SM3125 Critical Theory of Society
Kimburley Choi
30 January 2008
Marx: human nature, needs, and production
"Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life"
 Life was actual living everyday
activity. Human thought or consciousness was rooted in human activity, in our daily life. In other words, a person is determined by where and when he is—social context takes precedence over some human behavior. Or the main features of human nature, in Marx words, “species-essence,” is adaptability.
 Humanity is essentially social in nature: “the real nature of man is the totality of social relations.” Ex: being competitive, selfish, utilitarian, according to Marx, is because of capitalism and scarcity.
 However, although history involves a continuous transformation of human nature, this does not mean that every aspect of human nature is wholly variable.
Human beings as producers and agents to history, but are also conditioned by environment
1. Humans produce but are conditioned by environment:
“Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers – he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities – as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs – essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers.” 1
2. Humans Vs animals: humans produce not only for survival but also for “beauty” & selfactualization
“It is true that animals also produce. They build nests and dwellings, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc. but they produce only their own immediate needs or those of their young; they produce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need…. man also produces in accordance with the laws of beauty.” 2
“As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.” 3
3. Humans Vs animals: humans plan and organize themselves in diverse ways to produce:
“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 subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation.” 4
1 Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General,” in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
of 1844, section XXVI.
2 Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
3 Karl Marx, “First Premises of Materialist Method,” in “Part I: Feuerbach,” The German Ideology.
4 Karl Marx, 1845, “First Premises of Materialist Method,” in “Part I: Feuerbach,” The German
Ideology.
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4. Humans Vs animals: humans have consciousness. Humans make both their “life activity” and
“species” the “object” of their will. They relate to their life activity, and are not simply identical with it.
“The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from that activity; it is that activity.
. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a speciesbeing. Or, rather, he is a conscious being – i.e., his own life is an object for him, only because he is a species-being. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses the relationship so that man, just because he is a conscious being, makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means for his existence.” 5
Need
Marx conceives that humans have “tendencies,” “drives,” “essential powers,” and “instincts” to act and to produce to satisfy “need.” To fulfill needs, humans are driven to produce. However, what counts as a need changes from society to society, and it means differently in different historical period.
“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, tooth and nail.” 6
Therefore, “Life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things.” 7 Humans develop new needs to replace old: “the satisfaction of the first need (the action of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act.” 8
1. Needs and change of self
We transform the material environment, through which we transform ourselves. Example: New technological media & complex narrative enrich our experience.
“Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical need has only a restricted sense…. the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value, and not the beauty and peculiar nature of the minerals; he lacks a mineralogical sense.” 9
2. Needs and production—Relations of Production & Productive Forces
To fulfill needs and, men organized and work collectively to transform the material environment and to produce the means of life and means of subsistence. They enter into certain relations with one another in association with the economic sphere of production. These are called the
relations of production. Together with production forces, they constitute the economic structure of a society, the distribution of incomes, products, and assets, and the constitution of human needs, desires, and nature.
Relations of control or ownership of the forces of production
Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way. However, he argued that work is a social activity and work under different economic and social structures (the combination of
5 Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
6 Karl Marx, 1857, “Production, consumption, distribution, exchange (circulation), in Grundrisse, in the section “consumption and production.”
7 Karl Marx, “History: Fundamental Conditions,” in “Part I: Feuerbach,” The German Ideology.
8 Karl Marx, 1845, “History: Fundamental Conditions,” in “Part I: Feuerbach,” The German
9
Ideology.
Marx, Karl, 1844, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Early Writings (New York:
Vintage Book, 1975), p. 353.
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forces and relations of production) constitute different power relations among people and the
“social individual.”
Collective laboring activity
Productive forces
Instruments of production
Ind’l laboring activity
Labor power, skills, theory
Work motivation
Work organization
Situational knowledge buildings Tools, machines, instrumental materials
Objects of production
Spaces Raw materials
Ian Hunt, Analytical and Dialectical Marxism (Aldershot: Avebury, 1993), p. 104.
1. Hunter-gatherer societies tend to have non-hierarchical, with egalitarian social and political structures because of hunters’ mobility.
2. In the feudal society, the political forces of the kings and nobility had their relations with the economic forces of the villages through serfdom. Serfdom is the forced labor of serfs, who legally could not leave their jobs, in return for protection. The serfs, although not free, were tied to both economic and political forces (that landlords are bound to protect serfs) and, thus, not completely alienated.
3. Industrial revolution  rise of bourgeoisie & capitalism
Capitalism is organized on the basis of capitalists who own the means of production, distribution and exchange (e.g. factories, mines, shops and banks), and the working class who live by selling their labor to the capitalists for wages.
