James Heartfield wrote:
> Maybe I am being a bit thick, but Ted seems to be saying that the
> 300 000 years of human history are only precursors to the end point,
> communism (which hasn't even happened yet). All those preceding
> modes of social organisation are in some way deficient - self
> estranged - derivatives of the end time to come. Not so.
>
> This strikes me as being closer to Heidegger's conception of fallen-
> ness than Marx's of alienation. The latter really is a condition of
> capitalist societies, not to be confused with the ever present human
> condition of work, or opposition to nature.
>
> Mankind will always be somewhat estranged from nature. Even under
> Comunism, should that ever come to pass, people will get ill and
> die, and roast chickens will not fly into our mouths. The alienation
> of man from man in the generalised exchange of comodities, however,
> is a specific feature of capitalist societies. Alienation is not
> merely a manifestation of the estrangement of mankind from nature,
> but a problem all of its own, arising from the spontaneity of
> capitalist reproduction.
>
> Far from being unreal (see Ted's 3rd para, below), the different
> eras of human history are the only reality. The ideal of the species-
> being is a dream, at best an inverted projection of the actual
> movements of human history. Nothing is pre-ordained. The future is
> whatever we make of it.
The ideas I'm explicating are Marx's.
"Species-being" as the "human essence":
"The practical creation of an objective world, the fashioning of inorganic nature, is proof that man is a conscious species-being – i.e., a being which treats the species as its own essential being or itself as a species-being. It is true that animals also produce. They build nests and dwellings, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc. But they produce only their own immediate needs or those of their young; they produce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need; they produce only themselves, while man reproduces the whole of nature; their products belong immediately to their physical bodies, while man freely confronts his own product. Animals produce only according to the standards and needs of the species to which they belong, while man is capable of producing according to the standards of every species and of applying to each object its inherent standard; hence, man also produces in accordance with the laws of beauty." <http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm>
"Communism" as "the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man":
"Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm>
"Labour" "in the form of estrangement" as "the self-creation of man as a process," i.e. as the "educational" "activity" within "internal relations" through which the "species-powers" required for this "real appropriation" are developed::
"The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self- creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or his manifestation as a real species-being (i.e., as a human being), is only possible if he really brings out all his species-powers – something which in turn is only possible through the cooperative action of all of mankind, only as the result of history – and treats these powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement." <http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm>
As the passages from Marx and Engels (including the one from Engels on Hegel's idea of the "real" to the "rational") demonstrate, these ideas provide the ontological and anthropological framework of all Marx's writings, early and late.
You're misinterpreting them in what you say above.
For instance, the concept of "necessity" they involve is an essential aspect of Marx's elaboration of history as the full development of the "species-powers" that constitute human beings as fully rationally self- determined and whose activity, as such "universally developed individuals," is "the unity of the universal and individual," the unity of "freedom" and "necessity" (as elaborated by Engels in the passage from Anit-Duhring).
For this reason, it has to be a process of "self-creation":
"History does nothing, it 'possesses no immense wealth', it 'wages no battles'. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; 'history' is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_2.htm#history
>
So, understood within the framework provided by these ideas, "the future is whatever we make it."
The "stages" in history understood as an "educational" "process" of "self-creation" are "necessary" in the sense of "internally related" (a sense found in Engel's explication of Hegel's dictum: 'All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real').
That "people will get ill and die, and roast chickens will not fly into our mouths" explains why "natural necessity" in the sense of "the realm of natural necessity" in "communism" is inescapable. "Estrangement" in Marx's sense, however, has been overcome in the form this "natural necessity" takes in this communist realm, i.e. though insturmental, activity in the realm is the activity of actualized "species-beings" actualizing the "species-powers" that define them. It too actualizes "free will" elaborated as the unity of "freedom" and "necessity" (as in the Engels passage from Anti-Duhring). <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_2.htm#history
>
In the passage from "introduction to Metaphysics" I recently quoted, Heidegger explicitly rejects these ideas (as does Foucault, or at least Nietzsche as explicated by Foucault, in the passages I quoted from "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"):
"we have also warded off the other opinion, according to which the ode recounts the development of humanity from a wild huntsman and a traveler by dugout canoe, to a builder of cities and person of culture. These are notions from cultural anthropology and the psychology of primitives. They arise from falsely transferring a science of nature that is already untrue in itself to human Being. The fundamental error that underlies such ways of thinking is the opinion that the inception of history is primitive and backward, clumsy and weak. The opposite is true. The inception is what is most uncanny and mightiest. What follows is not a development but flattening down as mere widening out; it is the inability to hold on to the inception, it makes the inception innocuous and exaggerates it into a perversion of what is great, into greatness and extension purely in the sense of number and mass. The uncanniest is what it is because it harbors such an inception in which, from over-abundance, everything breaks out at once into what is overwhelming and is to be surmounted (das Überwältigende, Zubewältigende)." (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 165-6)
Ted