Marxist Anthropology and Humanism: Philosophical Framework
3) Marx’s Anthropology
Human alignment results from a particular socio-economic historical situation. Related to this is the human essence.
Characteristics:
- Man is a natural being with natural requirements that must be met to ensure subsistence. Work is the means of satisfying them.
- Man is unique because they are separated from nature through labor. At work, man transforms nature to put it at their service, considering their needs.
- The understanding of man as a worker implies a natural transformation of philosophical anthropology. The essence of man is to transform nature using reason. The product humanizes the worker; it is projected work. Objectification is realization. Work is not alienating in itself; only humans can be alienated.
- The human being is a historical subject and the result of a historical tradition.
- There is a general need to be universal. By producing tools to transform nature, humans meet their needs, not as single individuals but socially. Humans are social animals.
4) Marx’s Humanism
Marx’s philosophy is humanistic because it aims to achieve a historical and political transformation of society beyond capitalism. This transformation seeks to end alienation and create a social order where human beings can thrive.
A) The priority is to eliminate the alienation that dehumanizes man.
B) Marx places man at the center of reality, rejecting transcendent explanations.
He believed that only man can make sense of history, not a divine entity. Through work, man can alter the means of production and transform methods.
Philosophical Framework
Marxist thought is indebted to German philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially the thought of Hegel (the so-called absolute idealism) and the interpretations made by philosophers grouped in the Hegelian Left, most notably L. Feuerbach. Influenced by this, Marx criticized Hegel’s idealism and his rationalist notion of dialectic. He rejected the thesis that thought, consciousness, or spirit constitutes the main object of philosophy and the ultimate ontological foundation. Marx accepted, albeit critically, the materialistic interpretation of Feuerbach, that reality is matter.
Another decisive influence of Feuerbach is his radical critique of religion. Feuerbach considered religion (and God) a product of man that ended up alienating him. Man creates God to find comfort and hope but ends up submitting to it. It is necessary to deny religion and defend atheism to restore human dignity. Marx accepted this thesis but criticized it as too theoretical. He defended the need to link the critique of religion with the concrete material conditions of men’s lives, seeing religion as a counterfeit of reality, serving the ideological interests of the ruling class.
While in Paris, Marx came into contact with the ideas of French socialists (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Blanc…). He maintained a critical attitude towards their thoughts and theories. Marx and Engels rejected these theories for their lack of rigor, realism, and superficial analysis of history and human nature. Against this utopian socialism, Marx defended scientific socialism based on a thorough understanding of society’s economic structure. He also rejected the anarchist Bakunin’s approaches, considering that the individualism defended by Bakunin was incompatible with the social dimension of man and the need to create strong proletarian organizations to transform society. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels criticized all these theories.
Finally, Marx’s thought was developed in an intellectual atmosphere that pervaded Europe called positivism. Its main representative was Comte. Dazzled by the advance of scientific knowledge and technical progress, positivism idolized reason and science as the only criteria to explain reality and achieve a social organization that facilitates human progress. Inheriting the empirical approach, Comte considered it necessary to overcome metaphysics and religion to reach a positive state, achieving the goal of emancipation and full realization of humanity. Marx’s desire to give his thoughts scientific rigor can be seen as an influence of positivism. The expansion of the positivistic mentality had a decisive influence on the temporary abandonment of metaphysical questions. Marx developed a philosophy with strong social and political content.