Article

Thesis Eleven
2015, Vol. 126(1) 38–51
The critical value ª The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0725513614565150

philosophical the.sagepub.com

anthropology:
Rereading Marxism
and Anthropology: The
Concept of ‘Human
Essence’ in the
Philosophy of Marx
Aaron Jaffe
The Juilliard School, USA

Abstract
This article critically re-reads György Márkus’s seminal Marxism and Anthropology in
light of its recent reissue with an introduction by Hans Joas and Axel Honneth. Joas
and Honneth problematically identify the normative source of Márkus’s position as an
a-historical and extra-natural account of the human. In fact, when the human essence
is thought as natural while also historical, developing new powers and needs through
changing strategies of socially organized work, Marx’s materialist conception of his-
tory can be used to generate a critique of social organizations, relations, and struc-
tures that constrain rather than promote such development. Such constraint on
developing powers can be read as ‘alienation’ from the human essence. Márkus’s
work develops this reading of Marx in a textually sensitive way, but his analysis of alie-
nation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 focuses on the individual
when such analysis could in fact be profitably extended to apply to groups and the
species as whole.

Corresponding author:
Aaron Jaffe, Interdivisional Liberal Arts, The Juilliard School, New York, NY 10023, USA.
Email: [email protected]

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Jaffe 39

Keywords
Alienation, critique, humanism, György Márkus, Karl Marx, materialist conception of
history, nature, philosophical anthropology

More than 35 years after its publication in English in 1978, György Márkus’s excellent
Marxism and Anthropology (originally in Hungarian in 1966, with a second edition in
1972) has recently been reissued by modem-Verlag. The reissue comes at a fortuitous
time and provides occasion to reread and appreciate this indispensable work. The volume
is now accompanied by an introduction of sorts, written jointly by Axel Honneth and
Hans Joas. This introduction was neither a part of Márkus’s original nor the first English
translation and is itself a reproduction of Honneth and Joas’s subsequent interpretation of
Márkus’s reading of Marx’s philosophical anthropology in their co-authored Social
Action and Human Nature (originally published in German in 1980 and translated into
English in 1988). Honneth and Joas’s Social Action is readily available, but Márkus’s
text has become less so over the intervening years. Thus the modestly priced new edition
greatly increases the accessibility of an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the
philosophical underpinnings of Marx’s humanism, philosophical anthropology more
broadly, and the philosophical sources of social critique most generally. To my mind
Márkus’s text remains the single best volume devoted to the exploration of Marx’s phi-
losophical anthropology to date. While there are significant problems with Honneth and
Joas’s introduction, the reissue is both long overdue and greatly welcome.1
After the first section’s brief synopses of the major moves in Márkus’s text in this essay
I take up three further tasks. In the second section I will highlight the timeliness of modem-
Verlag’s reprinting of Márkus’s work. Politically, economically, and philosophically, the
time is indeed ripe for a serious re-investigation of Marxism, and Márkus’s account of
Marx’s philosophical anthropology offers a sound and nuanced basis to support such fur-
ther developments. Then, in the third section, I will point to some problems with Honneth
and Joas’s short introduction of Márkus. Here I will highlight what seem to me to be valu-
able elements of Márkus’s interpretation of Marx’s philosophical anthropology that Hon-
neth and Joas leave behind, as well as draw attention to some of their rather serious
misreadings of Márkus. These gaps and misreadings color their introduction of Márkus’s
interpretation of Marx’s philosophical anthropology in some unfortunate ways which risk
putting a reader of Márkus in a less than ideal position to appreciate his work. Fourth and
finally, and indeed in no way meaning to detract from Márkus’s excellent text, I will point
to a few possible limits of Marxism and Anthropology itself.

I Márkus on Marx’s ‘Philosophical Anthropology’

The subtitle of Márkus’s work is ‘The Concept of ‘‘Human Essence’’ in the Philosophy of
Marx’, and the central role the concept will play is developed in Márkus’s own introduction
to his text. Márkus (2014: 7) states that his goal is to analyze this ‘human essence’ so as to
demonstrate the existence and specify the nature of the link between Marx’s ‘materialist
conception of history’ and his ‘philosophical anthropology’. Márkus argues that tying
Marx’s conception of history to his philosophical anthropology avoids two related pitfalls.

