Behind the decisive importance of the development of the productive forces and the potential abolition of classes, which provide the grounds for the end of capitalist exploitation and social oppression, lies the fundamental importance of labour in understanding human society.

In the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, (Marx, in Early Writings, Penguin, pp. 279–400) Marx stated that ‘The whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labour’:

‘The first premise of all human existence, and therefore of all history…[is] that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history’. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.’

This is just as true today, although it would be an obvious mistake to see ‘production’ and the ‘needs’ it addresses purely in terms of the creation of goods and services necessary for bare minimum existence, or even in terms of modern ‘consumer society.’

What is consumed has to be produced:

‘Through estranged labour man not only produces his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to alien and hostile powers; he also produces the relationship in which other men stand to his production and product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts , p 279–400.)

Production thus involves not just the bare existence of humanity but also the form that human society takes, including the relations of production that set out the pattern of exploitation and oppression.  Upon this rests the superstructure of society, conditioned by the productive forces and relations:

‘. . . the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’  We thus produce not just material (and immaterial) goods and services but also our social, political and ideological institutions, including philosophy, morality and religion etc.

So, when Marx talks about production and needs he is talking about the production of humanity itself, the form that it takes in various societies and the necessary interaction with the rest of nature, of which it is part:

“Labor, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.” (Marx,, Capital, Volume I p133,). The satisfaction of human needs involves the ‘metabolic exchange with external nature’ (Grundrisse p. 528), which refers also to ‘historic needs … created by production itself, social needs’ (ibid p. 527), which are not just of a ‘physical’ nature (Capital Volume 1, pp 275, 341) but also include ‘intellectual and social requirements’ whose extent and number ‘is conditioned by the general level of civilisation’ (Capital: Volume I MECW Vol 35 p181.). 

It is in relation to this general level that individuals consider their own position, which makes inequality so corrosive of a person’s subjective and objective wellbeing: ‘our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature’ (Marx,Wage, Labour and Capital)

A number of consequences follow. The first is that the development of humanity’s productive powers create new needs, and human beings “distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.”  “The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need . . . leads to new needs and this production of new needs is the first historical act . . . a certain mode of production . . . is always combined with a mode of cooperation” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp 42, 49, 50).

This form of cooperation can be understood in several ways. First, the organization of production is a historical process involving learning and tools that have been transmitted from one generation to another. Second, every previous historical form of production has involved some division of labour — division between mental and material labour, a gender division of labour, class divisions, racial and ethnic divisions, and a division which assigns different individuals to different tasks in the specific production process and in society as a whole.

Third, human consciousness, intrinsic to production, is itself social, as human consciousness is only possible through language, and language is inherently social. “Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p 51).

Finally, human production is fundamentally social because human beings are fundamentally social animals. As Sean Sayers puts it: “We are inherently and essentially social beings. We develop our natures . . . only by participating in society. . . . Sociality is inscribed in our very biology” . (Sayers 1998) What this means is not simply that we like to hang out with one another but that our very sense of individuality and the kind of individuality that we have depends on the form of society in which we live. “The human being,” Marx writes in the Grundrisse, “is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon [political animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can only individuate itself in the midst of society” (Marx, Grundrisse p 84).

The Marxist understanding of humanity is thus that the ‘human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.’   These relations are conditioned by the need to produce socially: ‘In work, as we have seen, we produce not only goods but also social relations, and indeed we produce and transform human nature itself. ‘The whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labour’ (Marx, Economic and philosophical manuscripts, p 400, 423).

In Engels’ ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ labour is described as ‘the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.’

This creation is to be understood not just in terms of the need to produce in order to survive or to produce the culture we now currently enjoy, but also in terms of basic biological properties of humans that we take for granted and which developed from our evolution within the wider natural world.  This includes the development of cooperation and the necessity for language and the development of the specific configuration of the human brain, as the outcome of prior evolutionary changes in the corporeal configuration of hominids, eventually leading to the Homo Sapiens that includes opposable thumbs, bipedalism, binocular vision, etc. (Fracchia, The Capitalist Labour-Process and the Body in Pain, Historical Materialism 16, 2008: p 39)

This development is not, of course, the domain of Marxist theory, but of the natural biological and evolutionary sciences, but which Marxism has been able to build upon to explain the continuing development of humanity through its social organisation.  In terms of this development, Marxism perceives that humanity ‘by acting on the external world and changing it, at the same time change[s] his own nature.’ (Marx, Capital Vol. 1)

The development of the forces of production therefore can compel not only alienating labour but the source of what Marx considered real wealth: ‘when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc…. the full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? (Marx, Grundrisse p488)

Central to this is the reduction of necessary labour time, which we explained in the previous post is: ‘that required to reproduce the working portion of society at its given, historically developed, level of subsistence, its standard of living.’  Its reduction allows in the free time made available:

‘The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.’ (Marx, Grundrisse p 705–6)

While the potential exists for the time involved in surplus labour to be transformed into free time, the character of necessary labour time will also change.  The existing character of labour as mostly alienating, in which the social and cooperative nature of it is distorted and disfigured, could be transformed by conscious control of the productive forces to the objective of meeting and further developing human needs and powers.

‘I would have the immediate satisfaction and knowledge that in my labour I had gratified a human need, i.e, that I had objectified human nature and hence had procured an object corresponding to the needs of another human being’ (Marx ‘Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy’,Early Writings, pp. 259–78.)

‘Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. (Marx, Capital, Volume III p959)

The complete socialisation of the productive forces of society by the working class abolishing all classes, including itself, is a means, not of limited freedom from oppression – a purely negative objective – but ‘“the full development of human mastery over the forces of nature . . . the absolute working out of [their] creative potentialities . . . the development of all human powers as an end in itself ” (Marx, Grundrisse p488). Such is the claim of Marxism for the universal character of the working class struggle for emancipation.

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