Epilogue

Nature and artifice in Marx

The problem posed

That Marx, according to G.A. Cohen, “did not deviate” from “nineteenth-century conceptions of science” is “not necessarily to be regretted”; “the fashionable attempt to enlist him in the ranks of anti-positivist philosophy of science is entirely misguided”.1 Leszek Kolakowski’s pertinent contrast of Marx with Engels seems to point to a very different conclusion. Kolakowski says,

It does not appear that the philosophical bases of Marx’s Marxism are compatible with belief in general laws of nature having, as particular applications, the history of mankind and also the rules of thought, identified with psychological or physiological regularities of the brain.2

There is thus “a clear difference between the latent transcendentalism of Engels’s dialectic of nature and the dominant anthropocentrism of Marx’s view”, an anthropocentrism that can also favourably be contrasted with Engels’s “naturalistic evolutionism”. What Kolakowski means by this is that whereas Engels, broadly speaking, believed that man could be explained in terms of natural history and the laws of evolution to which he was subject and which he was capable of knowing in themselves, Marx’s view was that nature as we know it is an extension of man, an organ of practical activity.3

Cohen’s Marx is by contrast indistinguishable from Engels. Cohen believes that for Marx “history is a substitute for nature”, and that the

familiar distinction between forces and relations of production is, for Marx, one of a set of contrasts between nature and society. Commentators have failed to remark how often he uses “material” as the antonym of “social” and of “formal”, how “natural” belongs to “material” against “social”.4

Marx according to Cohen’s dualistic view thought that people “would relate in connections of mastery and servitude until they were masters of the physical world”, since the struggle with nature “obscures [man’s] insight into himself”. But capitalism, we are confidently assured (by Cohen not Marx) brings the strife between man and nature, and man and man, to an end. It completes the conquest of nature, which is now so reshaped by industrial history that men can claim it as their own. Nature had once pressed man down to a natural level, but he has now raised it to a human level.5 Nature is then not an externalization of man but his antagonist, to be conquered, subjugated and controlled.

Cohen and Kolakowski cannot both be right. Yet their very different discussions of nature d’après Marx push them closer together in one, crucial respect than either of them might be comfortable believing. Kolakowski, identifying what he calls the “Faustian-Promethean motif” in Marx’s writing, paraphrases Marx as saying that “the conquest of nature must go forward … in the next stage, man would achieve mastery over the social conditions of progress”. This statement is closer to Cohen’s dualistic than to Kolakowski’s own “anthropocentric” interpretation of Marx. A typical feature of Marx’s Prometheanism, Kolakowski continues, is his “lack of interest in the natural (as opposed to the economic) conditions of human existence”. Marx simply “did not believe” in natural obstacles to human activity.6 Even though these last two claims are as unfounded as anything in Cohen – they run up against so obvious a source as the Critique of the Gotha Program, for one – Kolakowski does not shrink from extending them. He insists, indeed laments that “socialized nature”, for Marx, “is not a metaphor. Everything in man’s being is social; all his natural qualities, functions and behaviour become virtually divorced from their animal origins”.7 Kolakowski collapses Marx’s anthropocentrism into this Prometheanism. He seems to share Cohen’s dualistic view that Marx regarded nature as an arena of (and for) human activity. Such activity necessarily pushes back nature’s boundaries as it advances human aims. Nature may not be as recalcitrant or antagonistic as Cohen imagines, but it remains fundamentally external to humanity. This raises interpretational problems that go beyond Cohen and Kolakowski. A response to them that denied nature’s externality and indicated that, according to Marx, mankind is itself part of nature and is to be regarded as one natural species among others could certainly find textual support in Marx’s writings, as we shall see. But if human beings are natural in this sense, here is no obvious reason not to apply the methods of natural science across the board to human history and society, much as Engels tried to do. If, on the other hand, Marx is regarded as anthropocentric this would imply a belief that humanity occupies and acts from some sort of privileged position vis-à-vis the rest of “external” nature. Since this interpretation, too, can find textual support in Marx’s writings, it is by no means clear on the face of things why a Baconian (or

“Faustian-Promethean” anthropological project, involving the domination and manipulation of external nature to human ends, should not be implicit in these writings. Marx’s statement that man “subjects the play of [nature’s] forces to his own sovereign power”8 is by no means an isolated utterance, and it certainly sounds Baconian; Marx even singled out Bacon for praise in The Holy Family.

Are we to conclude that Marx was a positivist after all (which he himself denied)? That his views of nature and humanity are simply inconclusive or inconsistent? Or that in believing both that mankind is a natural species and that we shape or adapt nature to our own purposes, Marx was trying (as it were) to have it both ways – neither of which has acceptable implications? Answering these questions involves (in the first instance) specifying what Marx’s anthropocentrism is and is not. In rightly indicating how distant it is from Engel’s beliefs, Kolakowski fails to indicate that Engels was much closer than Marx to “Prometheanism”. Engels, after all, maintained that “our mastery of nature consists in the fact that we have the advantage over other beings of being able to know and apply its laws”, and that because “we are learning to understand these laws and nature more correctly … we are more and more getting to know, and hence to control, even the more remote natural consequences … of … our productive activities”.9 The relation of theory to practice here is straightforwardly instrumental. The laws of physical nature, because they are laws as Engels understood the term, admit only of being applied for the sake of control. It is a point of some importance that such control can be either of nature or of society. Natural science and social management exist for Engels on the same continuum. Human beings in his view are in the last analysis physical objects whose motion is governed by the same general laws that regulate the motion of all matter. Alfred Schmidt tersely observed (of Engels not Marx) “the fact that human history is made by beings endowed with consciousness is nothing more than a factor that tends rather to complicate the matter”.10 Purpose, practice and human thought itself are in Engel’s view complex forms of motion, about which lawlike statements may be made. Human history and human thought are special fields of play for nature’s general laws of motion and development. This is why, on the one hand, the “government of persons” (in the St-Simonian phrase Engels so readily appropriated) can give way without undue difficulty to the “administration of things”. Either one is simply a matter of technique; slippage from one to the other is unproblematic because each is viewed instrumentally. Either we control nature or are controlled by it. Subjection to nature gives way to domination of nature, this being what human history comports; as in G.A. Cohen’s account, and as in the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, “master demons” become “willing servants”.

