Darwin showed how live on earth evolved of itself and not by virtue of some other god. Marx had already come to that conclusion, but also that man, as a species among others, was not only a product and part of other life on earth but its effective author. Two minds, one truth in the making.
'Plants, animals, minerals, air,
light etc constitute....part of human consciousness as objects of
natural science and art.... To say that man lives from nature means
that nature is his body with which he must be in continuous
interchange not to die. The statement that the physical and metnal
life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature
is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature.'
'.. The (non-human) animal is one
with its life and activity. It does not distinguish the activity fron
itself....Conscious life activity distinguishes distinguishes man
from the life activity of other animals...man, because he is a
self-conscious being...The practical construction of an objective
world, the manipulation of inorganic nature...Animals produce only
themselves while man reproduces the whole of nature.... Animals
construct only in accordance with the standards and needs of the
species to which they belong, while man knows how to produce in
accordance with the standards of of every species and knows how to
apply the appropriate standard to the object. Thus man constructs
also in accordance with the laws of beauty.'
Meanwhile 'We
shall begin with the contemporary economic fact. The worker becomes
poorer the more wealth he produces...The devalutation of the human
world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the
world of things...the more powerful becomes the world of objects
which he creates, the poorer he becomes in his inner life and the
less he belongs to himself. It is just the same as in religion. The
more of himself man attrributes to God, the less he has left in
himself....just as the gods are fundamentallly not the cause but the
produce of confusions of human reason...
'Private
property is likewise) the product... of alienated labour, of the
external relation of the worker to nature and to himself....
'From the
relation of alienated labour to private property it also follows that
the emancipation of private property from servitude takes the
political form of the emancipation of workers, not in the sense that
only their emancipation is involved but because this emancipation
includes the emancipation of humanity as a whole.'
And now, more than 150 years later, we can realise how completely human activity has transformed – or deformed – the nature of
not just human life but a lot of the rest as well. Unless and until we can wise up, 'emancipate' or heal ourselves, life as we know it is also lost.
We're all in that global boat. No good just blaming one race or master class, we'd have all done much the same in their position. To get us out of this fix and find a safer shore is all our job. No god, superwoman or higher law to put things right.
Marx wrote his economical and
philsophical notes around 1844, about fifteen years before Darwin
pubblished his 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for
Life'on 24 November 1859.
Darwin is now considered the founder evolutionary biology. Perhaps Charles Darwin might
have got in first with his more scientific vision if he had not been
so distressed at the prospect of dethroning God, shocking the world
and upsetting his wife in his revelation of a self-generating natural
world, with us part of it. What Marx did, though that was also kept
under wraps for years, was reveal the role of man, not God, in the
making – or breaking? - of the natural world and begin to outline not just what was going wrong but what we could do about it. The founder of revolutionary recovery?
