Anthropogenic phraseology serves double duty for much of the Green Left. It works descriptively, advancing a naïve empiricism. To the degree that a philosophical an-thropology is offered, we are served up a philosophy of history that turns on a self-referential, even tautological, conception of human nature: “The struggle for freedom represents the inner-human need to be free in terms of self-activity and human development.” For Marx, as we’ll show, the struggle for freedom is neither limited to humans – “the creatures, too, must become free” – nor does it derive from an “inner-human need.” In contrast, Marx underlines that the relational essence of “human need” is “outside itself.” That relational essence of human experience is grounded in “modes of life” that are irreducible to the interaction (collision) of acting units: human groups and ecosystem units. Rather, these must be grasped through an underlying labor-metabolic relation. Thus: “labor created man.” Through the metabolic labor process, historical man’s conditions of possibility emerge, entwining a “physical life-process” and a “historical life-process.” Modes of life and modes of production are constituted through social relations of environment-making within environments that are once, and unevenly, producers and products of those social relations. At the same time, given geographical conditions – Marx and Engels call them “natural bases” – necessarily exceed the narrow confines of a particular mode of production.
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Foto: Sylvia John