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Structure of Marx's World-View
By John McMurtry PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07229-6
CHAPTER 1
Human Nature
The final objection to Marx's general theoretical framework cited in our introduction was that there was nothing at all about "human nature," about the properties of man himself, in Marx's post-1845 work. Since this objection claims a radical void at the very foundation of his world-view, we will cater to it first. When we have shown that Marx does, in fact, sponsor in his mature work a definite and substantial position on this ontological substructure of society and history — human nature — we will count this position as constituting the elementary factor in the structure of his world-view.
It is first worth noting that Marx implies an underlying factor of human nature by his very concept of the forces of production. Of the forces of production we may say, in advance, that for Marx they necessarily involve developed labor-power competences, and they are by definition capable of making material use-values. But labor-power competences and material use-values themselves presuppose, respectively, definite capacities and needs of man himself out of which they are developed and to which they are useful. Forces of production therefore presuppose such needs and capacities, and a notion of human nature in these respects is implicit in Marx's theory from the start. And he repeatedly tells us just this. Hence he says, "Man develops his slumbering powers" (CI, 177); and "no production without needs" (G, 92).
In short, a notion of human nature involving capacities and needs is posited in Marx's theoretical framework by his very concept of the forces of production, and he consistently declares his awareness of this presupposition. But Marx not only presupposes these needs and capacities of human nature. They constitute, as well, the substance of his explicit concept of human nature.
In a rarely observed passage in Capital, Marx prescribes a program for dealing with human nature as a factor of history. Arguing against the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham who, Marx opines, has a grotesque "shopkeeper" view of man, he says:
To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog nature. ... Applying this to man, he that would criticize all human acts, movements, relations etc. by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general , and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch" (CI, 609).
What is of special interest to us in this passage is that the mature Marx — in manifest opposition to what so many have claimed — clearly accepts the legitimacy of a notion of human nature. Indeed, he prescribes such a notion as theoretically necessary to certain systems of thought. Consequently, since his own system of thought is one that "criticizes human acts, movements, relations, etc. by the principle of utility," that is, Marx's essential criticism of the capitalist order is the latter's systematic dedication to exchange-value rather than use-value, his own theory is committed, by his own prescription, to the program of "dealing with" man's nature in both its general and historical aspects. Thus Marx asserts in explicit recognition of this theoretical commitment, "One of the most vital principles of communism" is its "empiric view, based upon a knowledge of man's nature" (GID, 593). Not only, then, does Marx accept the validity of a concept of man's nature, but he prescribes it as necessary to his own system of thought.
Working according to the frame of Marx's own declared program, we now outline what his ideas on man's general and historical nature are. But first it is important to clarify the distinction between "human nature in general" and "human nature as modified in each historical epoch." The former refers to the properties of man conceived generally and independently of particular historical forms (for example, man's species need for food or nutrition), whereas the latter refers to the same properties conceived in a definite historical context (for example, the nineteenth-century European man's cultural need for food or nutrition that lives up to the specific established standards of his society). Hence the farmer's referent is general and constant, whereas the latter's referent is particular and changing.
HUMAN NATURE IN GENERAL
When he talks about man as a species, Marx pursues the traditional philosophical strategy of distinguishing him from the animal. In one well-known passage from The German Ideology, for example, he tells us that men can be distinguished from animals by virtue of their "consciousness," their "religion," or "anything else you like." But, he goes on to say, man actually raises himself above the animals only when he starts to produce his own means of staying alive: "They [men] distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence ..." (GID, 31). Since for Marx the dliferentia specifica of human behavior is that man alone produces his means of life, it follows that what he construes as the special capacity enabling such productiveness is for him the differentia specifica of man's nature.
In a nuclear discussion in Capital on the labor process, Marx clearly states what this special capacity is. It is man's creative intelligence. Again in this passage, Marx pursues the traditional procedure of distinguishing man from animal:
We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this: that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form on the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. (CI, 179)
It is important to note that in this paragraph Marx explicitly rejects a behaviorist distinction between man and animal. For he says that in terms of actual behavior, the spider and the bee carry out as complex "operations" and "constructions" as an architect. But their activities are mere executions of nature-given "instinct," whereas man's activities express a mentally structured "purpose" or "plan" that is raised by his own "imagination," and then realized in project-commanded activity. In other words, the differentia specifica of man has moved from an outward, behavioral difference (in The German Ideology) to a difference in intrinsic being itself (Capital). Again, contrary to conventional interpretation, Marx here grants more rather than less explanatory status to the immanent nature of man in his mature work.