There is more to object to in this picture than its evident apocalyptic dualism. (Indeed, one of the problems in interpreting Engels, or for that matter G.A. Cohen, is how this dualism can be reconciled with what Kolakowski identified,

correctly, as Engel’s “naturalistic evolutionism”.) If domination-and-control philosophies of nature all too easily lead into domination-and-control philosophies of human nature and society – and I see no reason to doubt this general proposition – then Engels’s views have repressive, even authoritarian implications. Terence Ball has argued persuasively that “there is a logical link between positivist metascience and the view that social relations are best managed by technical experts and administrators”.11 This helps explain why the task this book has undertaken matters to an understanding of Marx’s political thought. Much (if not all) recent Marx scholarship persists in implying, or stating outright, that thanks to his (alleged) positivism and his (alleged) technological determinism Marx could not have avoided an instrumentalist, thus implicitly authoritarian, standpoint.12 Since the historical links between post-Marxian Marxism and authoritarianism are not in doubt, and (as we have seen) take some disentangling, there is every reason to question the extent of their theoretical grounding in Marx’s writings. Only by doing so, with as unjaundiced an eye as we can bring to bear, can we set about deciding whether the repressive aspects of post-Marxian Marxist regimes are inherent or inscribed in Marx’s writings, or were added later.

Nature and human nature

Not all of Marx’s recent interpreters subscribe to the view that, whatever he said he was, he was not a positivist. That Marx believes in the domination and manipulation of nature, however, remains virtually unquestioned. It will be disputed here, for this essay proposes to interrogate and contest both claims

about Marx by looking closely at what he says about nature and human nature. In what follows I shall argue that whenever Marx deals with nature and artifice he advances a distinctively non-Baconian speculative anthropology. This anthropology, while it is in a certain sense productivist, it is not at all instrumentalist in the sense outlined above. Although it is basically historical in scope, Marx’s speculative anthropology is concerned inter alia with the ontological foundations of scientific inquiry. It suggests a substantive alternative to positivism and Baconianism alike. Since Marx failed to provide a fully developed philosophy of nature to accompany his speculative anthropology, we may question whether his alternative is provided rather than suggested. But while Marx’s speculations on nature and artifice are in some ways incomplete we can and must, on the basis of what Marx wrote, distinguish Marx’s Marxism from instrumentalism either of the Baconian or of the Engelsian variety.

Because Kolakowski fails adequately to characterize what he correctly identifies as Marx’s “anthropocentrism”, which in reality is anthropocentrism of a very particular kind, he misprizes it to the extent of confusing it with a “Prometheanism” which is, as we have seen, more properly the province of Engels. Turning to Marx, whose own anthropocentrism now needs characterizing, involves standing back and taking our bearings. Marx frequently refused to separate nature from humanity categorically, insisting that humanity is seen as one natural species among others. He specified that what connects human beings with nature, historically and anthropologically, is human labour. Nature is thus often surveyed through the human labour expended on it. But it follows from none of this that such labour is necessarily instrumental or manipulative or dominating in character. The capacity of the human species to render the material world congruent with conscious human purposes, for the sake of fulfilling human needs, surely would be manipulative and nature-dominating if the needs and purposes to be fulfilled were themselves unnatural in character. That Marx himself acknowledged this point is clear, as we shall see, from some of his characterizations of capitalism. But there is no reason to leap to the conclusion that all human needs and purposes are unnatural in anything like the same sense. Marx himself seems never to have entertained such an idea even as a hypothesis, let alone a conclusion. To the contrary, he consistently regarded human needs and purposes as being prima facie natural in character. This is why in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx insisted that human activity on nature be seen not manipulatively but metabolically. Marx says in Capital:

The human species is not alone in possessing the capacity to render (aspects of) the natural world congruent with its needs. Other animal species confront the materials of nature as forces of nature in very much the same way. What distinguishes human work from that of other species is its free, conscious character.

“Species-being” means natural being of a certain kind. Labour, as John Locke had recognized, is our natural means of self-expression. The striking feature of Marx’s characterization of labour for our present purposes is that what makes it human also and by the same token makes it natural. Nowhere in his discussions does Marx claim that “‘natural’ belongs to ‘material’ against ‘social’” – G.A. Cohen could not be more wrong – or that nature be seen as a mere backdrop, obstacle or means to the attainment of human aims that are themselves non-natural. Marx instead was in effect posing a remarkably radical question, one that many of his commentators and followers have failed to confront. Why should human needs and our means of satisfying them be considered different in principle from those of any other species? Why should our hands, organs, dimensions, senses, passions be said to be any less natural than theirs?

If we apply ourselves to nature as natural beings, Marx’s point is more anthropological or (if you will) anthropogenic than anthropocentric. It is not that people necessarily or always apply themselves to nature in a natural way. It is simply that in principle we can do so. If our labour is a natural force, it is possible to distinguish human activity from the logic of animal behaviour and survival by virtue of its conscious, intentional character without implying an external, manipulative stance that would oppose us to nature. This is precisely what Marx attempted to do.

