him) negative
moment and ethically most deplorable element - with the unchecked
growth of exploitation. 'The productivity of capital consists, in the first
instance, even if one only considers the formal subsumption of labour
under capital, in the compulsion toperform surplus labour, labour beyond the
immediate need (Bediirftigkeit); a compulsion which the capitalist mode
of production shares with earlier modes of production, but which it
exercises and puts into effect in a manner more favourable to produc
tion'.'! And, 'The great historic aspect of capital is to create this surplus
labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere
subsistence; and its historic destiny (Bestimmung) is fulfilled as soon as,
on the one side, there has been such a development of needs that surl'lus
labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need anslOg
49
out of the individual needs themselves - and, on the other side, when the
severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations
(Geschlechter), has developed general industriousness (Arbeitsamkeit) as
the general property of the new species (Geschlecht) . . . As ceaseless
striving towards the general form of wealth, capital drives labour beyond
the limits of its natural paltriness (Naturbediirftigkeit), and thus creates
the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which
is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour
also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of
activity itself . . .'' '
+ +
+
A further problem which comes up in connection with our topic is the

question of the 'teleological' character of the Marxian view of history. The
concept of human essence presupposes an understanding of history as a
unified process with a definite direction in the sense already clarified above.
However, what makes this notion legitimate within the whole of Marx's
thought?
The idea of the inner unity of the historical process is in fact already
implied by the fundamental principles of the Marxian conception of man
and society. Man is not some sort of 'bare self-consciousness' whose
determinations arise as the result of a free and 'pure' self-activity totally
independent of the material world. The human individual is a material,
natural being who depends on his actual environment, is conditioned by
the social objects of his wants and abilities, the objects of the realization of
his life that exist independently from him. But the individual is, at the
same time, an active - humanly active - being, for whom the environ
ment is nOt an externally given fact but a material reality appropriate.. and
transformed by his own activity. Every single generation inherits and
appropriates the social 'milieu' (primarily the accumulated forces of pro
duction and the social relations) created and objectified by the preceding
generations, and it changes them in a fashion determined by its own
individuality, which was itself formed in and through this process of active
appropriation of the social reality. The products of the activity of earlier
generations determine the life conditions of the succeeding generation,
and with them, in a general way, the 'direction', the possibilities and
limitadons of its activity as well. 'History is nothing but the succession of
separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, capital, and
productive forces handed down all by preceeding generations. On the one
hand, it thus continues the traditional activity in completely changed
50
circumstances. And on the other, it modifies the old circumstances with a
completely changed activity'." Only due to this does history present 'one
continuous series (zusammenhangende Reihe) of forms of intercourse',
one unified process.
The unity of human history is therefore most intimately connected with
Marx's historical determinism; it is based on the latter, since this unity
actually means nothing but the inner determination of the historical
process itself. It means that the changes in social life are to be understood
as 'self-movement' from the inner dynamics of society itself. The exami
nation of this concept of historical determinism, which would be possible
only within an analysis of the Marxian social theory as a whole, far exceeds
the scope of this study. We merely wish to emphasize that the Marxian
notion of historical determinism does not mean the mechanical depen
dence of social activity on the ready-made external material conditions
formed by the work of earlier generations, and thus it does not postulate
but even excludes a fatalistic predetermination of the total historical
process, a determination which would affirm itself over and beyond real
human activity, be independent of it. Every generation naturally acts
'under determined circumstances', on the ground of the forces of produc
tion, forms of intercourse, institutions and cultural values, inherited and
appropriated from the past. Bu t every generation also modifies and trans
forms these circumstances and conditions - if only because these con
ditions have to be constantly reproduced by human activity. This means
that for human generations there is always given a definite scope of action
circumscribed by the 'inherited' objective conditions of their life, a range
(more or less wide, depending on the character of these conditions) of
d{fVelopmental possibilities and alternatives, and men themselves 'choose'
(knowingly or unknowingly) in their actual practice from among these
possibilities. The realization of one or another of these alternatives is
determined by the (consciously or unconsciously integrated) entirety of
concrete human activities. Historical future is not given as the set result of
some social causalities or some sort of historical teleology. It becomes
actualized only in creative socialpraxis and can be apprehended also solely
as a moment and object of this praxis.
The vulgar mechanistic understanding of the Marxian concept of his
torical determinism, which we encounter not only in some critics of
Marxism but in certain Marxist works as well (indeed, quite often) , rev�als
itself most sharply when it eliminates the question of historical alternatzves,
the existence and significance of which was emphasized both by Marx and
Lenin. Consequently, in this interpretation there remains, despite all verbal
?
distinctions, not a vestige of difference between purely natural an So�lO
historical processes, between the forms of their respective determmatlon.
51
(This tendency found its clearest expression in the fetishization of the
notion of 'social law' characteristic of Stalin and of 'standard' Marxism in
general). In this conception histOry is depicted, at best, on the analogy of
an unreliable train schedule in which it is fixed naturally in advance, at
what stations the train will arrive, only the time of arrival cannot be
altogether taken for granted. Whereas for Marx the historical necessity of a
progressive (under the given conditions) social transformation (or a his
tOrically 'superior' social formation) meant not its inevitability at all events
but rather the fact that only a definite radical change and alteration of the
existing social relations - a change made practically possible by the
attained level of material and intellectual production and corresponding to
the interests of certain large social groups, classes - can provide the actual
solution to the inner crisis of the given historical formation, by transcenc
ing its basic social contradictions. 'In order that they (i.e. men - G.M.)
not be deprived of the result attained and forfeit the fruits of civilization,
they are obliged, from the moment when the form and mode of their
intercourse (die Art und Weise ihres Verkehers) no longer corresponds to
the productive forces acquired, to change all their traditional social
forms'." Whether this 'solution' will actually occur is not guarranted by
the existence of the objective contradictions and opposing social interests,
by the presence of the crisis itself. There are no histOrical crises from which
'\
there could be but one way out; the actual issue of the crisis is always one
among many concrete histOrical alternatives. Which of these possibilities
is actualized depends on men, on their deeds, on the rl!lJolutionarypractice of
classes; and this social activity is influenced, beyond the fundamental
economic determinants by a multitude of concrete histOrical factOrs (some
of which may be entirely .accidental in respect of the basic structural
characteristics which account for the crisis itself). If, as a result of various
concrete circumstances, there is no subjective force that could consistently
carry out the revolutionary-practical task of 'histOrical solution', the crisis
could pass into a long-lasting depression which constantly recreates the
muted conflict and contradictions, or it could lead even to the destruction
of the given social formation constituting a historical regression of civili
zation. And all this, as a matter of course, implies the more or less
significant modification of the long-run histOrical perspectives, too. That
is why the Communist Manifesto speaks of the fact that class struggle 'each
time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in
the common ruin of the contending classes" "
The constantly desintegrating and continually reconstituted great eas
tern empires, based on the Asiatic mode of production, may serve as
examples of a histOrical development continually reproducing, but incap
able of solving, its basic inner contradictions, eventually passing (at least in
52
some cases) into deep and protracted depression. But even on tbe 'classical'
road of societal development we met witb. bistorical 'de�d ends' - it is
enougb to refer to tbe breakdown of development in Greek antiquity or to
tbe cboking of tbe early beginnings of capitalism in Italy of XV-XVI.
century. And Lukics rigbtly points out in bis interpretation of Marx: 'Nor
is it tbe case tbat feudal society gave birtb to capitalism organically. It
merely 'brougbt fortb tbe material agencies for its own dissolution'. It
freed 'forces and passions witbin tbe womb of society wbicb feel tbem
selves to be fettered by it'. And in tbe course of development, wbicb
includes 'a series of forcible metbods', tbese forces laid tbe social foun
dation of capitalism. Only after tbis transition was completed did tbe
economic laws of capitalism come into force'. 4 6
And for tbe very same reason tbe conceptual clarification of some
'bistorical necessity' (in tbe above sense) as tbe form ofprediction of social
events, unlike prediction in natural sciences, is not merel;· a tbeoretical act.
By laying bare a concrete bistorical perspective social tbinking make
conscious one possible avenue of development, a possible outcome and
consequence of social actions in present situation, and tbis in itself is
necessarily an element, a part of tbe struggle for tbe realization of tbis
possibility (or, on tbe contrary, against it), it is itself a way of mobilization
of social forces for or aginst some alternative, tbus tbe tbeoretical act itself
bas an intrinsic practical quality. As Gramsci put it, 'One can foresee only
tbe sttuggle and not its concrete episodes; tbese must be tbe result of
opposing forces in continuous movement, never reducible to fixed
quantities, because in tbem quantity is always becoming quality. Really,
one 'foresees' to tbe extent to wbicb one acts, to wbicb one makes a
voluntary effort and so contributes concretely to creating tbe 'foreseen'
result. Foresigbt reveals itself, tberefore, not as a scientific act of knowl
edge but as tbe abstract expression of tbe effort one makes, tbe practical
metbod of creating a collective will'." And it is in tbis sense tbat Marx's
concept of 'buman essence' must also be understood. To perceive in work,
in tbe self-formative free and universal activity of men, tbe unity of bistory
could be possible only wben buman production was looked upon from tbe
communist perspective of 'liberation of labour', from tbe stance of tbe
proletariat'S revolutionary struggle. Tbus tbe Marxian concept of 'buman
essence', tbe Marxist pbilosopby of man as a socio-bistorical being is not
simply a particular 'interpretation of tbe world', an explanation of tbe
social and bistorical life. Tbis conception itself, as theory, is part of tbe
bistorical struggle for tbe universalization and freedom of man, for tbe
change and transformation of tbe 'world', of tbe present state of society; it is
part of tbe proletariat's rl!lJo/utionary praxis. 48
It follows from tbe Marxian conception of bistorical determinism tbat
53
neither the actual course of history nor the developmental tendencies of its
particular epochs can be comprehended through some sort of abstract
formula, but only through an analysis of actual life relations, socio-eco
nomic conditions, and forms of activity growing out of them. Marx
sharply opposes every school of thought which would subject history to
some lawfulness or purposiveness (in this connection the twO amount to
the same thing) external and alien to the content of the activities of
concrete historical individuals. That meditative conception of history
according to which the sequence of historical epochs is determined by
some higher transcendent goal or purpose, a conception which transforms
history and society itself into active and acting personages in order to
comprehend the course of human progress through a single abtract
scheme, is entirely alien to Marx's thinking." The Marxian conception of
history and society offers no general formula from which one could deduce
the main course of past events and at the same time construct a priori the
future path of mankind's development. This conception is, rather, a method
which makes it possible to grasp theoretically the past and the present, the
real, empirical content of history in its totality and movement as it emerges
from the living interaction of concrete human activities, and to form it on
practically but with the knowledge of objectives corresponding to the
needs and exigencies of the present and the conditions of their realisation.
But is this not contradicted by the fact the Marx understands (in
connection with the concept of human essence) the whole of human
history as a unified process with a definite direction, with an 'inherent
purpose'50? It must be seen, however, that this general tendency of history
expressed in the concept of human essence does not somehow exist outside
and above the concrete processes of historical change as a law directing and
governing these processes; it is rather the one-sided characteristic and sum
mary result of these series of concrete historical transformations and activ
ities connected to and building upon, one another, a characteristic which
can be separated from these processes only in the abstraction of thought.
One may point here to the fact that in all cases where we are faced with
some relatively independent system whose changes of state result from its
inner dynamics and laws, and not merely from external influences, it is
possible to define the 'developmental tendency' of the system in question
(as a 'phenomenological' law pertaining to it). But while the existence of
these relatively independent, 'self-moving' systems in inanimate and
animate nature is always based either on a relative isolation vis-i-vis the
environment (thermodynamical system, for example) or on a relative
permanence and stability of relations with the environment (as in the case of
living organisms), the histOrical development of humanity is characterized
first of all by the fact that its basis is constituted by a changing, ever more
54
wider and dynamic interaction with �nature' as environment. For this very
reason the general tendency of this development, its 'inherent purpose'
presents itself not as progressive approximation to some inevitable,
predetermined final condition, to a 'fateful end' (maximum of entropy,
death of the organism), but rather as an in principio unlimited tendency of
.
progress.
This whole argument from analogy is, however, in an essential respect
insufficient and even seriously misleading. One may perhaps say that the
'system' of society is not independent in one respect, in which all inorganic
and organic systems are eo ipso independent - in respect of knowledge
concerning it. But the real difference lies in the character of the question
itself. To grasp the general direction of history in fact amounts, as we have
pointed out earlier, to seeking out the role and the place of the problems
and conflicts created by the present historical situation within the devel
opment of mankind, and on the basis of this deciding forn and mobilizing
in support of, some developmental possibility that grows our from present
social struggles and which can only be realized by a 'collective will', by the
practical social activity of masses. The very task is not purely 'objective' and
theoretical, but a historical and practical one. According to the great
principle of rationalism, a principle which Marxism not only adopts, but to
which it gives a firm theoretical foundation, man is only capable of
'knowing' what he himself can create. To define the 'direction' of history,
therefore, twcomes · a meaningful theoretical question only when (and
because) it becomes a real practical task for men to direct their own history.
History as such h�s no 'purpose', it is neither 'meaningful' nor 'meaning
less' independent of conscious human activities which can not only 'ascribe'
some meaning to it, but make it meaningful. History becomes purposeful
and meaningful to the degree that men become capable of assigning a
historical perspective, a historical meaning, to their own actions on the basis
of, at least relatively, correct knowledge about their concrete situation,
about their given social, existential conditions, collisions and practical
possibilities. In the final analysis, therefore, history will be 'meaningful'
only when the acting individuals themselves will be capable of controlling
the historical consequences of their own social activity, capable of deter
mining, within the set, 'determined' circle of their possibilities, their own
development by their own conscious and collective decisions. For this to
become possible certain .objective conditions are necessary which are
themselves the results of a long historical development. But once these
preconditions have been created and are present, the theoretical clarifica
tion of the 'direction' of historical progress amounts to making conscious
the general developmental possibility offered by the age. And this clarifi
cation itself is then not only a matter of pure theory, but apractical deed, an
integral part of rendering history meaningful.
55
The concept of 'human essence' is a philosophical abstraction that
defines, in the above sense, the basic aspects and characteristics of the
general tendency of the total historical process. It follows from the very
substance of the Marxian conception that one cannot derrive from this
philosophical concept the specific characteristics of particular historical
eras, their emergence and their destruction (as, for example, the histOrical
necessity of the emergence and the transcending of alienation). Marx bases
the 'historical necessity' of a revolutionary communist transformation of
the existing social order on the concrete analysis of capitalist social
relations and the conditions and inner contradictions created by it, and he
is highly critical of those who, like Feuerbach or the 'true socialists' in the
mid-forties, would deduce communism and its necessity from the essence
of man." As Marx emphasizes vis-a-vis Hegel, the essence of man does not
move, act, or exist by itself as an imaginary person but only in its actual
human existence - that is, in individuals, concrete, historically determined
and historically changing individuals, and through their activity. The
human essence is, in the final analysis, only an abstraction, one-sided
characterization of the histOrical developmental process of successive
generations of individuals regarded in its totality and from the perspective
of a radical-revolutionary transformation of their present situation. At the
same time, this abstraction plays an unquestionably important role in the
Marxist conception of history, since it alone makes possible the clear and
unambiguous elucidation of the concepts of historical continuity andprog
ress. For the Marxian conception of progress, as opposed to its widespread
vulgar interpretations, does not set up the development of the forces of
production in the technical sense as the sole and exclusive criterion of
historical advance. What above all serves as the measure of histOrical
progress for Marx is the extent to which objective conditions are created
that make the rapid, uninhibited development of essential human powers
(wants and capacities), and in connection with them the unfolding of
multidimensional free individuality, possible - the extent to which the
'human essence' evolves and becomes realizable in concrete, individual
human existence (and the development of the forces of production is only
one, albeit fundamentally important, moment within the complex of these
conditions). Only in this manner does it become possible to view the
particular epochs and individual phenomena of history from a generally
valid axiological standpoint, not according to some transcendent scale of
values, but through an objective, historically immanent and at the same
time universal characterization of human development. Because what
appear for Marx as human values - values arising from, and existing within,
the process of historical change, but once created having a claim to
objectivity and generality - are precisely those aspects of human develop-
56
ment which express and promote - in objective or subjective form - the

