MARX,S CONCEPT OF SOCIAL INDIVIDUAL_____ ( 2) =========================================== BY: SEAN SAYERS ....Marx also rejects the individualistic starting point on philosophical, ontological grounds. Production should not be thought of simply as an instrumental activity to meed individual needs, it is always and necessarily a social activity. In working to create a material product , at the same time we produce and reproduce our social relations. HUMAN BEINGS ARE ESSENTIALLY SOCIAL CREATURES. These views run throughout Marx,s work. They are explicit in his early work . Activity and consumption, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social activity and social consumption ( Marx 1975, 349 ) In the terms of his later work, Productive forces are always and necessarily employed within the context of relations of production ( Marx 1958 ) ; production is necessarily connected with economic relations of exchange and distribution...................... It is only with the development of modern society and the free market that individuals get separated from fixed and predetermined roles ( of feudal lord and vassal, landlord and serf , etc )and become independent agents, free to persue their own particular interests. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate ( Marx 1973, 83 ) ............ THE .ERROR OF LIBERALISM is to mistake this form of individuality for human nature as such and to treat it as universal and existing independent of and prior to any social relations. The eighteenth_century individual ___ the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society , on the other side of new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century___ appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history,s point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature ( Marx 1973, 84 ) ____________________________________ See complete original paper : INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY IN MARX AND HEGEL { 2004 }
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 19:58:04 +0000
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