The universality of man is, in practice, manifested precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life and (2) the material, the object and the instrument of his life-activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself the human body. Man lives on nature … nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s spiritual and physical life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself.15

Nature mediates itself with itself through human labour, just as labour mediates itself with itself through nature. Nature establishes and helps define our

species-being. When we labour, turning the rest of nature to account, we affirm ourselves as a species; we develop our physical and mental energies; we experience ourselves and begin to feel conscious of ourselves. We are acting, or can act, spontaneously and voluntarily, without external compulsion. These characteristics of human labour are, in a sense Marx sought to establish, natural to us as a species. The human features of our labour do not deny but affirm our natural status. It is striking, however, that none of them can be said, or is said by Marx, to characterize animal behaviour, even of the learned, instinctive kind. Marx’s concern to distinguish (human) action from (animal) behaviour does not tempt him, as it has tempted some of his readers, to limit the use of the world “natural” to the latter. While there are types of behaviour human beings can be said to share with members of other animal species (“eating, drinking, procreating”), these, once they become “sole and ultimate ends” of human existence, turn into animal functions Marx does not shrink from terming “unnatural” for us – though they would not be unnatural even as sole and ultimate ends for members of other animal species.16 If they are not ends in themselves in this sense for us, these too are genuinely human functions that are natural to us as a species. Capitalism, far from completing the conquest of nature, as Cohen thinks, inverts our relationship with nature in this and other ways. It makes means of life, like “eating, drinking, procreating” appear as the goals of each and every act of production people undertake. If, as Marx says, the animal thus becomes human and the human animal, this is a historically specific reversal of natural priorities for which capitalism and its defenders are roundly to be indicted – indicted, that is, by Marx not Cohen.

Natural and unnatural acts

That objectification, the turning to human account of nature, has taken an estranged form under capitalism is not allowed to obscure Marx’s basic point that objectification through labour is a natural expression of our species-being. “Nature which comes to be in human history – the genesis of human society – is man’s real nature … nature as it comes to be in industry, even in an estranged form, is true, anthropological nature.”17 This enables us to press Marx still further. When we labour, some of what we produce is not consumed immediately but put aside for future use. We are able to work beyond the limits imposed by immediate necessity, in this and other ways. Among the more lasting objects we produce are tools, implements, instruments of labour and other means of production which become part of the work environment for ourselves and others at some future time. All these features of human labour make it social. But they need do nothing to rob it of its natural character. Even though, particularly in more modern times, “the object the worker directly takes possession of is not the object of labour but its instrument”, this does not displace nature. Instead, “nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, which he annexes to his own

bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible”.18 Human labour is to be distinguished from animal activity not because it is collective, cumulative or technological in character, but because we alone among animal species can bring to bear conscious intentionality to our projects and can thus “freely confront” what we produce. As Marx puts it,

We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which has already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht] his own purpose in those materials. All this is a purpose he is conscious of.19

Even the division of labour does not negate labour’s natural characteristics. What puts people in productive relationships is, in the first instance, “only the differences between their needs and their production”, differences which are, prima facie, “natural differences among individuals”. Insofar as these “form the motive for the integration of these individuals, for their social interrelation as exchangers, in which they are stipulated for each other as, and prove themselves to be, equal, there enters, in addition to the quality of equality, that of freedom”.20 While this may seem a surprising claim, coming from someone who was so bitterly critical of the capitalist division of labour, there is no real inconsistency here. Marx, without denying the natural basis of the social division of labour, was concerned to provide a criterion by which the specific form taken by the division of labour at various historical points might be judged. If people’s natural differences, their different skills, talents and aptitudes, form the basis of the division of labour, then human equality is acknowledged in the sense that people’s real, natural differences are respected. If these differences are neither respected nor, in fact, articulated by the specific form taken by the division of labour in society, as in the capitalist division of labour, then such equality and freedom are subverted. Even though other forms of social organization could presumably be condemned along the same lines, it is capitalism that Marx indicts for having obliterated real, natural human differences for the sake of producing more and more commodities.

It follows from this that if “free conscious activity is man’s species-character”,21 as Marx thought, this means that not all human activity somehow is necessarily free or conscious in the required sense. It means that our species-

character can in various ways be acknowledged or subverted. To see this we should look more closely at what our species-character comports, bearing in mind throughout that whatever happens to it in specific cases, Marx regarded it as prima facie natural in character. Marx says in the 1844 Manuscripts that:

What does Marx mean by this? When we work, we make our ideas, prefigurations and capacities real by giving them form, substance and materiality. We objectify ourselves (or something about ourselves) in working on the material world, effecting changes or modifications in its structure. In so doing, we are producing far more than mere objects. We realize (something about) ourselves as we objectify (something about) ourselves. We become more aware of our capacities as we make them or see them made concrete. The intentionality we can bring to bear on our work transforms behaviour into action and transforms us as actors at one and the same time. In this way a far-reaching kind of reciprocal process is set in motion. This process is not something superimposed upon a pre-existent or surpassed metabolic relationship with nature – this relationship is not a stage – but instead is its expression or working-out.

Marx’s claim, which sounds grandiloquent, that “the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of men through human labour”,23 should be understood in this sense. When we work, we are able to realize and recognize ourselves (or something about ourselves) in what we create. In the long run, we produce a store of techniques and experiences, a bank (if you will) on which we and our progeny can draw, re-draw and (perhaps) over-draw. We produce expansively. We produce new forms of social and political organization to accompany new ways of producing; we produce social forms of symbolic expression; we produce everything that we know of as constituting our humanity – science, art, morality, speculation, politics and economics.

