Now that we have presented the basic structure of Freud’s view of human nature, how shall we proceed with Marx? Since Freud held that men and women are intrinsically destructive, egoistic, and illogical, do we need merely to negate these characteristics to arrive at Marx’s position? There is a strong tendency among those who have pierced the reified Freudian view of basic human evil to affirm in response that human beings are essentially good. According to this view we are fundamentally moral at the core of our being and would naturally move toward our own self-realization were we not frustrated by external impediments. This is neither a new contention nor a new debate. The philosophes of the Enlightenment asserted the same position against Luther and Calvin, as did Rousseau against the Hobbesian conviction of natural human ruthlessness.
There is one significant difference, however. In the past the proponents of natural goodness argued on the basis of an assumption of progressive social transformation. Today, the argument is raised more from a situation of social stagnation amidst bourgeois cynicism. It is an act of willed buoyancy; in the present age sanity rests upon hope. The contention of natural human goodness it is the result of a simplistic wish for ontological certitude where only political labor can provide grounds for
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confidence. Since the claim to natural goodness is more a compensation for the absence of a vital social movement than its articulation, its consequences tend to be politically regressive. There are two points worthy of note.
First, it is no less a reification of human nature to claim its “natural” goodness than its “natural” evil. The mode of predication remains fetishized. 1 do not intend this assertion as the denial of human nature. But that nature cannot be characterized in a Marxist mode as intrinsically predisposed toward any specifiable end. The heart of Marx’s contribution to our understanding of human nature lies in his conviction that we are neither wholly formed nor wholly unformed at birth. We form ourselves in the process of social-historical production. We are simultaneously the impediments that prevent our self-realization, and beings capable of transcending these limitations. To be human is to be required, by the very absence of a fixed, instinctual disposition, to create one’s own nature. But we are not predetermined by that requirement to realize ourselves or even to strive in any predefined direction.
Marx noted that the first stage of transition from one social epoch to another is marked by the introduction of new content within old forms. 1 This is precisely what occurs when the Freudian view of natural human viciousness is supposedly stood on its head. A new content is poured into the older vessel and adopts its shape. We are seen as entities of a radically different sort; but we remain entities nonetheless. It is in fact very difficult to believe seriously in human nature as self-productive. Our lives are so thoroughly alienated that we respond more quickly to the image of human nature as given and fixed than to our own slumbering sense of potentially transcendent creativity. In a society that affords little scope for self-initiation, it is not surprising that we conceive of ourselves as little different from the remainder of nature. We come to view our own characteristics, to return to Marx’s phrase, “as self-evident laws of nature.” A socialist movement, in which a Marxist theory and vision of human nature plays a vital part, has the obligation to oppose such reification. It is of the deepest practical significance to maintain the seriousness of Marx’s view of human nature as self-transformative. To lose this vision, to become embarrassed by its rapture, is to contract in resignation before the density of the social world. It is to have lost any prospect of revolution.
This leads us to a second difficulty. The conviction that we are basically good tends to promote a strange complacency in regard to our own deformation. Those who view human nature as continually pressing toward moral growth are lulled into a false assurance of incorruptibility. The Freudian dualism of appearance and reality is reinstated, and we are consoled with the faith that under the current social pathology there is substantial reason for optimism. I his view may take an explicitly nega
tive form. Drawing on Freud’s view of libido, Lionel Trilling can assert that “culture is not all-powerful. . . . There is a residue of human quality beyond the reach of cultural control, and . . . this residue of human quality, elemental as it may be, serves to bring culture itself under criticism and keeps it from being absolute.” 2 Or the position can be given positive expression:
Man demonstrates in his own nature a pressure toward fuller and fuller Being, more and more perfect actualization of his humanness in exactly the same naturalistic, scientific sense that an acorn may be said to be “pressing toward” being an oak tree, or that a tiger can be observed to “push toward” being tigerish, or a horse toward being equine. . . . The environment does not give him the potentialities of capacities; he has them in inchoate or embryonic form, just as he has embryonic arms and legs. 1
Existence and the unfolding of the specific powers of an organism are one and the same. All organisms have an inherent tendency to actualize their specific potentialities. 4
These comments of Maslow and Fromm express the same reification they are designed to combat; they manifest that repetition of old modalities that Marx noted. A reductive conception of humanity and scientific method animates this perspective. For Marx there are no specific potentialities inherent in human beings; the analogy of the acorn and the oak could hardly have been better chosen to indicate precisely what is mistaken with the ontology of self-realization. For the human being at birth does not possess the internal itinerary that leads by preordained steps to the transformations that structure inorganic or merely animal nature.
What does mark us as unique is the capacity to transform our nature as given. The theory of self-realization is caught in a fatal difficulty. Either it holds that the end of human life is prestructured in the code of our genetic and psychic constitution at birth, or it denies any such view of “specific potentialities. But on the first alternative it must either ignore everything we have learned from historical and social study about the variability of the human condition, or it must pronounce one of these forms natural and the others unnatural deviations. The second alternative is no better. For if human nature at birth is intrinsically malleable and given its determinate form through concrete social activity, we are forced to acknowledge that the very existence and comprehension of “self,” “actualization,” and “fuller Being” are culturally divergent. We can then insist on the formula of universal self-realization, but we will have to recognize the emptiness of the abstraction to which we are committed.