unfolding and actualization of the 'human essence'.
Generally speaking, the relationship of the philosophical concept of
'human essence' to concrete historical and , social analysis clearly
exemplifies what Marx claimed to be generaliy valid for the relationship of
philosdphy to the study of history: 'With the depiction (Darstellung) of
reality, independent philosophy loses its medium of existence. At best, a
summary of the most general'results, abstractions derived from the obser
vation (Betrachtung) of the historical development of men, can take its
place. Apart from actual history, these abstractions have in themselves no
value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of
historical material and to indicate the sequence of its particular Strata. By
no means do they give us a recipe or schema, as philosophy does, for
trimming the epochs of history'." In Marxism there is no sharp, principal
dividing line between philosophy and 'social scrences', critical analyses of
some historicaliy concrete form of social existence.
The examination of the relationship between the Marxian conception
of human essence and that of historical determinism permits to say a few
words, complementary to the previous analysis, about a further trait of
human essence not discussed explicitly so far, though being of great
significance in Marx - human freedom. 'Man is a generic being not only in
that he practicaliy and theoretically makes his own genus (Gattung), as
weli as that of other things, his object, but also - and this is only another
expression for the same thing - in that he treats himself (er sich zu sich
selbst . . . verhalt) as the present and living genus, that is, he treats himself
as a universal and therefore free being'."
What is then the meaning of this concept of freedom pertaining to the
very essence of man? Marx definitely rejects the idealist interpretation of
freedom as independence from real world ('Lossein von der wirklichen
Welt'), as exemption from 'external' (material, social) influences and
determinations. If we understand by freedom an inherent characteristic of
all human individuals as rational beings making them able to transcend,
in one radical act of consciousness, ali social-historical limitations and to
liberate themselves from every external determination, then this concept is
only an ideological iliusion. In general, freedom is for Marx not some sort
of eternal, existentially given metaphysical quality of man; it is not a fixed
fact of human existence hut a historical capacity and situation which only
unfolds, to an ever growing degree, in social development.
The concept of freedom has for Marx a double, intimately linked,
abStract-negative, and concrete-positive meaning. In the negative sense
freedom is freedom from something, it means man's capacity to liberate
himself through his real activity from those conditions, relations, charac-
57
teristics which have turned historically into limitations, restraints upon
the manifestation of his socially formed personality. The possibility of this,
in general, is already implied in the fact of human consciousness. Man
relates not only to his external environment but also to himself and to his
own life-activity; he can make the social and - in some sense and within
some limits - even the biological determinations of his life the object of
his activity - i.e. something that he can consciously influence and change.
'An animal is immediately one with its life activity, not distinct from it.
An animal is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself into an object
of will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a
determination with which he immediately identifies. Conscious life
activity immediately distinguishes man from the life activity of the animal.
Only thereby is he a generic being. Only on that account is his activity free
accivity'.54
Freedom in this sense appears as the expression of the principle of
negativity, as man's capacity to continually transcend himself, to transform
his own nature through his own conscious activity. But this negatively
understood freedom, this constant release and liberation from limitations,
is at the same time, in its historical tendency, also something positive.
' . . . the real destruction of limitations means, at the same time, the very
positive development of the force of production, real energy, and the
satisfaction of irresistible needs - the expansion of the power of in
dividuals . . .''' Freedom, in this positive sense, is power which man procures
for himself'6 It means the development of man's control and domination
over the forces of nature, external nature as well as man's own nature; it
means the widening of the scope of human possibilities over which man
can, individually or collectively, dispose; it is the formation and cultivation
of human creativity, of the essential powers of man, beyond every fixed
limitation, as an end in itself.
But the historical development of man toward the creation and increase
of this freedom on the scale of whole society has not, up to this point,
coincided with the formation offree individuals. The man of the alienated
capitalist society, a man who is, in general, liberated from the personal
dependencies and constraints characteristic of earlier ages, is an 'abstract',
and that means also a 'f0rtitous', 'accidental' individual - that is, he is a man
whose life and activity, hence the manifestations of his individuality,
though free in a legal sense, are in fact determined by conditions and social
circumstances that act objectively and independently of him, conditions
which have a 'chance' quality for him. Hence he is a man for whom his life
does not constitute the expression of his personality, does not mean the
realization of his individual potential, the actualization of his freedom."
Liquidating private property and the naturally given division of labour,
58
transcending alienation, ,communism first creates the conditions for a

truely free human development and individual life. Marx does not consider
communism to be some fixed social formation, an unchanging type of
social relations which, once established, would have to be continually
reproduced; but he does mean by it such a transformation of the existing
social conditions that would permit the uninterrupted and unfettered
self-development of material and mental production, of the forms of
intercourse, of the essential powers of men and mankind, a development
subject to the conscious decisions of the collectively organized individuals.
Communism means 'a new mode of production, which is'lbunded not on
the development of the forces of production for the purpose of reproduc
ing or at most expanding a given condition, but where the free, unob
structed, progressive and universal development of the forces of produc
tion is itself the presupposition of society and hence of its reproduction; ,
where advance beyond the point of departure is the only presupposition'."
The freedom of the individual, made possible through the elimination of
the antagonism between human essence and existence, social and in
dividual development, objectification and self-realization, naturally does
not mean in' communism either an exemption from social influences and
determinations, an overcoming once for all the natural and historical
limitations of man. But it means that each individual will be able to choose
himself consciously within the (historically circumscribed) range of the
objective possibilities offered to him by the whole of social development
and to realize them in his life harmoniously, depending on his decision, on his
wants, abilities and interests. It means that the historically available material
and mental forces, objectifications evolved by the previous generations
come under the conscious control of the associated individuals, they
become really their 'possession', no longer acting as external and alien
powers independent of them. 'The reality (das Bestehende) that com
munism creates is the actual 'basis for making it impossible that anything
should exist independently of individuals (Unmoglichmachung alles von
den Individuen unabhangig Bestehenden) , insofar as this reality is only a
product of the preceding interaction of individuals themselves. Com
munists in practice treat the conditions created until now by production
and interaction as inorganic conditions, without imagining, however, that
it was the plan or the destiny of previous generations to provide them
material and without believing that these conditions were inorganic for
the individuals creating them'.'.
59
Noten
Notes to the Introduction

1. The German term 'Wesen' equally can mean 'being', 'the individual existent'
and 'essence'. By translating the Marxian expression 'das menschliche Wesen' as
'the human essence', we depart from the conviction that Marx's views on this
subject represent - at least in regard of the sphere of societal and historical life
- a new answer to the age-old philosophical question concerning 'essences' as
well. By defining human essence as the 'ensemble of social relations', existing
not only in the evanescent personal contacts between the individuals, but also
in the objectified systems of production, custom, language, institutions and
culture, and by regarding the relationship between these systems of objecti
vations on the one hand and the individuals creating them and participating in
them on the other as essentially historical in its character, Marx provides a
tertium datur against the dilemma of nominalism and platonistic realism. This
point was explicitely underlined by Marx himself in his polemics against
bourgeois political economy: 'As far as only the general form of capital as
self-perpetuating and self-realising value is concerned, capital will be declared to
be something immaterial, and therefore, from the standpoint of economist who
recognizes exclusively either things or ideas - relations e=-:�st for him not at all -
to be a mere idea'. (Marx: Zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie. Manuskript
186 1-186 3. - Gesamtausgabe (MEGN). Section II. VoL 3. Fart 1. Berlin, 1976.
F. 133. - Italics mine - G.M.)
2. One may find this view exemplified - with the best possible intentions - e.g.
in E. Fromm: Marx's Concept 0/ Man (New York, 196 1.).
3. A comprehensive investigation of Marx's idea of historical determinism lies
outside the scope of this essay. But later we shall have occasion to point out that
this Marxian conception is frequently misunderstood in the stanaard literature
in a mechanistic way.
4. Marx: Capital. Vol. 3. Foreign Language Publishing House, Moscow, 1959. p.
800. (Italics mine - G.M.).
5. By stressing the continuity between Marx's early (but written after 1843, i.e.
after his break with idealism) and late ouevre I do not wish to deny the fact that
there exist not only terminological, but in some respects important conceptual
differences between the respective works. In an earlier essay of mine I tried to
analyse those presuppositions and features of the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts which may be regarded as specific only to t��m and which were
modified or rejected by Marx later on. See G. Markus: Uber die erkenntnis
theoretischen Ansichten des jungen Marx. In: A. Schmidt (ed.): Beitrage zur
marxistischen Erkenntnistheorie. Frankfurt aiM., 1969.
Notes to chapter Man as universal natural being