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40 Thesis Eleven 126(1)

First it avoids defending communism as the moral adjunct of an a-historical ‘true’ human
nature and, second, it avoids a complete dissolution of the human in scientifically deter-
mined and rigid laws of historical development.2 In other words, by reading Marx’s human
essence as historically developing through conditioned freedom, Márkus charts a third
course between the paltry moralism of some humanisms and the value-less anti-
humanism of purportedly ‘scientific’ Marxism.
With this basis middle ground in hand, the book is divided into three parts with each
building on and extending the preceding analysis. The first part, titled ‘Man as Universal
Natural Being’, begins with a sketch of humans as limited natural beings that require an
active relationship to their natural surroundings to satisfy their needs. While animals are
also active, human activity relates to far wider swaths of their natural environment and
the results of this activity are, also unlike other animals, passed on generationally.
Humans are the kinds of animals that work together and with nature to satisfy their needs,
but significantly, the strategies guiding this work have a history, that is, strategies
develop by modifying and building on what came before. In this way humans are natural,
social beings that open-endedly generate ‘new active powers’ by developing ever new
active relationships with nature. Márkus, who defines and uses concepts precisely
throughout, means his ‘universal’ to be taken as a growing set of potentials regarding the
active human relationship to nature: ‘Man is essentially a universal natural being, in the
sense that he is potentially able to turn any object of nature into the subject matter of his
wants and activity . . . to turn a principally unlimited scope of natural laws and regulari-
ties into the principles of his own actions and so to transform his progressively expanding
environment to an ever increasing degree’ (Márkus, 2014: 25). Marx’s ‘species’ is fig-
ured by Márkus not primarily as a ‘universal’ in the metaphysical-philosophical sense,
but rather as an expanding set of strategies for relating to nature.
The second part further determines this universal by developing, as the title indi-
cates, ‘Man as a Social and Conscious Natural Being’. Here, Márkus stresses the
human’s ineluctable sociality. Life needs productive capacities but also capacities for
communication, norms, and values. The latter specifically include the changing
manners of affirmational contact with others, or ‘recognition’, which are all inter-
generationally inherited by and determining for each. In this context alienation is also
a distinctly social phenomenon and has at its basis the social production of individuals
individuated in such a way as to experience their lives, desires, and possibilities as iso-
lated, unmet, and constrained (Márkus, 2014: 38). It is important, however, to stress
that these phenomena are driven by objective social structures and developments and
are not merely generalizations or aggregations of individuals’ psychological experi-
ences or viewpoints. Whether an object of consciousness or not, an individual’s alie-
nation is actually one side of the developing species’ universalization when the
direction of universal development is dictated not socially but by either direct violence
or the mediated violence of the market.
In developing this interpretation of Marx’s alienation as socially and historically
determined, Márkus is also careful to avoid the implication that each concrete human is
fully explicable via this social determination. Even while shaping the contours and
general limits of individuality, socio-historical determination cannot explain just how
any individual chooses to act and thereby externalize and develop their capacities. This

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Jaffe 41

is the case because, in addition to being socially determined, human action is also
conscious. For Márkus, consciousness is an awareness of activity and its possibilities
given the multiple and growing capacities for acting productively with nature. As the
species’ universality develops so too do the possibilities of greatly differing consciously
guided relationships with nature. Thus, while consciousness is also socially determined,
this determination is a continuous development of possibilities. In this light conscious-
ness, mediated by the social structures through which it too is generationally passed on,
intentionally directs and organizes activity. The activity of this directing, like the capa-
cities for sensuous activity, also progressively develops its universality. Since in the
course of its historical development consciousness permits and directs wider relation-
ships to nature, nature becomes increasingly intelligible not only as potential sources
of need satisfaction but as specific objects appreciable for their unique and many-
sided individuality. Márkus persuasively shows how this is the best way to read Marx’s
somewhat opaque comments on the humanization of the senses. Humanization of nature
is then read as epistemic access to the relationally-established rich self-sufficiency of
nature and natural objects which are not then merely possible material for human use.3
The last part, ‘Human Essence and History’, returns to and further develops the
central categories already on the table. Here Márkus (2014: 58) begins by responding
to a-historical renditions of the human essence and shows how what he thinks as the
‘universal’ attribute of the human is both social and ‘a characteristic of some over-
arching historical development’. While work, sociality, and consciousness are also
essential human determinants, as ineluctable constants, their socially instantiated
forms change tremendously. This holds for ‘freedom’ as well, which emerges histori-
cally and is determined not as a metaphysical constant but in relation to concrete pos-
sibilities for social action (Márkus, 2014: 85). This means that all the central categories
of Marx’s philosophical anthropology require for their content sociological research.
Thus, under social relations determined by capital, the human directs strategies for
satisfying needs (work) intentionally, that is, consciously, and does so both socially
and in a larger, enveloping social organization which are in some particulars free, but
all four key determinants (work, sociality, consciousness, and freedom) are limited,
pale reflections, or alienated articulations of the species’ historically developed essen-
tial capacities. Taken together and in their actual social manifestation, they determine
the progression of the universal, which is to say, they determine the ‘unity and conti-
nuity’ necessary to think a distinctly human history which progresses, under certain
conditions, via alienation (Márkus, 2014: 62). In capitalism the universal’s alienation
becomes total, but this is not the same as it being absolute because the determination of
isolated, dependent, and alienated individuals is, at the same time, a development of
both the technical capacities and social ties requisite for the free, intentional, and social
direction of further, post-capitalist developments. Márkus stresses that this positive
possibility lying in the depths of alienation is in no way a necessary historical outcome,
for human history is the product of nothing but human action, and the appropriation of
possibilities for more free, intentional, social, and conscious work developed by but
unrealizable in capitalism requires the intentional, and organized work of revolution
(Márkus, 2014: 79). Only after such a revolution could the human realize its essence
in unalienated form.