It is of some comfort to see ourselves as constantly “pressing” toward our moral fulfillment. But such a vision leads us away from social prac
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tice to a new narcissism. If we are essentially good at our core, if under the surface of our fragmented and distorted lives the goal of our striving already exists, we are not so much in need of remaking the world as of delving inward to find our “true selves.” This has been a major social tendency of the last decade, though it has taken very different forms. For some, the doctrine of primordial goodness has led away to new forms of solipsism, new efforts at immediate transcendence. The “growth movement” has made a fetish of the “true self’ and abhorred political practice. Yet there is no “real person” behind our roles, character, and patterns of social action. We are our being in the world, though we are not fated to this world. The real self is the counterpart of that real world; neither can exist without the other. This is not to deny selfreflectiveness, but to locate the self within the world of other selves, and within the domain of labor, art, and public practice. But this world does not yet fully exist, and, consequently, neither do we.
For others whose lives have been concerned with political practice the present period has witnessed the exhausting fall from ahistorical optimism to despair. For the counterculture of the sixties, America, greening, was to come to fruition in uncorrupted innocence. The appeal was not to character as it had been shaped in the social world, but to the core of goodness w hich unites us all beyond class and power. For much of the left, there was a chiliastic vision trembling in anticipation of revolution. Behind every economic decline, every strike, every act of social disobedience or rebellion a burgeoning revolution was perceived. It was as if one were seated in a theatre constantly awaiting the revelation of the revolutionary players whom we would join in their triumph. And yet, the curtain fluttered so many times without being borne aloft. Finally, as it must, hope so poorly nurtured turned to despair, and the apathy of the present moment descended with the dimming of the lights. When the “core of goodness” refuses to reveal itself, there is nothing left but the surface of corruption, and that “surface” comes quickly to define the totality.
Marx’s view of human nature begins with human beings in their social relations:
Individuals producing in society, and therefore a socially determined production by individuals, naturally constitutes the starting point. ’
But man is not an abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the world of men, the State and society. 6
It is above all necessary to avoid postulating “society” once again as an abstraction confronting the individual. The individual is the social being. . . . Individual human life and species-life are not dilferent things, even though the mode of existence of individual life is necessarily either a more specific or a more general mode of species-lile, or that of species-life a specific or more general mode of individual life. 7
I he smallest intelligible unit of social explanation is human beings in specific social relations transforming the natural environment through historically determinate technology. These terms are “all members of one entity, different sides of one unit.” 8 The reciprocal action of the various aspects of the totality is what I shall mean by the term “dialectic.” I he various sides of the totality are both different from each other and inseparable from each other. Each term derives its meaning from its place in the totality; each term fills out the meaning of the others.
Now, these phrases of Marx—“The individual is the social being." “Man is the world of men”—indicate that the individual and society are inseparable. But they are not identical; that is, the individual does not disappear within the social whole. For society is no more intelligible without the individual than is the individual without society. This is a simple but basic point. Some readers of Marx take such affirmations as “production is consumption and consumption simultaneously production” to mean an equivalence of terms. But the “is” in the proposition does not mean abstract self-identity; it means dialectical unity. Marx makes the point very clearly when he writes that “thought and being are indeed distinct but they also form a unity.” 9 He himself underscores the term “distinct.” “Being” is independent of thought. There was a time when the world existed without consciousness. Why then does Marx maintain that these two notions make up a unity? First, because it is the nature of this “being” to give rise to “thought” and it is the nature of thought to transform the being out of which it has been produced. Second, because “being” is an abstraction, and the character of being before thought is distinct from the being which thought transforms. Finally, each historical epoch conceives of this “being” distinctly.
The heart of the dialectic is the manner in which the aspects of the totality reciprocally transform each other and the totality. This is what distinguishes a dialectical process from mere mechanical interaction. The more mechanistic a system, the more its aggregate properties can be deduced from the nature and laws of its component parts. If we drive one billiard ball into a group they will scatter in such a way that their new locations are theoretically deducible from the application of a general law to their initial positions. 1 he kind of change they undergo is additive and external. They may be marked or dented by the collision, but they do not change their nature as a result of it. I heir collective weight, mass
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and motion are intelligible on the basis of a combination of their separate properties. Each remains basically in the aggregate what it was outside of it.
Freud’s system remains mechanical because he does not see the individual essentially transformed through social life. That is why concrete historical change plays no part in his analysis. Human beings are fundamentally the same in primitive agricultural societies and in contemporary corporate capitalism. Of course instinct is channeled toward socially acceptable ends. But Freud cannot give up the mechanical analogy which insists that the entities still retain their original identity under their complicated interactions.
People give the name “love” to the relation between a man and a woman whose genital needs have led them to found a family; but they also give the name “love" to the positive feelings between parents and children, and between the brothers and sisters of a family, although we are obliged to describe this as “aim-inhibited love” or “affection.” Love with an inhibited aim was in fact originally fully sensual love, and it is still so in man’s unconscious [emphasis added]. 10
At one point in an argument designed to prove that Freud’s thought is dialectical, Reich gives the case away; “As development progresses the old element is not entirely lost through transformation. While a part of the trait develops into its opposite, another continues to exist unchanged (emphasis added). 11 In a dialectical process no original part remains unchanged. An acorn develops into a tree, but no dissection of the tree will discover an acorn still contained beneath the tree’s exterior. And what of the part of the trait that develops into its opposite?
Transformation into the opposite is a property which, Freud says, all the instincts in general possess. In such reversal the original instinct is not destroyed but is fully maintained in its opposite [emphasis added]. 12
One part of the instinct remains the same, another changes into its opposite. But the part that is transformed is fully maintained in its opposite. This description does not characterize a dialectical development. The paradigm of Freud’s notion of change is derived from physics or hydraulics. The analogy is to a particle reversing its charge, or a fluid diverted into a new channel.
We therefore have to conclude that the sexual impulse-excitations are exceptionally “plastic,” if I may use the word. One of them can step in place of another; if satisfaction of one is denied in reality, satisfaction of another can offer full recompense. They are related to one another like a network of communicating canals filled with fluid [emphasis added]. 13
The fluid does not develop; it merely changes position. The way in which Freud defines id and instinct precludes the possibility of their
development. They can be detoured in novel ways, but they remain the same.
