Some terms in Marx carry their difficulty on the surface, and species-being is the outstanding case. It arrives in translation wearing a hyphen, it sounds like biology and behaves like philosophy, and the glossaries that serve most readers dispose of it in a single line: species-being, they say, means human nature, or human essence, and the reader is sent onward as though a translation had been supplied. That gloss is not exactly wrong, and that is precisely the trouble with it. It is close enough to pass an examination and too loose to survive one serious question. If species-being simply meant human nature in the ordinary sense, then Marx’s elaborate account of what human beings do when they produce, and of what happens to them when their production is estranged, would be decoration around a dictionary entry. The term does work in the texts where it appears. It names a specific account of distinctively human activity, it supplies the standard against which alienation is measured, and it stands at the centre of the longest running dispute in Marx scholarship, the dispute over whether the mature Marx kept a conception of human nature or threw the whole idea away in 1845.

That dispute is not a quarrel about a footnote. It decides how the entire body of work is read. If the young Marx of the Paris manuscripts built his criticism of capitalism on a philosophical anthropology, on a claim about what human beings essentially are and what their activity essentially is, and if the older Marx abandoned that foundation for a science of production relations in which talk of essence has no place, then the early and late writings are two different theories sharing an author, and readers must choose which one they are studying. If, on the other hand, a conception of human nature runs through the work from the manuscripts to Capital, changing its vocabulary and its emphasis but never surrendering its core, then the criticism of capitalism in the later work still rests, quietly, on the standard the early work stated loudly. The sixth thesis on Feuerbach is the text both sides cite, a few sentences long, endlessly conscripted. This article reads the term from its source, follows it into the theory of alienation where it does its work, confronts the sixth thesis directly rather than through slogans, and then sets the whole career’s evidence side by side, including a footnote in Capital that settles more of the question than most participants in the argument appear to know exists. The claim defended here has a name, because named claims can be checked. The abstraction reading of the sixth thesis holds that the thesis denies that the human essence is an abstraction inhering in the isolated individual, not that human beings have a nature, and that reading it the second way makes Marx’s own later references to human nature unintelligible.

What the manuscripts actually say

Species-being translates the German Gattungswesen, and the word deserves a moment of unpacking before any doctrine is attached to it, because the German carries a structure the English flattens. Gattung is the genus or species, the kind to which a creature belongs. Wesen is essence or being, what a thing is in its character. A Gattungswesen is a being whose nature is the nature of its kind, a creature that relates to its own species as its object, that can make its own kind, and its own life activity, a matter of thought and will. Marx did not coin the term. He inherited it from Ludwig Feuerbach, and the inheritance matters enough that a later section of this article is given to it entirely. What Marx does with the borrowed term in the first of the Paris manuscripts of 1844, in the section on estranged labour, is the founding text, and it repays slow reading because nearly every later confusion begins with a hurried one.

The founding claim is that the species character of humanity lies in a particular kind of activity. Man, Marx writes, is a species-being not only because he makes his own kind and other kinds his object in practice and in theory, but also because he treats himself as a present, living species and relates to himself as a universal and therefore free being. The compressed formulation that follows is the one the whole tradition quotes: the species character is free conscious activity. Each word in that phrase is load-bearing. Activity, because the essence is located in what human beings do rather than in a property they passively possess, in production rather than in contemplation. Conscious, because the activity is undertaken with an image of its result held in advance, planned, imagined, revised, rather than executed by instinct on a fixed pattern. Free, because the activity is not exhausted by the pressure of immediate physical need, because human beings produce when that pressure is absent and produce most characteristically, Marx insists, precisely in freedom from it. A definition of humanity built from activity rather than from a trait has consequences that run through everything later in this article, and the first of them is that the essence is something enacted and therefore something that can be enacted badly, blocked, distorted or estranged, which a fixed inner property could never be.

The contrast with animal production is where Marx makes the definition concrete, and he builds it as a series of widening circles. Animals produce, and some produce elaborately. The bee builds, the beaver dams, the spider weaves. But animal production, on Marx’s account, is one-sided in four respects. The animal produces only under the domination of immediate physical need, where the human being produces even when free from that need. The animal produces only itself, its own body and the shelter or store its body requires, where the human being reproduces the whole of nature, reshaping material far beyond any bodily requirement. The animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs alone, where the human being knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, applying the inherent standard to the object in each case. And the animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, while the human being confronts the product freely, as something standing over against its maker, available for contemplation, exchange, inheritance and criticism. The famous sentence that caps the passage says that man therefore also forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty, a phrase this article returns to later, since it is the point where the austere vocabulary of production suddenly opens onto art.

Why does Marx compare human production with animal production?

Marx uses animals as a measuring instrument rather than as a subject. The contrast isolates what is distinctive in human activity by showing production stripped of it: making driven only by need, confined to one inherited standard, and inseparable from the producer’s body. Set against that narrow case, human production appears as free, universal and self-conscious.

The animal contrast is often misread as a piece of natural history, as though Marx were offering zoology and could be refuted by a sufficiently clever crow. That reading mistakes the function of the passage. The contrast is analytical, not empirical in intent: it defines a limit case so that the features of the human case become visible as features. Whether some animal species plan, teach or decorate is a genuine question for the sciences of animal behaviour, and findings there would complicate the letter of the 1844 text. They would not touch its structure, because the structure is a claim about the form of human life activity, that it is undertaken consciously, that it ranges over standards not given by the producer’s own body, and that it can be directed at ends the producer has chosen rather than inherited. A reader who treats the passage as a contest between species misses that the real comparison is between two ways an activity can be organised, one in which the activity is the direct expression of need pressing on an organism, and one in which the activity has become an end in itself, capable of being developed, judged and enjoyed for its own sake. The second way of being active is what Marx calls the species life of humanity, and the name for a being whose life takes that form is species-being.

There is a second element in the manuscripts that the simple gloss loses, and losing it makes the concept sound more individualistic than it is. The species in species-being is not only the biological kind. It is also the human community, the actual interconnection of individuals with one another. Marx’s claim is that the individual is a species-being in the sense that his or her own activity is inherently social, carried on with materials, languages, skills and needs that are products of the species as a whole, and directed, even in solitude, at objects whose meaning is socially given. The solitary producer on an island, a favourite thought experiment of the period, still works with tools whose design embodies generations of accumulated practice, still measures success by standards learned from others, still speaks, if only inwardly, a language no individual invented. Species-being therefore names a double relation at once: the relation of the individual to the kind, whose capacities the individual carries, and the relation of individuals to each other, through which alone those capacities exist in developed form. When the estrangement analysis arrives, it will exploit both halves of the definition, because a worker can be estranged from the species in the first sense, prevented from free conscious activity, and in the second sense, set against other workers as competitors, and Marx’s account requires both injuries to be visible as injuries to one and the same nature.

A third element completes the founding picture, and it is the one that connects the manuscripts to the mature economics. The human relation to nature in the manuscripts is described as an exchange, a metabolism, in which nature is humanity’s inorganic body: the material world outside the skin is not an alien warehouse but the medium in which human life is continuously enacted, the source of food and material and the field in which activity leaves its results. To be cut off from that medium, to confront the natural world only as property owned by another and as a workplace entered on sufferance, is therefore not an inconvenience added to life but a mutilation of the life activity itself. Readers of Capital will recognise the descendant of this thought in the analysis of the labour process, where the same metabolism is described in cooler language, and the continuity matters for the argument of this article: the concept does not vanish from the later work so much as it changes clothes, a point the evidence table below sets out text by text. The young Marx’s vocabulary is Feuerbachian and philosophical. The claims the vocabulary carries, about activity, need, universality and social connection, have a longer life than the vocabulary itself, and keeping the claims separate from the clothes is the first discipline the subject demands.

The Feuerbach inheritance

No reader can judge what Marx did with species-being without knowing what the term meant in the hands he took it from, because Marx’s use is a deliberate act of appropriation and relocation, and its polemical edge is invisible until the original position is in view. Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, published in 1841, was the most explosive work of German philosophy in the years of Marx’s intellectual formation, and its central claim is built entirely from the species concept. Feuerbach argued that religion, and Christianity in particular, is the projection of the human species-essence onto an imaginary divine being. The perfections attributed to God, infinite knowledge, infinite love, infinite power, moral purity without limit, are not discoveries about a supernatural person. They are the predicates of the human species, the capacities that belong to humanity as a kind, gathered up, freed from the limits of any individual, and contemplated as though they belonged to another being who stands over against humanity and judges it. The individual believer is poor in spirit precisely to the degree that God is rich, and the wealth of the divine is the alienated wealth of the species, experienced as external and commanding rather than recognised as the believer’s own.

The analytical machinery here is what Marx took, and it is worth stating the machinery separately from the theology, because the same gears turn in the estranged labour analysis with different material loaded into them. First, there is a stock of human capacities that belong properly to the species and are exercised, fragmentarily, by individuals. Second, those capacities can be externalised, placed outside the individuals to whom they belong, in a form that confronts them as an alien power. Third, the externalised form grows stronger as the producers of it grow weaker, in an inverse relation that Feuerbach states for God and the believer and Marx will state for capital and the worker. Fourth, the cure, for Feuerbach, is recognition: see that the alien power is your own essence, and the spell of its authority is broken, even if nothing else changes. Marx accepts the first three elements and revolts against the fourth, and that revolt is one of the hinges on which his whole development turns. Recognition, he comes to argue, changes nothing in the world that produces the alienation. The projection has a material basis, and the basis must be transformed, not merely seen through. Readers who want the wider map of this passage from religious criticism to social criticism will find it in the account of historical materialism against idealism, where the Feuerbach genealogy is traced as the doorway into Marx’s mature method.