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42 Thesis Eleven 126(1)

II The timeliness of the reprinting

Recent global economic crises and subsequent slow recoveries in western capitalist
economies have indeed created some room for the re-investigation of Marx’s thought.
In economics, politics, sociology, and theoretical anthropology, to name just a few
fields of intellectual production, there has recently been renewed attention to Marx’s
analysis and critique of capitalism. More specifically, there has been a significant
flowering of interest in Marx’s philosophical anthropology and the related problems
of alienation under conditions of capitalism.4 The oppressive conditions in Eastern
Europe that prompted over a generation of dissident thinkers to explore, expand, and
critically apply Marx’s humanism by working with, most prominently, the relatively
recently accessible Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Hereafter EPM)
are, to be sure, significantly different from those in advanced western capitalist coun-
tries today. There were also certainly great differences in and between Polish, Yugo-
slavian, and Hungarian intellectuals’ taking inspiration from the EPM, but Márkus’s
work was certainly seminal in the Hungarian context. Today, the ostensible alterna-
tives of historically failed ‘Marxism’ on one side and an immiserating and repeatedly
failing capitalism on the other have produced a will to re-work the ground first culti-
vated by Márkus and other bold, indeed courageous dissident Eastern European
Marxists.
With left theoretical and practical activity re-developing its capacities for critique and
struggle, it makes sense that there is an increasing willingness to again explore Marx as a
productive resource. With Marx we get an account of the human that, at the same time,
includes the possibilities that it is alienated from (and thus cannot realize) but which
could be realized given different social relations. This provides resources to move
beyond the kinds of value-neutral approaches still dominating social analysis, and think
in rigorously critical terms the social relations that constrain existing possibilities from
actualization. The possible sources of normative critique are thus not only a live issue for
contemporary philosophical research, but Marx’s philosophy, in particular his philoso-
phical anthropology, is quite well suited to help satisfy pressing social-analytic needs.
If the rallying cries of diverse movements have repeatedly pointed to the existence of
other possibilities, even worlds, a philosophical anthropology that can locate these pos-
sibilities as part of the ‘human’ might help secure a shared theoretical basis for develop-
ing movements. Doing so might indeed provide practical benefits. Even if not directly,
recognizing other possibilities rooted in a constrained and constraining system of social
organization can indeed, as Márkus (2014: 50) holds, ‘make new social demands on the
individuals involved in [thinking] them and thereby make these individuals to cultivate
in themselves new psychic capabilities and wants’. For this reason what Márkus (2014:
81) says of Marx’s anthropology could equally be said of his own work:

the theoretical act itself has an intrinsic practical quality . . . is not simply a particular
‘interpretation of the world’, an explanation of the social and historical life. This conception
[the Marxian concept of ‘human essence’] itself, as theory, is part of the historical struggle
for the universalization and freedom of man, for the change and transformation of the
‘world’, of the present state of society; it is part of the proletariat’s revolutionary praxis.

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Jaffe 43

Márkus’s interpretation of Marx is, by its own lights, a contribution to the kind of revolu-
tionary praxis that contemporary conditions have put back on the table as a possibility.
There is another aspect of the timeliness of Marxism and Anthropology that requires
mention. Unlike a significant number of other Marxist projects that flourished in Eastern
Europe shortly after its initial writing in Russia in the 1950s, Márkus’s text is not
explicitly political. At first blush this may sound like a contradiction with the previous
line of thought. It is not. In a way that immediate political application would fail to
achieve, Márkus’s textual fidelity and exegetical approach to discussing the human
essence makes his work applicable far beyond the local conditions of its production. In
other words, in providing a textually sensitive interpretation of Marx rather than a critical
application of Marx to then existing Hungarian conditions, Márkus provided a lasting
resource for a much larger set of critical projects. In his careful unpacking of Marx’s
notion of human essence as historically developing, Márkus’s work is more than finely
exegetical. In showing how development tracks the changing ways humans work with
nature to satisfy and, in so doing, produce new needs,5 Márkus develops the theoretical
resources to criticize social conditions that constrain precisely this essentially pro-
gressive feature of the human essence (Márkus, 2014: 61 n.12). Since his interpretation
of Marx conceives human essence as generating wider social needs and capacities, it can
be used as the basis for critical application at any historical juncture. If and when the
human essence is conditioned by relations that stifle rather than permit the free devel-
opment of both needs and strategies for satisfying them, and indeed these can be capi-
talist or ‘actually existing socialist’ relations, then activity and the structures responsible
for such stifling can be criticized as alienating what is most essentially human. In this
way ‘Alienation . . . is nothing but the separation and opposition of man’s essence and
existence’ (Márkus, 2014: 72).6 One of the greatest strengths of Márkus’s work is that it
limits itself to offering the robust frame of a philosophical anthropology, a frame which
indeed requires direct social analysis for its content. It can therefore help us think and
object to the structures responsible for alienation from the human essence here and today
just as well as when the work was initially produced.

