On Marx's Philosophical Anthropology

In the spring and summer Marx worked on his first systematic critique of bourgeois political economy, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, 1844. In this work Marx argued that alienation has an economic base, and he identified three types of alienation in capitalist society: the alienation of the worker from the products of his labor, the alienation of the worker from himself, and the alienation of people from one another. He argued that the equality of opportunity allowed under communism would lead to greater fulfillment of human potentiality and the overcoming of alienation in a more cooperative society.

In the best Soviet comments, this work is represented as the cornerstone of Marx's original philosophical anthropology. Marx regards a human subject as a conscious creature who is, due to his/her consciousness, not equal to his/her own living activity. This "outsidedness" towards his/her own existence gives him/her an option to treat the world universally and to behave freely. Treating the world like this, humans re-create consciously the material world around them and create their own "second nature". This process is where the phenomena of "labor" and "production" appear. Thus, labor becomes for Marx the universal way of human beings to be human, and that is why the alienation of labor products in a class-divided society seems to Marx as a crime against the very human nature. In my view, later on this "anthropological turn" of the still young Marx will become the deepest philosophical fundamental of Das Kapital.