The Internal Metabolic Rift

“Marx and Human Nature:  Refutation of a Legend,” by Norman Geras 2016

This book is a tightly-argued, logical rejection of the idea by some Marxists, like the idealist Maoist Louis Althusser, that Marx did not believe humans had any ‘innate nature.’  It is a somewhat Talmudic exegesis until you realize how basic the idea of ‘human nature’ is to right-wing arguments – and also surprisingly how fundamental it is to historical materialism and socialism.

Geras bases his analysis on the 6^th thesis from the “Theses on Feurbach” - notes written by Marx in 1848 which are used as the ‘proof’ by those who believe Marx dissolved human nature completely into social conditions.  Marx was arguing against Feurbach’s view that religion was innate in human beings.  Althusser, Istvan Meszaros, Sidney Hook, Robert Tucker and a number of other Marxists, liberals and anti-communists interpreted the exact text to mean that Marx discounted humans having ANY innate characteristics.  When I read the 3 points of the 6^th thesis, it clearly does not maintain that, but then I’m no errant philosopher, thank god.

Geras points out at length that the 3 points can be interpreted in several different ways, so without context they remain semi-ambiguous.  He discusses whether human nature is influenced by or manifested in social relations or is totally determined by or dissolved into ‘the ensemble of social relations’ and history.  

Geras then brings in the works written by Marx before and after the Theses on Feurbach – the earlier The Holy Family and the later The German Ideology.  The latter was the first introduction to historical materialism.  Both these works explicitly discuss human nature as something separate from social or economic conditions and any method of production.  In a sense, Marx understood that nature was not just external to humans but INTERNAL to humans.  The sex drive, the need for food and water, the need for warmth and shelter, the reality of birth, death and disease, the requirements of community and especially what separates humans from animals – labor and the ability to create, communicate and produce.  This led to historic systems of production.  All of this seems quite commonsensical.  In a way Althusser & Co. brought the metabolic rift between humanity and nature into the human body.  Theirs is an idealist approach alienating humans from their own biologic and social needs - much as Christian ideology attempts to do.

No room for conservative hermits

Conservatives allege that social Darwinism – ‘red in tooth and claw’ – is the basis of human nature.  They identify ‘human nature’ with every negative characteristic displayed by humans in certain societies.  Ricardo and Smith did something similar, basing their whole philosophy on individualism.  For conservatives, each predator preys on those lower on the food chain – and so do humans.  In a sense it is the beginning philosophy of barbarism. Marx and Engels postulated that actually labor and community created humanity and that the basic human need for a sufficient material and cultural life are paramount.  In other words the rogue individual in the tribe is either shunned, cast out or killed.  Those who do not work for the collective wealth are relegated to lower social status – except under class societies, where they congregate in the upper reaches!  Present anthropologists generally agree. 

On the other hand, the fascist ‘philosophy’ is one of identity – encouraging ‘tribes’ to war against tribes, nations versus nations, ethnicity versus ethnicity, religions versus religions, skin colors versus skin colors, etc. These divisions actually come from the survival needs of class structures and ruling classes, not from the proletariat or humanity in general.  This is full-bore barbarism. In this context, the idea of ‘socialist man’ or ‘the new human’ is flawed, as Marx contended that socialism’s attributes are already contained in human beings, and have only to be supported and freed from material want and alienated labor.

Geras posits that while conservatives use the corrupt characteristics of humans in certain societies as a club, Marx understood real, organic human needs are the basis for historical materialism.  The Theses on Feurbach is an example of Marx rejecting religion as part of ‘human nature.’ Certainly many people have gotten along without religion quite easily!  Religion in this case is really an imprint of the specific society and mode of production, i.e. a social product. Marx’s polemic against Jeremy Bentham rejected the “English petit-bourgeois” as the model of human nature.  And so on.  Instead the cooperative needs of labor to satisfy human needs define human society - which Marx maintained also went to issues of play, happiness, cultural production and the like.  In a sense, Althusser & Co. believe there was some kind of definitive break between the young Marx and the mature Marx.  Geras proves there was always a consistent evolution, citing Capital’s continuing references to a certain kind of human nature.   

What is stunning about reading Marxist analyses like this is that other ‘philosophies’ pale in comparison, depth and scope.  Libertarianism, atheism, anarchism, positivism, liberalism, humanism, pragmatism, feminism, nationalism, idealism, Catholicism, utilitarianism, religion etc. – all are partial, irrational or deeply misleading approaches as to how individuals, society and nature actually function.

