Marx’s contributions to politics, economics, and development have had an undeniably significant impact on the formation of theories in each of these areas. Underlying all of these contributions is a revolutionary philosophy concerning man’s nature and his role in society.
Marx’s ideas concerning human nature stem from the Enlightenment, taking its emphasis on man’s rationality and integrating it with an emphasis on man’s social nature. In addition, Marx adheres to the Enlightenment belief in the perfectibility of man, observing man, like society, transcending his former self over and over again. The process of transformation is made up of the elements of contradiction and instability, a new idea or force, and the synthesis of the two, transcending the original self.
This process is the result of man struggling to extract a livelihood out of nature and continue existence, becoming better and better at both dominating and cultivating the environment in such a way as to reap the most reward. Because it is man’s struggle with the earth that leads to his transformation, science, the means of understanding and subduing the natural world, also holds transformative powers for man.
If science and the natural world are the two forces that form and re-form man, then Marx seems to be putting forth the idea that man is the product of the material world rather than the spiritual or intellectual realms. But Marx also states that man is the source of his own consciousness. These notions create a tension between man as the creator and the natural world as creator, a tension between consciousness and evolution, a power struggle between man and his environment.
This seeming contradiction is the root of Marxist thought. On the one hand, “human nature is created under definite natural and social conditions…and man’s consciousness comes from real-life experience in the physical world” while at the same time, “we think up our ideas and construct our own rationalities” (Peet). In one breath, man is awarded agency and robbed by his environment of his very will and character. We know we exist and have free thought and will because of our ability to act and understand our own actions as reactions to the physical world, but at the same time our initiative is dependent upon having the world as a stage upon which to act, and our thoughts are formed and bound to the conditions into which we were born. Ideas have material origins, meaning that we assimilated the material world into our understanding and created thought around it, but it is the material world that gives our thoughts meaning and not vice versa. In fact, Marx describes our very happiness as being dependent upon materialism and that which we have or have not. This paradox, man’s conscious direction of his own fate coupled with his inability to operate independent of his environment and fellow beings, proves to be more of a balance of ideas than a contradiction, a balance that makes Marxism incredibly attractive.
