Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton

book. 5 He did not see this as overriding the
importance of the individual. On the contrary, he thought it a paradoxical
feature of our common nature that we are all uniquely individuated. In his
early writings, Marx speaks of what he calls human ''species being,'' which is
really a materialist version of human nature. Because of the nature of our material
bodies, we are needy, labouring, sociable, sexual, communicative,
self-expressive animals who need one another to survive, but who come to find a
fulfillment in that companionship over and above its social usefulness. If I
may be allowed to quote a previous comment of my own: ''If another creature is
able in principle to speak to us, engage in material labour alongside us,
sexually interact with us, produce something which looks vaguely like art in
the sense that it appears fairly pointless, suffer, joke and die, then we can
deduce from these biological facts a huge number of moral and even political
consequences.'' 6 This case, which is technically known as a
philosophical anthropology, is rather out of fashion these days; but it was
what Marx argued for in his early work, and there is no compelling reason to
believe that he abandoned it later on.
    Because we are labouring,
desiring, linguistic creatures, we are able to transform our conditions in the
process we know as history. In doing so, we come to transform ourselves at the
same time. Change, in other words, is not the opposite of human nature; it is
possible because of the creative, open-ended, unfinished beings we are. This,
as far as we can tell, is not true of stoats. Because of the nature of their
material bodies, stoats do not have a history. Nor do stoats have politics,
unless they are keeping them cunningly concealed. There is no reason to fear
that they might one day come to rule over us, even if they would probably do a
far better job than our present leaders. As far as we know, they cannot be
social democrats or ultranationalists. Human beings, however, are political
animals by their very nature—not only because they live in community with one
another, but because they need some system for regulating their material life.
They also need some system for regulating their sexual lives. One reason for
this is that sexuality might otherwise prove too socially disruptive. Desire,
for example, is no respecter of social distinctions. But this is also one
reason why human beings need politics. The way they produce their material
existence has so far involved exploitation and inequality, and a political
system is needed to contain the resulting conflicts. We would also expect human
animals to have various symbolic ways of representing all this to themselves,
whether we call it art, myth or ideology.
    For Marx, we are equipped
by our material natures with certain powers and capacities. And we are at our
most human when we are free to realize these powers as an end in itself, rather
than for any purely utilitarian purpose. These powers and capacities are always
historically specific; but they have a foundation in our bodies, and some of
them alter very little from one human culture to another. Two individuals from
very different cultures who do not speak one another's language can easily
cooperate in practical tasks. This is because the physical body they have in
common generates its own set of assumptions, expectations and understandings. 7 All human cultures know grief and ecstasy, labour and sexuality,
friendship and enmity, oppression and injustice, sickness and mortality,
kinship and art. It is true that they sometimes know these things in very
different cultural styles. Dying is not the same in Madras as it is in
Manchester. But we die anyway. Marx himself writes in the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts that ''man as an objective, sensuous being is
therefore a suffering being—and because he feels that he suffers, a passionate being.'' Death, he considers, is a harsh victory of the species
over the