Other prior reviews on the subject of Marx, use blog search box upper left:  “Marx and the Earth,” “Old Gods, New Enigmas – Marx’s Lost Theory,” “The Young Karl Marx,” “Ecological Revolution,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women,” “Ecology & Marxism,” “A Marxist Education,” “Marxism is Abolitionism,” “Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism – Marx and Normative Social Theory…” “Witty Lightweight Attacks Marxism.”  Etc.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

March 23, 2020 

Viejo Gringo Reports #4: Old Mountain, Old Reality

 A Wonder of the World

A visit to Machu Picchu is an event, a trip to one of the ‘7 Wonders of the World.’  However it is also mass tourism. Many tickets are required. Hordes wait on the train platforms.  Lines can be long. Timing is all important, and you only spend about 3 hours at the site, most with voluble guides.  The air is thin and some steps tricky.  Since we have all seen multiple pictures of the little city on the mountain, backed by its rounded, pointed peak, it seems unreal.  Am I really here?  Was I there?  Is this happening?  It is a bit disconcerting.  Tourists are snapping selfies and pictures of themselves endlessly, as if to prove the fact.  I would rather sit in one place for a time and absorb the thing. Do it if you go.

Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu

What is funny is that these tourists are from all over Latin America and the world.  Many have some kind of religion other than that of the Quechua Inca. Some have none.  Yet it is a pilgrimage to an important pagan religious site.  The architecture, agronomy, sun temples, holy rocks and mountains all play a role in that story. People flock to Notre Dame and the Siena basilica, the mosques in Casablanca and Mecca, the shores of the Ganges in India or temples in Ankor Wat.  Machu Picchu represents grounded paganism, though even paganism has its ridiculous side too.  Nevertheless I’ll quote a funny Facebook meme of a native American replying to a European priest and explorer in the 1700s:  “But dude, the sun is real!”

In the little mountain town there are dug-out places for offerings to Pacha Mama – Mother Earth. Llamas and alpacas were sacrificed to her. There is a stone condor, perhaps as a nod to the air and gods in the sky.  There is a semi-circular Temple of the Sun, designed like Stonehenge to catch the rays of sunrise on the summer solstice. There are terraced fields to grow food and also test varieties at height as a science experiment.  Quinoa, potatoes, chilis and corn were some of the foods.  There is a grassy central plaza where ceremonies, flute music and ball games took place.  It is the terminus of the walkable Inca Trail from Cusco, so it was tightly connected to that city. About 500 lived there other than the royal family.  What is somewhat tragic is that when the conquistadors and Pizzaro arrived they were still building structures.  So Machu Picchu, like life, went unfinished.

PAGANISM & HISTORY

And now for something different, but not quite.  It is also well known that Marx, in the “Gotha Programme” pointed out that labor ‘and nature’ create all wealth. There are also many quotes from Marx about the link between human biology and history.  Here is one I easily found by Engels:  "Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst..."

This is not biological ‘essentialism’ or crude empiricism.  This is a crucial fact, as we are very conscious and hard-working animals.  Marx studied ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’ because they are the foundation of human life.  He determined that the capitalists would figure out the lowest amount they could pay for workers to survive, gain knowledge and reproduce more workers and consumers.  It was and still is an essential calculation for many capitalists.  In other words, how much can we get away with?

These processes are the root of history since hunter-gatherer times. We are born into history, yes, but with a human body that still has ‘needs.’  Do a thought experiment about a ‘being’ that doesn’t need to eat, never gets hot or cold, never dies, is not bothered by rain, snow, sleet and the like, and can create others like him with the snap of a ‘finger.’  That would be a science fiction or religious ‘thing’ – it would not be human. It would be a product of Silicon Valley corporate ‘transhumanism.’  

And where would literature or film be without the gravitas of mortality?  Creativity, work, striving, building are all aspects of this 'human condition.'

Agricultural terraces at Machu Picchu

The ‘sacred valley’ of Peru leading to Machu Picchu provides clues as to this notion of human needs.  Why was the valley ‘sacred’ to the Inka?  Because of its agricultural productivity.  Terraces on the mountain sides, agricultural bottom-lands and a consistent rainy season made it a fertile place, along with rivers like the Urubamba and snow caps above. What pagan entities did the Inka worship?  The sun, moon, water and “Pacha Mama” – or mother earth.  Why?  It seems obvious.  This was their grounded, material “Trinity” unlike the ridiculous and idealist Christian / Catholic one – Father, Son and Holy Ghost - which has no connection to nature, just patriarchy.

Machu Picchu provided a summer refuge from Cusco for the royal family.  Note, every royal family has a ‘summer palace.’ Now the question arises, who got the surplus that funded the building of Machu Picchu as a center of learning, astronomy, shamanism, botany, stonemasonry, textiles, architecture and agronomy? The Inkan ruling class were the beneficiaries, along with their experts and shamans, while the peasant farmers and building laborers provided the labor, and the soldiers, protection. Which might remind one of the Egyptian pharaoh’s and their skilled layers too. Yet this grew out of the human drive to survive entailing food, clothing, shelter and community.  All these things are only made possible by the latter, community, which is key.  And the lords controlled the community, though egalitarian peasant communes called allyus existed far from the empire's control. 