III Honneth and Joas’s introduction

This brings me to the more critical part of my reading, which begins with an appraisal
of Honneth and Joas’s newly affixed introduction. Honneth and Joas begin appro-
priately enough by highlighting the intersubjective and historically developing human
essence for both Marx and Márkus. While Honneth and Joas conclude their intro-
duction recognizing a historicized essence, they nonetheless operate in their intro-
duction with more than one a-historical category. In this regard, Honneth and Joas
(2014: 2) are incorrect in their account of human development as bringing ‘to realisa-
tion the possibilities of freedom naturally present in germinal form’.7 One of the dis-
tinct advantages of Marx’s philosophical anthropology, one that Márkus is at pains to
stress, is that it moves away from metaphysical notions of essence that seek to render
the human intelligible by way of germinal seeds or deep underlying powers or possi-
bilities merely waiting for the right conditions to be realized. While it may seem valu-
able to define the human as itself containing an inherent germ and thereby immutable

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44 Thesis Eleven 126(1)

orientation towards ‘freedom’, doing so is a significant departure from Márkus’s text.

In the section ‘Human Essence and History’, Márkus (2014: 85) makes a point of
historicizing just where Honneth and Joas attribute an a-historical nature:

In general, freedom is for Marx not some sort of eternal, existentially given metaphysical
quality of man; it is not a fixed fact of human existence but a historical capacity and sit-
uation which only unfolds, to an ever growing degree, in social development

Even the seeming constants of work, sociality, and consciousness determine the human
essence only in the concrete ways each are actually manifest as moments of their
progressive unfolding. It is insufficient, for instance, merely to hold that man is a social
animal because the possibilities for and realities of participation in and constructing
social organization are left undetermined. Márkus (2014: 35) writes:

Marx does not stop at a general, philosophical description of the social character of human
material life activity. What he aims at, is first of all to understand the socio-productive life
of a historically given concreteness . . . simultaneously as a social totality capable of self-
reproduction and as a moment in the process of historical development (which means also:
to understand it in its historical-practical possibilities).

If the human is defined either as ‘sociality’ as such, or as a frozen moment of a form of

sociality, then any individual demonstrating a lack of such sociality would, by definition,
be non-human. If, however, possibilities of sociality determine the human and these pos-
sibilities are thought of as historically produced and productive, then such possibilities
can never be exhausted by any moment of actualization, and alienation from the species
need not imply not-being-human. In this way the ‘human’ is drawn broadly enough to
think alienation as a constraint on the development of capacities without committing one
to thinking that any so alienated are actually, even if momentarily, nonhuman. In a way
that Honneth and Joas do not appreciate, Márkus’s account of alienation finely avoids the
odd result of conflating the non-human and the alienated.
For Honneth and Joas the ‘germ’ of freedom can only be read as an a-historical, extra-
natural postulate, the realization of which requires transcending natural limits. Indeed,
they hold as much explicitly: ‘Through the gradual dismantling of instinct-guided beha-
viour [through work], the human species frees itself from the limits of nature’ (Honneth
and Joas, 2014: 2). For Honneth and Joas the human, as distinct from nature, appears
after instinctual constraints have been overcome by the disciplining power of work.
Indeed, Honneth and Joas hold that ‘in work the human being experiences himself as
an agent, a subject of action, who has stepped outside of nature and who follows his own
need-dispositions’ (Honneth and Joas, 2014: 3). Marx holds nearly the exact opposite to
be the case. Man has a historically developing but no less natural relationship to his
desires. Working to satisfy needs does not leave nature behind, but rather progressively
determines it. Recognizing as much, Márkus writes:

The historical process of human universalization has a dual character. It appears, on the one
side, as the naturalization of man, as the growth of his ‘inorganic body’, the widening of the
sphere of natural phenomena and interconnections to which his activity became adapted: his