It should be apparent from what has been said so far that Freud conceived the psychic apparatus primarily as a closed system. ... Of course, streams of influence reach it from the external world. But once these have activated it, the apparatus proceeds to operate within its own intrapsychic territory according to its own autonomous laws. Its connection with the world is not one of essential involvement, but only of casual interplay [emphasis added]. 14
1 his is a perfect description of a mechanical system. For Marx, on the contrary, human beings are essentially involved with the structure of their social world.
I his reference to an “essential characteristic” of human nature may expose us to the charge that we are violating the principle of concreteness which we ourselves insisted upon in criticizing the “universalism” of sell-realization. If, in Marx’s view, human beings must be understood in their sociohistorical context, and if the mode of social life has varied as dramatically as Marx himself insisted, what can be meant by the reference to essential human nature, even if that nature is defined as “dialectical,” “social," or the “free conscious activity of the species”?
Two points: first, the difficulty with self-realization is not that it is an abstraction, but that it is the wrong abstraction. Second, the present objection seems to assume that we are forced to choose between a wholly abstract and a wholly concrete designation of human nature. But no such choice is required. In Marx’s method, terms can only be understood in reference to each other, and particularly in relation to what appears as their opposite. The concept “concrete” can consequently only be understood in reference to the concept “abstract.” The simplest way to grasp this point is to note that “concrete” is in itself an abstract concept. Nothing is concrete in itself, but only in reference to a particular perspective. Therefore it is crucial to understand the basic perspective from which the designation “concrete” proceeds. This perspective will, of course, contain abstract terms. So, the concrete can only be understood in reference to abstract categories.
If you should now object that the preceding paragraph is itself too abstract, if you should insist that merely saying that the concrete must be referred to the abstract does not indicate which abstraction to begin with—you would be correct. We cannot begin with something purely concrete; nor can we begin with the truism that we need to use abstractions. The question is: which abstraction is the appropriate starting point?
Since it would take a separate essay to discuss this issue, let us simply refer to Marx’s own work. He began his analysis in Capital not with “the secret of private accumulation,” which might be thought the more spe
tific and historical origin of capitalism, but with the commodity. His choice can claim two particular advantages; first, that the notion “commodity is the most specific abstraction we require to understand the foundations of capitalism. Anything more abstract would not single out capitalism; anything less abstract would fail to grasp what all capitalist systems have in common.
Second, if we analyze the concept “commodity” we will be led to the other concepts through which to analyze the capitalist system—use value, exchange value, exchange, money, capital, surplus value, wages, and accumulation. Although it would be a mistake to think that the order of these concepts paralleled a similar historical order, it is nevertheless true that the derivation of these concepts from each other makes possible the understanding of historical change.
\\ henever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development—production by social individuals. It might seem, therefore, that in order to talk about production at all we must either pursue the process of historic development through its different phases, or declare beforehand that we are dealing with a specific historic epoch such as, e.g., modern bourgeois production, which is indeed our particular theme. However, all epochs of production have certain common traits, common characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition. Still, this general category, this common element silted out by comparison, is itself segmented many times over and splits into different determinations. Some determinations belong to all epochs, others only to a few. 15
The notion that human nature is essentially mediated by social relations, tools, and the natural environment is also abstract. The question is whether it is a rational abstraction. I have chosen to emphasize this point because, as I have noted, it is sometimes held that Marx wholly denied any abstract human nature. Instead, he is supposed to have held that human beings are totally malleable and derive whatever nature they possess from their concrete social-historical environment. Furthermore, it is argued, speaking of abstract human nature is ideological, because it converts a particular characteristic of men and women into an essential characteristic of all human beings.
But the rebuttal to this last point is as clear as the need for employing abstractions: if we omit a general conception of human nature we stand in jeopardy of reification for a reason opposite to the one just proposed. If we lack an abstract criterion of the distinguishing features of human
nature we deny ourselves a standard by which to judge whether the phenomenon before us is human or not. Everything becomes indiscriminately “equal”; no manifestation is more human than the next.
Bentham is a purely English phenomenon. Not even excepting our philosopher Christian Wolf, in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace every strutted about in so self-satisfied a way. . . . The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in a dull way what Helvetius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. 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 in each historical epoch [emphasis added]. 11 ’
To understand human beings in any epoch we must have an abstract concept of “human nature.” This contention rests on two arguments. The first can be gleaned by simply paying close attention to Marx’s actual language. Note precisely what Marx asserts: “He that would criticize all human acts ...” We cannot ground our estimate of human beings in their social relations unless we possess a normative principle of human nature. Unless we have some notion of what it is to be a fully developed human being, we have no ground whatever for condemning any social system or set of institutional arrangements: we cannot employ such notions as “alienation” or “exploitation”; we cannot recommend socialism as a “richer” or “higher” form of human existence. In short, unless we possess a normative criterion—a principle for distinguishing and grading the manifestations of human beings in the world—we are without a standard that would justify our political commitment to socialism. I his is the way I understand Marx’s contention, and I believe he was correct. A neutral, scientific, positivistic Marxism is a contradiction in terms. The fundamental Marxist categories are simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive; fact and value make up a dialectical unity. They are neither identical nor intelligible in separation from each other.
But there is a second argument on behalf of the need for articulating an abstract concept of human nature. Paradoxically, it derives from its apparent opposite, the total plasticity of concrete human nature. Consider two statements of this second position:
All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature. 1,
Man is the sole animal capable of working his way out of the merely animal state—his normal state is one appropriate to his consciousness, one to be created by himself . 18
Once again the specific language is crucial. Marx refers to the transformation of human nature. But “transformation” is different from mere “change.” Only that which persists can be transformed, for unless the
differences are rooted in something more fundamental than sheer variety there is nothing to be transformed at all. Transformation, in other words, requires persistence as well as modification.
