Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Marx and the Humanization of Nature
Marx was among the first to see through the modern apotheosis of
objectivity, arguing that if we turn to real, existing human beings engaged
in the production of their material existence, the ideal of the pure
spectator is exposed for the sham it really is. What we find instead are
laboring individuals who throughout human history have been inti-
mately engaged with nature and its processes, even in the alienated
mode of capitalist, industrial production. A human being is a toolmaker,
the
animal laborans
, and not the rational animal of ancient “idealists”
that Descartes transformed into the disembodied consciousness of one
who views the world in detachment from the material activities of
real people. For Marx, labor is “a process in which both man and
Nature participate,” and “the use and fabrication of instruments of
labour . . . is specifically characteristic of the human labour-process.”
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The human species-essence, an early expression of Marx's, is tech-
nological in character. The “first historical act” of humankind is the
production of the means to satisfy the basic needs of food, clothing, and
shelter. Humans first distinguish themselves from other animals not
through their higher mental powers but by producing the means of
their existence, indirectly producing their material life.
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But Marx is actually saying more than this. On the one hand, all prod-
ucts of production are real products only when they are consumed in
consumption. Consumption, in other words, seems to guide production
and provide whatever measure is necessary to restrain and keep it within
reasonable limits. On the other hand, products are in fact consumed as
either the instruments or raw material of production or simply the
means of subsistence of the producers themselves. Production—and
not consumption—is in reality the primary factor, and as such always
entails both the satisfaction and
creation of new needs
, which in turn
call forth new production in a never-ending cycle. This is the secret of
capitalism: the satisfaction of human needs evokes nothing but produc-
tion itself—a secret that Marx believed socialism could harness and put
to work in a more just social and political arrangement. Hence his
conception of the animal laborans whose activity is production and
consumption, but a consumption whose sole justification is further
production.
