User:Breadandroses/sandbox

On this page I will save bits of articles I'm working on which might not make it through til the finished product.

From article in progress on Marx's conception of human nature
Here are some claims Marx makes. Humans, he says, characteristically:
 * produce their surroundings and means of subsistence, and do so according to plans which they make and hold;
 * make their own lives the objective and aim of their activity; and
 * make their species and their community their objective (in the same sense).

It is necessary to understand that that these are not three wholly separate aspects of human nature. Rather, each is, in some sense, a special instance of the other. So, Marx regards production as perhaps the most important aspect of human life. While specifying this, however, he also makes reference to the purposive, planned character of human productive capacities. This same capacity for purposive plan-making is what informs his contention that humans make their own lives and their own species their object. When describing his conception of non-alienated labour, he writes that 'I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love.' He continues: 'In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.'

social requirements, i.e., to the requirements of' socially developed human beings. 


 * Firstly, the fact that labour is external to the worker – i.e., does not belong to his essential being; that he, therefore, does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence, the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working, he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His labour is, therefore, not voluntary but forced, it is forced labour. It is, therefore, not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, it is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character of labour for the worker is demonstrated by the fact that it belongs not to him but to another, and that in it he belongs not to himself but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, the human brain, and the human heart, detaches itself from the individual and reappears as the alien activity of a god or of a devil, so the activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. It belongs to another, it is a loss of his self. The result is that man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions – eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and adornment – while in his human functions, he is nothing more than animal.