I he second quote makes the case even clearer. Engels contends that man is the sole animal capable of creating the condition appropriate to himself. Now the term “appropriate” is once again normative. But the point takes us further, lor it rests on the necessary assumption that something distinguishes human beings from other animals. What precisely is it about ourselves as human beings that permits us to transcend oui merely animal state” and produce ourselves in accordance with conditions appropriate to our own consciousness? Other animals cannot accomplish this transformation. There is some capacity, some power, some creativity that distinguishes human nature as such. It is this quality of self-generation that continually transforms human nature in history. W hat is common to all human beings is their capacity to reconstitute their own being. So, the arguments for human malleability and for an abstract human nature do not contradict each other. They are two aspects of a dialectical unity; our distinguishing characteristic as human beings is our capacity to give ourselves specific determinations in social time. Neither a merely abstract nor a wholly concrete being is humanly intelligible. Marx 1 ejects the position of nominalists for whom only the “immediate” is real. He also denies the contentions of abstract humanists and “metaphysical philosophers for whom the common property is of sole concern.
In saying that the abstract and concrete are aspects of one structure, we have advanced our argument. But we have advanced to a new abstraction which, though more determinate than before, needs still to be specified further.
Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adopted to his own wants. By this acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. ... We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. 19
This statement makes an admirable beginning for our analysis. Marx notes two points: first, that human beings are natural, embodied, material beings; and second, that we are capable of will, imagination, and creativity. The root of Marx’s anthropology is in the double contention that we are of nature and more than mere nature. (Whenever Marxist praxis is in decay one of these sides prevails to the exclusion of the
other.) Human history is “differentiated from natuial history as the evolutionary process of selt-conscious organisms. 2 The animal uses nature, but man masters it. “Unlike the hunter, the wolf does not spare the doe which would provide it with young deer in the next year. We possess this superiority over other animals only because we can comprehend the laws of nature and apply them in practice. Therefore, while
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 . . . what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in the 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 in 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. 22
We carry out a purpose of our own and through its completion make ourselves determinate. We are forced to shape a recalcitrant nature which is both like us, since we are “one of her own forces, but not yet formed in a manner “adopted to our own wants. In fact, we do not yet exist in a form adopted to our own wants. But since we are natural, we can only reconstitute ourselves by remaking the world of which we are an aspect. Because we have the power ot imagination we can transcend the immediately given; but because we are natural, we cannot transcend it any way we please. Since our purpose is realized in the world it posesses a structure to which we must “subordinate our will. Both realism and idealism are contributions to the truth.
The motion of Freud’s view of human nature is centripetal: everything is drawn toward the body and its instinctual satiation. But the Marxist vector is centrifugal: we cannot, in his view, locate ourselves within the confines of physical boundaries. Our “nature is outside ourselves.” We are copresent with our worlds because our nature consists of a field of forces through which we relate ourselves to the natural and social dimensions of our own being. The origin of this field can be located “within us,” but the terminus of our movement is the natural-social world. The food we consume in hunger is not merely an external means to our internal drives. It is first ours in imagination and then, if we are successful, it is ours—of us—in fact. So, to say that we are purpose!ul and natural is to say that we are directed toward the world as a continuation of our selves. “To say that man lives from nature means that nature is his body with which he must remain in a continuous interchange in order not to die.” 23 Our ability to transform our slumbering powers into actual forces constitutes our creativity. Marx emphasized intentionality and purpose as much as any phenomenologist or “object-relational therapist. But he understood that we and our "object are social from
out inception, and that the class structure of this social system has the power to thwart our intentionality as well as to realize it. Our selves are not “given" in a fixed form at birth, but are rather the result of our continuous transformation of the natural-social world.
Marx distinguished between natural characteristics—those attributes, powers, and tendencies we share with the remainder of the natural and animal world and our species being, those features that differentiate us from other natural beings. 24
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 and faculties, which exist in him as tendencies and abilities, as drives. On the other hand, as a natural, embodied, sentient, objective being he is a suffering being, conditioned and limited being, like animals and plants, d he objects of his drives exist outside himself as objects independent of him, yet they are objects of his needs, essential objects which are indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his faculties. ... A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being and does not share in the being of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. 25
The plant cannot exist without the sun. But neither can the sun be what it is unless, in the context of nature, it promotes the growth of the plant. The plant is one of the determinations of the sun, just as this dyad is itself a determination of the soil, the atmosphere, and the remainder of nature. In this, human beings are no different from the remainder of nature. As human beings, however, we experience an essential connection with the objects of our needs, and thereby experience our separation from our own completion. What we lack is not merely the object, as independent, but our own self in its relation to the object we seek. We are conscious of having our nature outside of ourselves in a double sense: the objects we need are beyond our present possession, and our own capacities are similarly beyond our determination because they are intrinsically linked to the independence of the objective realm.
In contradiction to the bourgeois view, which tends to regard selfconsciousness as a personal capacity for direct self-awareness, Marx views self-reflection as grounded in human community. It is in a community that we become selves through the social process of being so defined by others. In recognizing that we belong to the same species as those who define us as human, we experience the mediation between others and ourselves. In self-consciousness we adopt the attitude of others toward ourselves. We learn to do what others do—to refer to ourselves as beings in the world. But our knowledge is mediated through the standard of humanity that prevails in our social life. And this criterion defines us as human only through the continual activity of becoming human in social praxis.