1. Marx: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings 0/ the young Marx
60
on Philosophy and Society. Ed. by L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat. Doubleday,
.
Garden City, 1967. p. 293. - When possible, I shall quote the text of 1844
Manuscripts from this translation (in the following referred to as Writings) .
But since it is incomplete, at other places I shall ..-e the translation of M.
Milligan (Marx: The Economic and Philosophic Man�uscripts 011844. International
Publishers, New York, 1964 - in the following: Milligan-traml. ) I must also
indicate here that in some cases, when the English translation available to me
was definitely inadequate to the German original, I intro�uced without further
notice some changes in the text quoted.
2. Ibid., p. 325.
3. Ibid:
4. Marx: Grundrisse. Foundations 0/ the Critique 0/ Political Economy. Penguin Bks.,
1973. p. 473. Also cf.: 'Nature is the inorganic body of man, that is, nature
insofar as it is not the human body. Man IiveJ by nature. This means that nature
in his body with which he must remain in perpetual process in order not to die'.
(Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings, p. 293).
5. K. Axelos: Marx, Penseur de /a technique, Minuit, Paris, 1961. p. 56.
6. Marx-Engels: The German Ideology. In: WritingJ, p. 409.
7. On the other hand we find equally unacceptable me contrary and even more
frequently made presupposition which ascribes a decisive role in the early
evolution of Marx' thought to the influence of the Feuerbachian materialist
ontology of nature (and generally to questions of natural philosophy). The
early works just completely fail to substantiate this view. The first writings of
Marx (especially his Doctoral Dissertation) undoubtedly present an idealist
organismic conception of nature in the tradition of a natura1ist pantheism very
widespread at that time in German philosophy: stressing the dynamic character
of all natural phenomena Marx concieves them as manifestations of the un
conscious forces of the all-embracing spirit. This conception, however, is
replaced by a dynamic and materia/iit view of nature without any perceptible
intellectual shock, in the course of a gradual evolution, due to the fact that
Marx radically reconsiders his earlier understanding of the relationship between
material and mental-spiritual activity in the domain of social ontology. The
whole path of Marx's intellectual development from idealism to materialism
runs through the examination of socio-historical problems and through
attempts at their theoretical and practical solution. And the significance of
Feuerbach has to be sought also in this field: he had a fertile influence on Marx
partly through his criticism of religious and philosophic alienation, partly
through his endeavour to reinterprete on a naturalistic basis the Hegelian
conception of the relationship between the individual and the society (the
constitutive character of the relation between I and you as sensuous-natural
individuals stands in the centre of Feuerbach's philosophy).
8. Marx: Economic and Philosophic Manuscri�ts. In: Writings, p. 326. See also the
characterization of man as a 'product of nature' INaturproduktl in the
Manuscripts of 1861-63 (MEGA'. Sect. II. Vol. 3. Part I. Berlin, 1976, p. 58).
8a. Cf. L. Krader: Dialectic 0/ Civil Society. Assen, 1976, p. 251. We also shall
translate therefore 'Gattungswesen' everywhere as 'generic being'.
9. Ibid., p. 294. Translation modified. - Marx generally regards the mode and
character of activity as the factor determining Or constituting the 'nature' of any
living or social entity. Cf.: 'As individuals express their life, so they are'. (The
German Ideology - In: Writings, p. 409.)
10. Marx: Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of State. In: MEGA. Part. I., Vol. II!. p.
526.
61
II. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings, p. 294-295.
12. In his early philosophical writings (not only in the Manuscripts, but in The
German Ideology, too) Marx usually designates the specifically human life
activity by the term 'work' (Arbeit), but he employs for this purpose the: ten�
'production' (Produktion) as well. These two expressions are treated-by him as
synonyms. In his later economic works, however, he makes a clear-cut concep
tual distinction (first introduced in Grundriss8, Notebook III). between 'work'
and 'production'. In this later, 'economic' sense - as can be seen from the
famous fifth �hapter of the first volume of the Capital - work (the German
term 'Arbeit' is, however, in this context often translated into English as
(labour') means the process between man and nature solely: it is the action of a
force of nature, i.e. the labour force, upon some substance of nature (see
Capital. Vol. III, p. 840) as it could be accomplished even by an abnormally,
artificially isolated single individual. That is, work as 'labour' means the
technological process taken independy of its social form. (This identification of
the process of work with the technological process is stated explicitly in the
Theories of Surplus Value see Marx-Engels: Werke (MEW). Dietz, Berlin. Bd.
-
26/2. p. 268, 270. etc.). But work in this sense is only an abstraction, even if not
'an atoitrary abstraction, but rather an abstraction which takes place within the
process itself (Grundrisse, p. 303.): the technological process exists really only
within some definite socia!form, man's active relation to nature can be realized
only through the mediation of relations between man and man. So work as
labour constitutes only one side or aspect of that unitary and indivisible process
which ftom the other side appears as the process of transformation of the
(socio-economic form', i.e. as that of the realization and change of definite
productive relations between the different social actors of economic life. This
later, unitary process is called by Marx in his later economic writings theprocess
ofproduction as 'appropriation of nature on rhe part of the individual within and
through a specific social form' (Grundrisse, p. 87). The earlier, philosophic
anthropological meaning of 'work' is connected not with the concept of (work'
(labour) in economic sense, but with that of 'production'. This can be seen
already from the statement, with which Marx introduces his philosophic
anthropological analysis of work in the Manuscripts: 'Work (Arbeit) not only
produces commodities. It also produces itself and the worker as a commodity . . . '
( Writings, p. 289.) More precisely, what is exptessed in the early philosophic
manuscripts of Marx by the category of work (or production) is designated in
his latet economic writings with the helr of Tocucions like 'the material
life-creating process of men', 'the real socia life-process', 'the productive life
process of society' (der materielle Lebenserzeugungsprozess der Menschen, der
wirkliche gesellschaftliche Lebensprozess, der produktive Lebensprozess der
Gesellschaft) etc. - locutions indicating rhe yet unanalysed object and general
starting point of the Marxian investigation, the purely economic content ofwhich
finds its subsequent articulation in the concept of the total process of social
reproduction.
13. The German Ideology. International Publishers, New York, 196 0. p. 7.
14. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Milligan-transl. p. 114. Translation
modified.
15. Capital. Vol. I. Foreign Language Publishing House, Moscow. 1968. p. 177.
15a. 'Only with the first product that is arplied to new production - be it only a
stone which is hurIea after an anima to kill it - begins the process of work
62
)
"
proper (dec eigenrliche Arbeitsproces� ' (Marx: Manuscript; of 1861-63.
MEGA'. Sect. II. Vol. 3. Part I. p. 87).
16. Marx himself repeatedly uses this analogy. See Capital, Vol. I. p. 179., 341. etc.
17. GruntiriHc, p. 90.
18. Grundris", p. 489.
19. Capital, vol. 1., p. 177. Translation modified.
20. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings, p. 295. Translation
modified.
21. The German Ideology. In: Writings, p. 417.
22. Naturally, in social life not solely marerial products of labour act as bearers of
norms and, more generally, as transmitters of the accumulated social ex
perience. Sociality, even in its most elementary forms, presupposes as its
universal precondition the existence of two further systems of rules and objec
tification patterning the everyday life and intercourse of individuals: that of
language and of custom (in the narrower sense of the word). The relationship of
these three basic forms of objectification - production, custom and language -
will be, at least partially, discussed in chapter 2. One of the important aspects of
historical development is then characterized by the!rocess in which, from the
primordial undifferentiated unity of production an everyday life, on the basis
of the above mentioned three universal systems, there emerge new and higher
types of objectification: the systems of writing and of law, the arts, the sciences
etc. About this process of development see the first chapters of G. Lukacs: Die
Eigenart""s Aesthetischen (Werke. Vol. 11. Luchterhand, Neuwied aiR., 1963),
further A. Heller:, A mindennapi tlet (The everyday life - Akademia, Budapest,
1970) and G. Bence - J. Kis: A nyelv a mindennapi etet elmileteben (The place of
language in the theory'of everyday life - 'Altahlnos Nyelveszeti Tanulminyok'
Vol. VII. 1970).
24. Grundris", p. 494.
25. 'Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human essence (men·
schliches Wesen) is the wealth of the subjective human sensibility either
cultivateq 9r created - a muscial ear, an eye for the beuty of form, in short, senses
capable of human satisfaction , (Genuss), confirming themselves as essential
human powers (Wesenskrafte) . (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. . In:
Writings, p. 309).
27. Theories of Surplus Value. - MEW. Vol. 26/3. p. 292.
28. 'Consumption accomplishes the act of production only . . . by raising the in·
dination, developed in the first act of production, through the need of
repetition, to proficiency (Fertigkeit) . . .' (Grundrisse, p. 93).
28a. Grundrisse, p. 700. See also his characterization of the system of machinery as the
transformation of 'simple forces of nature into potencies of social labour'
(MEGA'. Sect. II. Vol. 3. Part 1. p. 294).
29. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings, p. 325.
30. It is very characteristic of Marx's concept of man that he never d.rew a sharp
dividing line between wants and abilities. Man's nature is a 'totality of ne�ds
and drives' (Grundrisse, p. 2451 and in this living unity of the real personality
'passive' wants and 'active' capacities reciprocally presuppose each other and
mutually transform into each other. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
Marx employs a specific, single term to express this organic unity: the 'esse� tial
human powers' Imenschliche Wesenskrafre/. For man, on the one hand, 1S an
63
active being, i.e. he can satisfy his wants only by developing and exercising his
abilities and, on the other hand, the once formed capability demands some
sco� for itself, i.e. it appears as a specific need of activity. 'Each of his essential
actlvities and properties, each of his drives turns into a want, into a necessity
"lNat/ which transforms his self-seeking ISelbstsuchtl into a seeking ISuchtl
after other things and men outside himself IThe Holy Family MEGA. Part
-
L, Vol. 3., p. 296/. This whole problem plays an important part in Marx's later
writings, too, especially in his theory o f work as a specific human need. ISee,
e.g., his criticism of A. Smith's conception of work as sacrifice in GrundrisJe, p.
610 ff.l. Marx naturally acknowledges the existence of a deep gap between
wants and abilities in man of modern society, but for him this is a historical
phenomenon, a result of the 'naturally given' Inaturwiichsigl division of
l abour and of alienation.
30a, The translation of the Marxian term 'Bediirfnisse' is contested. Marx himself -
as 1. Krader points out IDialectic of Civil Society! p. 108 f.l - has used, in his
translation of Barbon on the first page of the Capital, 'Bediirfnisse' for 'wants'.
We shall also follow generally this terminology, more in correspondance with
the objective and social nature of 'Bediirfnisse' underlined by Marx. Therefore
we shall refer to 'needs' only in contexts where it is clearly about individu�l and
subjective-conscious demands - or where the existing English translations
prescribe the use of this terminology.
31. Grundrisse! p. 527.
32. One of the frequently occurring misunderstandings in the Marx-literature
concerns just the question of the relationship between work and wants. 'The
basic point of departure for all of Marx's epistemological thought is the
conviction that the relations between man and his environment are relations
between the species and the objects of its needs . .. ' - writes e.g. 1. Kolakowski
in his essay Karl Marx and the CiaJsical Definition of Truth (1. Kolakowski:
T()tI.Jard a Marxist Humanism. Grove Pr., New York, 1968. p. 42-43.)This
statement is unacceptable insofar as it loses sight of the specific character of the
relation between man and nature, since this specificity is surely not to be sought
in the existence of species-bounded, fixed needs in man, but in the creation of
new wants by, and in, work as human material activity. Marx definitely under
lines that only production constitutes man's really human, hence historic
relation to nature and that the production of new wants is the first act of history
(see The German Ideology. In: Writings, p. 420.). Therefore it is just this fact
which constitutes the main difference between man and animal: 'The diverse
shaping of material life is, of course, always dependent on needs already
developed, and the production as well as satisfaction of these needs is itself a
historical process not found with a sheep or a dog . . . though sheeps and dogs
in their present form, albeit in spite of themselves, are pro ducts of a historical
processes' (Ibid., p. 461 f.). And: 'Man excells all other animals due to the
unbounded character and extensibility of his wantS . . .' (Marx: Resultate des
unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses - a manuscript-fragment from 1863-1865
-, Marx.Engels Archiv. Vol. II/VII/. Moscow, 1933. p. 234) The departure
from needs and consumption constitutes for Marx a characteristic sign of
reactionary economic thought (see his criticism of K. Gl:iin in The German
Ideology - International Pu blishers edition, p. 164.). And indeed, by accepting
needs in the role of the primordial, ahistoric and fixed data of social life, one is
led to a relativistic denial of any kind of historic development as Kolakowski is
-
led in his epistemological investigation to an agnostic-relativistic position
64
•
(attributed by him to Marx) according to which the 'visual-worlds' of a man

and a fly, the perceptual articulations of reality accomplished by all the different
types of living organisms (man included) have an equal claim to 'truth' and
'authenticity' (see op. cit., p. 48 f.)
33. See The Getman Ideology - MEGA. Part I, Vol. 5., p. 235 f. and 596 f.
34. Grundrisse, p. 92. See also Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Writings, p.
310. - Twentieth century research in cultural anthropology describing the wide
variety of eating habits and norms in different societies and their socia-cultural
determinants has empirically confirmed the Marxian thesis about the social
character of the basic individual needs, though they are up to this day
frequently treated as purely biological.
35. Marx: The Poverty of Philosophy. Foteign Languages Publishing House, Moscow,
p. 42. Translation modified.
36. Grundrilse, p. 532. The analysis of the dialectics of individual and communal,
-
consumptive and productive, necessary and luxury wants plays a prominent