Marx’s point is of course not that doing these things somehow makes us godlike; it is simply that doing these things is natural to us as a species. But even if we grant him this point, problems remain. They stem from the commonsensical observation that today, living as we do in what is still sometimes (and optimistically) called “late capitalism”, we inhabit a highly artificial environment. The setting for our various enterprises easily enough appears artificial to the point of sheer contrivance. Yet it would appear from the foregoing account of Marx that what we commonly consider artificial might in some more fundamental sense be natural as well, or instead. For instance, the work we do today,

to stretch a point, could be considered as natural to us as the actions of our huntergatherer forebears were to them. This point could indeed be stretched further still. Since our ancestors presumably had more immediately pressing things to do than speculate about their relationship with something their descendents were to term “nature”, our various late capitalist artifacts might be comprehended as being more natural (to us) than our prepotent ancestors’ hides and pelts were (to them). We are able to be more conscious than they can have been of what a relationship with nature might mean. The risk here is of collapsing into relativism (or into sheer absurdity). We would then be unable to condemn capitalism for its blithe, roughshod disregard for natural or ecological limits, or for its unprecedented, ominously artificial character. We do not need to make of Marx an ecologist avant la lettre to see that he was engaged in criticizing capitalism for (broadly) similar reasons. This means that there is no good reason to stretch anything to a point of relativism. If we take our cue from the concepts of species-being and alienation, as Marx thinks we should, a clear distinction emerges. Highly artificial stages of civilization, which involve a highly complex division of labour and an elaborate organization of technological resources, may make it seem as though nature has retreated, in such a way that we depend less on nature than on other people and on the artifacts that surround us. But this is so only up to a point. The process by which we have reached such a stage has taken us away from nature or rendered us artificial only to the extent that it has offended against or subverted the natural character of our labour, as has alienation in the case of capitalism. In other ways, the process by which we have arrived at such a stage is an expression, not a denial, of the natural character of our labour. Behind this distinction (which is, finally, the distinction between alienation and objectification), is another, more deeply-rooted discrepancy: that between the enormous power (technical, economic, social, political) that the human species has elaborated in the course of its development, and humanity’s continuing, palpable dependence, suffering and exploitation.

If labour is reduced to a means of producing exchange-value, its human or natural qualities (like those of the labourer) are lost or obscured. If nature outside us, as part of the same reduction, becomes relevant to human purposes only insofar as it too can be yoked to and manipulated by capitalism’s productive apparatus, it is likely to become interpreted instrumentally or antagonistically. What Alfred Schmidt derisively but accurately identified as Engel’s “famous sudden leap … from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom”24, is an expression of this antagonism, not its solution. Nature to Engels was necessitarian; freedom could only be freedom from it or over it. Because Marx saw nature so differently, he was much less apocalyptic than Engels. His metabolism of nature and humanity at no point involved the sheer incorporation of nature by humanity, whatever G.A. Cohen may think; and his (Marx’s) discussions of necessity and freedom, as Schmidt goes on to point out, stipulate that there are always natural necessities or limits to our activity’s scope and scale, boundaries behind which we are always to some degree confined. While Engels virtually

collapsed the distinction between freedom and necessity and that between nature and artifice into one distinction, Marx sought to delineate a position from which so clumsy a synthesis would be impossible. Since his views of science help make this clear, it is to those that we must now turn.

Nature and natural science

Nature begins to exist for humanity as matériel, or even as a category we use in trying to make sense of the world, only with the advent of human activity within natural processes. It is people who give point, purpose and meaning to nature. Marx, as we have seen, in effect thanked Darwin for having separated (extrinsic or intrinsic) purpose from natural processes. But Marx did not do so in order to reintroduce extrinsic purpose in human guise. Human purposes, the only purposes nature can be said to have, are themselves natural, or are capable of being so. By extension, the human senses and cognitive faculties that apprehend the material world are intrinsically natural to those people who apprehend it. If this is so, if, in other words, the continuum of nature does not stop short at the arbitrary barrier of the human senses and cognitive faculties, the implications for our understanding of the ontological basis of natural science are radical indeed. Natural science cannot be what Engels, for one, thought it was (at a very basic level indeed): the observation of, and drawing of lawlike conclusions about, an external, material reality that exists independently of the observer it confronts. Marx was concerned to deny the basis of such confrontation and such externality alike. He claimed that the distinction between pre-social nature and socially-mediated nature “has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct from nature”. But if nature is not independent of human aims, projects and purposes in the required sense, scientific truth cannot be the correspondence of human perceptions and judgments to an independently-existing “reality”. Nature as we know it is the nature we have adapted and fitted to our various aims and purposes. This means that our various, successive adaptations and observations are not to be regarded as forays into the uncharted territory of a categorically separate realm of reality that operates according to its own, necessitarian laws – laws we can but confront, interpret and apply within our own, social realm. Our actions within and observations of nature are themselves natural expressions of our humanity. Marx says,

Industry is the actual historical relation of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If therefore industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man’s essential powers, we may also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man.25

Lest it be thought that such utterances are confined to Marx’s earlier writings, Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Program, insisted all over again that nature is

“the primary source of all instruments and objects of labour” and that labour itself, under all forms of production, “is only a manifestation of a force of nature”. On the one hand, “nature taken abstractly, for itself, separated from man, is nothing for man”; on the other hand, “nature, as it unfolds in human history, in the genesis of human society, is man’s real nature”.26 More pointedly still, with respect to natural science, Marx’s 1881 Notes on Adolph Wagner reiterated his claim that humanity’s various relationships with nature are not primarily theoretical but instead are, in the first instance, practical and modificatory.