But man is not merely a natural being; he is a human natural being. He is a being for himself, and, therefore, a species-being; and as such he has to authenticate himself in being as well as in thought. Consequently, human objects are not natural objects as they present themselves directly, nor is human sense, as it is immediately and objectively given, human sensibility and human objectivity. Neither objective nature nor subjective nature is directly presented in a form adequate to the human being. 26
This passage links factors separated in the bourgeois perspective: our dependence on nature; our transcendence of nature; our selfconsciousness as mediated through our awareness of our species as governed by criteria that define “humanity” as an achievement rather than a natural fact. In Freud’s view we satisfy our natural instincts through natural objects. For Marx, we constitute objects as "human objects by subjecting them to principles of human significance in the process of their appropriation. That is why, for Marx, production in the world and the self-production of human nature are intrinsically linked. We are compelled by our lack of predetermined instinctual nature to create ourselves in the course of imbuing the "natural world with our own social being. We never confront nature, either in the external world or within our own organism, unmediated by our self-constituted social existence.
The human self is constituted in the world. This contention distinguishes the Marxist position from every religious or therapeutic movement that claims to transform the self without transforming the natural-social world. It is sometimes held that the cultivation of selfawareness is a distinct contribution of bourgeois culture which socialism, with its emphasis on collective life, would destroy. This view 7 confuses two distinct notions: our awareness of ourselves, and introspection as the sole device for knowing ourselves. In other words, self-consciousness is identified with its privatistic bourgeois form. To be self-conscious is literally to be conscious of our self, and nothing more. The critical question concerns the nature of our self.
Capitalist culture isolates us from the world and other human beings. We are forced into an interior enclave. A virtue is then made of necessity and we are counseled to prize our seclusiveness as a unique cultural achievement. Since we believe with some justice that we stand in danger of losing ourselves in the world, we are inclined to believe that we can only “find ourselves” by turning our backs to the social realm and moving more deeply into our “real self. Current attempts to purify the self before returning to the world miss the critical truth in Merleau-Ponty’s observation:
We must reject that prejudice which makes “inner realities” out of love, hate, or anger, leaving them accessible to one single witness: the person who feels them. Anger, shame, hate, and love are not psychic facts hidden at the bottom ot another’s consciousness; they are types of behavior or styles of
conduct which are visible from the outside- Emotion is not a psychic internal
fact but rather a variation in our relations with others and the world." 11
No matter how profoundly we penetrate into the subject, we always find the world. 28
I his position is overstated, but it is the necessary counter to subjectivism.
One of the persistent themes of contemporary life asserts that our actions in the world, the roles we "play,” are mere masquerades of our deeper reality. Buried beneath our social selves is our real “homuncular” sell. We are admonished to strip away these artificial encumbrances so that we might reach the pristine essence behind social illusion. Fritz Peris states one of the basic assumptions of the contemporary therapy movement when he announces: “I am talking about the organism per se. I am not talking about ourselves as social beings. I don’t talk about pseudoexistence, but of the basic natural existence, the foundation of our being.” 29 Peris is not condemning this particular society for its pseudoexistence. He is reproducing a particularly privatistic version of Freud’s archeological perspective. The solution proposed, not surprisingly—since the social world is rejected—is a return to our biological being, our natural foundation.
Unfortunately, there is no natural biology to embrace, for there are no bodily functions that are not permeated with social meaning. Freud himself established this point for eating, sexuality, and defecation. Reich added the dimensions of posture, musculature, and breathing. Every historical epoch creates its own version of natural, primitive existence. The difficulty in our lives does not stem from the generic fact of “social roles.” Roles are our characteristic presence in the world, an indication of our capacity to pursue organized processes in our social relations. A being that could not engage in social roles would be relegated to chaoticimpulsiveness, routine, or reflex behavior. The destruction of the self does not derive from the sheer fact of “role,” but from the particular role we are required to “play” in this society. The word “play” gives the case away. Since we experience our roles as alienating us from ourselves, we attempt to deny their significance by relegating them to triviality. Since our culture determines that work is “important” and play “insignificant,” we construct the illusion that what we are in fact compelled to do in order to survive and flourish is of no real consequence. We would like to escape these odious social routines. The way out into the world is
blocked; it is, in fact, the realm we wish to avoid. I here seems no place to turn but into ourselves, to seek out some peaceful, loving core of the world, where social burdens are left behind.
Once, men and women sought to escape the pain of the world in religious fantasy. But secular society has destroyed this avenue of compensatory grace. Freud was right when he noted that the neurosis takes, in our time, the place of the cloister.” 30 The dichotomy between this world and “the other” has been reproduced in our lives as the schism between the real private self and the public other. We reserve what is most precious in ourselves for our personal existence, because the public realm is so foreign to our human desires. But we constantly discover that what we had marked off as our refuge from the world, our private being, is simply the form of social existence through which capitalist social relations establish their ubiquity.
We have argued that the self and the social world are dialectically joined. Marx also maintained that self-consciousness is only possible in community, and that a distinguishing feature of this capacity is our recognition that our lives are inadequate in their given form. The same social life that articulates the standards we employ to judge ourselves as human, provides us with the capacity to measure our distance from our appropriate relationship to the world.
The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified. Conscious life activity distinguishes man from the life activity of animals ... he is only a self-conscious being, i.e., his own life is an object for him, because he is a species-being. 31
Just as we are of nature and other than nature, so we are our lives and other than our lives. This is the source of our freedom. We are not fixed in any specific determination. To the extent that we enjoy control over our social world, we have the capacity to regulate the emergence of our specific character. Community, freedom, self-consciousness, and transcendence are dialectically related. But, of course, this is the ideal condition. For us to be able to treat ourselves as “universal and consequently free beings” 32 we must have collective power over our own social life.
