Understanding Human Need 2e. Dean, Hartley

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СКАЧАТЬ be expected, exhibit rather different understandings of human need and take correspondingly different approaches to social policy. Social policy both as a sphere of public policy making and as an academic subject is currently – whether implicitly or explicitly – informed largely by what Brian Ellis (2012) has identified as a form of progressive ‘social humanism’, which he describes as the ‘moral and political philosophy of the welfare state’. In essence, however, what he describes is in fact liberal humanism, albeit guided by ‘moral principles that are socially derived’. If for the purposes of social policy, however, we are to identify what is distinctively human about our needs, we might wish to re-visit key elements of our story of the human species and draw out elements first identified by Marx when he sought to define the ‘essence’ of humanity in substantive rather than spiritual terms. The work of distilling this analysis from Marx’s early philosophical work was originally begun in the 1960s by members of the Budapest School (see Pickle & Rundell, 2018), and in particular by György Márkus. The humanist strand in Marx’s thinking (Fromm, 1961; Parsons, 1971) has been largely overlooked or overshadowed, partly because Marx’s broader legacy was in practice diluted by democratic socialism on the one hand, and distorted by totalitarian communism on the other. Dominant approaches to and interpretations of Marxist thinking have too often been confined, in Bauman’s words, to a ‘truncated, shrunk and desiccated version of Marxism’ (2004: 33). For the purposes of this chapter, I shall set out the kernel of my interpretation of what has been, or may be, drawn or elaborated from Marx’s account of the constitutive characteristics of the human species.

Species characteristics

      The central contention from which we start is the notion of ‘human essence’, which ‘lies precisely in the “essence” or inner unity of the total social development of humanity’ (Márkus, 1978: 63). It represents the ‘ensemble of social relations’; an essence that is neither biological nor spiritual, but precisely human. What characterises the human species and its mode of existence, according to Márkus’ reading of Marx, is human consciousness, work and sociality. And to these three interconnected characteristics should be added the universality and freedom that ‘mark the general direction of the historical progress of humanity’ (1978: 61): or in short, humanity’s historical development. These characteristics, it may be argued, define the human species in relation to other species and in relation to the natural world. But they also define each member of that species as a generic being. We shall consider each in turn.³

      Consciousness

      The consciousness that characterises the human species is something beyond mere sentience. Around perhaps 70,000 years ago, the ‘Cognitive Revolution’ referred to earlier witnessed the beginnings of thinking: a form of consciousness that made uniquely human action possible in the sense that it is action that has purpose and meaning to the actor; and an intersubjective awareness on the part of members of the species as to their selfhood and identity in relation to the natural world and to each other. It is social being or ‘sociality’ (which we shall discuss further on) which shapes human consciousness.

      Descartes’ contention that conscious thinking was essentially independent of bodily functions fuelled an enduring debate concerning the ‘mystery of consciousness’ (J. Searle, 1997). It is a debate that continues to divide scientists and philosophers. Is thinking and awareness of our own existence no more than a neurological activity unique to the human brain, or does it entail something more essential about a human being compared, for example, with a highly trained and emotionally intelligent dog on the one hand, or a highly sophisticated and artificially intelligent robot on the other?

      Marx’s answer was that ‘Thought and being are indeed distinct, but they also form a unity’, insofar as an individual’s consciousness is ratified or ‘confirmed’ through her ‘species consciousness’ (1844: 351). Species consciousness was more than the capacity for passive contemplation, or the capacity for reason alone, but the capacity for ‘sense activity’ (Marx, 1845b: 82): for reflexivity, rather than mere reflection. Consciousness is the dynamic relationship between thinking and being that characterises human action and therefore human history. Marx’s understanding of the Agricultural, Scientific and Industrial revolutions was focused on the unfolding of the ‘human essence of Nature and the natural essence of Man’ (1844: 355). In the process of harnessing nature for the conscious purposes of the human species, human beings have begun to further their species being, albeit – as is observed earlier – in ways that have often been suboptimal, self-destructive and unsustainable. The greater part of humanity remains thereby ‘self-alienated’. The potential of this unique species has been systemically constrained. But central to humanity’s capacity as a species is the consciousness that allows its members, under the right conditions, autonomously to shape their actions. Consciousness is the means by which a human being has a personal and an intersubjective awareness of her identity; seeks meaning in the world around her and in her relationships to others; and can critically engage with that world in conjunction with others.

      

      Work

      It follows that conscious human activity, or what we might call ‘work’, is equally definitive of human essence. However, the activity valued two and a half thousand years ago by the patrician elite of ancient Athens, was to be distinguished from necessary physical labour upon which human society as a whole depends. Such labour was performed by slaves or peasants, who were not recognised as sufficiently civilised, nor therefore, as fully human. The rise of industrial capitalism, it was supposed, portended the final end of slavery and of feudal serfdom, since productive labour power became a commodity to be voluntarily bought and sold under free market conditions. The dominant form of ‘work’ – both physical and intellectual – began to assume the form of wage labour. For Marx, all forms of work – whether materially productive or socially reproductive – entail human self-realisation, and the essence of work lies not in its exchange value, but in its dynamic capacity to fulfil the needs of the human species (Heller, 1974).

      For Marx, all work encompasses the uniqueness of the human species’ metabolism with Nature. Work represents the human species’ symbiotic appropriation of natural resources and its manipulation of natural forces. He applied the term stoffvechsel (best translated as ‘social-ecological metabolism’) to define this fundamental condition of human existence (1887: 183–4). However, even in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, Marx recognised that certain human interactions with nature could have counterproductive consequences, and he foresaw that a ‘metabolic rift’ would be occasioned by the capitalist mode of production (see J. Foster, 1999). And wage labour as a distinctive form of work could be an alienated rather than a self-affirming activity. Most recently, in the late modern era, it has been suggested that the managerial ethos associated with even the best-rewarded employment can be corrosive of the human character (Sennett, 1998), while a great deal of employment – especially that which is organised informally – is poorly rewarded and chronically precarious (for example, Standing, 2011).

      But the manner of human beings’ metabolism with Nature as opposed to that of other species is that it is socially, not naturally, organised and reproduced СКАЧАТЬ