The proletariat control no means of production; they only control their own labor power which they exchange wage. The capitalists is a class who own means of production. They produce for exchange (for profit) rather than for the sake of use. Profit becomes an end in itself.
Marx argued that capitalism completely separates the economic and political forces, leaving them to have relations through a limiting government.
Example: HK: “free” market but few occupational health protection
2. Division of labor (d/l)
Not all human beings do the same work. There is a division of labor. Example: hunting/gathering; manual/intellectual; management/operation; specialized tasks in Fordism
(assembly line, mass production), Taylorism (scientific management); domestic d/l (man as breadwinner & woman as housewife but got no money return).
Different groups are organized in terms of different divisions of labor. Ex: farmer Vs industrial worker Vs service worker
“In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in a factory, the machine makes use of him…. In the factory, we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages…. Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity….” 10
Servicing job is not better; ex: Disneyland
10 Karl Marx, 1867, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 548-9.
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When we concentrate and put our efforts in learning skills needed to produce goods or services, we learn some new skills and we also fail to learn and improve other skills. Our needs are affected by the division of labor.
 Operational vs intellectual  narrow development
 Expertise  disempowerment of ordinary person.
Historical materialism—“materialist conception of history”
Capital: “the ultimate aim of this work is to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society.” Marx held that there are general socioeconomic laws applying to human history, that each stage of economic development gives rise to the next.
1. Social progress is driven by progress in the material, productive forces a society has at its disposal (technology, labor, capital goods, etc.)
2. Humans are inevitably involved in production relations, which constitute our most decisive social relations.
3. Production relations change following and corresponding to the development of the productive forces.
4. Production relations, on the other hand, help determine the degree and types of the development of the forces of production. For example, capitalism tends to increase the rate at which the forces develop and stresses the accumulation of capital, investment and money making.
5. Every type of state is a powerful institution of the ruling class; the state is an instrument which one class uses to secure its rule and enforce its preferred production relations (and its exploitation) onto society.
6. The superstructure—the cultural and institutional features of a society—is ultimately an expression of the mode of production (which combines both the forces and relations of production) on which the society is founded.
Human emancipation
Written in 1843, Marx reviews two studies on the Jewish question written by Bruno Bauer, another Young Hegelian.
“Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society 11 , to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person… only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.” 12
11 The word “civil society” used by Marx does not mean what we mean in Hong Kong society recently. The recent HK usage adapts the French meaning derived from French Revolution.
“Citoyen” means the participant in the political life of the community. In German, the word
“Bürger” expresses a person as an individual participating in the economic life of the community, the one with social rights not to be interfered to carry any activity that does no harm to other.
The French translation of Bürger is “bourgeois,” and “bourgeoisie” is the class of “individuals.”
The German Bürgerlicher Gessellschaft, literally “bourgeois society,” is usually translated into
English as Civil Society.
12 Karl Marx, 1843, “On the Jewish Question,” I Bruno Bauer, The Jewish Question,
Braunschweig.
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Written in 1843, Marx argues for a "radical revolution" to achieve self-realization. This is the first time he writes of the proletariat as the vehicle for revolution. Only by abolishing private property of means of production can humans self-actualize themselves.
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 To make one’s life one’s object
 To treat one’s life under one’s control
 To imagine one’s future and present & to fulfill those plans
 To achieve “self-activity” (actualization)
J.K. Gibson-Graham. 1996.
 Capitalism is represented as dominant and these authors argue it as a discourse. There are capitalist and non-capitalist activities and the noncapitalist ones had been relative “invisible” because our concept, capitalist hegemony, makes them invisible. The effect of the discourse is to limit our anticapitalist imagination.
 There are many types of economy that may coexist in a plural economic space, and in that case, capitalism must adapt to these other forms of economy.
 “Classic triad” of class—extraction of surplus, ownership of means of production, and control of the labor process” in characterizing Marx’s “bare bones” definition of class.
 It is impossible to have class struggle because individual class identity is decentered and diverse. Individuals may participate in various class process, holding multiple class positions at one moment and over time. Ex: Bill
 Non-capitalist class politics:
 Self-employment, Ex: Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) of India
 Distributional struggles move from distribution of income to distribution of resource and property distribution, ex: ecology law, Grameen Bank
 Producer-consumer coalition, ex: 台灣主婦聯盟生活消費合作社
13 Karl Marx, 1845, “10. The Necessity, Preconditions and Consequences of the Abolition of
Private Property,” in “Part I: Feuerbach,” The German Ideology.
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