In the type of life activity resides the whole character of a species, its species character; and free, conscious activity is the species character of human beings [emphasis added]. 33
Our character resides in our life activity, our social practice. It is through oui social labor that we determine and transcend ourselves and constiuct the form of our consciousness. The more alienated the form of our labor, the more fetishized our consciousness, the less able are we to conceive of ourselves as other than we presently are. Though Marx is occasionally driven into pessimism by the tendency of capitalism to fetishize consciousness, his basic position is that we never wholly lose our capacity for “free, conscious activity," for “we presuppose labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human.”
1 he practical construction of an objective world, the manipulation of inorganic
nature, is the confirmation of man as a conscious species-being_The
object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life; for he no longer reproduces himself merely intellectually, as in consciousness, but actively and in a real sense, and he sees his own reflection in a world he has constructed. 34
We are not identical with our given determinations and we are dialectically related to the world. It must follow that the world in which we embody our labor is equally indeterminate. Since we have our nature outside ourselves and the objects of this labor “are not natural objects as they present themselves directly,” it must be a basic human task to construct this objective world as an appropriate place for our objectification. Kant maintained that the human subject imposes various judgments upon experience and thereby constitutes its cognitive order. Marx maintained that practical labor imposes its categories upon the natural world and thereby constitutes its meaning for us as human beings. We are not presented with natural objects because we construct what we respond to. We “appropriate” the natural world, which means that we do not receive it passively but shape it through our activity. 35
Nature is simultaneously the limit to our construction and the means through which our objectification takes place. Nature is both obdurate and compliant. To the extent that we are free we realize ourselves in the world and “man himself becomes the object.” 36 The natural world always bears the imprint of human activity, but there is all the difference between activity that is stunted and minimally human, and that which is collectively controlled and directed toward the realization of our creativity, our species-being. The natural world must be so constructed that it can serve human need, for it is not “directly presented in a form adequate to the human being.” The role that nature plays in human life is determined by the form of society that imposes its role.
These considerations set the context for a quite remarkable passage which becomes even more significant in contrast with the views of Freud:
It will be seen from this how, in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy, we have the wealthy man and the plenitude of human need. The
wealthy man is at the same time one who needs a complex of human manifestations of life, and whose self-realization exists as an inner necessity and need. Not only the wealth but also the poverty of man acquires, in a socialist perspective, a human and thus social meaning. Poverty is the passive bond which leads man to experience a need for the greatest wealth, the other person. The sway of the objective entity within me, the sensuous eruption of my life-activity, is the passion which here becomes the activity of my being. 3 '
Freud holds the same basic view of “wealth” and “poverty” as the political economy Marx here criticizes. He applied the term “economic to his own view of the distribution of psychic energy: “We have seen that culture obeys the laws of psychological economic necessity.” 38 Freud related the use of his concepts to physics, not economics, for he determined to use the notion of psychical energy “in the same sense as the physicist employs the hypothesis of a flow of electric fluid. 39 But there is a striking parallel between the basic structures of classical physics and classical economics, and although Freud’s theory borrows directly from the former, his clinical application more closely resembles the latter.
The theme of scarcity and distribution which deeply concerned European capitalism in the nineteenth century is directly evident in Freud’s perspective. He constructed a theory of fixed libicfinal energy that is identical in form to the wage fund theory of the classical economists. According to this view there is a limited quantity of wages to be divided among competing working-class interests; a gain for one group automatically means a loss for another. The total sum cannot be expanded, so distribution must be the fundamental concern. The notions of “surplus” and “exploitation” are minimized or eliminated and the prospect of a collective improvement for the working class is held to be logically impossible.
Freud makes a similarly conservative use of the theory:
Since man has not an unlimited amount of mental energy at his disposal, he must accomplish his tasks by distributing his libido to the best advantage. 40
We perceive ... a certain reciprocity between ego-libido and object-libido. The more that is absorbed by the one, the more impoverished does the other become. The highest form of. . . object-libido is . . . being in love, when the subject seems to yield up his whole personality in favor of the object cathexis. . . .
At the same time the ego has put forth its libicfinal object-cathexes. It becomes impoverished in consequence of these cathexes [emphasis added]. 41
Marx defines as wealth precisely what Freud defines as impoverishment. But Freud is describing capitalist society and Marx is referring to human nature under socialism. Both are correct up to this pont. Under capitalism, a “plenitude of human need” signifies a “plenitude" of incompleteness, deprivation, vulnerability, and impoverishment.
We have seen the importance which must be attributed, in a socialist perspective, to the wealth of human needs, and consequently also to a new mode of production and to a new object of production. . . . Within the system of private property it has the opposite meaning. Every man speculates upon creating a new need in oidei to force him to a new sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence [emphasis added]. 42
Since capitalism requires each individual to create a new dependence in others, it promotes a character structure that is simultaneously aggressive and fearful of the other’s incursions. Freud’s theory reifies both sides of the situation. On the one hand, the instinct theory views hostility as a permanent biological disposition, independent of social origins. On the other, we are admonished not to become overly involved in loving others. For the more “object-cathexis” we put forward the less we retain for ourselves; the more dependent and impoverished we become. To be “wealthy” in Freudian terms is to stand self-contained within the citadelself. The economics of emotion and desire parallel the arguments advanced for the sanctity of private property.
And yet this fortress offers little refuge. Self-scrutiny is continuously required to warn of the possibility of rebellion from wihin. And so, both love and hatred become personal afflictions which the individual can only tolerate by refracting outward toward the world. In order that we “may not fall ill . . .” we are impelled to love “when the cathexis of the ego with libido exceeds a certain degree.” 43 Similarly, we would be overwhelmed by our own self-destructiveness if we did not expel it from our own organism. So much despair is generated in this view of the self that Freud is moved to deny not only instinctual dependence on the object, but instinct itself. Thanatos is more than a longing for dominance and pain; it is a longing for dissolution. Walled off against the world, the fortress bears slow witness to death within its confinements.
