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Thus, Marx appears to say that human nature is no more than what is made by the "social relations". Norman Geras's Marx and Human Nature (1983), however, offers an argument against this position. [3] In outline, Geras shows that, while the social relations are held to "determine" the nature of people, they are not the only such determinant.
Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend is a 1983 book by the political theorist Norman Geras, in which the author discusses the philosopher Karl Marx's theory of human nature with reference to Marx's Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach.
The concept of human nature is the belief that all human individuals share some common features. [141] In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes his position on human nature as a unity of naturalism and humanism. [142] Naturalism is the view that Man is part of the system of nature. [142]
Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves. Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being's life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class. [1]
For Marx, the human nature – Gattungswesen, or species-being – exists as a function of human labour. [ 231 ] [ 232 ] [ 234 ] Fundamental to Marx's idea of meaningful labour is the proposition that for a subject to come to terms with its alienated object it must first exert influence upon literal, material objects in the subject's world. [ 235 ]
Furthermore, he criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man [menschliche Wesen, human nature]. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single ...
Marx saw the fundamental nature of capitalist society as little different from that of a slave society in that one small group of society exploits the larger group. [ 78 ] Through common ownership of the means of production, the profit motive is eliminated, and the motive of furthering human flourishing is introduced.
The philosopher Herbert Marcuse offers a discussion of the role of nature in Marxist philosophy informed by Schmidt's work in his Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972). [3] The political scientist David McLellan describes The Concept of Nature in Marx as, "an important and well-documented consideration of the importance of Marx's materialism." [4]