CONCEPT OF NATURE IN THE WORKS OF MARX AND EMERSON PHILOSOPHY ESSAY   pt2   1700w

Productive Man?

Marx had nothing against the projects of science or industry, seeing them as emancipatory, believing that: “the celebrated unity of man with nature has always existed in industry” (The German Ideology, 84)

It has been argued that in Marx’s later work, he “shifted his focus from the emancipation of mankind through labour to emancipation from productive labour by an even greater productivity.” (Rabinbach, 73) Rabinbach even goes so far as to say that “He became a productivist” arguing that in his later work: “Freedom is redefined as the rationalisation of nature under the law of energy: “freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, regularly regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under common control instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature, and achieving with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature” (Rabinbach, 73)

Marx was indeed a productivist, and he did apply a rational, scientific approach to the study of “the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production- an analysis he referred to as an “objective” and “scientific” study of the unfolding of history” (Eckersley, 79), and it is true that: “Marx’s view of history and his particular notion of humanity as homo faber… perpetuate[s] an instrumentalist and anthropocentric orientation to the human world” (Eckersley, 82)

However, that Marx placed ultimate faith in industry, (he also believed that the communist future would