part in Marx's later economic writings, too (mostly in connection with inves
tigation of concrete historical problems), and it is understandably so, since for
him this dialectics constitutes one of the mose important dimensions of human
history. In a restricted sense, he ?Jines out in the Grundrisse, 'necessary needs
ate those of the individual himself reduced to a natural subject (Natursubjekt)'.
But historical development (and this tendency is especially strong in capital
ism) effects 'the transformation of that what previously appeared superfluous
into what is necessary, as a historically created necessity . . .' (Ibid., p. 528.) So
e.g. 'the craft themselves do not appear necessary ALONGSIDE self�sustaining
agriculture, where spinning, weawing etc. are done as a secondary domestic
occupation. But e.g. if agriculture itself rests on scientific activities - if it
requires machinery, chemical fertilizer acquired through exchange, seeds from
distant countries etc., and if rural, patriarchal manufacture has already vanished
- which is already implied in the presupposition - then the machine-making
factory, external trade, crafts etc. appear as needs for agriculture. Perhaps guano
can be produced for it only through the export of silk goods. Then the
manufacture of silk no longer appears as a luxury industry, but as a necessary
industry for agriculture. . . . (I)t is because of this, that what previously
appeared as a luxury is now necessary, and that so-called luxury needs appear e.g.
as a necessity for the most naturally necessary and down-to-earth industry of all'.
(Ibid., p. 527 f.) The most complex analysis of the dinamical interrelations
between individual-consumptive and directly social, productive wants is to be
found in part IV. of the first volume of Capital, in the Marxian analysis of the
historical ptocess of industrial revolution.
37. We cannot discuss it here, but at least we must point to the decisive role that
the notion of radical needs plays in the Marxian theory of revolutio� . These. are
the needs that the capitalist process of production and the SOCIal confllCts
inherent in it necessarily invoke and evolve in the oppressed class of producers,
i.e. in the proletariat, but which cannot be satisfied within the framework of the
existing system of social relations. SO', for insrance, Marx regards as the 'one
revolutionary side of the automatic factory' the fact that in it 'th� n:e? for
universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the mdlvl?ual
begins to be felt' (The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 144). But this need fat unlvet·
sality, for the 'fluidity' and variability of the functions of labour IS - a�co.rdmg
to Marx - thwarted by the social form of the organizatio?- ?�labour withm �he
capitalist factory which necessarily reproduces 'the old dIVISIon of labour With
65
its ossified particularities' - and it is juSt this fact that constitutes the 'absolute
contradiction' of the capitalist process of production (see Capital, Vol. 1, part
IV., chapter 13., § 9.). The emphasis put on the revolutionary importance of
'radical' needs - i.e. on needs ofthe oppressed classes which in their nature and
through their content transcend the existing system of social relations - is in
complete correspondence with the general theoretical standpoint of Marx that
locates the ultimate basis of revolutionary situation in the contradiction bet
ween the already acquired productive forces and the subsisdng relations of
production and at the same time considers the revolutionary class itself to be
'the greatest productive force' (see The Poverty ofPhilosophy, p. 174.). These ideas
of Marx have undoubtedly acquired now a specific theoretical and practical
import for the radical movements in those developed capitalist countries where
the situation of a (revolution of hunger' no longer prevails for the basic social
groups of producers. On this question see the recent discussion about 'new
working class', especially in Italy and France.
38. Since these needs and wants are immediately related to the sociality and
consciousness of man, their cJ:aracter and emergence has to be brought in
connection with an analysis of these aspects of 'human essence', which will be
attempted at in the next chapter.
39. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings, p. 304 f.
40. ' . . . narure has lost its mere utlity by use becoming human use'. (Ihid., p. 308).
4l. Grundrisse, p. 99.
42. Ibid., p. 712.
44. Capital, Vol. III. p. 857.
45. In craft work 'there appears not the exchange value, but the use value of labour
as the ultimate end'. (Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses.
Marx-Engels Archiv. Vol. II (VII), p. llO. here Marx also discusses at length
-
the limitations inherent in such a social system of production.)

46. Grundrisse, p. 422. Also 693 ff., 708 f. etc.
47. In all these societies 'the reproduction o/presupposed (vorausgesetzter) relations
more or less naturally given (naturwiichsiger) or historic as well, but become
traditional - of the individual to his commune, together with a specific, ohjective
existence,/redetermined for the individual, of his relations both to the con
ditions 0 labour and to his co-workers, fellow tribesmen etc. - are the
foundation of development, which is therefore from the outset restricted, but
which signifies decay, decline and fall once this barrier is suspended'. (Grund
risse, p. 487). Marx never discusses systematically the socio-economic mechan
isms ensuring the 'conservative' (or, as he frequently calls it, 'petrified') char
acter of precapitalist formations, but in his analyses of these economic organ
isms he often refers briefly to them. So he points out that the equalizing
tendencies inherent in some forms of communal 1anded property as in the
Russian mir or the various Asiatic village communities may bar the possibility
of effective accumulation necessary at the given stage for further development;
he describes the various modes of the fixation of the existing form of produc
tion either by direct communal or state regulation (as e,g. in the guild-system)
or by indirecr means (as through rent in kind the ossifying effect of which on
agricultural production he discusses in chaprer 47, of the third volume of
Capita!); he analyzes social systems rigidly fastening a given level of social
division of labour (as thejajmani-system in India to which he pays considerable
attention) or rendering society-wide, free mobilization of basic facrors of
66
•
productiot:l (land, labour or instr�ment) impossible. (As a chance example of

the last case: !Under guild conditions, e.g., mere money, if it is not itselfguild
money, masters' money, cannot buy. the looms to make people work with them;
how many an individual may operate etc. is prescribed. In short, the instrument
itself is still so intertwined with living labour, whose domain it appears, that it
does not truly circulate'. - Grundrisse, p. 505; d. also p. 297). It also must be
stressed that Marx on several occasions speaks of eYrs of productive relations
emerging under specific historic conditions an resulting not in some
momentary and transient destruction of the productive forces, but in their
long-run regress and decay. It is in this way that he characterizes, for example, the
influence of usury capital (,rent capitalism' as it would be called in recent works
on economic anthropology) on the Asiatic and antique modes of production.
Usury, he points out, �improverishes the mode of production, paralyzes the
productive forces instead of developing them . . .' It �does not alter the mode of
production, but attaches itself firm1y to it like a parasire and makes it wretched.
It sucks out its- blood, enervates it and compels reproduCtion to proceed under
ever more pitiable conditions'. (Capital. Vol. III. p. 582 f.) The conception
which is equally present in the Marxism of the II. International and in the
Stalinist interpretation of Marxist theory and which regards the development of
the productive forces (understood at that as purely technical progress) as some
inevitable, autonomous and automatic process having the force of a necessity of
nature, is completely alien to Marx.
48. Grund17sse, p. 541. and 540.
49. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings, p. 305 f.
50. Ibid., p. 311. and 304.
51. Ibid., p. 312.
52. Ibid., p. 314.
53. Grundrbse, p. 361.
54. A chronic misunderstanding in Marx-interrretatiOn is tied to the narrow and
one-sided reconstruction of his concepr 0 work. Certain scholars - like K.
Axelos in his already quoted book - completely disregard the anthropological
meaning of work and view it only as an external transformation of natural
objects, as the purely technical domination of man over his environment. Others
reduce the anthropological aspect of wotk to a richer, more secure etc. need
fulfilment alone and thus they attribute a conception to Marx, which positively
subordinates production to consumption. We can meet this view, e.g., in H.
Barth: tMarx names rhe process of labour, leading to an objectification of man
in his product, the self-externalization or self-alienation (Selbstentausserung
oder Se1bstentfremdung) . . . Through work an object comes into being which
has a kind of independent existence. Since, however, these objects are not ends
in themselves, but only means of subsistence, they only then fulfil their
destination, when they are terminated (aufgehoben) and annihilated, when
they serve to man's consumption and pleasure (Genuss) and in ir rhey prove to
be the means of this reproduction . . . (T)he self-alienation, through which some
good comes into existence, as long as humanity lives under naturally given
(naturwuchsig) condition, will be rendered in this way undone'. (H. Barth:
Wahrheit und ldeologie. Zurich, 1945. p. 118). One must remark, first, that Barth
here clearly identifies work as objectification (Vergegenstandlichung) with
alienation (Entfremdung, Endiusserung) - an identification which, according
to Marx, constituted the main idealistic error both ofthe Hegelian Phenomenol
ogy and of the bourgeois political economy (see Economic and Philosophical
67
Manuscripts in Writings, p. 327 f. and GrundriSJe, p. 831 f.), a point which we
shall discuss later. What concerns us here immediately is rather the conviction
attributed by Barth to Marx, according to which it is only production lor the
sake of consumption that is (human' and (natural', since only it can cancel the
moment of alienation always present (conforming to this conception) in work.
Marx, however, never hold this view. What is more, he expressly defended the
Ricardian formula of'production for the sake of production' against those of its
petty bourgeois critics who countered it with the slogan ' production for the
sake of consumption': '(Ricardo) wants production for the sake 0/production and
this is right. If one maintains, as Ricardo's sentimental adversaries did, that the
production as such is nOt the end, then he forgets that production for the sake
of production means nothing else, but the development of human productive
forces, consequently the development 0/ the riches 0/ human nature as an end in
itself. (Theories of Surplus Value - MEW, Vol. 26/2, p. 106 f. - see also
Grundrisse, p. 408 ff.) The capitalist mode of production is the first great
historical form that transcends the limited character and 'narrowness' of earlier
societies and breaks down the barriers inherent in them; it is only in it that
'production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of produc
tIOn', and just this constitutes 'the possivite essence of capital'. But in capital
ism wealth constitutes the aim of production only as thing, it exists solely in the
form of objects which are external, accidental and alien to the individuals.
Therefore 'this complete working-out of the human content (lnnern) appears
as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation,
and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human
end-in-itself (Aufopferung des Selbstzwecks) to an entirely external end'.
(Grundrisse, p. 488.) Capitalism, however, producing new, social needs par
excellence in the masses of population, on the one hand, and decreasing the
labour time socially necessary to the manufacturing of products, on the other,
increases thereby the social demand on the abilities and erudition of the
individuals as producers and thus !posits the superfluous (i.e. time - G.M.) in
growing measure as a condition - question of life or death - for the necessary'.
(Ibid., p. 706.) In this way capitalism itself creates the preconditions for such a
form of social production in which wealth loses its fetishistic, reified form and
directly appears as 'the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures,
productive forces etc. created through universal exchange'. (Ibid., p. 488.)
Notes to the chapter Man as a social and conscious natural being