Feuerbach’s own conception of the species-essence was contemplative and largely static, and Marx’s criticisms of it, scattered through the manuscripts and sharpened in the Theses on Feuerbach of 1845, identify the weaknesses he believed he was repairing. Feuerbach’s human essence is an inner, silent generality that naturally unites many individuals, a bundle of capacities, reason, will and love above all, that each person simply has by belonging to the kind. It does not develop. It is not produced or reproduced through activity. It stands outside history, because the species whose essence it is stands outside history, contemplated in abstraction from the actual relations in which actual people live, work and dominate one another. Feuerbach, Marx charges, resolves the religious essence into the human essence but then treats that human essence as something abstract and unhistorical, and so never arrives at the criticism of the real conditions that make the projection necessary. The species, for Feuerbach, is an object of feeling and intuition. For Marx it becomes an object of practice, something human beings are continuously making and remaking in production, and that single shift, from a species contemplated to a species enacted, is the whole difference between the inheritance and the use Marx makes of it.

What changes when the species-essence is moved from religion to labour?

In Feuerbach the projection lives in belief, so insight can dissolve it. In Marx the projection lives in production and property, so the alien power confronting the worker is capital, a real institution rather than an idea, and only a change in the organisation of labour can recall what has been externalised.

The relocation can be traced gear by gear, and tracing it shows how much of the estranged labour analysis is Feuerbach’s machine rebuilt in iron. The stock of species capacities becomes the capacity for free conscious production, exercised by individuals but developed by the kind. The externalisation becomes the product of labour itself, which under private property confronts the producer as an alien object, owned by another, accumulating as capital. The inverse relation becomes the manuscripts’ bleak arithmetic: the worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, cheaper the more commodities he creates, because the world of things he has made grows in value precisely as the world of his own activity is devalued. And the cure is transformed from recognition into a practical demand, the supersession of the property relations that make the externalisation compulsory, since a worker who perfectly understood his estrangement at the start of a shift would be exactly as estranged at the end of it. What Marx keeps from Feuerbach is therefore the form of the analysis, essence externalised and confronting its source as alien power. What he discards is the location, the mechanism and the remedy. That is why calling species-being a religious residue, as some critics do, gets the genealogy backwards: the concept enters Marx’s hands as the instrument by which religious criticism is converted into social criticism, and its philosophical character is the record of that conversion rather than a leftover mysticism.

One more piece of the inheritance deserves attention, because it explains a feature of the manuscripts that puzzles readers who arrive from the later work. Feuerbach’s species is also the name of a standard of judgement. To say that the divine perfections are the species’ own capacities is already to say that the individual’s poverty is a falling short of a measure internal to humanity, not a punishment imposed from outside it. Marx inherits the internal standard along with everything else. When the manuscripts judge estranged labour, they do not judge it against a heaven, a natural law, or a moral code imported from another system. They judge it against the species life that the worker’s own activity expresses in distorted form, against what that activity is when it is free and conscious rather than compelled and estranged. The norm is immanent, drawn from the nature of the activity itself. This matters enormously for the later dispute about human nature, because it shows what kind of normativity a Marxian conception of human nature carries: not a list of commandments deduced from an essence, but a standard generated by comparing an activity with its own unimpeded form. Critics who accuse the concept of smuggling values into science have this structure in their sights, and the accusation, and its answer, occupy the centre of this article below. For now the genealogy is enough. Species-being is Feuerbach’s term, rebuilt by Marx into a claim about production, and armed with an internal standard by which production under private property can be found wanting.

The standard by which alienation is measured

A standard is only as good as the measurements it makes possible, and species-being earns its place in the manuscripts by making the fourfold analysis of estranged labour possible. The wider treatment of that analysis, its textual history and its place in the theory as a whole, is given in the companion study of Marx on alienation, and readers who want the full architecture should go there. What belongs in this article is narrower: the way each of the four relations of estrangement is defined as a specific failure of species-being, so that the concept functions less as a portrait of humanity than as a diagnostic instrument, a gauge against which damaged forms of life activity register as damage.

The first relation, the worker’s estrangement from the product of labour, presupposes that production is the objectification of the producer, the embodying of life activity in a thing that should stand as its confirmation. When the product instead belongs to another and confronts the worker as an alien power, the gauge reads the injury directly: activity that ought to have realised the species capacity has enriched an external stock instead. The second relation, estrangement within the activity itself, is the gauge applied to the process rather than the result. Labour that is external to the worker, labour in which the worker does not affirm but denies himself, is activity that has lost the defining marks of the species character. It is not free, because it is coerced by need and by the overseer’s power. It is not conscious self-direction, because its ends, pace and methods are set elsewhere. It is, in the manuscripts’ severe phrase, labour that belongs to another, activity as passivity, and the worker feels freely active, Marx observes, only in the animal functions of eating, drinking and procreating, while in the distinctively human function of production he feels reduced to the animal level. The inversion in that sentence is the gauge working at full sensitivity: the human and animal functions have traded places, and the trade is legible as an injury only because a standard exists by which production counts as the properly human activity and its degradation counts as a fall.

The third relation is where species-being stops being background and becomes the explicit subject, and it is also the point at which this article’s concept locks into the architecture of the alienation theory. Marx derives the estrangement of man from his species-being as a consequence of the first two relations, and the derivation is worth following because it shows the concept doing logical work rather than decorating the argument. If the product of labour is alien and the activity is alien, then the life activity itself, the species life, has been turned into a mere means to individual existence. Labour, which is the form in which the species realises itself, is reduced to an instrument for keeping the individual worker alive, and the relation between the individual and the kind is inverted: instead of individual life existing as the enactment of the species life, the species life exists, in degraded form, as the servicing of individual survival. From this inversion the fourth relation follows, the estrangement of man from man, since a worker whose species life has been privatised into survival confronts other workers as rivals for the means of survival, and confronts the capitalist as the person in whom his own alienated species power has accumulated. The detailed anatomy of these relations, and especially of the third, is developed in the study of the four types of alienation, which takes the third relation as its centre of gravity. For the purposes of this article the point is structural. Remove species-being from the manuscripts and the four relations collapse into a list of complaints. With it, they form a derivation, each injury specified as a determinate way in which free conscious activity has been turned against itself.

This diagnostic function also explains why the concept cannot be replaced, in any faithful reading, by a simple claim that workers are unhappy or that wages are low. Misery is a symptom that many theories can register. What species-being registers is a specific kind of disorder: the disorder of a being whose defining activity has been organised so that the activity frustrates the definition. A well-paid worker in a thoroughly estranged process still registers on the gauge, because the gauge measures the form of the activity rather than the size of the reward, and this is both the concept’s analytical strength and the source of the strongest objection to it, since a standard that can find fault in comfortable conditions will be accused of dictating its findings in advance. Marx’s answer, implicit in the manuscripts and explicit in the later dispute, is that the standard is not a preference of the theorist but a characterisation of the activity drawn from the activity’s own developed forms: production at its most developed really is free, conscious, universal and social, in the workshop of the independent craftsman, in science, in art, wherever makers direct their own making. The estranged forms are measured against possibilities the species has already demonstrated, not against a utopia the theorist has imagined. Whether that answer is sufficient is a question this article takes up in earnest when the critics have had their full say.

The sixth thesis and the abstraction reading

Every road in this subject leads, sooner or later, to eleven short texts that Marx wrote in a notebook in the spring of 1845 and never published, the Theses on Feuerbach, and within them to the sixth, which has become the most contested sentences in the entire corpus relative to their length. The sixth thesis addresses Feuerbach’s handling of essence directly. Feuerbach, Marx writes, resolves the religious essence into the human essence, but the human essence is not an abstraction inherent in each single individual, and in its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, consequently, misses the essence as something internal and silent, and is compelled to abstract from the historical process and to treat individuals as fixed in isolation from their relations. The standard reading of this text, repeated in textbooks and lecture halls for generations, takes it as a repudiation of human nature as such: there is no essence of man, there are only social relations, and individuals are whatever their relations make them, so that any talk of a transhistorical human nature is a Feuerbachian leftover the mature Marx discarded. On the standard reading, 1845 is a guillotine. Before it, a philosopher of essence; after it, a scientist of relations; and species-being falls on the early side of the blade.

The abstraction reading denies that the text says anything of the kind, and the denial begins with the elementary discipline of asking what a sentence’s negations actually negate. The thesis denies two specific things. It denies that the human essence is an abstraction, and it denies that the essence is inherent in each single individual, seated inside isolated persons like a soul or a stamp. Neither denial touches the proposition that human beings have a nature, share needs and capacities as members of a kind, and can be characterised at the level of the species. To infer from the thesis that Marx rejected every conception of human nature, a reader must add a premise the text does not contain, namely that a nature could only exist as an abstraction inherent in isolated individuals, so that denying that form of it denies the thing altogether. But that premise is exactly what a naturalistic conception of human nature rejects. A biologist who says that the nature of a social animal is realised only in its relations with others, that the isolated specimen is a mutilated case rather than the paradigm, has not denied the animal a nature. She has specified where the nature lives. The abstraction reading proposes that Marx’s sixth thesis does the same work for the human case: it relocates the essence from inside the isolated individual to the ensemble of relations in which alone individuals develop and exercise what they are, and relocation is not abolition.

Did Marx believe in human nature?

Yes, on the strongest reading. The sixth thesis on Feuerbach denies that the human essence is an abstraction inherent in the isolated individual, not that humans have a nature. Capital explicitly distinguishes human nature in general from human nature as modified in each historical epoch.

The philosopher who made this argument unavoidable is Norman Geras, whose Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, published by Verso in 1983, remains the strongest treatment of the question and the book almost nothing in the online discussion of species-being appears to have read. Geras proceeds with unusual literalness. He takes the sixth thesis sentence by sentence and asks what its words exclude and what they leave standing. His central observation is the one sketched above, sharpened into a distinction: Marx in the thesis is criticising a conception of the human essence, a particular philosophical picture of essence as an abstractum lodged in each separate person, and a criticism of a conception of a thing is not a denial of the thing. A thinker who argues that health is not a fluid inherent in the body has not denied that bodies are healthy or sick. Geras then performs the check that gives his book its force: he reads across the later corpus for what the standard reading predicts should not be there. If Marx after 1845 held that there is no human nature, only relations, then his later writings should avoid ascribing general needs, capacities and dispositions to human beings as such, and should treat every apparent ascription as shorthand for relations. They do not avoid it. They speak, repeatedly and without embarrassment, of human nature, of the nature of man, of needs and powers that belong to human beings generally and that particular social forms frustrate, distort or develop. The standard reading must explain each of these passages away. The abstraction reading must explain only the vocabulary’s recession, a far lighter burden, and the asymmetry between the two burdens is the argument.

