Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Part of what makes Marx still relevant to our post-Communist world
is his quintessentially modern belief that work itself is the satisfaction
of our species-essence and not merely the means to bodily gratification.
This belief has its origin, we now know, in the reevaluation of labor
in medieval monastic life. Marx, however, radicalized this Christian
idea by dropping its theological justification (
laborare est orare
) and
by limiting it to the human sphere, where it could serve the supreme
value of life. “Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life
engendering.”
19
Production in the real world where nature imposes its
harsh discipline on us is humanity's active species life. Accordingly, its
essential powers are displayed in the history of industry, albeit in alien-
ated forms up to and including the capitalist mode of production.
The “rich” human being, who exists more as an idea than a reality for
Marx, is “the human being
in need
of a totality of human manifes-
tations of life,” life being understood as the material production of
more life.
20
In spite of his protestations against idealism and the “pov-
erty of philosophy,” Marx was, when all is said and done, a metaphy-
sician, but one who proposed a theory of being intended to undercut
all philosophical dualisms—ideal versus real, subject versus object,
spiritual versus material—stretching back to Plato and beyond. Inasmuch
as the mode in which humans produce the means of their subsistence is
a definite form of activity that expresses their life and hence their very
being, production must be carried out in a form that corresponds to
the true expression of that life, which Marx believed can occur only in
socialism.
Clearly, then, Marx's economic humanism was not limited to the mate-
rial improvement of the worker. The proletariat must appropriate the
forces of production both to preserve their existence and “to achieve self-
activity,” which is to say to actualize their human essence as producers
and toolmakers. For “man produces even when he is free from physical
need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom.”
21
Truly
free
pro-
duction—and here we come to the heart of the matter—is the human
invasion of the object and therefore its dissolution as a thing existing
over and against a subject: G. W. F. Hegel's substance become subject,
but the subject now correctly identified as the animal laborans. By
making nature the reflection of humans' essential powers, Marx believed
he had pointed the way to a self-affirmation in and through the world
