Transforming (Human) Nature

I'll keep this relatively short, partly out of necessity and partly because I've written this a thousand times before; I keep hammering on it though because I believe this is the most important thing to comprehend about the human condition, and the most important insight Karl Marx gave us in his thorough critique on capitalism.

_{source: Pxfuel}

I know, it may come across as a tad pretentious to claim a modicum of understanding about something as grand as "the human condition". Also it's inescapable to do a lot of generalizations when talking about large groups of uniquely individual people, and I know some of them believe that's exactly the reason why it can't be done; you can recognize them when they talk about "alternative facts" and their "personal truths" in their denial of the existence of THE facts and THE truth, the space where our individual perspectives on reality coalesce in something known as "shared truth". Come to think of it, they don't like to think of anything as "shared"...

Karl Marx was one of many "pretentious" thinkers who claimed to have deduced THE truth about a particular aspect of the human condition, and his is a perspective that is woven throughout almost all my writings about the economy, politics and class struggle that define our current reality, especially the economy. That's because in the economy we've expressed our relation to the material world as well as to each other; humans are unique in nature because we've mastered the art of transforming nature to more than meet our needs, "more than" being the core of Marx's analysis of the economy and the human condition. Throughout our existence as a species, there are some core and unchanging truths about the way we transform nature to our benefit; transforming nature needs labor, and the ones doing that labor have always produced more than they need for themselves. That's because of nature too; there is always a group that can't work, the elderly, the disabled, the children, the mothers and fathers raising their kids and so on. Workers have always, even when we were nomadic tribes, produced more than they need to survive. They've always produced a surplus of some sort.

It's the manner in which this surplus is produced that has been drastically changed since we stopped being nomadic tribes; since then the size of this surplus has been enlarged more and more, needing ever less labor, and the owners of the means of production have always been the sole recipients of this surplus, giving them the means and power to shape minds and society to their advantage. Prof. Richard Wolff says it best in the below linked video when he states that the absence of brotherhood, equality and freedom under capitalism is exactly the same as the absence of brotherhood, equality and freedom under feudalism and slavery, which is why Marx coined the phrase "wage slaves" when describing modern day employees. Capitalism is the continuation of a 10,000 year old mode of production, one that has become so intrinsic to our way of experiencing reality that it is often unwittingly confused with "human nature"; it's not. It's just a system, a failing system we see crumbling beneath our feet every day...

_{Economic Update: The Contributions of Karl Marx (Part II)}

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