Under capitalism, need is continually transformed into “neediness.” Since desire is more and more satisfied through commodities, we find ourselves required to barter or purchase the entities or techniques that are necessary for our gratification. On the one hand we become instruments of our own self-manipulation. On the other, we become dependent upon “skilled experts” for the provision of culture, “common sense,” entertainment, pleasure in sport or sexual intimacy. But these needs are continually more standardized through commodities which must be literally bought from others. And since the purpose of this commodity production is to exploit us for commercial gain we quite reasonably become suspicious of the commodities we depend on and, eventually, of commoditized needs themselves. We prefer, often, not to “need” at all, since we perceive helplessness in the condition of need.
So, when Freud writes of a desire to abolish stimulation and turn to equilibrium, he is noting a pervasive characteristic of our society. But it is
a characteristic that is often obscured by the countertendency to renewed and increasingly more powerful stimulation. I he less able we are to satisfy ourselves through commodities the more strongly we desire “genuine” or “authentic” fulfillment. I he whole panoply of therapeutic and religious growth movements is an attempt to satiate this growing hunger for “use value” as against exchange. But the greater the “demand” for pristine, “uncommoditized” experience, the greater the opportunity for those suppliers who rush into the vacuum with more sophisticated products.
Romantic love is a paradigm of this transformation. Since the public realm of work is recognized as inhuman, hope of meaningful recognition and nurturance is relegated to the private sphere of the intimacy of pairs of lovers. They are there to make good in the intensity and passion of their feelings what cannot be expected in the outside world. But there is simply too much to make up. After the initial euphoria mingled with terror in which romantic love originates, every sign of the world is greeted with some disillusionment. But, of course, the lovers are also shaped in this world, and so they are forced to bring to their enclave the materials they are seeking to flee.
Furthermore, when love becomes commoditized, it takes on the characteristic of any product. Its value becomes inversely proportionate to its supply: dating is basically an initiation into the rites of husbanding one’s affection while attracting the largest supply from others.
Romantic love is one scarcity mechanism that deserves special comment. Indeed, its only function and meaning is to transmute that which is plentiful into that which is in short supply. This is done in two ways: first, by inculcating the belief that only one object can satisfy a person’s erotic and affectional desires; and second, by fostering a preference for unconsummated, unrequited, interrupted, or otherwise tragic relationships. 44
This perceptive comment by Philip Slater seems to me to exaggerate the extent to which love is in fact “plentiful” in capitalist society. He therefore overstates how much “fostering” needs to be done. A competitive, atomistic society will itself impose unconsummated relationships. What needs to be “fostered” is the belief that this situation is both inevitable and the highest stage of human existence.
There is an interesting passage in Marx which prefigures a tendency that has perhaps only reached its apogee in our own time:
We arrive at the result that man (the worker) feels himself to be freely active only in his animal function—eating, drinking and procreating, or at most also in his dwelling and personal adornment—while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal. The animal becomes human and the human becomes animal.
Eating, drinking and procreating are of course also genuine human functions. But abstractly considered, apart from the environment of human activities, and turned into final and sole ends, they are animal functions. 45
I take this passage to mean that when ends that have been relegated to privacy become compensatory satisfactions for the alienation of appropriately human functions, i.e., satisfactions in which our “species nature has been reduced to the function of mere survival, they become abstract, inhuman activities. In contemporary language, they become compulsory and obsessional. Rather than offering us refuge from exploitation they become a new tyranny. The nameless protagonist in Last Tango in Paris, in flight from the external social world which has abused and terrorized him at every turn, makes a desperate attempt to replace social pathology with primitive, “animal” functions. But forced back to anality, there is no further recess of the sheerly biological realm of the body in which to hide. Yet the public world is no more hospitable. In its frantic rituals of compensation and amnesia—in the last tango—he grows weaker and moves toward death. Finally he lies curled as a fetus, turned in upon himself, unable to find life in the world or beyond it.
When we cannot participate as human beings in the public polity, when we cannot shape the social realm through our mutual labor, our society offers as one compensatory fantasy the idolatrous recession into the primitive. Marx underscores the manner in which frustrated productive labor is transformed into private ends, a reversal of Freud’s claim that ungratified sexuality turns to the public world for satisfaction. For Freud, work plays a critical role in the “economics of the libido”:
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one—if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses. And yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. 46
For all his incredible tenacity in undermining the ordinary claims of common experience, Freud showed a singular lack of curiosity in regard to the significance of the last assertion of this passage. It is certainly true that Freud generally regarded work as a grim necessity for die preservation of human life. And in this he was certainly historically correct. But this passage speaks to something beyond the utilitarian im
portance of work. Here Freud considers its “libidinal” value as a sublimation for “narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic” needs.
