Abstract
We have just now emerged from a period of theorizing by Marxists where individual human beings have often been discounted as epiphenomenal. Their psychic characteristics have been conceived as nearly totally derivative of social relations, ideology, or social for mations as a whole, and as having little impact upon social structuration and change. To the extent that such characteristics have any role at all in this mode of theorizing, they have usually done so only passively. For example, because human individuals have an expanding coterie of needs the production of commodities is also said to expand (automatically). That such individuals are also the conscious and active producers of their own social relations and ideology, who demand that (certain of) their needs be met and (sometimes) become agents of social change when these needs are not met, has often been lost in the fray.
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Notes
Louis Althusser, For Marx (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) pp. 10–11, 221–3, 231.
(With E. Balibar) Reading Capital (London: New Left Books (Verso), 1979) pp. 111–12.
See also Victor Molina, “Notes on Marx and the problem of individuality”, pp. 230–58 in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, On Ideology (London: Hutchinson, 1978) pp. 232, 236, 243.
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971) pp. 73, 51.
E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978) p. 131.
In the first category I would place such works as Adam Schaff’s Marxism and the Human Individual (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970)
and Istvan Mészáiros’s Marx’s Theory of Alienation (New York: Harper and Row, 1972);
in the second, Bertell Oilman’s Alienation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
Oilman, op. cit. John McMurtry, The Structure of Marx’s World View (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London: New Left Books (Verso), 1983).
As is implied, for example, by Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx (London: Allison and Busby, 1978) pp. 32, 43.
Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
D. F. B. Tucker, Marxism and Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
Jon Elster, “Marxism, functionalism, and game theory: The case for methodological individualism”, Theory and Society, vol. 11, 1982, (July), pp. 453–82.
John Plamenatz, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man (Oxford: Oxford University (Clarendon), 1976) p. x.
Melvin Rader, Marx’s Interpretation of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) p. vi.
G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
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© 1989 W. Peter Archibald
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Archibald, W.P. (1989). Introduction. In: Marx and the Missing Link: “Human Nature”. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09184-3_1
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