There is a centuries-long tradition of textiles in Peru, which needs no explanation. The conquistadores burned indigenous textiles in their destructive religious frenzy, along with melting all the gold and silver into ingots and shipping them to Spain.  The Inca did not use gold and silver for money, only in ceremonies to decorate their upper classes.  Pre-Incan societies had many artifacts for fertility and those depicting sex, which figures.  Why did they need children to know anything, as they had a very large school in that little mountain town erroneously called Machu Picchu?  Why did they need children, period?  That answer too is obvious.  It's a note to post-modernist liberals.

This is how pre-colonial human ‘history’ functioned at this point, an archaic society rooted in the highly-conscious and hard-working human animal’s life-needs and life-force, which eventually produced a surplus for their holy ruling class.  Then Pizzaro’s colonialist diseases, cavalry and troops arrived and killed or destroyed what they could.  Another system began to grow in Peru – extractive colonialism which turned the Inca into virtual slaves. The Incan allyu of collective farming also began to fall victim. This was a defining moment in Peru’s history from my contact with the guides here.  

History is determined by systems of production and reproduction, initially based on survival, that flower into class struggle over the surplus and issues of exploitation.  With better development in tools, technology and machinery based on surplus accumulation, along with waves of class struggle, capital has moved away from relative scarcity in some cases to plenty, much as Marx predicted.  But only with a social revolution would this be possible to spread world-wide.  This would bring shortened labor hours and a happier life.  The means of production and reproduction would become social property and valued, not private property for the enrichment of an upper class.  Simple stuff really, though perhaps too simple for the academic philosopher, estranged intellectual or reformist Marxist.  Sorry!

A link to a BlogSpot book review about how ‘human nature’ was fundamental to Marx and Engels approach to social life – “Marx and Human Nature – Refutation of a Legend” by Norman Geras:  https://maydaybookstore.blogspot.com/search?q=geras  

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to search our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Peru,” “human nature,” “paganism,” “Geras,” "tourism." 

The Cultural Marxist / May 23, 2025

Substantive Equality

 “Beyond Leviathan,” by István Mészáros, edited by J.B. Foster, 2022

This is a book that attempts to provide a Marxist theory of the state. It is ultimately based on Marx’s insight that socialism / communism consists of the “withering away of the state.”  Mészáros was an inspiration for Hugo Chavez, a colleague of Gyorgy Lukács and one of the foremost modern theorists in the Marxist movement.  Venezuela’s “The Organic Law of the Commune” in 2010 was inspired by his writings.  Mészáros understood there would be a transitional, post-revolutionary period prior to socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat (workers' state).  This would slowly dissolve as capital’s remnants died with the increasing involvement of the population in power, and the first version of the socialist commune would be born… a commune without a state, with administration by elected members instead. Eliminating the state in this way was the unique task of the working-class and Marxist movement, as an oppressive ‘state’ had been a feature of most prior social / economic formations – slave, tribute, feudal and capitalist.

As can be guessed by this analysis, conceptions like ‘state socialism,’ ‘the state of the whole people,’ 'socialist state,' 'really existing socialism,' 'people's democracy' and other similar formations are theoretical and lazy bombast. While some Marxists think 'socialism' began in November 1917, Lenin clearly said in Pravda:  "Everyone agrees that the immediate introduction of socialism in Russia is impossible."

“Leviathan” of course is the term used by Thomas Hobbes to describe the early capitalist state.  Mészáros highlights the highly destructive nature of modern imperial and monopolistic capitalist states, which, due to their world-wide reach, now threaten international carnage on unimaginable terms – nuclear, environmental, economic and war. Quite literally they have to be overthrown for humanity to begin to survive. We see this today in the new cold/hot war, the inability to deal with climate change, resource limits, failed states, economic collapse and the continuation of nuclear threats.

Mészáros takes apart theorists of the state from Plato to Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, Weber and dozens of lesser-known theorists, who mostly substitute actual, substantive social equality with inadequate ‘legal equality.’  He considers Hegel and Hobbes to be the greatest bourgeois philosophers of the state, though few present bourgeois thinkers reference them. Mészáros claims that real freedom is the child of equality, and does not consist of abstract legal nostrums.  As he puts it: “Freedom as such, divorced from its necessary connection with materially substantive human equality, is inevitably idealistic/mystifying.”  Today we can see the failure of Leviathan’s ‘laws’ to create equality, abundance or justice.  Economic and political control still rests in the ruling class, not among the population, no matter how many (bourgeois) democratic gains have been won. Or been taken away!