We shall call this special property of human nature, which for Marx enables man uniquely to "raise a structure in his imagination" and "erect it in reality," the capacity of projective consciousness. This phrase is meant not only to draw instructive connection between Marx and Sartre, as well as to represent by the phrase's literal meaning the sense of Marx's position itself, but to link Marx in some way with others in the past, like Aristotle and his notion of man's elevated faculty for poiesis — which, ironically, is more suggestive of Marx's position here than the Greek praxis he favors, which for Aristotle meant "doing" as opposed to "making" (Nichomachean Ethics 1140a2). The kinds of similarity between Marx's concept of a distinctive human capacity to "raise a structure in the imagination" and then "erect it in reality" and the whole Western philosophical tradition of mind as the unique feature of man (his "divine element," his "pilot," his "light of reason," and so forth) are too manifest to labor here. But what does deserv attention, what does mark Marx off from most of this tradition is his emphasis on the creative nature of mind, not a Democritean atom system nor a Humean "association" mechanism; as well as his emphasis on the action that mind must issue in to "prove its reality," not essentially comtemplation, as with the ancients, nor retrospection, like Hegel's Owl of Minerva, which "only takes flight when the shades of twilight have fallen."
This species-distinctive capacity for "projective consciousness" that Marx postulates in man is the legislative-executive agency informing all the latter's uniquely human productive feats. It is the human nature cognate of homo faber. However it is limited, cur- tailed, perverted, or otherwise determined, it still is what specially enables man to be a "toolmaking animal": to be so "many sided" in his constructions, to wield nature as "one of the organs of his activity," and to perform all the other constructive negations of production that alter the world from what it is. In his own words, "the history of industry" is its product, "the open book of man's essential powers, the exposure to the five senses of human psychology" (EPM, 109). The capacity for projective consciousness is, in short, the essence of human nature underlying what Marx elsewhere calls man's "positive freedom." It is for this reason that he declares, "freedom is thoroughly the essence of man." Man's freedom is, for him, built in; prescribed by the agenda of his human nature.
But a few further explications are in order.
1. This special human capacity of "projective consciousness" achieves its "truly human" expression for Marx in the activity of creative art. For it is in "composition" that he sees the inventive and implementive aspects of this natural capacity most freely and integrally expressed (G, 611). In such creative art (Marx's example is the "composition" of the writer), both the project and its execution are unconstrained by extrinsic dictate and united in the same productive agent, unlike the "antagonistic" and "unfree" forms of almost all historical production. The ultimate end of posthistorical communist society is thus, Marx emphasizes here and elsewhere, to provide those technical and economic conditions whereby all men's activity can achieve precisely this status of creative art, whereby all men's projective consciousness or "creative dispositions" can seek "absolute elaboration" (Pre-C, 84-85). For Marx, then, Man the Producer is, in the end, Man the Artist.
2. Marx's position by no means rules out the possibility of collective plans or projects. The operation of such collective projective consciousness can take either of two extremes for Marx: production where the "head" and the "hand" of the social organism altogether "part company" (extreme division of labor) and become "deadly foes" (CI, 508); or production where the collective laborer is communist and the plans and execution are performed together: the "tribal community, the natural commonbody" (Pre-C, 68) of man's being, dialectically fulfilled in the concrete universal of communism. The former of these forms occupies all previous, class-divided history; and the latter constitutes the "realm of freedom" (CIII, 821), the classless utopia. In the "realm of freedom," the "heads" and "hands" of all unite in thoroughly cooperative and unantagonistically integrated production. Here a social architect, everyone planning and acting in full community, projects and implements as a completely integrated whole, as the original architect writ huge.