Men do not, in any way, begin by “finding themselves in a theoretical relationship to the things of the external world”. Like every animal, they begin by eating, drinking, etc. That is, not by “finding themselves” in a relationship but by behaving actively, gaining possessions of certain things in the external world by their actions, thus satisfying their needs. (They thus begin by production.)27

This passage should serve to remind us of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”, where the “old materialism” of Feuerbach and others is excoriated for concerning itself with the interaction of external physical forces that are impervious to the influence of human purposes. Not only is our practice, as with Vico, our guarantee of knowing the reality we have made, but we are actors in and authors of our own drama in the additional sense that we may have no real knowledge of the world without practical activity on it.

If, in the words of the second “Thesis on Feuerbach”, “the dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question”, this is as true of scientific thinking as of any other kind. What Marx abhorred about idealism was not its constitutive side, which he can be said to have extended to cover labour, but its abstract, speculative side. What Marx called “the abstract materialism of natural science”28 is deficient in the same sense. The truths of natural science, far from being logically prior to history and society, and far from providing any model for truths about society, are themselves dependent on the social purposes which provide the climate and context for the scientist’s enterprise. “Genuine science” has to proceed from “sensuous need”; “one basis for life and another for science is a priori false”.29 The crucial distinction in Marx’s thought is neither that between freedom and necessity, nor that between nature and artifice, nor yet that between materialism and idealism. (A stress on activity and a materialist epistemology are not the same thing; the “Theses on Feuerbach” map out the difference.) The crucial distinction is between “abstract” speculation, contemplation and theorizing on the one hand, and practical reality, history, society, activity and the inquiry that is appropriate to these realms on the other. This distinction, unlike the others, is

applicable to natural science; the constitutive function of human thought and action on the world arises not from anything within the realm of thought, as Hegel had believed, but from people’s life in the world. What follows is not that nature is to be regarded as an inhuman, necessitarian realm to whose laws people are sooner or later subject, as Engels thought it was. Nor is the world a kind of stage on which we as supine spectators can or should watch natural processes unfold autonomously, as again Engels considered it to be. Engels understood “dialectics” to be “the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought”. He believed that “the dialectic in our heads is in reality the reflection of the actual development going on in the world of nature and of human history in obedience to dialectical forms”. People’s cognitive links with nature consist in their subjection to general laws of nature of which human history and the laws of thought are but particular expressions. Thoughts are identified as physiological regularities of the brain; everything in the last analysis is an instance of matter in motion. Since “the unity of the world consists in its materiality”, we can deduce the “dialectics” of society from the “dialectics of nature” by using “a ‘system of nature’ [like that of d’Holbach but] sufficient for our time”.30 It should be clear how remote such thinking is from Marx. Marx did not seek to deduce the dialectics of society or history from those of nature, nor least because he did not regard these “dialectics” as boundlessly accommodating, in the Engelsian manner. Marx – perhaps (who knows?) sensing, as Engels never did, that “matter” could itself be seen as a metaphysical category – consistently refused either to use the term “dialectics” or to argue from matter, on the grounds laid down in the “Theses on Feuerbach”, and in The German Ideology.

Feuerbach refers particularly to the view of natural science, he mentions secrets revealed only to the eyes of the physicist or chemist; but where would natural science be without industry or trade? … Even the objects of the simplest sensuous certainty are given to him only through social development, industry and commercial relations. The cherry tree, like all fruit trees, was transplanted into our zone [Western Europe], as is well known, by commerce; it was only by virtue of this action of a determinate society at a given time that it was given to the “sensuous certainty” of Feuerbach … even pure natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and activity, through the sensuous activity of men.31

Marx’s emphasis, in Terrell Carver’s well-judged words, “was always on human productive activities in a social and material setting, which men and

women alter as they develop their productive powers. This (is) obviously different from Engel’s insistence on the primacy of matter-in-motion, whose laws supposedly underlie and unify the science of nature, history and ‘thought’”.32 There is no counterpart in Marx’s writings to Engel’s breezy assertion that “in nature, amid the welter of innumerable changes, the same dialectical laws of motion force their way through the history of the development of human thought and gradually rise to a consciousness in the mind of man”.33

What we do find in Marx’s writings is a very different emphasis on the development of human needs in and through human history. Since these needs are the motives of our production and our natural science alike, the extent to which they too might be considered natural is relevant to the themes of this book and awaits discussion below.

Human needs and human nature

If Marx saw freedom as the ability to render the material world congruent with human purposes, and to subject it to human needs, this view already had a long vintage by Marx’s time. His own strictures about the shortcomings of the “old materialism” notwithstanding, the belief that the transformation of society in accordance with human goals is the ultimate test of human freedom has deep roots in the materialist tradition that long predates Marx, and to which he made constant reference. Marx in his doctoral dissertation, for example, praised Epicurus over Democritus because Epicurus’s theory permits human intervention in the material world. The Epicurean view of man was of a creature who belonged to a world governed by a chain of physical causes, but who could initiate action on his own behalf and modify the world to his own purposes. Unlike Democritus, who was concerned with the atom as a pure, “abstract” category, and with atomism as a hypothesis explaining external nature tout court, Epicurus sought to understand nature in order to rid humanity of its belief in spiritual bondage and teach people a better way of life. Accordingly Epicurus, “the greatest Greek Aufklärer” (as Marx so aptly termed him), regarded science as something that would include and not – as with Democritus – exclude human consciousness and action in the world. Marx saw Epicurus and Democritus not as differing in degree but as standing diametrically opposed “in all that concerns truth, certainty, application of this science, and all that refers to the relationship between thought and reality in general”.34 (Engels, with his own billiard-ball atomism, and for that matter his assumption of the priority of natural scientific explanations, is mutatis mutandis closer to Democritus.) Marx belongs to the side of materialism that stressed human concerns – knowledge, power, needs – and