Mészáros solution is the increasing control of society by the whole working class, by the ‘associated producers,’ by the commune, in line with Marx’s conception of the state’s ‘withering away.’  Then substantive equality and democracy can be achieved and capital definitively left behind.  This concept replaces the bureaucratic version of a ‘socialism’ which includes a state that never disappears, with a Party or its leaders substituting for the working classes forever.

A society is a ‘social metabolism’ to Mészáros, which includes an organic unity of every facet of society – the economy in all its forms, the legal system, the repressive apparatus, the propagandist media, the school system, cultural institutions, the electoral system and lastly the government.  All reinforce one another.  They ultimately rest on a mode of production and how it extracts the natural, financial and labor surplus.  The fact that capital can swing between fascism, political dictatorships and a descending scale of liberal democratic standards indicates the subterranean similarity between them all.  The fact that war, waste and environmental destruction are now ‘normal,’ along with severe inequality and the threat of nuclear annihilation, shows the extent to which capital has become destructive and outmoded.  He calls it a 'centrifugal' and 'descending' mode of production at this point.

The Leviathan State.  Game of Thrones was a documentary.

This book is more erudite, abstract and philosophical than I let on, as I boil it down, but there it is. The point of reading this book is to see what kind of new light can be shed on the nature of the capitalist state – or any state – as well as the resolution of that contradiction.  Mészáros uses frequent repetition, philosophic terms, large words, many italics and a somewhat wandering argument.  Hegel thought that the bourgeois-democratic state was the ‘endpoint’ of history.  Unlike Hegel, Mészáros sees the necessary human dialectic as moving towards the abolition of the state, capital, class and scarcity, on a world-wide basis.

Other points made by Mészáros:

     1.   Capital is in a global, universal, extended and creeping structural crisis.

     2.   This is not a normal ‘boom and bust’ cycle.

     3.   “Socialism in one country” is not possible.  Solutions must go beyond national borders.

     4.   In an argument with Sartre / Marcuse, he rejects their characterization of the working class in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries as bought-off.

     5.   Hence, their and other’s theories of only waging ‘cultural struggle’ are inadequate.

          6.  'Evolutionary socialism,’ the ‘welfare state’ and the “New Deal” have failed.

     7.   He warns against increasing global ‘adventurism’ by political/military capitalist elites.

     8.   It is not enough to simply overthrow a capitalist state or nationalize industries.  The ‘capital complex’ remains mostly in place, while an overthrow can be reversed.  

     9.   Debates about ‘morality versus realism’ or ‘representative democracy versus direct democracy’ are straw men.

     10.               At present states and economies are inter-dependent, dominated by global imperialist state combines and great-power logic.  The state has actually strengthened in the declining period of capital’s rule, which is logical, as it needs more control over a restive population.      

     11.               States are supposedly founded on ‘the law,’ yet state lawlessness abounds in the international arena.  No explanation is ever given.

     12.               According to the bourgeoisie, the law and the state are identical.  Which in practice means ‘might is right,’ justifying repeated domestic state lawlessness. He uses the 1984 British miners’ strike as an example.  This lawlessness is not an exception.

     13.               Marx never gave up his conception of the withering away of the state.

     14.               Mészáros opposes both liberal/utilitarian and liberal democratic ideas of the state, which many times rest on the individual.  As he quotes the utilitarian Bentham:  “The community is a fictitious body, composed of individual persons…” thus beating Margaret Thatcher to the punch.

     15.               The goal of a classless society is the real goal of human emancipation. Capital and state stand in the way.

     16.        The goal is not a "utopian bucolic village community" a la Robert Owen.  True wealth consists of disposable time, based on eliminating scarcity.  

     17.         Capital creates 'failed states,' but cannot curtail their own war adventures that create those failures due to liberal imperialism's and capital's drive for control and profits.  Mészáros thinks this is because of the impossibility of a capitalist 'world state,' as the world only consists of antagonistic nation-states. 

The last chapters are detailed analyses of Plato, Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, Campanella, Bacon, Harrington, Paine, Owen, Thomasius and Bloch on the state, which I’m not going to cover. 

Mészáros doesn’t answer the question of what happens to the revolutionary organizations or single ‘Party’ after the revolution.  It would seem that they would also wither away as the dictatorship of the proletariat fades and socialism develops. He does not address the ‘nation’ as separate from the state.  Like Marx, he does not fully describe ‘statelessness.’ These are the largest theoretical questions left in this otherwise clear book.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of reviews, using these terms: “The Necessity of Social Control” (Mészáros); “Georg Lukács: Record of a Life,” “History and Class Consciousness” (Lukács); “Marx and Human Nature” (Geras) or words like Marx, state, stateless, communism or Hegel.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / April 16, 2022