> Ted writes
>
> "This idea of the human essence is found throughout Marx's writing."
>
> but I am not sure how much light this sheds.
>
> If the essence is the relations but the relations are different in
> different epochs/ at different levels of technique/ then the essence
> changes. Since the usual understanding of essence is that it is
> unchanging, does the concept of 'relational essence' (an oxymoron?)
> help.
>
> Is there an unchanging human essence in Marx? Only in the most
> abstract terms: men rework nature and in doing so enter into
> definite relations one to each other. But that is so vague as to be
> a truism. Once you go further and specify the social relations that
> men enter into, you are pulled in the direction of what is
> distinctive about men in different epochs.
>
> Of course it is true that men never finally escape their human
> biology (only alter it), but that would be what was not their human
> essence but their animal essence. Defining the human essence it
> seems to me must escape us since it is necessarily without
> limitations, rather like trying to define freedom, which would only
> be to remove its scope.
The "internal relations" constitutive of each stage of development produce "essences" understood as particular forms of "self- estrangement," i.e. particular forms of divergence from the "species- being" - the "idea" of humanity in Hegel's sense - actualized by the ideal "internal relations" that constitute "communism."
These forms are "activities" in "internal relations" (all being is "activity" in "internal relations") - "processes" - as in the capitalist "labour process" constitutive of wage-labour. Marx, again sublating Hegel (as he himself points out in the passages I recently quoted), treats them as "educational," e.g. wage-labour is a "steeling school." They develop the "species-powers" constitutive of human "species-being."
The "essences" constitutive of "self-estrangement" are therefore only "real" as expressions of a "necessary" developmental stage; the "internal relations" constitutive of them are developmental relations that eventually lead to their "annihilation." Only human "species- being" is ultimately "real."
"No philosophical proposition has earned more gratitude from narrow- minded governments and wrath from equally narrow-minded liberals than Hegel’s famous statement: 'All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real.' That was tangibly a sanctification of things that be, a philosophical benediction bestowed upon despotism, police government, Star Chamber proceedings and censorship. That is how Frederick William III and how his subjects understood it. But according to Hegel certainly not everything that exists is also real, without further qualification. For Hegel the attribute of reality belongs only to that which at the same time is necessary: 'In the course of its development reality proves to be necessity.'" <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm
>
Another example of historically varying "essences" as forms of self- estrangement is providing by the varying "passions" characteristic of each "educational" stage, e.g. the capitalist versus the feudal "passions." These "passions" express the "essences" of the capitalist and the feudal lord as these are formed by "the ensemble of the social relations" constituting feudalism and capitalism. They too are forms of self-estrangement that prove positively developmental (though not for the "individuality" dominated by them), i.e. they "supply the impelling and actuating force for accomplishing deeds shared in by the community at large." <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm
>
"The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature.
"Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side.
From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it.
"Indeed private property drives itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not depend on it, which is unconscious and which takes place against the will of private property by the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty which is conscious of its spiritual and physical poverty, dehumanization which is conscious of its dehumanization, and therefore self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence that wage-labour pronounces on itself by producing wealth for others and poverty for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite.Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property.
"When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need -- the practical expression of necessity -- is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm>
"The functions fulfilled by the capitalist are no more than the functions of capital - viz. the valorization of value by absorbing living labour - executed consciously and willingly. The capitalist functions only as personified capital, capital as a person, just as the worker is no more than labour personified. That labour is for him just effort and torment, whereas it belongs to the capitalist as a substance that creates and increases wealth, and in fact it is an element of capital, incorporated into it in the production process as its living, variable component. Hence the rule of the capitalist over the worker is the rule of things over man, of dead labour over the living, of the product over the producer. For the commodities that become the instruments of rule over the workers (merely as the instruments of the rule of capital itself) are mere consequences of the process of production; they are its products. Thus at the level of material production, of the life-process in the realm of the social - for that is what the process of production is - we find the same situation that we find in religion at the ideological level, namely the inversion of subject into object and vice versa. Viewed historically this inversion is the indispensable transition without which wealth as such, i.e. the relentless productive forces of social labour, which alone can form the material base of a free human society, could not possibly be created by force at the expense of the majority. This antagonistic stage cannot be avoided, any more than it is possible for man to avoid the stage in which his spiritual energies are given a religious definition as powers independent of himself. What we are confronted by here is the alienation [Entfremdung] of man from his own labour. To that extent the worker stands on a higher plane than the capitalist from the outset, since the latter has his roots in the process of alienation and finds absolute satisfaction in it whereas right from the start the worker is a victim who confronts it as a rebel and experiences it as a process of enslavement. At the same time the process of production is a real labour process and to the extent to which that is the case and the capitalist has a definite function to perform within it as supervisor and director, his activity acquires a specific, many-sided content. But the labour process itself is no more than the instrument of the valorization process, just as the use-value of the product is nothing but a repository of exchange-value. The self-valorization of capital - the creation of surplus-value - is therefore the determining, dominating and overriding purpose of the capitalist; it is the absolute motive and content of his activity. And in fact it is no more than the rationalized motive and aim of the hoarder - a highly impoverished and abstract content which makes it plain that the capitalist is just as enslaved by the relationships of capitalism as is his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in a quite different manner." ("Results of the Immediate Process of Production" 1863-1866 Marx, Appendix to Capital, vol. I, Penguin ed., pp. 989-90)
Ted