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Jaffe 45

becoming from a limited to an ever more universal natural being. On the other side, this
process appears as the humanization of nature. (Márkus, 2014: 28); and
For man, that is, as an object of human consciousness, nature exists only in so far as man
enters into a practical relationship with his environment. (Márkus, 2014: 54)

As with ‘freedom’, Honneth and Joas construe ‘nature’ as an a-historical constant. For
this reason it is rather misleading to suggest that, for Marx, ‘the human being appropri-
ates his organically possible capacities for action’ (Honneth and Joas, 2014: 2). Capaci-
ties for action are historically, not organically possible and appropriable. Indeed when
Márkus uses ‘appropriate’ he is sure to signify that that which is appropriated is histori-
cally generated.8 Capacities for action are only meaningful when they have been made
real possibilities by the historical development of the socially organized and historically
developing human-nature relationship.
While the organic constitution of Homo sapiens has traditionally provided a limit to
the historical development of natural possibilities, even these limits are being increas-
ingly transgressed by current developments. For Marx, and likewise Márkus, capacities
never pass a line of demarcation into the unnatural. On Honneth and Joas’s rendition,
however, Marx’s anthropology is natural in a merely biological sense. Further, and in
direct opposition to Márkus, Honneth and Joas describe work as nature-transcending. In
sum, when these positions are combined with the notion of a germinal freedom, Honneth
and Joas can be read as offering an anthropology with a bifurcated nature, teleologically
oriented towards realizing freedom as an ontological constant. This position would be
ripe for many trans- and post-humanist criticisms. Yet these would be misreadings of
Marx, and they are misreadings that Márkus has been careful to avoid. While there are
some helpful elements in the introduction, particularly the emphases on intersubjectivity
and recognition, at a minimum, Honneth and Joas risk obscuring some central and indeed
highly valuable elements of Márkus’s position.
This is clearest when Honneth and Joas misdiagnose what drives Márkus’s critical
position. On Honneth and Joas’s reconstruction, critique is rendered possible by a triad
of tendencies: the capacities for work, intersubjectivity, and individual consciousness.
All three tend to universalization over time. The historical development of productive
capacities also broadens human cognitive development, the material practices of work
tie producers to each other in increasingly interlocking webs of dependent communities,
and consciousness advances because it is increasingly freed from satisfying biological
necessities. In making the source of critique universalization, and the ultimate source of
universalization human work, Honneth and Joas make work’s trifold tendency towards
universality the telos informing their version of critique. Work, it would seem, is
essentially fated to such universalization such that conditions precluding an orientation
towards this end are criticizable not as engendering alienation from the human essence,
but only as non-human. In this way Honneth and Joas exclude alienation from a deter-
mination of the human essence. Márkus (2014: 78), however, insists that Marx’s notion
of history

excludes a fatalistic predetermination of the total historical process, a determination which

would affirm itself over and beyond real human activity . . . Historical future is not given as

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46 Thesis Eleven 126(1)

the set result of some social causalities or some sort of historical teleology. It becomes
actualized only in creative social praxis.

The source of Márkus’s critique then is not a to-be-achieved telos, but social organiza-
tion and the ways it immanently permits, develops, and constrains the strategies of social
praxis made historically possible. The source of Márkus’s critique is thus far more in line
with the materialist conception of history Marx articulated than the rough reconstruction
Honneth and Joas provide.

IV Possible limits of Marxism and anthropology

I hope I have sufficiently stressed the inherent plausibility of the argument, the textual-
groundedness, nuance, as well as the value of Marxism and Anthropology to ensure that
the following comments are read as friendly amendments rather than challenges. I wish
to extend the scope of Márkus’s analysis a bit further than is present in his text because
I believe the resources for alienation critique can be applied more broadly than, at least
for the most part, Márkus explicitly develops. I will then offer this extension as a pos-
sible solution to what appears to me to be an ambiguity or perhaps even an unnecessary
problem in Márkus’s text. The issue I have in mind is best described as Márkus’s over-
emphasis on the alienation of individuals, the flipside of which is an under-theorization
of how alienation, even in the early EPM, can be applied to social organizations or the
species, humanity as a whole.9 This relative inattention to the broader applicability of
Marx’s alienation critique in the EPM stems from Márkus’s reading of Marx’s relation-
ship to Hegel as prompting a focus on analyzing individual alienation. Márkus writes:

Marx treats this problem [of alienation] in his various works from various aspects: primarily
from the point of view of the individual in his early works (this holds true first of all for the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, which are characterized by a definite attempt to
employ the method of Hegel’s Phenomenology reinterpreted in a materialistic manner) and
from the point of view of society as a whole in his later writings. (Márkus, 2014: 66)