It is worth pausing on why the standard reading achieved its dominance, since the abstraction reading is not new and its textual basis was always available. Part of the explanation is the sheer portability of the slogan form. The ensemble of the social relations fits on a slide; the careful distinction between denying an essence and denying a picture of essence does not. Part is the prestige of the anti-humanist moment in twentieth-century Marxism, examined in full below, which gave the standard reading a theoretical programme to serve: an entire school had staked its interpretation of Marx on a rupture in 1845, and the sixth thesis was its charter document, quoted the way charters are quoted, for authority rather than for content. And part is a genuine feature of the text itself. The thesis is compressed notebook prose, written for its author alone, and compressed prose invites readers to pour their own programme into the gaps. Against all three forces, the abstraction reading has only the words, read slowly, and the later corpus, read whole. Geras’s title calls the standard reading a legend, and a legend is exactly what a text becomes when its citation replaces its reading. The remedy for a legend is not a counter-slogan. It is the evidence, assembled in one place, which is the business of the next section.

One refinement of the abstraction reading must be registered before the evidence is assembled, because it protects the reading against its own overstatement. The reading does not claim that nothing changed in 1845, or that the Theses merely repeat the manuscripts in shorter sentences. Something real changed, and the change is the one the sixth thesis actually performs: the locus of the essence is moved. In the manuscripts, for all their materialism of production, the species character can still sound like a possession of the individual producer, a quality of his activity that estrangement then steals from him. The thesis corrects the picture by insisting that what an individual is, is constituted in relations, that there is no pre-social residue of humanity waiting underneath the relations to be liberated, and that the essence is therefore historical through and through, taking determinate shape in each ensemble of relations rather than hovering above them. Continuity readings that ignore this correction turn Geras into a claim that Marx never developed, which he never made. The claim is that a conception of human nature survived the correction, transformed by it: a nature that is general in its needs and capacities, and always modified, never simply expressed, in the forms each epoch gives it. That formulation, general nature and historical modification held together, is not an invention of the continuity school. It is, almost word for word, a distinction Marx himself draws in Capital, and the footnote in which he draws it is the single most important exhibit in the case.

The evidence across the career

Disputes of this kind are not settled by accumulating quotations in the manner of a debating society, but they are disciplined by forcing the rival readings to face the same exhibits in the same order. That is the purpose of the human nature evidence table below. Five texts are set side by side: the manuscripts in which species-being is the explicit foundation, the sixth thesis on which the standard reading rests, the two great unpublished works of the following decades where the question of survival can be tested, and the footnote in Capital where the mature economist states his position in his own terms. For each text the table records what it says about human nature, how the anti-humanist reading construes it, how the continuity reading construes it, and which construal the wording better supports. A table of this kind functions as a literature review compressed into one object, and research students assembling the debate will find that keeping the five exhibits in a single view, in a structured study file such as the VaultBook study notes tool provides, prevents the commonest error in the literature, which is arguing from whichever single text a writer happens to have open.

Text	What it says about human nature	The anti-humanist reading	The continuity reading	Which reading the wording supports
The Paris manuscripts	The species character of humanity is free conscious activity; human beings produce universally, beyond need, and according to the laws of beauty	A youthful philosophical anthropology, later discarded as pre-scientific	The founding statement of a conception retained in substance throughout the career	The continuity reading for content; the anti-humanist reading only for the vocabulary, which is Feuerbachian
The sixth thesis on Feuerbach	The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual; in its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations	A repudiation of human nature in favour of relations alone	A denial that the essence is an inner abstraction, relocating the nature of the kind in the relations where it is realised	The continuity reading; the negations target a picture of essence, not the existence of a nature
The German Ideology	The first premise of history is living human individuals, their physical organisation, and the production of material life to satisfy needs	A turn to material premises that leaves anthropology behind	A naturalistic restatement: needs and organisation are the given basis on which relations then work	The continuity reading; the premises are explicitly about human beings as a natural kind
The Grundrisse	Human needs and capacities are developed historically; the individual is a social being whose powers expand with production itself	Transitional notebooks in which older vocabulary lingers by inertia	The conception operating freely inside the mature economic method, with enrichment replacing essence as the keyword	The continuity reading; the treatment is systematic, not residual
The Bentham footnote in Capital	Whoever would criticise human acts must deal first with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch	An incidental remark in an attack on Bentham, carrying no theoretical weight	The mature Marx’s own two level distinction, stated as a methodological rule	The continuity reading decisively; the distinction is asserted, not conceded in passing

Read down the final column, the table’s verdict is cumulative rather than dependent on any single exhibit. The manuscripts can be conceded to the anti-humanist as juvenilia without loss, since the case does not rest on them. The sixth thesis, read for its negations, does not deliver the repudiation it is famous for. The German Ideology, the very text in which the turn to history is supposed to have expelled anthropology, opens its account of history by fixing premises about human individuals, their physical organisation and their needs, and proceeds to derive the first historical act from the necessity of producing to satisfy those needs, which is a conception of human nature doing foundational work under a plainer description. The Grundrisse, drafted in the late 1850s as the workshop of Capital, treats the development of human needs and capacities as internal to the analysis of capital itself, describing the cultivation of the social individual and the expansion of the powers of the species as tendencies of the system under study. A vocabulary can linger by inertia in a manuscript or two. It does not organise the method of a life’s central project by inertia. What lingers in the Grundrisse is not a phrase but a framework, the framework in which production is always simultaneously the production of things and the production and reproduction of the producers, of their needs, their capacities and their relations.

The Bentham footnote

The last exhibit deserves its own discussion, because it is the article’s best single find and because its obscurity in the general discussion is genuinely surprising. In the first volume of Capital, in a footnote directed at Jeremy Bentham, Marx pauses the economic argument to rebuke the utilitarian philosopher for his handling of human nature. Bentham, in Marx’s account, takes the modern shopkeeper, and especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man, and measures every epoch’s arrangements by their utility for that parochial figure. Against this procedure Marx lays down a methodological rule: whoever wishes to judge human acts, movements and relations must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham, he adds, makes short work of it, assuming with characteristic dryness that what is normal for the philistine is normal for humanity. The footnote is short, parenthetical and devastating for the standard reading of the sixth thesis, because it is the mature Marx, in his central published work, asserting in his own voice the two level structure the continuity reading attributes to him. There is a human nature in general. There is also human nature as modified in each epoch. The errors of a critic arise from collapsing the second level into a timeless norm or, what is the same fault from the other side, from denying the first level exists at all.

How does the Bentham footnote change the reading of the sixth thesis?

The footnote supplies the distinction the thesis leaves compressed. Marx there separates human nature in general from human nature as modified in each epoch, which shows that insisting on the ensemble of social relations was a claim about modification, not a denial that anything general exists to be modified.

The footnote also disciplines the continuity reading, and a good exhibit disciplines both sides or it is propaganda. If Marx had held a simple doctrine of a fixed human essence, fully formed in 1844 and merely applied thereafter, the footnote’s second level would be decoration. It is not decoration. The modification is real, deep and without a fixed limit: needs that did not exist become necessities, capacities that were marginal become central, and the very senses are educated by the world production builds. What the footnote rules out is only the two one-sided positions, the timeless essence of the philosopher Feuerbach was criticised for abstracting, and the empty relationalism that would make the phrase human nature in general meaningless. Between those poles sits the position the whole corpus, read whole, supports: a nature that is genuinely general in its structure of needs, powers and sociality, and genuinely historical in every determinate form that structure takes. The sixth thesis, aimed at the first pole, states the historical side with notebook brevity. The Bentham footnote, written two decades later for publication, states both sides in one sentence. Reading the thesis through the footnote is not an interpretive luxury. It is what reading an author whole, rather than in slogans, consists in.

The anti-humanist objection at full strength

Part Six of the discipline governing this series requires the strongest objection to be stated in the form its defenders would choose before any verdict is returned, and the objection to species-being is formidable enough to deserve that courtesy in full. Its classical author is Louis Althusser, whose reading of Marx, set out in the essays of For Marx and in Reading Capital during the 1960s, reorganised the interpretation of the whole corpus around a single dramatic claim: that in 1845 Marx executed an epistemological break, a rupture with his own philosophical past, abandoning the ideological problematic of essence, alienation and human nature in which the early writings are imprisoned, and founding in its place a science of history whose concepts, mode of production, forces and relations of production, surplus value, have no need of a subject called man and no place for one. The intellectual biography of the man who made anti-humanism a programme, and the milieu in which the programme was forged, is traced in the study of Louis Althusser, and readers who want the context should go there. What belongs here is the objection itself, in its strongest form, which has four charges, each aimed at a different joint in the concept of species-being.

The first charge is that a philosophical anthropology of free conscious activity is a normative ideal masquerading as a description. To define humanity by an activity that most human labour, in most periods, conspicuously fails to exhibit is not to describe the species but to prescribe for it, and the prescription is smuggled in under the guise of a finding. Science, the objection continues, characterises its objects by what they do under specified conditions, and explains variation by variation in the conditions. The species-being framework instead characterises its object by what it would do under conditions that have never generally obtained, and explains the actual record as a falling away. That is the structure of a doctrine of the Fall, translated into the vocabulary of production, and its theological ancestry in Feuerbach is not a biographical accident but the mark of its logical type. A theory that needs its object to be other than it is, in order to condemn what it is, has installed the verdict in the premise.

