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Analysis Of Marx's View Of Human Nature

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The concept that is human nature is one of the central themes of Marx’s works. It has been featured consistently in many of his pieces, although they seem to somewhat contradict one another at first glance and comparison. This essay will first attempt to expound on his views of human nature whilst concurrently illustrating how it fits into the larger scheme that is his political and economic philosophy – that is, Marxism, socialism, and communism. Then, it will explore the common rebuttals on his view of human nature and how it is inconsistent with the aforementioned philosophies before ending off with the possible responses Marx would give to counter such criticisms.

To understand the intricacies of Marx’s political and economic philosophy, we must first comprehend the foundation on which this philosophy is built on – one of which is human nature, or ‘human essence’.

In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx writes that ‘the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’. Here, it seems as if he is claiming that there is no such thing as a human ‘nature’. However, what Marx is really saying is that human nature is expressed as a result of the way society is structured economically; the base of society in a particular epoch affects its superstructure, which affects social relations and hence the way we as human beings behave in that epoch. In other words, our human nature (which is an expression of the

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