| This question <16|16> overall <18|20> Hans: <18|21>. |
| Question 611: Is human life something that has to be produced socially? |
| [19] Hans: The Production of a Life is More than Just Means of Subsistence On the one hand, Marx holds that the production for the satisfaction of human needs must be social. In Grundrisse, he says that solitary production is as unthinkable as solitary language. But this is something we have in common with ants and other animals which cannot survive alone. The present statement says more. Not only our means of subsistence but our very lives must be produced socially. Our circle of needs is not a constant which can only be fulfilled by society-wide cooperation, but our whole lives, what we think of ourselves, what we need, and who we are, is a social product. In German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote: “Humans have history because they must produce their lives.” |
| Cleo's answer [16] rephrases the Question as: “We need each other for survival.” This is too much emphasis on the first aspect and not enough on the second. This is why this answer, if graded, would have received an A- and not an A. |
| Since I am already in nitpicking mode, I'd like to take a closer look at the following sentences in Cleo's answer: |
| Activites that a group of people take part in and their relationships that exist among each other form a society. A society exists and is formed due to the process that occur within it and the relationships that result. |
| It is wrong to identify group activities with social activities. A riot is the activity of individuals as a group, and an orgy is individual activity in a group, but neither forms a society. Societies consist of relationships. The relationships in our society pre-exist the activities of any human living today. The social role of a family father existed long before every father alive today was born. The same with teacher, employer, etc. Therefore it is wrong to say that the relationships result from the processes that occur in society (that would be methodological individualism), but they pre-exist these processes, although they may be modified by these processes. (All this, also the examples with orgy and riot, comes from Roy Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism, which is a systematic modern exposition of the worldview implicit in Marx's work.) |
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