1. Marx: Excerpt-Notes of 1844. Notes on J. Mill. In: Writings, p. 271 f. Trans-
lation modified.
2. Cf. The Holy Family MEGA. Part I., Vol. 3. p. 295 f. ; furrher Grundrisse, p.
-
83 ff.
3. In the text of the MEGA-edition instead of !Genuss' in this passage everywhere
stands !Geist' (spirit).
5. Grundrisse, p. 495 and 529.
6. Ibid., p. 496.
7. Ibid., p. 529.
8. If one presupposes !a man already to be found in some form of society, then one
must intro duce as the point of departure the specific character of this social
man, i.e. the specific character of the community in which he lives, since here
68
..
production, consequently the process through which he wins his life (sein Lebens�
gewinnungsprozess) , bears already some kind of social character'. (Marx: Mar
ginal Notes on A. Wagner's Textbook - MEW. Vol. 19. p. 362.)
9. Cf. 'It is therefore inherent in the simple production process that the earlier
stage of production is preserved by the later . . . ' (GrundrisJe, p. ,361.)
10. The Economic an� Philosophic Manuscripts. Milligan-trans. p. 182.
II. This ontogenetic-psychological I;[Qcess of appropriation as social learning is
interestingly analyzed by the SOVIet psychologist A. N. Leontjew. See his book
The Problems 0/ Psychical Development (in Russian). Moscow, 1965.
12. On population as 'the teal and the concrete, ' . . which is'�he foundation and the
subject of the entire social act of production', see Grundrisse! p. 100 ff.
13. Capital. Vol. II - MEW. Vol. 24. p. 42.
14. IbId., p. 385.
15. Grundrisse! p. 96. See also p. 832. And compare: ' . . . these relations of dis
tribution (i.e. of capital and land, in opposition to the distributiofl: of products
of consumption - G.M.) constitute the foundation of the particular social
functions which within the production process itself are bestowed on its
definite agents in contradistinction to the immediate producers. They give a
speCific social quality to the conditions of production and to their represen
tatives'. (Capital. Vol. Ill. p. 857.)
16. ' . . . before Oistribution can be the distribution of products, it is: 1.) the
distribution .of the instruments of production, and 2.), which is a further
specification of the same relation, the aistribution of the members of the society
among the different kinds (Arten) of production'. (Grundrisse, p. 96.)
17. Resulrate des unmirrelbaren Produktlonsprozesses. Marx-Engels Archiv, Vol.
IINII/. p. 176.
18. As far as the early stages of human historical development are concerned, Marx
attaches very gteat im portance to the humanization of the natural rapports
between the sexes an d between the generations. But even later on sexual
relations constitute - according to him - one of the most immediate criteria of
the rate of development of a human personality. 'The immediate, natural,
necessary relationship of human being to human oeing is the relationship of man
to woman. In this natural species-relationship man's relationship to nature is
immediately his relationship to man, as his relationship to man is immediately
his relationship to nature, to his own natural condition (Bestimmung), In this
relationship the extent to which the human essence has become nature for man
or nature has become the human essence of man is sensously manifested, reduced
to a perceptible fact. From this relationship one can judge thus the entire level
of mankind's development'. (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In:
Writings, p. 303.)
18. The German Ideology - MEGA. Part I., Vol. 5., p. 416.
19. It is just this way that the fact and process of socialization is depicted in a
number of influential and otherwise widely differring contemporary philo
sophical and psychological theories, e.g. in classical existentialism an d Freud
ism, in Bleuler's theory of autism, in the conception of infantile egocentrism of
early Piaget etc. A profound Marxist criticism of the psychological theories
mentioned can be found in 1. S. Vygotsky's book, Thought and Langua!{e
(Moscow, 1934 - in the English translation of the work by M.LT. Press thIS
discussion is, unfortunatelly, very heavily abridged.) .
20. Marx: Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction. In:
Writings, p. 250.
69
2l. The German Ideology. In: Writings, p. 461 f. Translation modified.
22. This reductionist �theory of milieu' now reappears in some neobehaviourist
conceptions of personality (as with Guthrie) and it is also often implied in the
r
sociological treatment of the notion of 'social role', ex licitly or implicitly
explaining the very fact of individuation by the plurality 0 such roles. So gerth
and Mills, for example, maintain that 'the person is composed of the combi
nation of roles that he enacts' (H. Gerth - C. W. Mills: Character and Social
Structure. New York, 1964. p. 80.) Recently this conception has shown up in
the works ad some Marxist sociologists, too (see, e.g., the interesting general
sociology of Z. Bauman:' Zarys marksistowskiej tconi spokczemtwa, Warsaw, 1964,
p. 466 ff.). A general Marxist criticism of the current sociological theories of
<social role' and in connection with it a ·deeper investigation .9f the problems
discussed here briefly can be found in the essay of A. Heller: Uber die marxis
tische Interpretierbarkeit des Rollenbegriffs (in her volume Alltag und
Geschichte. Neuwied-Berlin, 1970.)
23. See his stimulating essay: Cogito, Historical Materialism and the Expressive
Imerpretation of Personality (in Polish, in his volume Kultura i jetysze. War
saw, 1967.)
24. The German Ideology. In Writings, p. 427. - If it is the development of
productive forces which renders a world-wide social commerce and intercourse
of individuals first possible, it is only this latter that makes the advance of
productive forces reaIly permanent and international. <It depends entirely on
the extension of commerce whether the productive forces, especially inven
tions, in a locality are lost for later development or not. As long as there is no
commerce beyond immediate neighborhood, every invention must be sepa
rately made in each locality. Pure accidents such as eruptions of barbaric people
and even ordinary warS are enough to cause a country with advanced pro ductive
forces and needs co start all over again from the beginning . . . Only when
commerce has become worldwide and is based on large-scale industry, when all
nations �re drawn into the competitive struggle, will the permanence of the
acquired productive forces be assured'. (Ibid., p. 446 f)
25. Grundrisse, p. 84.
26. See ibid., p. 474, 484, etc.
26a. <First, there is the tearing loose of the individuality from the orginally non
despotic chains . . " but satisjying and comlortable bonds 0/ the group, of rhe primitive
community , - therewith the onesided working out of the individuality'.
(Marx: Ethnological Notebooks. Assen, 1974. p. 329.)
27. Economic and Philosophic Maniscripts. In: Writings, p. 294.
29. Capital. Vol. L p. 178 - About the teleological structure of work see G.
LUkacs: Zur Onto70gie des geseilschafttichen Seins: Die Arbeit. Neuwied-Darmstadt,
1973.
30. Ibid., p. 508.
3l. The German Ideology. In: Writings, p. 414.
31a. On the other hand it should be underlined that Marx often uses the term
'consciousness' (Bewusstsein) in a broader sense than the one accepted today -
he contrasts it not with the 'unconscious', but identifies it with <mental' in
general. So <consciousness' comprises with him not only that what is clearly and
d istinctly apprehended, 'known', but also the whole sphere of 'unconscious'
presuppositiqns and beliefs handed down by tradition, the socially im planted
and in an unreflected way accepted mental habits, dispositions and feelings as
well.
70
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 423. '.
33a. 'Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness. In
the first view the starting point is consciousness as a living individual; in the
second it is the real living individuals themselves as they exist in real life, and
the consciousness is considered only as their consciousness'. Ihid., p. 415.
34. 'Did not old Moloch rule? Was not the Delphic Apollo an actual force in Greek
life? Here even Kant's critique means nothing. If someone conceives that he has
a hundred dollars, if this conception is not merely incidental and subjective for
him, if he believes in it, then the hundred conceived dollars have the same value
for him as a hundred real ones. He will e.g. contract debts on the basis of his
imagination, which will really matter, just as all 0/humanity has incurred debts on
the basis 0/ its gods'. (Marx: The Difference Between the Democritean and
Epicure�n Philosophy of Nature, Notes to the Appendix. In: Writings. p. 65).
35. Grundnsse, p. 225.
36. See Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings, p. 293.
37. Ibid., p. 307. Translation modified.
38. Marx: Theses on Feuerbach. In: Writings, p. 401. - In one of his early essays
Hotkheimer comments this Marxian idea in the following way: 'The facts that
are transmitted to us by the senses are socially preformed in a two·fold way:
through the social character of the perceived object and through the social
character of �he perceiving organ. Both have been formed not only by natural,
bu t also by human activity; the individual, however, experiences itself in case of
perc.eption as receptive and passive. But the opposition between passivity and
' that in epistemology takes the form of the dualism of sensation and
activlty,
reason, does not apply to society in the same measure as to the individual.
Where the latter experiences itself as passive and dependent, the former, though
it is composed of individuals, is nevertheless an active, even if unconscious and
insofar inauthentic, subject. This difference in the existence of man and of
society is an expression of the split that has hitherto characterized the historical
forms of social life'. (M. Horkheimer: Traditionelle und kritische Theorie.
Frankfutt aiM., 1968. p. 22.)
39. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings, p. 312. Marx's terminol·
ogy is here typically Feuerbachian; cf. especially Feuerbach: Grundsiitze der
Philosophie dey ZUkunft. § 41.
40. For Marx language is not an external form which is additively affixed to the
ready contents ofconsciousness rendering them thereby communicable, rather
it is a social system of objectification which the individual must appropriate in
order to develo p and ac quire the specifically human, conscious psychic capac·
iries, first of all that of ideatoric, conceptual thinking. The acquisition of
language means a re·structuring of the whole psychic activity making it
conscious and human. (Language is as old as consciousness. It is the practical,
real consciousness which also exists for other men and only thereby exists for
me personally as well. Language, like consciousness, only arises from the need
and necessity of commerce (Verkehr) with other men . . . Consciousness is thus
from the very beginning a social product and will remain so as long as men
exist'. (The German Ideology. In: Wntings, p. 421 f. Transl. corrected.)
Further: 'To compare money with language is not less erroneous. Language
does not transform ideas in such a way that the specificity of ideas is dissolved
and their social character exists alongside them as a separate entity, like prices
alongside commodities. Ideas do not exist separately from language'. (Grun
dyisse, p. 162 f.)
71
41. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Wriiings, r. 309. C£ also: (But
doesn't the pianist produce music and satisfy our musica ear, does not he even
to a certain extent produce the latter? He does indeed . . . the pianist stimulates
production; partly by giving a more decisive, lively tone to our individuality,
and also in the ordinary sense of awakening a new want for the satisfaction of
which additional energy becomes expended in direct material production'.
(Grundris", p. 305 f.)
42. The German Ideology. In: Writings, p. 414. Translation modified.
43. See the Marxian characterization of the way the theoretical thinker appropriates
the world as radically different from 'the artistic, religious and practico-mental
appropriation of this world' Grundrisse, p. 101. (The Englis h translation of
-
this passage is unfortunatelly incorrect.) A detailed examination of the origin of

these relatively independent forms of intellectual production out of everyday
life and consciousnes (in the Marxian terminology: out of the practico·mental
appropriation of reality) and of their interrelations with the latter can be found
in the first three chapters of G. Lukacs' Das Eigenart des Aesthetischen ( Werke,
Vol. 11. Neuwied, 1963.)
44. See, e.g., Grundrisse, p. 705 f., 712. etc.
45. See especially the epistemologically very interesing remarks of Marx on the
practico·utilitarian character of the elemental abstractions of everyday thinking
in the Marginal Notes to Adolph Wagner's Textbook of Political Economy (MEW.
Vol. 19. p. 362 f.)
46. E�onomic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings, p. 310 f.
47. Ibid., p. 308. .
48. Grunarisse, p. 101. - The idea is, of course, Hegelian. See especially his rarely
mentioned, important essay Wer denkt abstrakJ? (and for an almost identical
formulation, e.g., Encyclopedia, § 82.)
49. In connection with the above mentioned 'theoreticization of senses' (and
generally for a better understanding of some of Marx's epistemological formu·
lations taken from the 1844 Manuscripts) one must take, however, into account
the following fact: In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx departs
from a premise that is no longer present in his later works. Namely, he
presupposes (in accordance with his then hold, rather romantic conception
about the direct 'identity' of individual and society after the overcoming of
alienation) that in an unalienated society the individual acquires the possibility
to appropriate and to realize in his empirical consciousness, in his 'sensuousness'
all the richness of social consciousness, of hiscorically elaborated and attained
knowledge to the full. Accordingly he also maintains that in this epoch science
and, more generally, abstract theoretical thinking will lose their relative in
dependence, cea<;e to exist as separate forms of human activity and become
direct and evanescent (though constantly re-appearing) moments of real
human sensuousness as the unity of sense-intuition and thinking. 'Sense percep
tion (Sinniichkeit) (see Feuerbach) mUSt be the basis of all science. Science is
only actual when it proceeds from sense perception in the twofold form of both
sensuous awareness (sinnliches Bewusstsein) and sensuous need, that is, from
nature. The whole of history is a preparation for 'man' to become the object of
sensuous awareness and for the needs of 'man as man' co become sensuous needs'.
( Writings, p. 3 11 f. - see also the Marxian critiq ue of the dialectics of abstract
thinking in Hegel characterized as the alienated comprehension of alienation:
ibid., p. 318 f.) I n his later works, however, Marx definitely reconsiders this view
and presupposes, as told earlier, the continued existence of science and, gener·
72
,
, .
ally, of all the higher forms of 'intellectual !production' as distinct spheres of
human activi�y, not absorbable in their entirety into the empirical conscious
ness of the individuals even in a future unalienated society. (Though seemingly
he ?oes not regard as necessary their con�inued existe�ce as separate professions
avaIlable only for the few, but then as thelf sole, exclusive occupation.) 6n this
early <epistemological Utopia' of Marx more in my paper mentioned in the
Introduction.
50. J. Calvez: La Pense, de Karl Marx, Paris, 1956. p. 380.
51. See his earlier quoted essay Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth.
52. Economic and Philosophic Manuscn'pJs. In: Writings, p. 335.
53. Ibid., 29;. - This notion of an activity applying to the object its own 'intrinsic
standard' (innere Mass) is further concretized in Capital, when Marx in his
examination of machinery and large-scale industry shows that in machine
production all the processes are decomposed into their natural, 'intrinsic'
elements without any regard to the antropomorphic particularities of their
human execution and then are brought again into new, objective connections
through the application of natural sciences. In manufacture, writes Marx, 'on
the one hand, the workman becomes adapted to the process, on the other, the
process was previously made suitable (angepasst) to the workman. This sub
jective principle of the division of labour no longer exists in production by
machinery. Here, the process as a whole is examined objectively, in and for
itself, and it. is analyzed in this way into its constituent phases; and the problem,
how to execute each phase-process and how to bind these various phase
processes into a Whole, is solved through the technical application of
mechanics, chemistry, etc. . . . ' (Capita!. Vol. I. p. 380. Translation corrected.)
54. Th, Econ()f1Zic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Milligan·transl. (modified) p. 165.
Notes to the chapter Human essence and history
1. During the friendly (and for the author very helpful) discussions over the
English manuscript of this book, Lawrence Krader has made objections against
this formulation, putting work, sociality and consciousness as moments of
'human essence' on the same level. As against this conception Krader referred
to ·some of the well-known formulations of Marx underlining the primacy of
work (production) and social intercourse in regard to consciousness. So Marx
wrote: 'Man can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or
anything else you like. They begin to distinguish themselves from animals as
soon as they begin to produce their means of subsitance . . .'; and: 'T�e
consciousness is therefore already from the beginning a social product and It
remains so, as long as men exist at all'. (The German Ideology - MEW. Vol. 3.
p. 21 and 30-31.) Since this objection undoubtedly has a crucial importance, t?e
author perhaps may be allowed to answer it publicly: The view represented 10
this book also depart from the fact that Marx regarded work, material produc
tion as the determming factor both in anthropogenesis and in subseque�t human
historical devel0t'ment (see chapter I.). In this sense therefore the 'pn.macy' of
material production as against 'spiritual' production, the so-called 'soctal.forms
of consciousness' is accepted by us too. This does not mean, howe:ver, 10 our
opinion, that one could characterize work as 'primary' and consclOusne� as
'secondary' either in the sense of a ' temporary prec�dence or thac of l�glcal
inferabi1ity, and correspondingly of ontological reabty. We .do er;tphat1c�lly
agree with the Marx-interpretation of K. Korsch who underl1Oed: Accor�1Og
to the not abstract-naturalistic , but rather dialectic and therefore solely SClen-
73
rifle method of the Marxian-Engelsian materialism the pre- and extra-scientific,
as well as the scientific consciousness of the natural and especially of the
historical-social world no longer stand autonomously against this world, but
rather stand in the middle of it, being the real, actual - even iftspiriruaUy ideal'
- component part of this natural and historico-social world . . . Also the eco
nomic representations stand to the reality of the material productive relations
of bourgeois society only apparently in the relationship of the picture to the
depicted object, actually they relate to them as a particular, specific part of a
whole does to the other pares of this same whole' (K. Korsch: Marxismus und
Phi/oJophi,. Frankfurt-Koln, 1976. p. 131 and 135.) Neither is the genesis of
human species through productive activity imaginable without the simul
taneous emergence of the first forms of social life and organization and of
consciousness, nor is any type of material-productive activity possibey without
consciously and intentionally acting human subjects. This was, in our opinion,
definitely underlined by Marx himself. The famous definition of labour in the
first volume of the Capital specifically emphasizes its conscious-teleological
character as the feature distinguishing human material activity from that of any
animal (the difference between <the best bee and the worst architect'). Else
where Marx writes even more resolutely: 'we have seen, that value rests on the fact
that men relate reciprocally to their works (Arbeiten) as to equal, general and in
this form social labour (Arbeit). This is an abstraction, as an human thinking
(Denken), and social relations are possible only among men, as far as they thin k
and possess this capacity of abstraction from the sensuous individuality and
accidentality' (MEGA'. Sect. U. Vol. 3. Part. 1., p. 210.) Work, sociality and
consciousness are therefote integral and indispensable constituents and charac
teristics of all histori�al forms ofsocial Hfe, they are in this sense equally moments
of 'human essence', even if they are not equal as far as their 'significance' for the
theoretical explanation and the practical induction of historical change is
concerned. Because Marx's materialism is first of all apractica/ one: it rests not
on some metaphysical consideration concerning the reIationship of'matter' and
'spirit' in general, but on the historico-practical premise according to which one
cannot change the existing social reality radically but by changing the material
life-conditions of this society and thereby the character of the very materia}
productive activity of the individuals.
la. M. Fritzhand: 'Human essence' in Marx's Thought (in Polish, in the author's
volume of essays: Cz/owiek, Humanizm, Mora/nose. Warsaw, KIW., 1961. p.
102.) - A basically similar position is represented in E. Fromm's study: Marx's
Concept -of Man. True, Fromm emphasizes the historical character of 'human
essence', but he understands this historicity as merely the modification and
unfolding ofpre-existent potentialities (and psychological potentialities at that)
that are set and given by the very fact of human existence. (This apptoach is not
uncommon; similar points of view may be found in the majority of those
bourgeois philosophical anthropologies which at least attempt to account
theoretically for the anthropological significance of man's historicity. Thus,
despite the dissimilarities in their thought, on this question (of human nature)
the same basic solution can be found in the philosophies of Dilthey and
Dewey.) So Fromm states: 'Man's potential, for Matx, is a given potential; man
is, as it were, the human raw material, which as such cannot be changed, just as
the brain structure has remained the same since the dawn of history'. (E.
Fromm: Marx's Concept of Man, New York, Ungar, 1961. p. 26.) And in some
of his conclusions Fromm goes far beyond even this conceptiol'l: ' So, for
74
..
exemple, he transforms, now"·�uite in the spirit of the Enlightenment, the