regarded science as being justifiable insofar as it is of use as a specifically human concern among other specifically human concerns. His arguments against Feuerbach should be seen in the light of this placement. Marx certainly saw Feuerbach’s materialism as one-sided, contemplative, passive and ultimately self-defeating; and for these very reasons he saw it also as mechanical, concerned with the interaction of physical forces and impervious to the influence of human goals. Marx argued accordingly that those socialists who, following some of the precepts of the French enlightenment, regarded social transformation as possible only through the manipulation of the educational environment, in order to turn Lockean sensationalist psychology to good account, were arguing incoherently. Circumstances do not change themselves; people change them. It is the purpose, indeed the very definition of human activity to work on the external world and to change it consciously, as we have seen; and this has to do not with a “Promethean” flexing of human powers, but with the expression of human needs.

Marx, who was in no way reluctant to disinter and resuscitate what was already an old socialist slogan – “to each according to his needs” – and to do so in texts as far apart chronologically as The German Ideology and The Critique of the Gotha Program, believed in the dynamism of human needs as the index and measure of human history. The Critique in particular makes it clear how expansive was the notion of “needs” Marx had in mind.

Marx is suggesting not that the liberal-bourgeois values of liberty, equality, fraternity are imperfectly realized in capitalist society and await their completion, but that because they are values of a particular kind – abstractions which as such cannot comprehend or take account of individual differences or particular human needs – they should be dispensed with altogether; the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right” is to be “crossed in its entirety”. To contribute to one’s community on the basis of one’s ability and to receive from that community on the basis of one’s needs, is a formula for justice in the distribution of wealth that is altogether superior to the bourgeois principle of equality, which has nothing in common with Marx’s understanding of the term, and is nothing but a bourgeois right to correct a bourgeois wrong.

Like his understanding of the human labour that realizes them, Marx’s understanding of needs was expansive, not limiting. If technological progress and

cumulative adaptation of nature should entail an increase in the number or quality of human needs that are then to be satisfied, this is all to the good, since the dynamism and expansiveness of needs has always been a leitmotif of human history, and by extension will always continue to be one. It is therefore unsurprising that Marx constantly lampooned those (on the left as well as the right) who attacked capitalism on grounds derived from the pre-industrial idyll it had supposedly disrupted and subverted. The Manifesto is just the most obvious text mocking the Babouvists and other “reactionary socialists”, who earnestly and self-righteously recommended what Marx called elsewhere “the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even realized it”.36 Once again, Marx’s designation of such simplicity as “unnatural” should give us pause, since like so much else in his writings it too suggests that culture and civilization are either natural, or not unnatural, or (at the very least) not necessarily unnatural. It suggests in other words that Marx was not Rousseau. Marx did indeed maintain that “industry is … the open book of man’s essential powers” and that socialism, which would be established only once the forces and relations of production had been developed to their highest point, would see a society based not on poverty, crudeness and austerity, nor yet on wealth considered as the mere antithesis of such simplicity, but on “the rich human being and the rich human need”.

Marx believed in the necessity of contrasting a communism geared to the satisfaction of human needs with a capitalism which could promote only inhuman needs. Under communism, not capitalism, “the wealth of human needs” signifies “a new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature”. Compared with these the wealth (of a different and lesser kind) generated in and by capitalism (for some, not all) stands condemned: “The extension of products and needs becomes a contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites. Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need.”37 In this way Marx castigates the “unnatural”, “inhuman” needs fostered by capitalism while preserving intact his scorn for the age-old prejudice against civilization and luxury as such – a prejudice exemplified only most recently by Rousseau, Babeuf and others. Culture, as far as Marx was concerned, becomes unnatural only under the specific conditions he associated with capitalism. Even wealth, once its “bourgeois form is stripped away” is nothing but “the universality of needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces”, nothing other than “the absolute working out of [humanity’s] creative potentialities”.

Human needs and powers are closely associated. Needs are “not merely anthropological phenomena in the [narrower] sense, but truly ontological affirmations of being”.38 Human capacities exist in potentia as needs that require the

material world, which provides or can provide the means of their satisfaction. We require external objects if we are to subsist. As Marx put it, in the 1844 Manuscripts, “[the] worker can produce nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labour is manifested, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.”39 More than mere survival is involved, however, since all aspects of the development as well as the maintenance of the self require such external objects. Marx, with this very generality in mind, included among human sensuous needs, or among those activities that require a material object, not just the five senses, “seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling”, but also activities most of us would consider cognitive rather than sensuous – “thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving” the “so-called practical senses”.40 All are capacities dependent upon the provision of objects appropriate to their exercise; without such provision the capacities or propensities in question could atrophy. But the extensiveness of the list suggests that Marx, here as elsewhere, intended to distinguish humanity from other natural species who also depend on nature for the objects of their needs, and who also produce some of the means for their subsistence, and that he proposed to make this distinction on grounds of freedom and consciousness.