To be sure, in the EPM Marx praised Hegel’s Phenomenology for its conception of the
human not only as a process of self-creation, but as a cooperative process of self-creation
fundamentally figured by the increase in powers accompanying labor and alienation. On
this score Marx lauded Hegel for recognizing that the bond between labor and alienation
develops the species’ powers. Indeed the fullest realization of the human essence for
Hegel, the interrelation of humans as universal species-beings, is only possible given the
historical development of widening productive capacities and their concomitant rela-
tions. In writing the EPM Marx had the Phenomenology’s self-consciousness in mind,
which culminates, immediately prior to the master/slave dialectic, with the category
of the ‘species’. In his review of Hegel’s philosophy in the EPM Marx (1975: 337) was
careful to include recognition of the species in consciousness as an element of the species
essence: ‘man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say,
he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species-being, and has to confirm and man-
ifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing.’ It is therefore not surprising
that Marx, in his EPM (1975: 332), singled out not Hegel’s Philosophy of Right10 but his

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Jaffe 47

Phenomenology with the comment that ‘there lie concealed in it all the elements of crit-
icism, already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian
standpoint’. This is to say that it is certainly understandable that Márkus would empha-
size Marx’s indebtedness to Hegel in the EPM generally while specifically highlighting
Marx’s development of the species essence and its alienation in individuals.
Yet, Márkus’s understanding that Marx’s relationship to Hegel prompts an indivi-
duation of alienation is pushed too far. In the EPM, Marx criticized Hegel’s method of
Aufhebung in the Phenomenology as preserving at a higher level what ought to be negated.
Marx further explained how he thought Hegel had inappropriately identified consciousness
as the motor for the process of such preserving-negation. For Marx, even when Hegel
emphasized sensuousness and sociality he did so within a philosophy of consciousness
such that alienation was overcome in the fullness of a reflective, self-realizing idea. For
Hegel, according to Marx, social alienation is transcended not in the reorganization of
material relations, most fundamentally the social reorganization of active relationships
with nature, but in the adequacy of socially-mediated self-conceptions. For this reason,
Marx significantly departed from Hegel in the EPM and did so by more than merely trans-
lating Hegel into materialist categories. The rejection of resolution in consciousness or
self-conception motivated Marx to articulate a version of species essence’s alienation that,
beyond individuals, included the historically developing social relations that determine
human activity. Since for Marx capacities are socially generated, the problem of alienation
is a social problem even when its effects are, at times, emphasized from the point of view
of the individual. Put simply, part of what Marx used to separate himself from Hegel in the
EPM was the conceptualization of alienation as describing not only individuals but social
units or productive communities, as well as humanity as a whole.
For this reason, Marx’s alienation of the species essence as early as the EPM can be
used to describe individuals, societies, and the human species as a whole. An example
taken from our social context may help illustrate. An individual may be constrained from
exercising and honing their capacities to cook fine food due to the necessity of selling their
labor power and the paucity of both free time and wages. Likewise, a social organization
may be incapable of providing sufficient nutrition for all its members despite a commu-
nity’s technical ability to do so. Finally, humans as a whole may be unable to quit or
effectively modify harmful agricultural practices, the effects of which on the environment
can constrain rather than promote the possibilities of continued adequate nutrition, despite
both the knowledge of this effect and the technical possibility of beginning to transform
such practices.11 There are two salient issues that all three examples share. First, for each,
the logic of the capitalist mode of production is an essential determinant of the inability to
actualize real, historically developed possibilities, and, second, these constrained possi-
bilities also diminish individual, social, and universal capacities for further, free devel-
opment in the future. Due to such constraint, the further development of the capacities of
the individual, society, and the whole are also diminished. Alienation from the species is,
in this light, alienation from the developed and developmental social possibilities of an
individual, a society, or the species as a whole.
While Márkus used his Marxian paradigm of production to develop explicit tools for the
analysis of social totalities in another work,12 my aim here is to extend the philosophical
basis of individual-alienation Márkus here discerns in the EPM to social and universal