It would be foolish to conclude here, however, that Marx imagined the operation of this collective projective consciousness as the only form in which men could realize themselves in the future society. The individual enterprise assuredly does not disappear here, though some detractors of Marx's vision would have it that way. On the contrary, it becomes ever more materially enabled as technological development, wielded by the "social architect," progressively reduces the working day and increases "free time" for whatever creative expression the individual chooses to undertake (CIII, 820; G, 488).
3. The realization of man's special capacity for projective consciousness presupposes, for Marx, man's status as a "social animal": not, of course, in the sense above, but rather in the sense that consciousness of any human sort presupposes social intercourse whereby its currency of language may come to exist. "Consciousness," he says, "is from the very beginning a social product and remains so as long as men exist at all" (GID, 42). Hence, for Marx, to say that man has consciousness, as opposed to saying that he can have it, is to imply also his sociality — his situation (if only, as Robinson Crusoe, in the past) amidst the interpersonal connectives of language, conventions, tools, cooperative labor, and so forth, from which stably formed unities of conception can arise.
This is not to say, as some have interpreted Marx as saying, that man is inherently "social" in the sense of being altruistic. Social relationship does not imply social benevolence: though there is in the early Marx good evidence that he believed, with Feuerbach, that man's power to conceptualize others as members of the same species rendered human or "species beings" (Gattungswesen) intrinsically empathetic. Indeed, it is his later rejection of this belief in a conceptual communism that constitutes the principal difference between Marx's early and later views of human nature.
The theme of man's differentia specifica, residing in what we have called "projective consciousness," persists throughout Marx's work. More than twenty years before the above passage on human labor appeared in Capital, he said much the same thing in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, while discussing, again, how man differs in nature from the animal:
Free conscious activity is man's species character.... The animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. ... Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and consciousness. ... Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. ... Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. ... But man in the working up of the objective world ... duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world he has created. (EPM, 75-76)
Elsewhere Marx talks of man's special "ability to think" (GID, 315) "intellectual faculties" (WLC, 73) and "natural thinking process" (SC, 315), and so forth. And he is quite explicit in Capital and other places that the forces of production are the "materialization" of the sovereign workings of this distinctive mental capacity. "Man ... is ... a living conscious thing," he says, "and labor is the manifestation of this power residing in him" (CI, 202) or, in the Grundrisse: "Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules, etc. ... These are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified" (G, 706).
The material capacity of "projective consciousness" is then, for Marx, the essential feature of human nature: the long-hidden key to understanding his concept of man from the Manuscripts to Capital. Why has it so often been overlooked by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike? Let us very briefly suggest three reasons. First, there is a strong tendency in scholarship on Marx to interpret wrongly what he says about "ideology" being a "reflex" of the forces and relations of production as statements on human consciousness as such (see Chapter 5). Second, Marx's great emphasis on the influence of specific material conditions upon men and his correspondingly great scorn for wholly "abstract" conceptions easily but mistakenly leads to the conclusion that he rejected general conceptions of man, conceptions of human nature, altogether. The second error, as one can see, tends to ground the first. And third, reinforcing both of the above, Marx weaves his account of human nature so integrally into his post-1845 writings that only a study of his corpus as a whole can disclose the full substance of his position.
Once we are aware of the essential core of Marx's concept of human nature — its "species character" of projective consciousness — we can see how it clearly underlies his fundamental positions: underlies, for example, his calls for "conscious plan" in social production, his indignation at the reduction of human work to dictated and "mindless detail task," his preoccupation with the profit imperative of the capitalist system "blindly" governing human productive activity, his disdain for ideas and thoughts not carried into praxis, and so on. Indeed, we question whether it is possible to make sense of his very vocabulary, and its relentless use of such terms as "brutalizing," "alienating," "monstrous," "inhuman," "savage," "ghoulish," and "bestial," unless one acknowledges in such usage a presupposed concept of human nature, unless one discerns an underlying positive notion of what man intrinsically is that makes these terms meaningful and not merely diatribe. To call something "inhuman" presumes, of necessity, an idea of what is "human." And it is difficult to miss Marx's tendency to employ such terms whenever he sees external circumstances as having robbed men of the exercise of their creative intelligence.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Structure of Marx's World-View by John McMurtry. Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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