Marxist Anthropology: Alienation and Human Nature
Marxist Anthropology
New Humanism: Marxism promotes a critical struggle against the alienation of human beings, calling for freedom, rationality, and individuality. It maintains the rational-Enlightenment ideal of man.
Marx denies the existence of a being superior and different from nature and man: this is atheism, the denial of the existence of God. He affirms the autonomy and sufficiency of human beings.
Man is the subject of history, the basis of its theoretical explanation of the world and history. Actual events and social praxis define life and human consciousness. Human nature is not something apart from their production processes and development.
- The human being is a natural being, distinguished from animals by being able to produce the means to change nature through labor.
He is an active and productive being, and is fulfilled as a human being through work.
Practical-productive activity leads him to relate to other humans and socialize. Human beings think and act according to the circumstances in which they live; they are determined by the productive system.
Economic Alienation
The human being is an alienated being. Marx inherits Hegel’s concept of alienation (alienation of all) and Feuerbach’s (religious alienation, but considering nature as something external to man).
The human being should be actively developed through work, but this has not happened in any mode of production throughout history (Asian, slave, feudal, capitalist) since the worker is deprived of the fruits of their labor.
Marx studied mainly capitalist society, in which he distinguishes two types of human beings as they relate to the means of production: the owners and the workers. These two opposing classes have come to the situation of human self-alienation.
The object produced with the energy and effort of the worker does not belong to the employer: this is the expropriation of the subject. The human being is not recognized in the product of their work; he is not fulfilled but is deprived of his life; he is not fulfilled but is alienated.
The worker is used as a means of production, becoming a commodity to be bought and sold, and his creativity is restrained. This is the reification or objectification of the subject. The work product is transformed into capital and becomes an instrument of exploitation of the workforce. The work is not recognized as something unique, something directing, but is something imposed.
Nature ceases to be the venue of the human being and becomes the object of exploitation and domination, becoming something hostile.
All the following alienations have their origin and explanation in economic alienation.
Social Alienation
Society is polarized between dominant and dominated, exploiters and exploited; men do not relate as people. All social institutions are in this situation of confrontation, alienated; they are composed of human beings who identify with their status and not their status as persons.
Political Alienation
The State and the legal system protect the economic system; it is a “bourgeois state.” The proletariat is perceived as the enemy because it favors the middle class.
Ideological Alienation
The conscience of human beings depends on their material conditions of life. The proletariat is alienated because the ideology of the bourgeois class dominates.
Philosophy theoretically justifies the interests of the dominant classes, convincing the proletariat of the inevitability of their situation. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.”
Religion promises man a fictional world where all his problems will be resolved, preaching submission and acceptance of suffering for salvation in another world. It is the opiate of all the yearnings for emancipation of the working class, therefore being at the service of the ruling class. Marx regarded religion as “the opium of the people.”