Marxian �i�tinction between permanent and bistorically changi � g needs in�o
an Opposltlon between true and false needs, between 'real needs rooted in
human nature' and the 'synthetic, artificially produced needs of man'. He then
defines the principial goal of socialism in the recognition and realization of true
human needs. (Cf. 0)'. cit., pp. 62 f.)
2. M. Fritzhand: Op. Cit., p. 103. - It should be, however, noted that at the very
beginning of his essay the author makes the following interesting observation:
'I do not belive Marx would have defended a position which held the totality of
traits he most often designated with the term 'human essence' to belong to
every human individual without exception. Rather, this totality of traits
belongs to the (human species'; it characterizes the 'species existence' of men
vis-a.-vis the 'species existence' of animals; it is a totality which aprears only in
human societies and appears, without exception, in every socia formation'.
(Op. cit., p. 75.) This remark, however, remains unexplicated and undeveloped;
incfeed, it is not only bypassed, but even contradicted by the subsequent
analysis.
modified.
4. Theses on Feuerbach. In: Writings, p. 402, Translation modified,
5. 'Human essence' and 'human nature' are for Marx by no means identical
concepts, The notion of 'human essence' constitutes the subject matter of our
present analysis, As for 'human nature', this term, as M. Fritzhand correctly
emphasizes, most often designates the 'essential powers', the characteristics and
potentialities of typical individuals of some given historical epoch, As such
'human nature' is historically variable, although it includes some constant
elements, since Marx clearly acknowledges the existence of certain historically
invatiant human traits, needs, etc., in human development (Cf., e.g. Capital.
Vol. 1. p. 609. note 2.) It is in this sense of the term that Marx states: ' . . . all of
history is nothing else but a continuous transformation ofhuman nature'. (The
Poverty of Phi/o,ophy, p. 147.)
6. See Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings, p. 303.
7. Ibid., p. 304. .
8. Excerpt-Notes of 1844. Notes on]. Mil!. In: Writings, p. 281. - Cf. Grundns",
p. 693: Ha mere abstraction of activity".
9. See, e.g., The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Milligan-trans!., pp. 71 f.
10. Cf. The Gennan Ideology. Internatlonal Publishers edition, p. 49. Ana also: 'The
communist revolution . . . does away with labour (die Aroeit beseitigt)' (Ibid"
p. 69), etc. Marx also states that this 'abstract labour' is 'harmful and pernicious'
(The Econmic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Milligan-trans!. p. 71.) As Herbert
Marcuse correctly points out, Marx uses in all these contexts the term '!abour'
" co mean what capitalism actually understands by it in the last analYSIS, t�at
activity which creates surplus value in commoditv production, or, wh1C�
'produces capital' . . . Labour thus means that free and univ�rsal develop�ent IS
denied the individual who labours and it is clear that in thlS state of affairs the
liberation of the individual is at �nce the negation of labour'. (E:I. Ma.rcuse:
Reason and Revolution. New York, Oxfotd u.P., 1941. p. 293.) ThIS notion of
the 'abolition of labour' returns - on a modified basis - in the Grundnsse, too
(see op. cit., pp. 325., 693. etc.)
11. Excerpt-Notes of 1844. Notes on]. Mil!. In: Writings, p. 272. .
12. Though we shall return to it later on, we must point out already here that thIS
-75
Marxian view of history as a unified process of development - a view expressed
and articulated just in the notIOn of 'human essence' - cannot be
comprehended as a purely descriptive, value-free abstraction, an 'explanation'
that can be in some way 'inferred ' from empirically ascertained historical facts
alone. This conception of history assumes and presupposes the acceptance of a
definite perspective (i.e. the affirmation of determinate, presently existing social
needs that point in the direction of this perspective, the affi rmation of the radical
needs of the proletariat) and the choice of values emerging from, and deter
mined by, this perspective. The concept of 'human essence' locates, articulates
and explicates precisely these values and at the same time it indicates the basic
conditions of their realization through an analysis of the real condition humaine
that is history: It offers, departing from our present conflicts and a1cernatives, a
way of ordening the empirical data of history which permits to comprehend it
as a continuous process of development making the chosen historical perspec�
tive desirable and realizable. In this way it is an attempt at the �theoretical
rationalization' of our basic socio-practical decisions. But this rationalization
means �only' the spelling out of the historical �meaning' and consequences of
our practical decision, it never can resu1c in a 'justification' of our choice of
values in the sense of their deduction from some class of independently and
indubitably established 'facts'. It can be perhaps best seen as an act of rational
practical -persuasion through the elaboration of a philosophico-theoretical scheme, a
'paradigmatic' view of history . Naturally, this theoretical explanatory scheme,
th is ordening must be possi ble and permissible on the basis of the empirical
data, and so it can and must be evaluated in accordance with the immanent
criteria of theoretical thinking, of science. But these criteria can be met -
generally sp eaking - by different 'views', interpretations and conceptions of
history (o f man, of society), departing from differing practico-historical per
spectives, present �alternatives', related to different (among them: antagonistic)
social need s and interests. Therefore, the Marxian concept of 'human essence'
f
necessarily, unelimiably presu Poses and encloses the moment ofpractical choice,
that of decision in the socia conflicts of the present and berween presently
given social possibilities; it contains within its very theoretical content the
moment of praxis, namely of a revolutionary praxis radically transforming the
existing state of affairs.
13. The German Ideology. In: Writings, pp. 461 f. (Italics mine - G.M.)
14. Cf. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings, p. 314. Further: �The
great thing in Hegel's Phen011lmology and its final resu [t - the dialectic of
negativity as the moving and formative principle --' is simply that Hegel grasp
the self-formation (Selbsterzeugung) of man as a process, objectification as loss
of the object, as alienation and transcendence of this alienation; that he thus
grasps the nature of work. and comprehends objective man, authentic because
actual, as the result of his own work'. (Ibid., p. 321). Compare this with Hegel's
own statement: 'Man as spirit is not immediate, but essentially something
returned into itself. This movement of mediation is an essential moment of
spirit. Its activity is this going beyond immediacy, the negation of immediacy,
and return, therefore, to itself. Spirit, therefore, is that which it makes itself
through its activity. Only that which has returned into itself is subject, actual
reality. Spirit exist only as its own result'. (Hegl: Die Vemunft in der Geschichte.
Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 1966. p. 57 f.
15. This interpretation of the 'anthropology' of Marx apparently corresponds to a
very large degree to the conception of 'human nature' and 'man is general'
76
\.,
elaborated by Antonio Gramsci in his commentaries on Croce; by the way, a view

he worked out without having recourse to those early works of Marx which
constitute the basis of our interpretation. The answer to the question: 'what is
man?', (being 'the first and most fundamental question of philosophy') cannot
be found, according to Gramsci, in the 'single individual man', since this
question is not an 'abstract or objective' one. By posing it we actually try to find
out, what man can be, and namely, what he can be nlJW; whether he can master
his own fate and create his own life. The unity of all that what is human,
implied already by the question itself, cannot be found neither in the identity of
the biological Cmaterial') nature of men, nor in the identity of 'thinking' or
'spirit'. This unity is not something given before history, but made in history
which is the actual and active process of unification, a process unaccomplished
and going on. Der.arting from this Gramsci reveals the practico-'utopical'
character of all phIlosophy and the revolutionary character of the Marxian
theory of man as the 'philosophy of praxis'. On all these see especially A.
Gramsci: Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence & Wishart, London,
1971. pp. 351 ff.
16. See, for example, his criticism of the views of Rudolf Matthai: 'Society, the
'totality of life' (Gesamtleben) is conceived by our author not as the interaction
of the constituent 'individual lives' but as a separate existence which then
undergoes another and separate interaction with these 'individual lives'. If there
is reference to real affairs in all this, it is the illusion of the independence of the
state as opposed to private life and the belief in this apparent independence as
something absolute' (The German Ideology. Internationa1 Publishers, p. 107.)
17. 'Individuals have always started with themselves though within tneir given
historical conditions and relationships, not with the 'pure' individual in the
sense of the ideologists'. (The German Ideology. In: Writings, p. 458.).
18. Grundrisse, p. 265. (Italics mine - G.M.) - This is one of the (ver y few) actual
statements of Marx on which the Althusserian 'structuralist' interpretation of
Marxism is based. And one may even agree with Althusser that social relations,
'relations of production' cannot be treated as 'simple human relations' (d. Lire
ie Capital. Vol. II. Maspero, Paris, 1965. p. 102.), if one understand by the latter
the evanescent personal contacts between individuals. In this sense Marx
writes: 'These relations are not from the individual to the individual, but from
the worker to the capitalist, from the tenant to the lawdownes etc'. (The
Poverty of Philosophy - MEW. Vol. 4. p. 123.) Furthermore, social relations
become objectifiea and institutionalized and in this form they constitute, as
Marx tells, a 'living unity' or, if one prefers, a 'structure'. In this sense the
relations have an oDjective and irreducible existence. And the less control the
individuals have over these objectified and objective conditions of their exis
tence, the more these conditions become an autonomous power over them and
appear as the real subject of social life, of history. Only for Marx thiS. is a
historical fact characterizing a given type of social development (i.e. alienatt�n) ,
a fact that has to be negated in praxis and overcome, while for Althusse� t.hls IS
the hidden truth of alfhistory (being.a 'theatre without author' -: cf. Ibtd.; p.
177.) which can only be established and revealed by science, theoretlc�I 'pract1ce.
And the possibility to abolish the alienated character of t�ese cond1t1ons an.d
relations - at least its abstract pOSSibility - lies for Marx 10 t�e �a: t that thiS
alienation (the cutting free of social relations from the related 1Odlvlduals) can
never be total, it never can annul the subjectivity of social individuals and to. reduce
them to mere 'positions' and 'functions' in a given system of relatlons of
77
production (compare with Althusser, ibid., pp. 156 ff.) - in the fact that 'forces
of production and social relations' in the fast end always remain only 'cwo
different sides of the development of the social individual'. (Grundrisse, p. 706.)
In all probability this is the key to the understanding of the historical role chat
Marx attributed to classical Greek antiquity ('the normal childhood of man'):
in a brief period of Greek historical development there existed the possibility
for a definite and relatively large group of individuals ('the free citizens') to
incorporate in their life and activity in a comparatively free and harmonious
manner the essential human powers, social and cultural abilities historically
created by their own society as a whole. (See Grundrisse, pp. 110 f.) An
analogous historical phenomenon was pointed out by Engels in his well-known
characterization of the Rennaissance (see Engels: Dialectics 0/ Nature, New
York, International Publishers, 1940. pp. 1 ff.)
20. The Gemzan Ideology, International Publishers. p. 24. (Italics mine - G.M.) -
Compare also with a later formulation: 'The social relations of individuals to
one another as a power over rhe individuals which has become autonomous,
whether conceived as a natural force, as chance or in whatever other form, is a
necessary result of the fact that the point of departure is not the free social
individual'. (Grundris.re, p. 197.)
21. ' . . , alienation as the predominant form of appropriation [is, along with com
modity as the primary unit of wealth], characteristic only of the bourgeoiS
period of production . . .' (Marx: A Contribution to the Critique '0/ Political
Economy, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1970. p. 58.
22. Theories of Surplus Value, MEW. Vol. 26/3., pp. 270 and 273 f.
23. Grundrisse, p. 585. In a more particularized way: 'Thus all powers of labour are
transposed into powers of capital; the producrive power of labour into fixed
capital (posited as external to labour and as existing independently of it - as
object (sachlich); and in circulating capital, the fact that the workers himself
has created the conditions for the repetition of his labour, and that the
exchange of this, his labour, is mediated by the co-existing labour of others,
appears in such a way that capita} gives him an advance and posits the
simultaneity of the branches of labour . , . Capital in the form of circulating
capital posits itself as mediator between rhe different workers'. (Ibid" p. 701.)
And: The appropriation of living labour by objectified (vergegenstandlicht)
labour - of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself
- which lies in the very notion of capital, is posited, in production resting on
machinery, as the character of the production process itself, including its
material elements and its material motion, The production process has ceased to
be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its
governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered
among the individual living workers at numerouS points of the mechanical
system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only
a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in
the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant
doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labour confronts living
labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power
which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital . . . The
accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general/roductive force of the
social· brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as oppose to labour, and hence
appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically offixed capital, in so far
as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper'. (Ibid"
pp. 693 f.)
78
•
24. 'Moreover, the co-operation of wage-labourers is entirely brought about by the