Our human needs express our capacity to transcend the limits of material existence and modify or make our mark upon (some aspect of) the external world by shaping it in accordance with freely chosen ends. Marx’s stress on objectification as the characteristic feature of human creativity is in some sense “productivist” or “expressivist”, but it is not for this or any other reason instrumentalist; it certainly distinguishes Marx from the mechanistic materialism that had characterized the eighteenth-century French enlightenment. The “new materialism” celebrated aphoristically in Marx’s “Theses” on Feuerbach avoids the mechanical determinism of some aspects of the French enlightenment along with their man-machine theories of human nature.

Our Human needs have to do not with the power of physical objects and processes over people but with people’s power over the physical world. Needs express their self-conscious subject, part of whose self-consciousness consists in knowledge of the degree of dependence on the material world, knowledge of the limits of freedom. Autonomy – in Marx as, ceteris paribus, in Hegel’s celebrated master-slave set-piece in The Phenomenology of Spirit – is measured, and only has meaning when it is measured, against dependence, a degree of which, far from being antithetical to freedom (as it was for instance to Engels), is the medium for the existence of freedom.

In The German Ideology Marx, starting from the materialist premise that “men must be in a position to live in order to ‘make history’”, and that life involves first of all the satisfaction of material needs, “eating … drinking, housing, clothing and various other things”,41 isolated these needs as crucial to

the historical transition from primitive to civilized humanity. There is primitive subsistence as a need, the satisfaction of which leads to the production of new needs which in turn lead to new social relations. Patricia Springborg has sensitively pointed out that “Marx sees these [needs] as something more than historical stages in a descriptive anthropology – as with Rousseau, they constitute analytic categories whose logic is proven by their extension in history”.42 Historical progress, as the Grundrisse also maintains, is to be seen in light of the unfolding of needs alongside that of productive forces geared to their satisfaction. Even capitalism, which in one way inverts needs, turning them inside out, in another way has a long-term mission civilisatrice, as it were despite itself, and even this ultimate civilizing effect is borne by socially determined needs. There is perhaps a “cunning of reason”, or even a kind of “hidden hand” involved in this overall process, as Springborg deftly indicates; but this should not blind us to what the process itself entails:

the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being, production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and relations – production of this being the most total and most universal possible social product, for, in order to take gratification in a many-sided way, he must be capable of many pleasures [genusfässig], hence cultured to a high degree…43

Springborg points out Marx’s willingness here and elsewhere to generalize “a theory of the dynamics of culture as a tissue of structures and institutions which are built up around the creation and satisfaction of needs”.44 Earlier theorists – Rousseau, Lucretius, Seneca – based their indictments of progress on an assumption that people by an act of will or judgment could choose not to succumb to a life governed by the pursuit of a widening range of material benefit. Marx made no such assumption and thought that those who did failed to acknowledge the casual origins of needs in society:

Whether a desire becomes fixed or not, i.e., whether it contains exclusive [power over us] … depends on whether material circumstances … permit the “normal satisfaction” of this desire and, on the other hand, the development of a totality of desires.45

Yet what Marx had in mind was not a one-way pattern of determination but the progressive creation of a world of material objects as a natural expression of humanity’s species-being. The “labour process”, presented “in its simple and abstract elements” is “an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between

man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed conditions of human existence … common to all forms of society”.46

Concluding remarks

G.A. Cohen’s belief that with the advent of capitalism history, according to Marx, becomes a substitute for nature may be taken as a point d’appui for the present discussion, in which I hope to have shown that such positions misunderstand Marx’s views of history, nature and capitalism alike. Cohen’s position is admittedly extreme, but it is one that by virtue of its extremity casts light on the shortcomings of many less extreme interpretations of Marx. Capitalism according to Marx, whatever Cohen might think, is not finally to be regarded as a straightforwardly terrible simplificateur, ridding us of our natural limitations and sharpening our understanding of ourselves in such a way that our newfound clarity of vision will (somehow) help propel us into a new, even less naturally-bounded future. Marx’s understanding of capitalism was demonstrably more complex. Capitalism is not all of a piece. In some ways it may be a harbinger of communism as Marx understood the term, but in other ways it poses obstacles to the attainment of such communism. In some ways it prefigures our future, as Marx saw it, while in others it clouds, not clarifies, our vision of what such a future might comport. More specifically within the compass of the present discussion, capitalism according to Marx does not signal the rolling-back of external natural boundaries to human emancipation in the sense that once we have “mastered” nature “insight into ourselves” will then proceed apace and come to the fore. Nature, whose boundaries are not according to Marx drawn up apart from humanity, is quite simply not external to humanity in the sense Cohen and others require.

Capitalism in Marx’s view, far from clarifying or focusing it, has the effect of obscuring our insight into our own, natural character because it denies our species-being; because it inverts the relationship between our natural needs and the means we as a species have developed over our history to their satisfaction; and because it substitutes for objectification, a natural expression of our species-character, alienation and contrivance of the kind that offends against and negates our species-character. Seen in this light, what is wrong with the positivist and instrumentalist views Marx opposed is that they have no way of accounting for the difference between objectification and alienation. Indeed they provide no place for alienation per se at all. The distinction of alienation from objectification is however central to Marx’s characterization of capitalism in particular, and by extension, to his characterization of human action (as opposed to behaviour) in general.