The second charge is derivational. Nothing in the analysis of production, of value, of the circulation of capital, yields or requires the proposition that free conscious activity is the essence of the producers. The economic theory can be stated, tested and developed entire without it, as in fact the exposition of Capital proceeds for long stretches without it, and a premise that does no work in the deductions is not a foundation but an ornament. Worse, the objection argues, the ornament is a liability: it invites readers to evaluate modes of production by their distance from an ideal of activity rather than by their laws of motion, and so substitutes moralised commentary for the analysis Marx spent his maturity building. The young Marx of the manuscripts, on this reading, is not the prophet of the mature theory but its first obstacle, a brilliant Feuerbachian whose categories the science had to break to be born, and sentimentality about the early writings is sentimentality about the obstacle.

The third charge is historical and concerns essence as such. A human nature general enough to survive every epoch, the objection holds, is too thin to explain anything that happens in any of them, while a nature thick enough to guide judgement is always the nature of one epoch dressed as the nature of all. Feuerbach’s essence was the second kind in disguise, the sensibility of the German educated class of his decade universalised. The sixth thesis is then read as Marx’s own recognition of the trap: essence is withdrawn from the individual and dissolved into the ensemble of social relations precisely so that nothing transhistorical remains to do the dressing. Theoretical anti-humanism, in Althusser’s phrase, is not a cruelty but a hygiene. It protects the science of history from its permanent temptation, which is to found criticism on an image of man and call the image knowledge.

The fourth charge is textual and the most concrete. The vocabulary of the manuscripts recedes. Species-being, estrangement as the master category, the species vocabulary generally: these fade from the published work as the economic concepts take over, and the few general references to human nature that survive are, on the anti-humanist reading, the ordinary phrases of a nineteenth-century writer rather than theoretical terms of art, no more load-bearing than a modern economist’s talk of human capital. A theory is identified by its working concepts, and the working concepts of the mature Marx are not anthropological. The break is dated 1845, located in the Theses and The German Ideology, and confirmed, its defenders argue, by everything the subsequent forty years of writing do not say.

That is the objection at its strongest, and it is not foolish. It explains real features of the corpus: the recession of the vocabulary, the genuine novelty of the economic concepts, the polemical energy of the Theses against Feuerbach. Any answer that treats it as a misunderstanding will fail. The answer that the continuity reading actually gives, assembled from Geras and from the evidence table, is more specific. To the first charge, it replies that the standard is not counterfactual in the way alleged: free conscious production is an observed form of human activity, visible wherever producers direct their own production, and the essence claim is the claim that this observed form reveals the capacities whose frustration requires explanation, a structure no more theological than a medicine that defines health by the organism’s unimpeded functioning and disease as impediment. To the second charge, it replies that the anthropology does work in the mature theory, though quietly: the analysis of the labour process in Capital is built from the distinction between the worst architect and the best of bees, between production guided by an imagined result and production by instinct, which is the manuscripts’ definition of conscious activity restated as an axiom of economics, and the valuation of machinery, of the working day and of cooperation throughout the mature work is organised by what these arrangements do to the activity and capacities of the producers. To the third charge, it replies with the Bentham footnote: Marx considered the alternative between a timeless essence and no general nature at all, and refused it in print, in a distinction, not in a slogan. To the fourth charge, it concedes the fact and disputes the inference. The vocabulary recedes because the work changes genre, from philosophical manuscripts to economic exposition, and because a writer who has absorbed a premise stops re-arguing it in every chapter. Recession is compatible with abandonment. It is also compatible with absorption, and the way to decide between the two is not to count occurrences of a word but to test whether the later arguments still lean on the earlier structure. The architect and the bee, the footnote on Bentham, the Grundrisse on the social individual: at the load-bearing points, they lean.

What would count as evidence against the continuity reading?

The reading would fail if the later corpus systematically avoided ascribing general needs and capacities to human beings, or if Marx anywhere repudiated the earlier conception as an error rather than merely changing his vocabulary. Passages that explain away every general ascription as shorthand for relations would count heavily against it.

An honest verdict must also register what the anti-humanist objection establishes even where it fails. It establishes that the periodisation question is real, and that no reader is entitled to treat the corpus as a single timeless block. The dispute between the break and continuity readings, in its full scholarly form, is the subject of the comparison of the young Marx and the mature Marx, which maps the rival periodisations across the whole career. It establishes, too, that the manuscripts’ normativity is a genuine philosophical commitment and not a piece of science in the narrow sense, so that readers who want Marxism without any normative anthropology are wanting something the texts, on the continuity reading, do not contain. And it establishes the concession that the brief for this article requires to be stated plainly: the vocabulary of species-being genuinely recedes. Gattungswesen does not stride through Capital. What the continuity reading claims survives is the structure, a two level conception of human nature, general in its needs and capacities and historical in all its forms, doing quiet work at the foundations of the mature theory. A reader who finds that claim too weak to be interesting should notice that the entire dispute is about exactly that difference: whether the foundation of the criticism of capitalism includes a conception of the beings capitalism frustrates. On the evidence assembled here, it does.

The descendants of the concept in the later work

The strongest support for the continuity reading is not any single surviving phrase but the reappearance, at the foundations of the mature work, of the manuscripts’ defining structures in economic dress. Three reappearances matter most, and each can be checked by any reader with the books open, which is the kind of support an interpretation should want.

The first is the analysis of the labour process that opens the systematic part of Capital. Marx there distinguishes the labour process in general, the purposeful activity through which human beings appropriate nature, from its historically specific forms, and he marks the distinctiveness of human labour with the most famous animal comparison in the mature work: what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect raises the structure in imagination before erecting it in reality. The passage is usually quoted as a remark about planning. Read against the manuscripts, it is the definition of species-being restated as the foundation of the economics. Conscious activity, activity guided by an image of its result, is installed as the generic character of human labour twenty three years after the estranged labour manuscript defined the species character as free conscious activity, and it is installed at exactly the point where the theory needs a transhistorical platform from which the historical forms can be surveyed. The bee has followed Marx from 1844 into Capital because the contrast is not an ornament of the young philosopher. It is the mature economist’s way of specifying what labour, as such, is, before asking what capital makes of it.

The second reappearance is the Grundrisse’s treatment of the social individual. In those notebooks Marx projects the development of production to a stage at which the powers of the species, accumulated in machinery, science and organisation, confront the individual as a social inheritance, and he describes the human prospect in terms of the development of all human powers as an end in itself. The vocabulary of essence is absent and the thought is the manuscripts’ thought at a higher level of concreteness: the species capacities, built up historically, define the measure of what individuals in a given epoch can be and do, and a social order is judged by whether it turns that accumulated wealth into free development or into its opposite. The third reappearance is the most solemn, the passage in the third volume of Capital on the realm of freedom, where Marx writes that freedom in the sphere of material production can consist only in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature and bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by a blind power. Beyond that sphere of necessity, he continues, begins the development of human powers as an end in itself, the true realm of freedom. The language of 1844 is gone. The structure, free conscious activity as the human standard, estrangement as its blind and alienated form, is the closing philosophy of the mature system, printed in its final volume.

Needs, capacities and the shape of a Marxian human nature

If the continuity reading is right, then Marx has a conception of human nature, and a reader is entitled to ask what the conception contains. The answer matters because the phrase human nature, in ordinary use, suggests a fixed inventory of traits, selfish or cooperative, aggressive or gentle, from which political conclusions are then read off like weather from a chart. Marx’s conception has almost nothing in common with that picture, and stating the difference precisely is the best protection against the commonest misreading of this entire subject.

How is species-being different from a list of human traits?

A trait list describes what human beings are like, statically, and invites arguments about which entries belong on it. Species-being names a form of activity, together with the needs and capacities that activity presupposes and develops. The nature in question is therefore dynamic: it exists in being exercised, and it grows with its own exercise.

What the conception contains, across the corpus, is a structure rather than an inventory. At its base are needs that belong to human beings as living organisms: for food, shelter, rest, sexual life and the care of children, needs whose frustration is injury in any epoch and whose satisfaction every social form must organise somehow. Around those are capacities that belong to the kind: the capacity for conscious, purposive activity surveyed above; the capacity for language and for the thought language makes possible; the capacity to form standards, to judge productions by norms internal to kinds of making; the capacity for social connection itself, the need for others not merely as instruments but as the medium in which individuality develops. Above the base, and changing with history, are the developed needs and capacities that production itself creates: needs for objects that did not exist, skills that no earlier epoch required, senses educated by new worlds of material and art. Marx is explicit in the Grundrisse that production produces not only objects for subjects but subjects for objects, cultivating the consumer’s capacities along with the goods. A conception of this shape, fixed in structure and open in content, is exactly what the Bentham footnote’s two levels describe: a human nature in general, specifiable as needs, capacities and sociality, and human nature as modified in each epoch, as the determinate development of those needs and capacities reaches the level that epoch’s production makes possible. Nothing in this structure licenses the folk inferences the phrase usually carries. It does not say human beings are naturally selfish, since appropriation of others’ products is a determinate historical form and not a base need. It does not say they are naturally selfless, since the need for individuality and for objects of one’s own is in the structure too. It says what they need, what they can do, and that what they can do grows, and it leaves every particular social arrangement to be judged by how it treats the needs and develops the powers.

Producing according to the laws of beauty

One phrase from the founding passage deserves a section of its own, because it is the point at which this austere subject unexpectedly opens onto aesthetics, and because it is mishandled more often than it is read. When Marx writes that man forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty, he is completing the animal contrast, and the placement is the meaning. The animal forms things under the compulsion of need and by a single inherited standard. The human producer, applying the inherent standard of each kind of object and ranging beyond need, is thereby capable of forming things by a standard that is neither need nor utility: the standard of the thing’s own rightness of form, which the passage calls beauty. The claim embedded here is that aesthetic production is not a luxury appended to human production after the serious work is done. It is a signature of the species activity itself, visible whenever making outruns necessity and obeys the object’s own measure rather than the maker’s hunger. Pottery older than agriculture’s surpluses is decorated. Tools are finished beyond function. The impulse the passage names has left its evidence in every archaeological stratum that contains shaped material.