“Sublimation” is a concept that contains a judgment of value. Actually it signifies the application to another field in which socially more valuable achievements are possible. 47
Does Freud mean to identify work with “professional work,” thereby eliminating the category of wage-labor, the predominant form of work in capitalist society? Or does Freud intend to distinguish “professional work” from “freely chosen professional work,” the former operating according to the defense mechanism of displacement, while the latter, alone, is capable of the loftier transformation provided by sublimation? Does the phrase “special satisfaction” mean that all work offers considerable satisfaction, even if it falls short of that optimum available only to those who are specially privileged? It is difficult to answer these questions, but a clue is provided in a letter Freud wrote a half century earlier:
The mob gives vent to their impulses, and we deprive ourselves. We do so in order to maintain our integrity. We economize with our health, our capacity for enjoyment, our forces: we save up for something, not knowing ourselves for what. And this habit of constant suppression of natural instincts gives us the character of refinement. We also feel more deeply and therefore dare not demand much of ourselves. . . . Why don’t we make a friend of everyone? Because the loss of him or any misfortune happening to him would bitterly affect us. Thus our striving is more concerned with avoiding pain than with creating enjoyment. . . . Our whole conduct of life presupposes that we shall be sheltered from the direst poverty, that it is always open to us to free ourselves increasingly from the evils of our social structure. The poor, the common people, could not exist without their thick skin and their easygoing ways. Why should they feel their desires intensely when all that the afflictions of nature and society have in store is directed against those they love: why should they scorn a momentary pleasure when no other awaits them? The poor are too powerless, too exposed to do as we do. When I see the people doing themselves well, putting all seriousness aside, it makes me think it is their compensation for being so unprotected against all the imposts, epidemics, diseases, and the evil conditions of our social organization. . . . There is a psychology of the common man which is somewhat different from ours. Such people also have more feeling of community than we do; it is only they who are alive to the way in which one life is the continuation of the next, whereas for each of us the world vanishes with his death. 48
I Find this one of the most remarkable passages in Freud’s work. Its analysis is worth a short volume. Freud never came closer to realizing the social constitution of the contemporary psyche, nor the class structure of the dynamics of repression and release. For all its obf uscation, Freud’s
commentary cannot disguise social dissolution beneath the personal despair and theoretical pessimism of bourgeois culture. This reflection expresses a view of mind analogous to the structure of social classes:
Our mind, that precious instrument by whose means we maintain ourselves alive, is no peacefully self-contained unity. It is rather to be compared with a modern State in which a mob, eager for enjoyment and destruction, has to be held down forcibly by a prudent superior class. 49
Freud's early letter reveals the nature of this “prudent superior class." As the mob concentrates within itself the functions of id and libido, the privileged class represents the executive functions of the ego and the moral authority of ego-ideals and superego. It deprives itself, economizes its capacity for life, and saves for unknown ends. In this process it develops a superior refinement, though it cannot risk its deep feeling in the world. We have already noted this theory of capitalist accumulation applied to the psyche. But here Freud adds the other side of the orthodox bourgeois theory: the view of the profligate masses. At one point he is severe; at another, sympathetic. But the “mob,” for whatever reason, is moved from impulse and the desire for immediate release. It moves either because it is incapable of anything more or because it is perceptive enough to recognize, in this momentary pleasure, the limited compensations for its suffering.
These are illuminating considerations, once they are demystified. The additional “deprivation" of the professional stratum permits it to rationalize its political authority, just as the superior wealth of the capitalist class was once regarded by bourgeois economists as a reward for superior savings. There is a dialectic in all our lives which buys self-justification at the expense of deprivation. And while Freud notes that the privileged classes can gain protection from the worst poverty and social evil, we can draw the relevant implications from the fact that these advantages require the unprotected labor of the masses. The idlike mob must be “held down forcibly by a prudent superior class.” It must be controlled against its will; or, more accurately, it must be controlled by having its own will turned against it. The “superior class” uses the energy of the masses against it, just as the superego turns the hostility of destructive impulses into fetters upon their expression. We can see that Freud’s theory of the individual psyche accurately represents the extent to which the layers of our selves are formed out of the system of antagonistic social forces.
Our desires are, as Freud describes them, short-lived, ruthless, peremptory, and seething with irrational demands. But this is not, as Freud believed, because of their constitutional nature. In our society drives are mediated through social relationships so as to produce real
82 Marx and Freud: Convergence and Antagonism
dependence behind a facade of freedom. There is little chance that the child’s first inclinations will be slowly and lovingly nurtured and articulated as it enters more fully into the social world. The disfigurations of childhood are repeated in the remaining institutions of capitalist society—in school, media, and work, thereby providing the social determination of what Freud took to be the repetition compulsion of our biological being.
In Freud’s account it is not desire that develops, but the mechanisms of repression and control. Again, there is a perverted insight in this account. Our social needs remain unsatisfied while our manipulated wants are stimulated to frenetic excess. Our “private” desires can be compared .with a mob, because they are formed in an irrational society which devalues true social life and instigates instead insatiable longing, self-hatred, and despair.
When we transform Freud’s figure, the analogy between the modern state and the individual psyche is clear: those who can control their own internal passions are given the privilege of controlling others. Desire versus control is the dominant motif for both the individual psyche and the social system. Yet Freud cannot decide whether the privileged class governs by sublimation or deprivation. And he cannot shake off the awareness of isolation that forms the bourgeois mentality, its pervasive discontinuity and fear of total annihilation in death. The masses flee their vulnerability in the security of crude gratification. The privileged deny themselves gratification and, in their refinement, make themselves vulnerable to pain and death.
In a socialist society my need can be my opportunity for fulfillment rather than my vulnerability. Such needs are humanly formed and can therefore be humanly realized. If the world of social nature is myself, “outside myself,” the deeper and richer my engagement in this world, the greater my human enlargement. For Freud, the other is not only not myself, but my antagonist. We cannot help but see ourselves in the world we have constructed. Everything depends on the form of this construction. The significance of nature for us resides in the character of the society that has imbued it with meaning. Under capitalism, nature becomes a battleground for competing interests. But if, in the object, humanity becomes acquainted with itself, and if the object is itself objectified, then it follows that in my relationship with nature I will be ingesting the labor, stunted or fulfilled, of other human beings. This is what Marx intends when he holds that “the sense and minds of other men have become my own appropriation .” 50
I he whole of history is a preparation for “man” to become an object of sense
perception, and for the development of human needs (the needs of man as
such ). 51