It could be argued at this point that while positivism of the Engelsian stripe has no way of distinguishing action from behaviour, or indeed of accounting for human activity per se at all – in other words that positivism is “the alienation of

reason”, as Kolakowski once put it in a book of that title – Baconian instrumentalism (in some of its versions) does attempt to account for human action. Two observations are pertinent here. The first is that Baconian anthropology characterizes human action as that domination and manipulation of nature which is a, or the, leitmotif of human history or of our very existence as a species. I hope to have shown that Marx disputed, disparaged and rejected such characterizations. The second observation is also of broad application. Instrumentalist, Baconian and positivist views in various ways emphasize or privilege natural science or experimental method as a means by which the human species dominates and manipulates nature. I hope also to have shown that Marx’s very different, rival anthropology was intended, inter alia, as an explanation of the ontological foundations of natural science that would render notions of the epistemological primacy of scientific method nugatory and beside the point. In all these related endeavours Marx was engaged upon staking out a position from which communism as he understood the term would and could relapse neither into a Rousseauian-Babouvist denial of progress, nor into an instrumentalist misapprehension of the character of human progress. I hope finally to have shown that Marx offered a workable alternative to all of these unappealing rival views – workable not in the sense that it answers every question a serious critic might have, but in the sense that it manages to reinstate humanity as a natural species (or agency), and to do so not because of capitalism but in its despite.

Footnotes

1 G.A. Cohen, Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 46.

2 Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents in Marxism, vol. 1, The Founders, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978, p. 401.

3 Kolakowski, Main Currents in Marxism,pp. 402, 405, 401.

4 Cohen, Marx’s Theory of History, pp. 24, 98. See also Jon Elster, Marking Sense of Marx, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 56.

5 Cohen, Marx’s Theory of History,pp. 22, 40.

6 Kolakowski, Main Currents in Marxism, pp.412–13.

7 Kolakowski, Main Currents in Marxism,p. 413.

8 Karl Marx, Capital, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1976, vol. 1, pp. 283–4.

9 Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature, New York, International Publishers, 1940, pp. 292–3.

10 Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, London, Verso/NLB, 1971, p. 191.

11 Terence Ball, “Marxist Science and Positivist Politics”, in Terence Ball and J. Farr, ed., After Marx, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 236.

12 There is however more confusion than unanimity among recent commentators. William Shaw’s Marx’s Theory of History (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1978) restates the technological determinist position in (pp. 52–82). Roy Bhaskar, “On the Possibility of Social Scientific Knowledge and the Limits of Naturalism”, in Issues in Marxism (ed. John Mepham and David Hillel-Ruben, Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, 1979) argues for Marx’s “anti-positivist naturalism” even though “there is (or can be) an essential unity of method between the natural and the social sciences” (p. 108). Different kinds of corrective are provided by David Hillel-Ruben, Marxism and Materialism (Brighton, Harvester and Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, 1977), and Russel Keat and John Urry, Social Theory as Science (London, RKP, 1975). Keat and Urry think that Marx was a realist and a naturalist and a positivist because he failed to generalize before examining the material world. Derek Sayer’s Marx’s Method: Ideology, Science and Critique in ‘Capital’ (Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press 1979), regards Marx as a naturalist who, since he uses “essentialist” categories, is thus not a positivist. See also Chapter 1, above, and After Marx, ed. Ball and Farr, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, particularly Part 3, 1984 (pp. 213–79), for further arguments that Marx was not a positivist. On the other hand, John McMurtry’s The Structure of Marx’s World-View (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979) regards technology as “the Marxian Providence”, which has replaced Divine Will as the arbiter of history (!) (p. 71). Albrecht Wellmer’s Critical Theory of Society (New York, Herder and Herder, 1971) and Helmut Fleischer, Marxism and History (New York, Harper, 1973) simply collapse Marx into Engels, which Alfred Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx (London, Verso/NLB, 1971) finally fails to do. Schmidt’s book inspired the present essay, which proposes to help Schmidt cut through the welter of confusion outlined, and I hope not caricatured, above.

13 Marx, Capital, pp. 283–4.

14 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, p. 75.

15 Marx, Manuscripts, p. 74.

16 Marx, Manuscripts, p. 73.

17 Marx, Manuscripts, p. 110.

18 Marx, Capital, p. 285.

19 Marx, Manuscripts, pp. 283–4.

20 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1973, p. 242, cf. pp. 242–5 in general.

21 Marx, Manuscripts, p. 75.

22 Marx, Manuscripts, p. 75.

23 Marx, Manuscripts, pp. 113–14.

24 Schmidt, Concepts of Nature, p. 135.

25 Marx, Manuscripts, pp. 109–10.

26 Karl Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’, in Marx-Engels Selected Works, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962, vol. 2 (hereafter MESW), p. 18; Marx, Manuscripts, p. 74.

27 Karl Marx, Texts on Method, ed. Terrell Carver, Oxford, Blackwell, 1975, p. 190.

28 Marx, Capital, p. 272, n. 2.

29 Marx, Manuscripts, p. 111.

30 Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962, p. 504; cf. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, pp. 314, 179; Engels to Schmidt, 1 November 1891, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975, p. 590; Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 65, 36–7; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works inOne Volume, New York, International Publishers, 1986, p. 622.

31 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1962, p.58.

32 Terrell Carver, “Marx, Engels and Scholarship”, Political Studies, xxxii, 1984: p. 253; cf. Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship, Brighton, Harvester, 1983, p.134.

33 Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 15–16.

34 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Moscow, International Publishers, 1962, vol. 1, p. 38.

35 Marx and Engels, Selected Works, p. 24.

36 Marx, Manuscripts, p. 100; cf. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 488–9.

37 Marx, Manuscripts, p. 116.

38 Marx, Manuscripts, p. 76.

39 Marx, Manuscripts, p. 70.

40 Marx, Manuscripts, p. 73.

41 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 39.

42 Patricia Springborg, The Problem of Needs and the Critique of Civilization, London, Allen & Unwin, 1981, p. 101.

43 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 409–10.

44 Springborg, Problem of Needs, p. 103.

45 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 277.

46 Marx, Capital, p. 290.