For the argument of this article, the laws of beauty passage does two pieces of work. It widens the conception of free conscious activity beyond the factory question that dominates the manuscripts, showing that the species standard applies to making in general, so that the criticism of estranged labour is a special case of a general account of human making rather than a complaint about one industry. And it supplies a test of the continuity reading that is almost unfairly sharp. When the third volume of Capital locates the true realm of freedom in the development of human powers as an end in itself, the activities that fill that realm, in any plausible filling, are the activities the 1844 passage was already describing: making, learning, playing and contemplating pursued under their own standards rather than under need. The distance between the manuscripts and the mature system is real, in vocabulary, in method, in everything except the destination.

Universality: the standard of every species

Among the marks of species-being in the founding passage, the one that receives least attention and carries most consequence is universality. Marx’s human producer does not produce by one standard. He knows how to apply the inherent measure to each object, to work wood as wood demands, stone as stone demands, and to learn standards not given by his own body, his own tradition, or even his own epoch’s practice. The claim is easy to pass over as a flourish and is in fact the load-bearing difference between a craft conception of humanity and Marx’s. A craft conception fixes the human essence in a particular excellence, reason in the Greek version, toolmaking in a later one, and then struggles with every human activity that falls outside the chosen excellence. Marx’s version fixes the essence in the capacity to take up excellences, to make any standard one’s own by learning it, which is why the same writer can treat labour, science, art and social organisation as theatres of one and the same nature without ranking them into a hierarchy of the truly human. The species character is not a performance. It is the openness of performance to every form the world affords.

Universality also explains a feature of Marx’s social thought that readers often attribute to separate doctrines. If the individual’s capacities are the species capacities taken up through learning, then the wealth of an individual life is a function of the wealth of the connections available to it: the traditions it can inherit, the teachers it can reach, the materials and instruments its society has accumulated. The manuscripts draw this consequence in their vision of the rich human being, the person whose needs have been developed to the point of needing the totality of human life activity, and whose senses have been educated by the whole wealth of a culture. Richness here has been turned inside out. It names not the size of a stock owned but the breadth of a nature developed, and poverty names its opposite, a nature stunted to the single need of survival and the single sense of having. This inversion runs forward into the mature work’s treatment of wealth under capital, where the accumulation of things and the impoverishment of the producers proceed together, and it is unintelligible unless the species standard is already in place: things accumulate in the form of capital precisely because the producers’ own developed capacities have been externalised into a stock that confronts them. Feuerbach’s gear, turning again, in the heart of the economics.

There is a corollary for how the concept should be used by readers who take it up as an instrument rather than as an exhibit. Because the standard is universality, the diagnosis of estrangement is never merely that an activity is unpleasant, repetitive or ill rewarded. Those are evils a utilitarian can count. The specifically Marxian diagnosis is that an activity has been narrowed: confined to one standard where the producer could command many, sealed against learning, cut off from the social inheritance that would let the producer’s capacities widen through the work itself. Work can be tolerable and still estranged in this sense, and work can be arduous and unestranged, as any demanding practice freely taken up and rich in its own standards will show. The concept earns its keep by making that distinction available, and the distinction is lost the moment species-being is glossed as a synonym for wellbeing.

Species-being and the social individual

The manuscripts contain a second formulation that later readers sometimes set against the first, and the relation between them is worth settling. Alongside the species passages, Marx writes of the individual as a social being, insisting that even activity performed in solitude, the scholar’s work, the writer’s draft, is social in its content and its conditions, since its materials, its language and its very problems are socially given. Some commentators treat the social formulation as an early sketch of the sixth thesis and the species formulation as Feuerbachian baggage, as though Marx kept two anthropologies in 1844 and discarded one in 1845. The texts do not support the rivalry. The social claim specifies the medium in which the species capacities exist; the species claim specifies what those capacities are. An individual cut off from society would not be a purer instance of humanity but a deprived one, because the universality that defines the species life is stocked entirely from social inheritance. Conversely, a society is not a second kind of being floating above its members; it exists in the activities of individuals exercising inherited powers. The two formulations are the same doctrine stated from its two poles, and the sixth thesis, far from cancelling the earlier one, states the social pole with a compression that has misled hasty readers into thinking the other pole was abandoned. Ensembles of relations are not inhabited by abstractions. They are inhabited by beings with needs, capacities and a characteristic form of activity, and a theory that described the relations while denying the relata would not be materialism but a peculiarly empty geometry.

This is also the place to answer a question that arises in nearly every seminar on the subject: whether species-being commits Marx to the view that human beings are naturally good, cooperative or selfless. It commits him to none of these. The conception is about the form of activity and the structure of needs, not about a moral temperament. Competition, domination and cruelty are human activities too, exercised consciously, socially and with great universality of technique, and nothing in the manuscripts requires pretending otherwise. What the conception supplies is not a verdict that people are good but a standard by which arrangements can be judged to frustrate or develop the powers people demonstrably have. A reader who wants Marx to have founded his politics on human sweetness will find the texts uncooperative. A reader who wants him to have founded it on nothing at all will find them equally uncooperative. The foundation is a nature, neither sweet nor sour, whose frustration is a fact of a particular kind: the kind that can be shown, in the organisation of production, rather than merely lamented.

The essentialism charge, examined separately

The critics’ slogan that species-being is unscientific essentialism bundles together three accusations that deserve separate trials, because the concept is guilty of at most one of them and the bundling is what gives the slogan its force. The first accusation is metaphysical: that an essence is a ghostly entity, a thing behind things, and that science has no use for such furniture. Against the Marx of the manuscripts this charge misfires in an instructive way, since the sixth thesis itself, the critics’ own charter, is Marx’s refusal of exactly that picture of essence: no abstraction inherent in each single individual. The essence the continuity reading defends is not an entity. It is a structured set of needs and capacities ascribed to a natural kind, of the same logical type as the ascriptions every science of a living kind makes when it speaks of what an organism requires and what it can do. If that is essentialism, then biology is essentialist in its sleep, and the word has been stretched until it names the practice of characterising kinds at all.

The second accusation is methodological: that a conception of human nature is unfalsifiable, compatible with every observation, since any conduct whatever can be redescribed as the nature expressing or being frustrated. This charge has real bite against lazy uses of the concept, and the honest reply begins by granting that species-being is not a hypothesis in the experimental sense and was never offered as one. It functions in Marx’s work the way the concept of a kind’s characteristic activity functions in any theory with a historical dimension: as the framework within which particular claims, about the effects of the division of labour, the length of the working day, the organisation of machinery, are framed and tested. Geras’s defence of the conception’s legitimacy is careful on exactly this point. A theory of human nature, he argues, is not refuted by the diversity of human conduct, because the theory ascribes needs and capacities, whose expression is always mediated by conditions, and the ascription earns its place by the explanations it organises: why certain frustrations register as injuries across otherwise different cultures, why the expansion of needs follows the expansion of production with such regularity, why no social order has ever had to teach its members to object to being treated as mere instruments for long. Frameworks are judged by fertility and coherence rather than by single experiments, and by that standard the conception has a record to defend rather than an apology to make.

The third accusation is political, and it is the one the anti-humanist tradition cared about most: that human nature talk is the natural home of conservatism, since every established order discovers, on inspection, that its arrangements correspond to the nature of the beings they govern. The historical record lends this charge colour; appeals to nature have defended hierarchies of sex, of race and of station with dreary consistency. But the charge proves the opposite of what its users intend when it is applied to Marx’s conception, because the content of that conception is precisely what the conservative appeals lack. A nature specified as needs that every order must meet and capacities that develop without a fixed ceiling is a standing criticism of any order that starves the needs or caps the development, and it cannot be conscripted to bless an arrangement without emptying it of the features that make it Marx’s. That arguments from nature have been abused is a reason to inspect each such argument’s content, as this article has inspected Marx’s. It is not a reason to prohibit the form, a prohibition that would disarm criticism more thoroughly than it disarms apologetics, since apologetics has other weapons and criticism of frustrated human powers has few.

The tradition that formed around the concept

Concepts have careers as well as meanings, and the career of species-being after Marx explains why a reader now encounters it wearing so many uniforms. The Paris manuscripts were not published in Marx’s lifetime and reached print in full only in 1932, a delay with enormous consequences. Generations of Marxists had formed their understanding without the text in which the concept is founded, and when the manuscripts appeared, they landed in a movement whose official philosophy had hardened around a materialism of laws and stages in which a philosophical anthropology had no place. The manuscripts were therefore received, from the start, as a scandal or as a revelation, depending on the receiver. The tradition that took them as revelation, Marxist humanism, built the interpretation of Marx around alienation and species-being, finding in the early work the standard by which actually existing socialist states, as well as capitalist ones, could be judged and found wanting. That tradition, its major figures and its fate, is surveyed in the account of Marxist humanism, and it matters here for one specific reason: the humanists’ use of the concept was often as loose as the glossaries’, treating species-being as a banner word for human dignity rather than as the precise account of activity the manuscripts give. Loose use by friends did the concept almost as much damage as rejection by opponents, since it confirmed the anti-humanist charge that the term was a vessel for edifying sentiment. The scholarly recovery represented by Geras is distinguished from the older humanism by its austerity: it defends the conception of human nature while declining to build a politics on the banner, and its Marx is a more exact thinker, and a more formidable one, than either the humanists’ prophet or the anti-humanists’ scientist.

The misreadings that cluster around the concept can now be gathered, since the article has supplied the corrections one by one. The flat gloss, species-being as a synonym for human nature in the ordinary sense, fails because the ordinary sense suggests a static inventory, while the concept names a form of activity and the needs and capacities it presupposes. The slogan reading of the sixth thesis fails because it attends to the thesis’s fame rather than to its negations. The claim that Marx rejected human nature after 1845 fails against the German Ideology’s opening premises and the Bentham footnote’s explicit distinction. The claim that the concept is a religious residue fails against the genealogy, in which the term is the instrument of religion’s conversion into social criticism. And the claim that the concept simply disappears fails against its descendants: the architect and the bee at the foundation of the labour process, the social individual in the Grundrisse, the realm of freedom at the close of the system. Each misreading survives by reading one text, or one phase, or one tradition’s account of the matter. The whole corpus, read whole, is the correction, and assembling it in one place has been the purpose of this article from its first paragraph.

