Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx's early humanism and human flourishing under capitalism
Leon Maack
Essay from the year 2020 in the subject Philosophy - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, language: English, abstract: This essay aims to explore the chapters 'Estranged Labor' and 'Private Property and Communism' in Karl Marx’s 'Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844' and elaborates on how they are still relevant today. In his Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx proposes a potent and extensive philosophical analysis of the human being and its situation under a capitalist system. In doing so, he perceives history as a process of man’s alienationand its necessary abolition; man being history’s subject and labor being man’s essence. Marx, however, is no advocate of the concept of an anthropological humanism; for him, human beings have no abstract essence but are instead constituted in an historically grown environment: „just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him.“ Society’s and man’s relationship is reciprocal: not only is society produced by human beings, Marx also saw that this man-made society in turn has great effect on the human beings which are born into and inhabit it. He continues to claim that the „human aspect of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist for him as a bond with man – as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him – and as the life-element of human reality. […] society is the complete unity of man with nature – the true resurrection of nature – the consistent naturalism of man and the consistent humanism of nature.“ [...]