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alienation. Since universality of the species is the scope of its productive possibilities and not
a static fact, or an unachieved telos, the species’ universality itself undergoes historical
development. While not ‘alive’ in the same way as individuals, as Márkus notes, Marx thinks
the human species in some manner as having its own life. Under conditions of capitalism,
productive activity increasingly produces the life of the species in the service of the social
power of capital, which has the further effect of producing the kind of subjects most suited
for this process (Marx, 1975: 276). In other words, it is very much in the interest of capitalist
economy to employ alienated individuals in the work of expanding its power. Laboring has
always been necessary to secure what is required to reproduce life, but alienating labor does
so in a manner that uses the objectified universality of the species for purposes other than
universal, human development. In this context the ‘life of the species’ is the actual move-
ment of the species’ universality: it is the life or self-development of the universal, and this
life is defined by how the social organization of such capacities varyingly constrains or pro-
motes their realization and development. At this level, an account of the species would be an
account of the productive possibilities of a social totality or humanity as a whole, and as such
would include both capacities and the socially organized constraints on their realization.
Since capacities, their social organization, and the manner of their realization cumulatively
determine the movement or life of the universal, the species is always in the process of its
historical articulation. Further, since alienation describes a stunted or one-sided articulation,
this means that the human essence as a whole can itself develop in alienated form.
My central claim is that Márkus has given us the tools to think social and species
articulation as also alienated. The species is alienated when its articulation is beyond the
collective control of individuals, social units, and social organization as a whole, the
activity of which is responsible for just this articulation. The species can also be thought
as self-alienating when in its articulation it determines individuals divorced from abil-
ities to direct just such social developments. In fact, these are two sides of the same coin.
In this way individual-alienation and species-alienation are conceptually distinguishable,
but intimately tied to each other. As was the case with individual-alienation, species- or
social-alienation can serve as a basis for critique when the capacities for developing and
satisfying needs are constrained from realization and further articulation, and recogniz-
ing individual-alienation would, at least implicitly, also entail the existence of the larger,
social-alienation. As earlier, individual and the larger, social or universal determination
of alienation from the ‘human essence’ signifies the existence of a gap between capaci-
ties and the socially mediated real possibilities for realizing them.
This extension of what Márkus appreciates in the EPM resolves a possible problem in
Márkus’s text regarding the overcoming of alienation. For Márkus (2014: 72), alienation
is: ‘Nothing but the separation and opposition of man’s essence and existence . . . And
transcending alienation means the elimination of this disaccord and conflict between
human essence and existence.’ In posing the solution as overcoming the gap between
essence and existence, Márkus risks suggesting that the essence is itself distinct from or
unsullied by the existence of impoverished, immiserated, and abstract individuals.
Against his better lights, Márkus here could be read as thinking the species’ essence as a
set of capacities unencumbered by their concrete generation and objectification by social
individuals. While the stress on capacities is certainly correct, especially when Marx is
so influenced by Hegel, the essence of the species can never be dissociated from its

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Jaffe 49

determination even in highly alienated individuals. That is, the historical development of
the set of human capacities (the life of the species) produces itself in alienated form when
human activity, individually, in groups, and as a whole is also alienating. Holding an
essence distinct from existence would risk being subject to some of the criticisms here
levelled at Honneth and Joas. In theorizing the solution to alienation largely from the
standpoint of the individual, Márkus may have momentarily fallen behind what his
interpretation of Marx’s alienation in the EPM made possible. For Marx, the species’
essence can itself be alienated such that the solution to the problem of alienation can only
partially and in one way be understood as a unification of existence with essence. Only
when the species itself is not produced in alienated form will it be possible for ‘the
historical progress of mankind’ to cease being ‘separated from the development of single
individuals’ (Márkus, 2014: 72).
Finally, as others objecting to Marx have noted, it is perhaps risky to make the
judgment of non-alienated society rest on the realization of universality and freedom in,
as Márkus writes, ‘single individuals’. It might well be the case that productive possibi-
lities far exceed that which even the most talented individuals are capable of concretely
realizing. In such a case it would be unavoidable that the species’ essence is wider than
any individual’s capacities, but this gap need not be taken as evidence of alienation. In
short, Márkus seems to be echoing Marx’s German Ideology dream of man in communist
society, and in doing so Márkus sets the bar for non-alienation too high. If individuals,
social units, and humanity as a whole can take charge of and direct the further articula-
tion of their capacities and strategies for satisfying newly developing needs, this would
produce free, social individuals and an unalienated species, without necessarily produc-
ing individuals as many-sided as Márkus, at this juncture, suggests is necessary. As Már-
kus developed elsewhere and stresses in his conclusion, alienation requires this gap, but
also requires a loss of control over the direction and further articulation of the species’
essence. There are, to be sure, political implications to accepting as legitimate a reduced
scope of conscious self-direction for individuals in the context of their social or species
direction. Yet precisely here, the indispensable value of Márkus’s text is that it provides
the philosophical anthropology needed to critique just when such conditions alienate
individuals from their human essence.