Reading the sixth thesis as its author wrote it

Because so much turns on a few sentences, the sentences deserve the treatment usually reserved for legal clauses: a reading that proceeds phrase by phrase and refuses to let any phrase be skipped. The thesis opens by naming its target, and the target is not a doctrine of human nature but a procedure of Feuerbach’s. Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. Marx’s complaint begins only after that achievement is granted, and granting it matters: the resolving of God into humanity is not what the thesis attacks. What it attacks is the next step, in which Feuerbach, having recovered the human essence from its projection, treats that essence as an abstraction inherent in each single individual. The word abstraction does double duty in Marx’s vocabulary of this period, and both senses are active. An abstraction is a product of thought that has been severed from the concrete whole it was drawn from, and it is also, in the Feuerbachian case, a generality that unites individuals only in the mind of the philosopher, an internal and dumb generality, as the thesis calls it, that naturally, which is to say silently and without mediation, links many individuals. Against this the thesis sets its famous counter-formulation: in its reality, the essence is the ensemble of the social relations. The phrase in its reality is the hinge. Marx does not say the essence is nothing, or that the word should be retired. He says where it is real: not inside the single individual as a possession, but in the ensemble of relations in which individuals actually stand, produce, exchange and develop.

Two further observations belong to any careful reading. The first concerns what Feuerbach is said to be compelled to do as a consequence of his error: he must abstract from the historical process, fix the religious sentiment in isolation, and presuppose an abstract, isolated human individual. The criticism is that abstraction from history is the price of the inner essence picture, and the price is charged against Feuerbach, not against the idea of an essence as such. A Marx who believed there was nothing general to say about human beings would have had a shorter complaint available: he could have charged Feuerbach with inventing the essence outright. Instead the charge is that Feuerbach locates it wrongly and freezes it, which presupposes there is something to locate and to freeze. The second observation concerns the word ensemble, which is doing quiet work. An ensemble is not a solvent. Relations are relations among beings of a definite kind, and the kind’s needs and capacities determine which relations are possible, which are necessary, and which register as frustration. Property relations presuppose beings who need objects and can labour. Exchange relations presuppose beings who can communicate standards and recognise equivalents. The thesis’s counter-formulation therefore does not eliminate the relata in favour of the relations; it states the level at which the essence is realised, and a reader must supply, from the rest of the corpus, the beings whose essence it is. Geras’s book is at its most persuasive on exactly this ground, because it shows that the standard reading requires the thesis to perform an elimination the sentence never attempts.

The manuscripts themselves, finally, should be placed accurately in the story, since their physical history shapes what can be claimed from them. The Paris manuscripts of 1844 are unfinished notebooks, drafted in a burst of study as Marx worked through the classical economists, and abandoned without preparation for publication. The species-being analysis occupies the first manuscript’s section on estranged labour, the most finished prose in the collection, and it is surrounded by fragments in which the argument is visibly being built rather than polished. Two consequences follow for method. Arguments from the manuscripts’ silence are weak in both directions: the young Marx did not write a treatise on human nature, and the absence of a developed doctrine there proves neither that he held one in finished form nor that he held nothing. And the estranged labour section’s relative finish is itself evidence, because a writer abandons drafts selectively, and the passages on species-being are the passages where the drafting tightens into something close to publishable argument. The continuity reading does not need the manuscripts to be a system. It needs them to be what they are: the earliest statement of a structure that the later work can then be checked for, and found, at the points where the later work lays its own foundations.

What the concept does in later debates about work

A concept’s descendants can be traced in arguments as well as in texts, and the clearest line of descent from species-being runs through the twentieth century’s debates about the organisation of work. When Harry Braverman, in the 1970s, argued that the management of capitalist production systematically separates conception from execution, transferring the planning of work from the worker to a managerial apparatus, the analysis was presented as an application of Marx’s account of the labour process. Underneath the application sits the manuscripts’ structure entire. Work from which conception has been removed is activity stripped of the conscious direction that defines the species character; the worker who executes another’s plan stands to the architect and the bee exactly as estranged labour said: closer, in the form of the activity, to the animal pole of the contrast. Braverman’s critics, who showed that skill often migrates rather than vanishes and that new capacities form inside apparently degraded processes, were also arguing within the structure, disputing where the frustration of capacities lies rather than whether the frustration of capacities is the right question. A framework that organises both a thesis and its corrections has demonstrated the fertility by which frameworks are judged.

The same structure organises a quieter inheritance in the study of needs. Development economics and welfare philosophy in the later twentieth century repeatedly reinvented, and in the hands of writers such as Amartya Sen explicitly developed, an approach that evaluates social arrangements by the capabilities they make available to people rather than by the commodities they distribute. The resemblance to the Marxian structure, needs and capacities as the standard, arrangements judged by development and frustration, has been noted by scholars on both sides, and the comparison is instructive precisely because it is not an identity: the capability approach is a deliberate construction with its own foundations, and its convergence with parts of the Marxian framework suggests that the framework answers to something durable in the subject matter. Human beings really are beings whose good is bound up with the exercise of developed capacities, and theories that begin there keep finding one another’s footprints. Species-being, on the continuity reading, is Marx’s name for that starting point, reached in 1844 through Feuerbach and defended in the mature work every time the argument asks what production does to the producers.

Does the continuity reading flatten Marx’s development?

A fair worry remains, and it should be faced as a worry about the continuity reading itself rather than about its opponents. If a conception of human nature runs from 1844 to the third volume of Capital, does anything in Marx actually develop, or has the interpreter dissolved a lifetime of intellectual change into a single static doctrine with changing labels? The worry misidentifies what the continuity claim asserts, but it identifies a real interpretive sin that careless continuity readers commit, and distinguishing the claim from the sin is the best way to state the article’s final position on periodisation.

The claim asserts continuity of one structure: the two level conception of human nature, and the standard of free conscious activity by which social forms are judged. Around that structure, nearly everything else in Marx develops, and the developments are among the most dramatic in the history of thought. The mechanism of exploitation, entirely absent from the manuscripts, which speak of estrangement where the mature work speaks of surplus value, is discovered and rebuilt over two decades. The method changes from philosophical criticism to the critique of political economy, with its painstaking reconstruction of categories from the commodity outward. The theory of history acquires its architecture of forces and relations of production. The account of the state, of crisis, of money, of rent: all built, rebuilt and in places abandoned. A continuity of anthropology inside that scale of change is not a flattening. It is the normal shape of a research programme with a stable core, and it is exactly the shape the anti-humanist reading must deny by locating the change at the one point where, on the evidence, the structure holds. The break reading sees the development correctly and misplaces it. What broke in and after 1845 was the framework of Feuerbachian criticism, its vocabulary, its method of resolving essences, its confidence that recognition transforms. What did not break was the conception of the beings whose history the new science was built to explain.

The manuscripts’ own horizon confirms the picture, in a passage of the third manuscript that states the positive side of the doctrine with a completeness the estranged labour section only implies. There Marx describes the supersession of private property as the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, and sketches a condition in which the senses become human senses, educated by the whole history of production, and need itself becomes human need in its developed richness. The passage is often quoted for its lyricism and rarely for its logic. Its logic is the two level conception stated as a historical prospect: the general capacities, of sense, of need, of activity, are constant as the endowment of the kind, and their humanisation, their development into fully social and cultivated forms, is the work of history, obstructed by estrangement and advanced by every enlargement of the social inheritance. To describe that prospect is not to endorse a programme, and this article, bound by the neutrality discipline of the series, reports the doctrine without recruiting for it. What matters for the interpretive question is that the passage exists, that it states the continuity structure inside the early work itself, and that its closing vision, a humanity whose powers are developed as an end in itself, is the same vision with which the third volume of Capital ends its account of freedom. The arc from the third manuscript to the realm of freedom is the longest single arc in Marx’s writing, and species-being is the line that draws it.

The body, nature and the metabolism

One further strand of the founding text deserves development, because it connects species-being to the strand of the later work that has attracted the most new readers in the environmental debates, and because it shows the conception operating at its most material. The claim that nature is humanity’s inorganic body is not a metaphor in the manuscripts’ usage. It states the material constitution of the species life: human beings live by a continuous exchange with the world outside their skins, taking in food, air, water and materials, returning products and waste, and this exchange is not an accident that befalls an otherwise self-sufficient being but the very medium of its existence. Labour is the exchange become conscious and purposeful, the metabolism conducted under the direction of an imagined result. From this it follows that the human relation to nature is internal to the conception of human nature itself, and that damage to the terms of the exchange is damage to the species life, a conclusion the estranged labour analysis draws for the worker’s separation from the land and that the mature work draws again, in cooler terms, in the analysis of the labour process as a process between man and nature in which man mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. The sentence just paraphrased stands in Capital, in the chapter that also houses the architect and the bee, and its presence there is one more instance of the pattern this article has documented throughout: at the foundations of the mature system, where the generic character of labour must be specified before its capitalist form can be analysed, the specifications are the manuscripts’ specifications, translated into the language of the economics and carrying the same conception of the beings involved.

The pattern, by this point, has been exhibited often enough to support a general statement about how to read Marx on any contested concept, and the statement is worth making explicitly because it is the method this article has practised and the method the evidence table was built to serve. When a term disappears from a long corpus, ask not only where the term went but whether the work the term did is still being done, and by what. Terms are cheap to retire; structures are expensive, because arguments lean on them. Species-being as a word retires early. The work it did, specifying what human activity is, what human beings need, what standard social forms are judged by and what the producers’ frustration consists in, is done in the mature work by the analysis of the labour process, by the theory of needs and their historical development, by the Bentham footnote’s two levels and by the realm of freedom’s closing standard. An interpretation that tracks the word will report a disappearance. An interpretation that tracks the work will report a transformation. The texts, read whole, support the second report, and the difference between the two reports is the whole of the dispute with which this article began.

