Marx’s theory of being is fundamental to his wider approach to history and politics, explains John Rees 

Some recent discussion of Marxism seems to assume that his theory of social being can be abandoned. In these brief points I try to explain why that is not the case. 

1. It is commonly thought that Marx had no theory of human nature. But, while it’s true that he rejected all the stereotypes commonly associated with such theories: that humans are naturally greedy, or lazy, or warlike, or whatever, it is untrue to say that he held no general theory of being, of what it is to be human. 

2. Marx sees humans as natural beings, formed in and as part of nature. This is why he saw Darwin’s theory of evolution as the counterpart of his own historical materialistic outlook, gifting Darwin a copy of Capital on publication. 

3. In this view, human beings are products of the natural world and constantly dependent on the natural world, including their own biological capacities, for their survival. In a strikingly forceful phrase, especially for a theorist of social change, in Capital Marx described this relationship as the ‘ever-lasting, nature imposed, condition of human existence.’ 

4. So what were these ‘everlasting’ conditions? Clearly the propagation of the species required the birth and survival of the next generation of humans and human labour on the natural environment provided the means by which this was possible. 

5. Over time, the productivity of human labour altered the social structure within which the reproduction of the human race took place: from non-class society to class society, and then through a succession of different forms of class society culminating, so far, in modern capitalism. 

6. These historical changes were titanic, involving at the very start of class society, the ‘world historical defeat of the female sex’ and the beginning of women’s oppression, which also transformed its form according to wider changes in class structure. 

7. But what did not change, what was ‘everlasting’, was the nature-given biological needs of humans, to reproduce, survive, eat, find shelter etc. As Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology, every analysis must begin with ‘the actual physical nature of man’ and ‘the natural conditions in which man finds himself.’ 

8. In this historical process, Marx was clear that the exploitative and oppressive forms of society could, eventually, be abolished. But that would not abolish the basic nature-imposed relationship between human beings, their nature-given biology, and the wider natural world. It would mean that those needs were met in non-oppressive, non-exploitative ways, but they would not and could not be abolished. 

9. So labour, and therefore the reproduction of labour, is a timeless, universal property of being human. It is an ontological category, which forms the basis of a wide range of social structures both unoppressive, in pre-class and communist societies, and oppressive in class societies. Labour exists independently of its exploited forms as an ontological category in Marxism. That is why, even under capitalism, commodities have a use value, universally valid, and an exchange value, only true in the capitalist form. Thus certain temporary social constructs relate to universal characteristics of the relationship between humans as physical beings and the wider natural environment. Indeed, much of Marx’s theory rests on explaining how fundamental and enduring human needs are alienated under class society, especially capitalism, and only met in a distorted form. So doing away with or weakening Marx’s ontology will also undermine a considerable part of his theory of alienation and vitiate any criticism of capitalism as an inhuman system. 

10. Women’s oppression has been fundamental to all forms of class society because it was centrally concerned with the production of the next generation of labour, and with the inheritance of property. As The German Ideology has it, the precondition of existence ‘which, from the very outset, enters into historical development, is that men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family.’ Those members of society that differed from approved sexual norms, lesbians, gays, trans people for instance, were marginalised and oppressed.  

11. A properly dialectical account of women’s oppression refuses to ignore the natural basis on which women’s oppression arose, or the social conditions under which it can be abolished. The struggle for women’s liberation involves the struggle to abolish all oppressive structures and attitudes towards sexuality. 

12. Against modern subjectivists and postmodernists, Marxists insist that women’s oppression is not only an ideology that can be abolished by criticism or transcended by personal choice. It is a social structure which shapes the lives of biological females in a way which it does not do to men. It is, like the exploitation of labour itself, a social structure which roots itself in and distorts a naturally given human capacity. It is not reducible to biology, but neither is it separable from biology. 

13. Against biological determinists, Marxists assert that women’s oppression and all other forms of oppression are not inevitable but can be abolished by transformation of the class structure, but only by the entire transformation of the class structure, that is by socialist revolution. There is no reformist or individual lifestyle solution to woman’s oppression. Social structures are only very partially malleable within capitalist society, they cannot be evaded, ignored, or fundamentally altered, except in ways the system finds necessary, acceptable, or co-optable.  

14. We are unequivocally for the liberation of women, trans people, and all other oppressed groups. But there is no automatic unity among the oppressed. It has to be constructed, as it was, partially at least, between the black movement and the women’s movement in the 1970s, for instance. This cannot be done by diktat, but only through constructive debate.  

15. Those seeking to polarise debate on the left, or demonise their opponents, are not tribunes of the oppressed but sowers of dissent. The violence of their rhetoric is in inverse proportion to their usefulness to the working-class movement.