capital that employs; them. The connection of their function and their union
into one single productive body lies outside them, in capital which brings and
keeps them together. Hence the connection of their labour confronts them
ideally as the plan and practically as the authority of the capitalist, as the power
of a foreign will which subjects their activity to its own aim', (Capital. Vol. 1., p.
331. Translation corrected.) - For other passages on alienation in Capita! see
pp. 310, 360 ff., 435., etc.
25. The Holy Family. In: Writings, p. 367. The same conception rea�pers. in a
-
more mature form, recapitulating the results of the critical analysis orcapitalist
society, in a late manuscript of Marx written just before the final version of
volume one of Das Kapital. 'In reality the domination of the capitalist over the
workers is nothing else but the domination of the conditions ojwork which have
become autonomous vis-a.-vis the worker (these conditions include, aside from
the objective preconditions of the production process the means ojproduction
-
- , also the objective preconditions of the sustenance and the efficiency of

labour power, i.e., the means of the sustenance of life belong also to them) over
the worker himself . . , The junctions fulfilled by the capitalist are only functions
of the capital - of the value that increases its value by sucking up living labour
- practiced with witt and consciousness. The capitalist functions only aspersonified
capital, capital as a person, just as the worker is only personified labour, which is
for him suffering, exertion. To the capitalist, however, labour belongs as a
wealth-creating and increasing substance, juSt as in reality labour appears as an
elemenr unified with capital in the process of production in the character of its
living, changing jactor. Therefore the domination of the capitalist over the
worker is the domination of the thing over the man, that ofthe dead labour
over living labour, of the product over the producer, since actually commod
ities, which become the means of domination (Herrschaftsmitte1) over the
worker (although only as means of domination of capital), are mere results of
the process of production, merely its products. The relationship is exactly the
same in material production, in the real social life-process - which is precisely
the process of production - as is manifested on 'the ideological level in
re!igion, it is the inversion (Verkehrung) of the subject into object and vice versa.
Examined historicatty, this inversion appears as the point of transition necessary
to enforce the creation of wealth as such, the creation of the relentless forces of
production of social labour, at the expense of majority. Only in this way can the
material bases' of a free human society be created. This contradictory stage must
be gone through, JUSt as man had to develop his own spiritual powers (Geis
teskrafte) at first religiously, in the form of alien, independent powers. This is
simply the process oj alienation of his own work (Entfremdungsprozess seiner
eigenen Arbeit). At the same time, the worker stands, from the beginning,
higher in this contect than the capitalist, the latter being rooted in this process
of alienation, finding his absolute satisfaction in it; while the worker, its victim,
confronts it in a relationship of rebellion and experiences it as a process of
enslavement (Knechtungsprocess).' (Resultate des unmittelbaren Produk
tionsprozesses. Marx-Engels Archiv. Vol. II. lVIII, pp. 32 ff.) Since the ques
tion, whether Marx abandoned the concept and theory of alienation in his later
oeuvre, is disputed even now, we should afso note that this rarely discussed (and
surely not 'ea:ry') manuscript of his from 1863-1865 contains (in the chapter
entitled MystiJlkation des Kapitats etc" op. cit., pp. 152-166.) one of the most
detailed discussions and analyses of alienation (using this term too) in the
79
iHE UBRARl
whole life-work of Marx. One should also add that this chapter immediately
precedes the great section of the manuscript dealing with capitalist production
as the p roduction and reproduction of the specifically capitalist relations of
productIon a problematic ·that Marx later moved from the first volume of the
-
Capital to the unfinished third volume.

26. One of the most important actual preconditions of adequately understanding
Marx's theory of history and society - a condition surely not met yet today - is
the many-sided analysis and reconstruction of his theory ofdivision of labour. It
is no accident that even in his late economic manuscripts Marx characterized
division of labour as 'the category of all categories of political economy'
(MEGA'. Section II., Vol. 3. Part I., p. 242.) In relationship to our topic we
would like to note only the following: In the most general and abstract sense
division of labour means simply the distribution of the whole mass of social
r
labour among all the members of a given opulation, a distribution which is
necessarily present in all historical forms 0 production since ir is presupposed
and conditioned by the social character of work as such. This 'distribution' of
labour becomes division of labour in the specific, narrower sense of the word, it
becomes social division o t labour, only when the total mass of social labour takes
the form of 'coexistence of different kinds of labour' (Theories of Surplus Value,
MEW. Vol. 26/3., p. 266.), i.e., when the forms of activity directed at the
satisfaction of different wants become socially differentiated, are transformed into
socially codified 'occupations', among which in dIviduals are distributed through
social mechanisms; that is, when the distribution of individuals among branches
of production is mediated not through their natural differences (of age, sex, etc.
- the so-called 'naturat or 'physiological' division of labour), but is dependent
on their social characteristics. Sodal division of labour emerges only at a
definite stage in the development of the forces of production, but from the
historical moment of its emergence 'the division of labour, as the totality of all
different types of productive activity, is nothing but the total configuration of
social labour regarded from its material side as labour producing use values
(Gesamtgestalt der gesellschaftlichen Arbeit nach ihrer stofflichen. Seite, als
Gebrauchswerte pro duzierende Arbeit betrachtet)' (Contributions to the Critique
ofPolitical Economy, p. 51. Translation modified. Italics mine - G.M.) As such,
in the form of the socially planned and controlled distribution of the correct
proportions of various productive functions, the social division of labour will of
course be preserved in communist society, too: 'As if the division of labour' -
argues Marx against bourgeois economists - 'was not just as, possible if its
conditions belonged to the associated workers (although historically it could
not at first appear in this form but can only achieve it as a result of capitalist
production) and were regarded by these workers as they are by their very nature,
I.e., if the workers related to them as to their own products and the material
elements of their own activity'. (Theories of Surplus Value. MEW. Vol. 26/3.,
p. 271. - See also Capital. Vol. I., pp. 76).
In the period of 'prehistory', social division of labour emerged and exists in
the form of naturally given (naturwuchsig) division oflabour. (It should be noted
that, especially in his early works, Marx often made no terminological dis
trinction between 'natural' and 'naturally given' division of labour calling both
naturwiichsig that easily can lead to misunderstandings.) The main characteris
tics of a naturally given division of labour are the following:
a. The subsumption of individuals under some specific branch of production
takes place independently of their personal gifts and interests, of theif in-
80
• •
dividual traits in general, and is determined by anonimous social forces (by their
social 'positions') which the individuals cannot essentially influence.
b. The historical starting point of the social division oflabouc is the division
of manual and mental labour (see The German Ideology. In: WritingJ, pp. 422
f.). With the development of naturally given division of labour the separation
of these two becomes a more and more fundamental and sharp division and
opposition. As a result, the internal unity of working activity as goal-politing
ana goal-realizing material expenditure of force is loosened and lost; the setting
of goals as the mental-intellectual moment of work, separated now from the
physical activity itself, in part becomes the special task of some specialized
individuals who stand above the manual workers, in pact it is transposed to an
impersonal mechanism operating as a force of nature. Thus the parricular kinds
of physical labour become more and more onewsided and mechanical; they
demand the cultivation of narrowly specific capabilities at the expense of at!
others; thus they become constraints on the many-sided unfolding of human
abilities. Within the bounds of naturally given division of labour the work of
the individual loses its manwdeveloping character and becomes a force that
deforms individuals and blocks their developmenr.
c. The historical emergence of a shcial division of labour based on the
separation of mental and manual labour necessarily coincided with the for
mation of the most primitive forms of exploitation and class society, of the
'Asiatic mode of production'. Within the framework of class societies the
development of the division of labour converges with the emergence and
growdl of the social hierarchization of the branches ofactivity involved, from the
point of view of sharing in the total social product, the pOSSibility of par
ticipating in decisions regarding the common affairs of society, social prestige,
etc. etc.
Marx regarded the 'abolition of the old division on labour' (Capital, Vol. !.,
p. 488.), i.e. the 'naturally given' form of the social division of labour, as one of
the fundamental goals of the communist transformation of society. Precisely
this constitutes one of the most essential aspects of the historical overcoming of
alienation. But it must also be noted that the abolition of the capitalist division
of labour has an additional aspect in the works of Marx (The German Ideology.
The Poverty of Philosophy, Capital): tbe abolirion of speciahzation. Marx
presupposed that modern industrial production liberated from the fetters of the
capitalist social form does away with the need for particular individuals to be
active throughout their whole life in one limited branch of the division of
labour; indeed, regularly changing the forms of one's activity (�ithin the
framework of the social regulation of their totality and their propornons to one
another) would become the general rule on this new basis. This view of .�arx
was based (at least in his later writings) on very definite presupposlt1ons
relating to the perspectives of technical progress. Namely, he assume� that
machine industry accomplishes in an ever increasing measure the re.ductJon of
all types of complex labour to simple one, ultimately to the 'few baSK for� s of
human motion', making thereby the abolition of specialization techmcal�y
feasible and socially desirable (see Capital, Vol. !., pp. 420 f£., 484 ff., ere.) : TblS
historical tendency noted by Marx was in fact a real one, and not only m hiS
own age, but even in the first decades of our century - in some branches of
industry it is in force even now its extreme expression bei?g the system of
_
Taylorism. At the same time, the abolition of the naturally glve� c�ara.cter of
division of labour (and therefore of alienation) and the elImmatIOn of
81
specialization are not, in our opinion, logically connected with each other (rhough
Marx, to emphasize once again, did not separate chern, e.g., in Capital). It
should be clear from the above thac the abolition of the naturally given division
of labour means the transformation of the character of labour process and of the
social mechanism that distribute individuals among the different branches o,f
production (in the broad sense), and it is not directly related to the question to
what extent individuals can, during the course of their life - not in personal
cases, bur as a social rule - vary and alternate the forms and types of their
productive activity. This claim seems to be supported by the fact that in the
GrundrisJe (contrary to Capita!), which also explores in detail the idea of the
abolition of the 'old' division of labour, of alienation, of the cleavage between
physical and mental labour, etc., Marx doe.s not speak of the abolition of
specialization (in the above sense); indeed, his train of thought occasionally
seems to contradict this presupposition. Very likely, this difference between
Capital and Grundrisse is related to the fact that in these two works Marx
operates with distinctly different presuppositions concerning the ' future per�
spectives of technical progress and the development of production in general.
(This difference finds a clear expression, e.g., in the facr that according to the
Capital in 'automatic factory' it is only 'a numerically unimportant class of
persons' who will look after the whole of machinery and repair it (Capital, Vol.
I., p. 420.), while in the Grundrisse 'the automatic system of industry' is
characterized just by the fact that the worker here generally 'comes to relate
more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (Grundrisse,
p. 70S.) To clarify the mutual relationship of these twO conceptions is thus far
an unsolved task. In any case, in a recently published (only in Russian trans
lation) manuscript of Marx written between 1861 and 1863 (,Machines. The
application of the forces of nature and science') one can see the clear signs of a
gradual transition from the conception of Grundris.se to that of Capital (see op.
cit., Voprosy istorii estestvoznania i techniki. Series 25. 1968. pp. 45 ff., 67 r.)
27. The German Ideology. International Publishers, p. 22.
28. Marx: Aus l. Feuerbach. MEW. Vol. 3., p. 540. .
29. The German Ideology. International publishers, p. 22.
30. For a concise characterization of the Marxian concept of Asiatic mode of
production see F. Tokei: Zur Frage der a.siati.schen Produktionswei.se. Berlin
Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1969. (In the meantime there appeared also the very
important in this respect Ethnological Notebooks of Marx (Die Enthnologischen
ExzerptheJte. Hrsg. von L. Krader. Frankfurt aiM., Suhrkarnp, 1976). (See also
the fundamental monograph of their editor: 1. Krader: The Asiatic Mode of
Production. Ass.en, Van Gorcum, 1975).
31. See, for example, the characterization of the 'idyllic village communities' in the
East in Marx's article for New-York Daily Tribune: 'The British Rule in India'
(MEW. Bd. 9. pp. 127 ff.)
33. Capital. Vol. 3., pp. 858 f.
34. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings, p. 304. - In the context
of this quotatioJ! it may be worthwhile to say a few words about one of the
often discussed questions of Marx-interpretation - the problem of the age
preceding alienation. Some formulations in the Economic and Philo.sophic Manu�
scripts (alienation as the 'loss' of the human essence, communism as the
'regaining' Or 'restoration' of human essence, etc.) could suggest that Marx
presupposed a historical situation before the emergence of the naturally given
-
82
division of labour and alrrnarlon - in which human essence and existence,
social and individual development were in actual unity. 'The imaginary of
reintegration and return contains the idea that man must again become what he
originally was. His integrated form is presupposed at the beginning of history'.
(H. Barth: Wahrheit und Ideologie. Ziirich, 1945. p. 115.) All similar interpre·
tations, which suggest the postulation of a pre�historical golden age (similar to
Rousseau's age of savagery) by Marx should be treated, however, with reserve.
True, in the historical period preceding the emergence of private property and
naturally given division of labour, the products of work do not become,
according to Marx, forces independent of men and ruling over them, but form
their real (communal) 'property', the inorganic body of their subjectivity. In
this sense, therefore, work appears here directly in its real, anthropological
significance as an activity that develops the powers and capabilities of men. But,
on the other hand, we can hardly speak here of actually human work, since this
activity barely surpasses the satisfaction of immediate physical needs, ir is
narrowly limIted, since man still directly depends on his surrounding natural
environment which has been hardly touch'lcfby work. Second, and this is even
more important, in this context we can hardly speak sensu stricto of the
convergence of individual and social development (human existence and es
sence), since individuality in Marx's sense of this word does not exist in this
epoch at alL For the concept of the individual is not identical for Marx with
that of a single and singular biological organism; men are not yet individuals
perforce of their !uniqueness', their difference from one another in the
physico-biological or even psychological sense. Generally speaking, the notion
of individuality is for Marx not an ontological, but a socio-historical category.
We can only speak of 'individuals' where human beings have historically
acquired a degree of practical distance and relative autonomy in relation to the
social whole they belong to. As the first version of Marx's letter to Vera
Zasulich (see MEW. VoL 19) and the discussion of the precapitalist forms of
property in the Grundrisse argue, the further we go back in history from the
point of universalization of alienation in capitalism, the individual has less and
less autonomy in regard to his immediate social environment: his social
relations appear to him as the self-evident frame of his own existence, his
community as a simple objective datum and presence which is unproblematic
and hence unchangeable. In this sense Marx says that in the beginning of really
historical development the social life of man is still 'animalistic' (tierisch - The
German Ideology. In: Writings! p. 422.), that man himself is only a 'clan being',
'herd animal', 'a link in rhe chain of the community' and his community a
'herdlike existence' (Herdenwesen), etc. (See Grundrisse, pp. 496 ff.) The
emergence of individuality itself takes place through the formation of the
'abstract individual', i.e., only through the historical path of alienation.
35. Theories of Surplus Value. MEW. Va. 2612., p. 111. Cf.: 'The capitalist
production is . . . most economical of realized labour, labour realized in com
modities. It is a greater spendthrift than any other mode of production of man,
of living labour, spenthrift not only of flesh and blood and muscles, but of
brains and nerves. It is, in fact, only at the greatest waste of individual
development that the development ofgeneral men is secured in those epochs of
history which prelude to a socialist constitution of mankind'. (MEGA2n.
Sect. II. Vol. 3 Part I., p. 326 f.)
..
36. Grundrisse! p. 105. Translation modified.

37. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In: Writings! p. 317. Translation
modified. - Compare also with Grundrisse, p. 162.
83
" . . (with) the overthrow of the existing state of society by the communist
r
38.
revolution . . . and the abolition of private pro erty which is identical with it,
. . . the liberation of each single individual wi! be acoomplished to the extent
that history becomes world history. Hence it is clear that the real intellectual
wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections.
Only in this way will separate individuals be liberated from the various local
barriers, be brought into practical connection with the produccion of the whole
world (intellectual production included) and be able to enjoy this all�sided
production of the whole earth (the creations of man). All-around dependence,
that naturally given (naturwuchsig) form of the world-historical co-operation of
individuals, will be transformed by the communist revolution into the control
and conscious governance of these powers, which, born of the interaction of
men, have until now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to
them'. (The Getman Ideology. In: Writings, pp. 429 f.)
40. 'Since due to the general venality (Verkauflichkeit) the workers have found out
that everything could be separated from them and sold off, they became free for
the first time from being subordinated to any definite relationship'. (Marx:
Atbeitslohn MEGA. Fart I., Vol. 6., p. 462.)
-
41. Theoties of Surplus Value. MEW. Vol. 2611., p. 353.

44. Marx: Letter to Annenkov, December 28, 1846. In: Marx-Engels: Selected
Works. International Publishers, New York, 1968. pp. 670 f.
45. Marx-Engels: The Communist Manifesto. In: Selected Works. p. 36. Italics mine.
46. Lukacs: His�ory and Class Consciousness. Merlin Press, London, 1971, p. 246. -
Lukacs' quatations are from volume one of Capital. . .
47. A. Gramsci: The Modern Prince. International Publishers, New York, 1957, p.
101.
48. The interpretation of historical determinism that we outlined here and which is
based on the well-known works of Lukacs, Korsch, and Gramsci, is the only one
that we believe can be reconciled with the whole of Marx's social theory. At the
same time, it is an indisputable fact thar some formulations of Marx, especially
in Capital, contradict, at least prima facie, this interpretation. Only a detailed
analysis of the Capital could show what is the depth and the significance of this
contradiction (if there is one) from the poine of view of the work as a whole. In
this context the passages, especially in Marx's correspondence, where he com
ment or explicates the relevant statements from Capital, deserve also specific
attention. See, e,g. his letter to the editors of Ot'echestvennie Zapiski, in MEW.
Vol. 19., pp. 107 ff.)
As to our interpretation of historical determinism see also the following studies
from recent Hungarian Marxist literature: A, Heller: Toward a Marxist Philos
ophy of Values. Kinesis, Fall 1972; A. Heller: Alltag und Geschicht,. Luchtet,
hand, Neuwied-Berlin, 1970; M, Vajda: Marxism, Existentialism, Phenome
nology. Telos, 1971. No. 7.
49. 'History does nothing; it 'possesses no colossal riches', it 'fights no battles'! Rather
it is man, actual and living man, who does all this, who possesses and fights;
'history' does not use man as a means for its purpose as though it were a per�n
apart; it is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his ends'. (The Holy Famtly,
In: Writings, p. 385.) . . . .
50. In general, Marx, to distance himself from the teleologiCal VIewS of IdealIst
84
historiosophies, avoids the use of terms like 'purpose', 'goal', etc. in contexts
not directly related to individuals. But we can at times find in his writings such
formulations: 'But obvi"-usly this process of inversion (Verkehrungsprocess -
i.e., the transformation dfobjectification into alienation - G.M.) is a merely
historical necessity, a necessity for the development of the forces of production
solely from a specific historic point of departure, or basis, but in no way an
absolute necessity of production; rather, a vanishing one, and the result and the
inherent purpose (immanenter Zweck) of this process is to suspend this basis
itself, together with this focm of the process'. (Grundrisse, pp. 831 f.)
51. 'It is also clear from this discussion how grossly Feuerbach deceives himself
when he declares himself a communist . . . by virtue of the qualification 'com
r
mon man' converted into a predicate to! Man, and thus he bdieves it OSsible to
change the word communist, which actually means the follower 0 a definite
revolutionary party, into a mere category.' (The German Ideology. In: Writings,
p. 435.)
52. Ibid" pp. 415 f. On the question of Marx's concept of philosophy in the
�
-
context of the' contemporary debates over the task and subject matter of a
Marxist PhilO O hy, see M. Vajda: Objective View of Nature and Social Praxis.
Magyar Filoz6 tai Szemle, 1967, No. 2. (In Hungarian); Gy. Markus: Dis
kussionen un Tendenzen in der marxistischen Philosophie. In the volume by
A. Hegediis, M. Vajda and others. Die neue Linke in Ungam. Vol. 2. West
Berlin, Merve Verlag, 1976.
modified.
54. Ibid., p. 294.
55. The German Ideology. MEGA. Fart L, VoL 5. p. 283.
56. Cf. ibid., p. 293.
57. 'When we look at social relations which create an undeveloped system of
exchange, of exchange values and of money, or which correspond to an
undeveloped degree of these; then it is clear from the outset that the individuals
in such a society, although their relations appear to be more personal, enter into
connecrions with one another only as individuals imprisoned within a certain
definition, as feudal lord and vassal, landlord and serf, etc., or as members of a
caste etc. or as members of an estate etc. In the money relation, in the developed
system of exchange (and this semblance seduces the democrars), the ries of
personal dependence, of distinctions of blood, education, etc., are in fact
ex ploded, ripped up (at least, p�rsonal ties all appear aspersonal relations); and
individuals seem independent (this is an independence which is at bottom
merely an illusion, and it is mOre correctly called indifference), free to collide
with one another and to engage in exchange within this freedom; but they
appear thus only for someone who abstracts from the conditions, the conditions of
existence within which these individuals enter into concact (and these con
ditions, in turn, are independent of the individuals and, although created by
society, appear as if they were natural conditions (Naturbedingungen), i.e.
conditions not controllable by individuals). The definedness (Bestimmtheit) of
individuals, which in the former case appears as a personal restriction of the
indvidual by another, appears in the latter case as developed into an objective
restriction of the indivi dual by relations independent of him and sufficienr unto
themselves . . . These external relations are very far from being an abolition of
'relations of dependence'; they are rather the dissolution of these relations in to
a general form; they are merely the elaboration and emergence of the general
85
1
il
foundation of the telations ofpersonal dependence.' (Grundrisse, pp. 163 f.) And,
j
I
'Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the •
I
first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight
extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective
(sachlicher) dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general I
social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round wants and universal ,
\
capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal !
development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal,
social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage. The second stage
cteates the conditions fot the thitd.' (Ibid., p. 158.)
!
58 . Ibid., p. 540. •
\.
•
i
I.
I
1 ,
· ,

György Márkus - Marxism and Anthropology - The Concept of Human Essence in The Philosophy of Marx

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György Márkus - Marxism and Anthropology - The Concept of Human Essence in The Philosophy of Marx

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DIALECTIC AND SOCIETY

Lawrence Krader, Editor

1. Lawrence Krader, THE ASIATIC MODE OF PRODUCTION:

Translated by E. de Laczay and G. Markus

ISBN 90 232 16 156

Printed in The Netherlands by Van Gorcum, Assen

Man as universal natural being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ........ .......... 3

Man as a social and conscious natural being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ........................ . 15

Human essence and history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..... .............. . . . . . . . 36

May one speak legitimately of a Marxian "philosophical anthropology"

What is man? Marx starts to answer this age-old philosophical question

individuals and their consequent relationship to the rest of nature. Of

it . . ".'0 Naturally, animal activity cannot be simply reduced to native,

instinctive forms of behaviour, since they will be overlayed by a web of

formation into results and repositories of subjective activity"1' Work,

natural as well as artificial - can be used, of course, in a multitude of ways

developing new productive abilities man mounts in his activity, converts

Second: In the continuous process of material reproduction there evolve

decelerate, but in some historical cases (as that of "Asiatic stagnation"

the evolution of nature. "Labour (Arbeit) is the living, form-giving fire; it

The characterization of man as a working and therefore universal being

I can seldom pursue in direct community with others - I am socially active

other economic determinations connected with it (so the instrument may

and internalized by him, turned into constituents of his own personality.

particular condition under which they produce thus corresponds ro the

A further characteristics of human essence discussed by Marx is conscious­

him in language as externalized social consciousness.'o Only by breaking

of form, in short, sensei-capable of human satisfaction, confirming them­

conscious knowledge claims. As a necessary result of his becoming practi­

forms of intellectual achievement differing from each other in their objects

The case is somewhat different with the other constituents of human

traits, chose dimensions of this total developmental process on the basis of

question about 'human essence', an attempted resolution of the question:

itself as the process of man's gradual and unceasing transformation into a

traits of alienation, although in rudimentary, primitive, and consequently

(gemeinschaftlich) relations, are hence also subordinated to their own

A further problem which comes up in connection with our topic is the

ment which express and promote - in objective or subjective form - the

transcending alienation, ,communism first creates the conditions for a

Notes to the Introduction

Notes to chapter Man as universal natural being

led in his epistemological investigation to an agnostic-relativistic position

(attributed by him to Marx) according to which the 'visual-worlds' of a man

consumptive and productive, necessary and luxury wants plays a prominent

the limitations inherent in such a social system of production.)

productiot:l (land, labour or instr�ment) impossible. (As a chance example of

Notes to the chapter Man as a social and conscious natural being

this passage is unfortunatelly incorrect.) A detailed examination of the origin of

exemple, he transforms, now"·�uite in the spirit of the Enlightenment, the

elaborated by Antonio Gramsci in his commentaries on Croce; by the way, a view

24. 'Moreover, the co-operation of wage-labourers is entirely brought about by the

- , also the objective preconditions of the sustenance and the efficiency of

Capital to the unfinished third volume.

36. Grundrisse! p. 105. Translation modified.

41. Theoties of Surplus Value. MEW. Vol. 2611., p. 353.

'Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the •

59. The German Ideology. In: Writings, p. 461.

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A further characteristics of human essence discussed by Marx is conscious

of form, in short, sensei-capable of human satisfaction, confirming them

conscious knowledge claims. As a necessary result of his becoming practi