The word before Marx: Hegel and the genus

The genealogy of species-being does not begin with Feuerbach, and one step further back clarifies what both men thought the term could do. In Hegel’s philosophy, the genus, die Gattung, is the universal that lives in its individuals and reproduces itself through them, and Hegel’s treatment of animal life gives the genus a process: individuals are born, strive, mate and die, and through their perishing the genus maintains itself as the power over them. The individual animal, for Hegel, is inadequate to its genus, and its death is the genus asserting itself against the inadequacy. Feuerbach took the structure and inverted its valuation. What Hegel treated as the universal’s triumph over the finite individual, Feuerbach treated as the individual’s rightful wealth held in alienated form: the genus is not a power above human beings but their own essence, whose perfections they should recognise as theirs. Marx then performed the second inversion, relocating the drama from thought and feeling into production. The species asserts itself, on his account, neither in the individual’s death nor in the individual’s contemplation, but in the individual’s activity, and it is frustrated not by finitude as such but by determinate social arrangements that can, in principle, be changed. Tracking the term through its three owners is the shortest way to see what is distinctive in Marx’s version: the genus becomes historical, practical and corrigible, an essence whose biography is the history of production itself. It also explains why the term resists clean translation. Gattungswesen carries this whole itinerary in two syllables of German, and species-being in English is a label for the itinerary as much as for a thing.

Consciousness inside free conscious activity

The middle term of the founding definition repays the same slow treatment as the others, because consciousness in Marx’s usage is more specific than awareness. The architect and bee passage fixes the canonical meaning: human activity is conscious in that its result is present in imagination before it is present in material, so that the producer works to a plan that can be criticised, improved and taught. Three consequences distinguish this from the thinner claim that human beings think while they act. First, the plan makes the activity corrigible in mid-course: the maker can compare the emerging object with the imagined one and revise either, which is the root of skill as something cumulative rather than instinctive. Second, the plan makes the activity communicable: an imagined result can be described, drawn, specified and handed to others, which is the root of cooperation, of teaching and of every division of labour in which conception is shared rather than monopolised. Third, the plan makes the activity judgeable by the maker: the producer can stand back from the finished object and find it good or wanting against the standard held in advance, which is the root of the aesthetic dimension the laws of beauty passage names. Estrangement attacks all three consequences at once. The worker who neither sets the plan nor may revise it, whose activity is specified by others and whose product is judged by standards he has no part in forming, is conscious in the thin sense throughout the shift and deprived of consciousness in Marx’s sense at every moment of it. The definition’s middle term is therefore not a compliment to the species. It is a criterion, and like every criterion in the manuscripts, it is built to register a specific and otherwise hard to name injury.

Freedom inside free conscious activity

The first term of the definition is the most contested, because freedom is a word with many landlords. In the manuscripts it has a precise and limited sense that should be protected from grander imports. Activity is free, in the founding sense, when it is not compelled by immediate physical need, when the producer produces in the absence of the hunger’s direct command and can therefore produce according to the standards of the object and the choices of the producer. Freedom here is not a political condition, not a set of rights, and not an absence of all constraint: the maker remains constrained by the material, by the inherent standard, by the plan. It is the specific freedom of activity that has become its own end in the moment of its exercise, the freedom visible in every workshop and studio where making continues past the point need would have stopped it. This limited sense explains the manuscripts’ otherwise puzzling claim that human beings produce truly only in freedom from need, a claim that is not a sneer at necessary labour but a definition of the pole toward which the species character points. It also explains the architecture of the mature system’s ending, in which the realm of freedom begins beyond the sphere of necessity while resting on it, and the shortening of the working day figures as freedom’s material prerequisite. Between 1844 and the third volume, the word freedom in this construction does not change its meaning. What changes is the machinery around it: the young Marx asserts the pole, the mature Marx calculates the conditions, the length of the day above all, under which a society could move its centre of gravity toward it. Readers deciding between break and continuity might weigh that constancy of meaning against the change of vocabulary and judge which is the deeper fact about the work.

Does species-being found an ethics?

A question that follows naturally from everything so far, and that students meet as soon as they take the concept seriously, is whether species-being gives Marx a moral theory by the back door. If there is a human nature, and social forms can frustrate it, then the frustration looks like a wrong and not merely a malfunction, and the whole apparatus of moral judgement seems to follow. The scholarly literature divides instructively here, and the division connects this article to the wider argument about Marx and justice that runs elsewhere in this series. One line of interpretation holds that Marx’s criticism is indeed moral at its root, resting on the flourishing and frustration of human powers, whatever his polemics against moral vocabulary. Another holds that the criticism is better understood as resting on freedom and self development as goods internal to his account of history, not on a theory of right. For the purposes of understanding species-being, the precise resolution matters less than the shared premise the dispute reveals: both sides conduct the argument on the ground of the human powers and their fate, because that is the ground the concept supplies. A Marxism with no conception of human nature would have to conduct the argument elsewhere, on consequences or on class interest alone, and the fact that the tradition’s deepest normative disputes keep returning to the powers and needs of human beings is further evidence of where the foundation lies. The concept does not dictate a complete ethics, and readers should distrust any presentation in which it quietly does. It supplies the standard of flourishing against which arrangements are measured, and leaves the construction of duties, rights and priorities to arguments that must be made separately and can be contested separately.

What the ensemble of relations changes for the individual

Return, finally, to the practical difference the sixth thesis makes, because the abstraction reading is sometimes mistaken for a purely scholarly rescue, as though it saved a doctrine by narrowing it. The difference is real and it cuts in a direction readers can use. If the essence were an inner possession of the isolated individual, then estrangement would be a kind of theft of private property in the soul, and its remedy would be a recovery of what each person already owns in themselves, an inward emancipation that social change might assist but could not constitute. On the thesis’s account, there is nothing inside, held in reserve, to recover. What a person is, is enacted in relations, and so the frustration of the species powers is a property of the relations themselves: of how production is owned and directed, of how individuals are set toward one another, of what the accumulated inheritance is used to develop. Remedy, on this account, cannot be inward, because the injury is not. It must be a transformation of the ensemble, after which different individuals, because differently related, become possible. This is the sense in which the sixth thesis radicalises rather than abandons the manuscripts. The manuscripts locate the standard in the species life; the thesis locates the species life in the relations; and the mature work then analyses the relations with an apparatus the manuscripts never possessed. The line of descent is from a standard, through its location, to its science. Break readers see a severed rope. Continuity readers see a rope being paid out. The evidence table’s five exhibits, the architect and the bee, the footnote on Bentham and the realm of freedom are the strands by which the second judgement is reached, and any reader who re-examines them in order can test whether the strands hold.

Species-being and the division of labour

The German Ideology adds to the anthropology a mechanism the manuscripts had only gestured toward, and no account of species-being is complete without it, because the division of labour is the institution through which the frustration of the species powers is organised in ordinary economic life. The manuscripts locate estrangement in private property and in the sale of labour. The work of 1845 and 1846 asks the prior question: how does activity come to be split so that each individual is confined to a fragment of the species activity and confronts the rest as an alien whole? Its answer is that the division of labour fixes individuals in exclusive spheres of activity, so that a person becomes a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman or a critic and must remain so to live, while the total activity of the society, the combined universality of all those fragments, exists only as a social power standing above the individuals whose activity it is. Read against the founding definition, the injury is exactly specifiable. Universality is the species character; the division of labour privatises universality to the level of the whole and denies it to every member. The whole produces by every standard while each producer is confined to one, and the confinement, not the effort, is the estrangement.

The same text contains the corpus’s most famous counter-image, the passage imagining a condition in which nobody has an exclusive sphere, in which a person might hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic as an identity. Scholars handle the passage with care, noting its place in a manuscript whose layers and deletions are themselves debated, and it should not be inflated into a programme. Its function in the argument about human nature is narrower and sounder. It shows what the authors took the frustration to consist in: not in work, not in variety of appetite, but in the fixation of identity by function, the reduction of a being defined by openness to every standard into the occupant of a single standard for life. The image is the species standard stated as biography. Whoever reads it as a holiday brochure has missed that its subject is the same as the manuscripts’ subject, the shape of a human life measured against the universality the species makes possible.

The concept tested against hard cases

A standard that applies only to the cases it was built from is a description of those cases wearing a title. Species-being claims more, and its claim can be tested by carrying it to kinds of activity the manuscripts did not discuss and asking whether the gauge still reads intelligibly. Care work is the hardest case and the most instructive. The labour of tending children, the sick and the old is conscious and skilled, saturated with judgement about standards internal to its object, and it is organised in most societies partly by love, partly by obligation and partly by wages, in mixtures that resist the manuscripts’ categories. The gauge reads the case without strain, because its questions are formal: whether the carer directs the activity or executes another’s specification, whether the capacities exercised are developed or stunted by the arrangement, whether the activity is treated by its social organisation as the expression of a person or as a cost to be minimised. Where the answers are bleak, the concept names the bleakness as a frustration of the same powers the factory frustrates, which is a finding, not a metaphor, and it extends the theory’s reach over the large share of human labour that produces no object at all.

Play and science test the standard from the other side, as activities in which the species character appears in comparatively unimpeded form. Play is production’s mirror: activity undertaken freely, consciously, under standards internal to itself, for no end beyond its own exercise, and its universality across human societies, and its emergence in children before any instruction in it, is the kind of evidence a conception of human nature should be able to welcome rather than explain away. Science, in its developed form, is the plan held in imagination become collective: results anticipated, criticised, revised and taught, with standards of validity that no individual’s need dictates. Marx’s own treatment of science in the Grundrisse, as a power of the species accumulated in the general intellect, belongs to this register. The point of both cases for the interpretive dispute is that they show the standard is not a disguised complaint about factories. It identifies a form of activity wherever it occurs, in the nursery, the laboratory and the playing field as in the workshop, and estrangement is simply the name for the social arrangements under which that form is systematically denied in the activity by which people earn their lives. A conception that can organise this range of cases without changing its terms between them has earned the title of a theory of human nature, whatever else may be said against it.