Notes
1. Stylistically, a few misspellings have been fixed, and some paragraph breaks have
changed from the 1972 edition. The reprint oddly excludes a table of contents but
thankfully converts Márkus’s extensive and valuable endnotes into footnotes. Throughout,
citation of Márkus leaves his use of italics and parenthesis unmodified; brackets indicate
my own emendations.
2. Márkus singles out Erich Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man for committing the first error
(2014: 8). The ‘orthodox’ Marxism of the Communist Party and Althusser make the
second error.
3. While not at the time of writing a distinct concern, it is worth noting here that Márkus’s
interpretation of Marx’s anthropology provides fine resources to respond to worries that Marx
is problematically ‘productivist’.
4. See, for instance, Sean Sayers (2011), David Swain (2012), Rahel Jaeggi (2014), Amy
Wendling (2009), Mehmet Tabak (2012) and Sabby Sagall (2013). In addition to Márkus’s

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50 Thesis Eleven 126(1)

reissued text, Erich Fromm’s classic, Marx’s Concept of Man, was relatively recently reissued
(2004).
5. Ágnes Heller’s The Theory of Needs in Marx (1976) draws from Márkus here.
6. As will be clarified in what follows, alienation also requires a lack of social control over
the selection and direction of development of such possibilities. This process of social
selection is also historical. This means that alienation would not obtain, on either Marx’s
or Márkus’s view, if, for instance, technologically advanced social organizations are
constrained from whaling for the production of lamp-oil precisely because the social selec-
tion of productive capacities had already moved beyond this strategy for relating to nature
to satisfy human needs.
7. Márkus (2014: 57 n.1a) explicitly warns against just this error in his discussion of Fromm as
well.
8. See for instance: ‘the individual is a human being only though, and due to, the fact that he
appropriates, incorporates into his life and activity (to a larger or lesser extent) abilities, wants,
forms of behaviour, ideas, etc. which were created and objectified by other individuals of
earlier generations or those contemporary to him. So the human individual in its concrete
personality is even in itself, taken in isolation a product of social intercourse and history’
(Márkus, 2014: 32).
9. Early in his text Márkus quotes Marx from the EPM describing the inseverability of the
generic life and the individual (Márkus, 2014: 32), and I have already highlighted how this is
figured, for Márkus, as a ‘totality’ above (Márkus, 2014: 35). Later, Márkus also holds ‘the
general philosophical notion of ‘‘human essence’’ is . . . ‘‘valid’’ for, and applicable to, the
whole process of human history’ (Márkus, 2014: 74; emphasis added). Finally, after repeat-
edly following Marx in defining the species in terms of its capacities, in his conclusion Márkus
describes control over capacities as individual or collective (Márkus, 2014: 86). Given this
textual basis it may be the case that my proposed extensions articulate positions that Márkus
leaves open. Still, in his reading of the EPM, Márkus tends to emphasize alienation from the
position of the individual, and social or humanity-wide alienation is largely unexplored. Már-
kus later explicitly affirms this position in his ‘Alienation and Reification in Marx and Lukács’
in (1982: 139–161), where he affirms his reading of Marx (2014: 66) as offering an account of
individual-alienation in the EPM (Márkus, 1982: 142), which is only expanded to social total-
ities in the German Ideology (Márkus, 1982: 143–7).
10. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right develops the universality of ethical life, but the critical power of
the text is diminished by articulating the state, even in the context of international markets and
poverty, as the explicit reality of such universality. There is here no negating power of labor to
produce richer capacities via social relations and alienation. The logic of capitalism is far
closer to thinkable with the grammar of the Phenomenology than with the Philosophy of Right.
11. A version of this environmental example has been recently, but briefly, developed in reference
to Marx’s theory of alienation by Victor Wallis (2011).
12. See Márkus (1986: 50).

References
Fromm E (2004) Marx’s Concept of Man. New York: Continuum.
Heller Á (1976) The Theory of Needs in Marx. London: Allison and Busby.
Honneth A and Joas H (1988) Social Action and Human Nature. Cambridge: University of
Cambridge Press.
Jaeggi R (2014) Alienation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Márkus G (1982) Alienation and reification in Marx and Lukács. Thesis Eleven 5–6: 139–161.

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Márkus G (1986) Language and Production: A Critique of the Paradigms. Dordrecht: D. Reidel
Publishing Co.
Márkus G (2014) Marxism and Anthropology: The Concept of ‘Human Essence’ in the Philosophy
of Marx. Sydney: modem-Verlag.
Marx K (1975) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In: Marx–Engels Collected
Works, Vol. 3. New York: International Publishers, pp. 229–346.
Sagall S (2013) Final Solutions: Human Nature, Capitalism and Genocide. London: Pluto Press.
Sayers S (2011) Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Swain D (2012) Alienation: An Introduction to Marx’s Theory. London: Bookmarks.
Tabak M (2012) Dialectics of Human Nature in Marx’s Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Wallis V (2011) Species questions. Historical Materialism 19(3): 213–218.
Wendling A (2009) Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation. New York: Palgrave.

Author biography
Aaron Jaffe is an Instructor of Philosophy and the Liberal Arts at The Juilliard School
and was recently granted his Doctorate in Philosophy from The New School for Social
Research. His dissertation was titled ‘Alienation from ‘‘Species-Being’’: An Investiga-
tion of Marx’s Philosophical Anthropology’ and his current research interests focus
on the history and structure of concepts valuable for critical social analysis.

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