Language: the quiet proof of the species character

One capacity in the Marxian structure is so pervasive that the texts rarely pause over it, yet it may be the most persuasive exhibit for the whole conception, because its species character is undeniable and its mode of existence is exactly the one the sixth thesis describes. Language is not an abstraction inherent in each single individual. No individual invents it, owns it or could exercise the capacity for it in isolation, and yet it is not a free floating relation either: it exists in beings of a definite kind, whose organs, brains and sociality make them language capable, and it develops historically at a pace no biology explains. The German Ideology calls language practical consciousness and treats it as arising from the need of intercourse with others, which places it precisely at the intersection the abstraction reading defends: a general capacity of the kind, realised only in the ensemble of relations, modified in every epoch and community, and impossible to locate inside the isolated individual without absurdity. A critic who accepts that human beings have a nature in the thin sense language requires, a shared endowment expressed only socially and historically, has accepted the logical form of the continuity reading, and the remaining argument is about how many other capacities share that form. Marx’s answer, across the corpus, is that production does: the same structure of endowment, social realisation and historical modification governs the activity by which the species makes its world, which is why the sixth thesis, aimed at a picture, leaves the nature standing.

The senses and their education

The third manuscript contains the doctrine’s most original extension, and it deserves retrieval because it shows the conception of human nature operating at a level trait lists never reach: the level of perception itself. Marx argues there that the senses have a history. The ear that appreciates music, the eye that finds form beautiful, the palate educated by a cuisine, are not biological constants but cultivated organs, and their cultivation is the work of the whole previous history of production, which creates the objects to which educated senses correspond. The dealer in minerals, his example runs, sees the commercial value of the stone but not its beauty, having no mineralogical sense, because his activity has educated one sense and starved the others. The implication for the theory of human nature is exact and bracing. Even the apparently natural equipment with which individuals meet the world is a social and historical product, so that the two levels of the Bentham footnote penetrate each other: the human nature in general includes the capacity for sensory cultivation, and every epoch’s modification reaches down into what its members can literally perceive. Estrangement, correspondingly, can be specified at this level too, as the narrowing of the senses to the single sense of possession, and the manuscripts’ claim that private property has made human beings stupid and blind to everything but having is, under the rhetoric, a precise application of the framework. A nature that includes educable senses cannot be a fixed inventory. It can only be a structure of capacities whose development is the biography of the species, which is the conception this article has defended from its first exhibit to its last.

Why the nature must be historical

It remains to explain, in positive terms, why Marx needed the nature to be historical rather than merely allowing that it is, because the abstraction reading can otherwise sound like a compromise stitched together to save appearances, half essence and half relations. The necessity is internal to the theory of history. A science of social forms must explain how genuinely new needs, capacities and forms of individuality arise: how beings who once needed nothing beyond subsistence come to need education, leisure, music and political voice, and to be injured by their absence as surely as by hunger. Two explanations are barred. The needs cannot be read off a fixed essence, since the essence, fixed, would contain only what the earliest humans required. They cannot be invented from nothing by each epoch’s relations, since relations among beings explain the development of powers only if the beings bring powers that are developable in those directions rather than others. The theory therefore requires exactly the structure the continuity reading attributes to it: an endowment general enough to ground development and open enough to be transformed by it, a nature whose content at any moment is the sediment of its own history. This is why the strongest form of the abstraction reading presents the sixth thesis not as a retreat from the manuscripts but as their completion. The manuscripts state the endowment through the analysis of one activity, production, at the moment of its estrangement. The thesis states the endowment’s mode of existence, in relations, against the picture of it as an inner possession. The German Ideology then builds the history on the two together, and the mature economics inherits the whole construction. Seen in that order, the sequence from 1844 to 1845 is not a guillotine but a joint, the place where a philosophical anthropology is articulated into a theory of history without surrendering the anthropology. Interpretations differ on many things in Marx. On the textual facts assembled in this article, the joint reading accounts for more of the corpus, with fewer passages explained away, than the guillotine reading it replaces, and accounting for the corpus is the only tribunal either reading can appeal to.

The manuscripts in their moment

The founding text was written in Paris in the spring and summer of 1844, by a twenty six year old exile immersed in his first systematic study of political economy, reading Smith, Ricardo, Say and Mill with a notebook open and Feuerbach’s method in his hands. The circumstances explain both the text’s power and its peculiar form. Marx came to the economists with a question they did not ask: not how wages, profit and rent are determined, but what the system they describe does to the human beings inside it, and he found the economists themselves supplying the facts from which his answer is built, since their own accounts concede that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and that labour produces palaces and hovels in a single motion. Species-being is the standard he brings to those facts, the yardstick that converts the economists’ descriptions into a criticism. Knowing the moment also disciplines the reading. The manuscripts are a young scholar’s workshop, in which a philosophical inheritance is being tested against a new science at speed, and they should be read as the record of that testing rather than as either scripture or juvenilia. The anti-humanist reading treats them as the second and the pious reading as the first. The continuity reading treats them as what they are: the first draft of a framework whose later drafts are called the Theses, The German Ideology, the Grundrisse and Capital, revised at every stage and recognisable at every stage. Frameworks, unlike slogans, are allowed to have drafts.

The negative case: the denial of an object

The standard also reads, with uncomfortable precision, the condition opposite to estranged labour, in which the species activity is frustrated not by being organised against the producer but by being denied an object altogether. A being defined by free conscious production, whose powers exist in their exercise, is injured by enforced idleness in a way no theory of mere income loss can capture, and the literature of unemployment, from the classic community studies of the 1930s onward, records the injury in its characteristic shape: not only poverty but the collapse of time structure, of social contact, of the sense that one’s activity is needed, a cluster of deprivations that income replacement alone demonstrably fails to repair. The manuscripts predict the shape. If labour is the species life, then exclusion from labour, in a society where labour is also the gateway to every social inheritance, is exclusion from the medium in which the nature is realised, and the excluded person is estranged from the species by the door being shut rather than by the room being hostile. Marx’s framework holds both injuries in one account, the worker estranged within activity and the worker estranged by its denial, because both are specifications of a single relation between a being and its characteristic activity. A theory of human nature that could register only one of them would be the poorer, and the fact that the 1844 framework registers both, decades before either became a standard topic of social research, is a final piece of evidence for the fertility by which frameworks, as this article has argued throughout, are properly judged.

For students and exam candidates

The sixth thesis is a standard essay trap, and it catches candidates in a predictable way. The question invites a verdict on whether Marx believed in human nature, the candidate quotes the ensemble of the social relations as though it were a verdict, and the script concludes that Marx rejected the whole idea in 1845. That answer earns the marks reserved for the standard reading stated without defence. The stronger answer runs the trap in reverse. State the standard reading fairly, name its anti-humanist pedigree, and then deploy the abstraction reading: the thesis denies that the essence is an abstraction inherent in the isolated individual, and a denial of that picture is not a denial of a nature. Support the move with the two exhibits markers are looking for, the opening premises of The German Ideology and the Bentham footnote’s distinction between human nature in general and human nature as modified in each epoch. Define species-being by activity rather than by traits, use the architect and the bee to show the definition surviving into Capital, and concede the one true fact on the other side, the recession of the vocabulary. A script that concedes that much and still lands its verdict reads as scholarship rather than as advocacy, which is what the top band describes.

For teachers and seminar leaders

Species-being cannot be taught responsibly without a term of Feuerbach behind it, because students who meet the concept without the projection argument experience it as an arbitrary piece of jargon and file it accordingly. Begin with the Essence of Christianity in miniature: the species perfections gathered into God, the believer impoverished in proportion. Then perform the relocation in front of the class, gear by gear, until the class can see capital occupying the position God occupied, with the single decisive difference that the new projection lives in production and cannot be dissolved by insight. The sixth thesis then arrives as a problem the students are equipped to have, rather than as a slogan to memorise. A productive seminar exercise sets the two readings against the same five exhibits from the evidence table and requires each group to argue the reading it privately rejects, since the abstraction reading is only understood once its opponent has been made as strong as it can be. Close by asking where the concept’s standard could be applied without anachronism, and insist that answers name an activity and its frustration rather than a mood.

For researchers, historians, and journalists

For researchers, the evidence table in this article is best treated as a literature review compressed into one object, and its gaps are its most useful feature. Each cell in the two interpretation columns represents a position that must be documented from the secondary literature before it is attributed, and the final column’s verdicts are judgements to be tested against the editions, not findings to be cited. Three checks discipline work in this area. First, translation: the argument turns on words such as Gattungswesen, Wesen and ensemble, and any claim built on an English rendering should be verified against the German, since the abstraction reading in particular leans on the scope of Marx’s negations, which translation can widen or narrow. Second, the notebook status of the Theses: Engels published them in 1888 as an appendix, describing them as hurriedly scribbled notes, and arguments that rest a periodisation on their exact wording should acknowledge the textual status explicitly rather than treating the theses as a published manifesto. Third, the Bentham footnote varies in placement and numbering between editions of Capital, and citations should name the edition used. For journalists, the discipline is simpler and stricter. Species-being is not a synonym for human dignity, for authenticity, or for the proposition that people dislike their jobs, and copy that uses it as one will misinform readers while borrowing an authority the concept does not lend. Used accurately, the term identifies a specific claim: that human beings are characterised by free conscious production, and that Marx, on the strongest reading of his whole corpus, never stopped believing it.

Conclusion: the standard that stayed

The question this article set out to answer was whether the sixth thesis on Feuerbach abolishes human nature in Marx. The answer, on the evidence of the whole corpus, is that it abolishes a picture of human nature, the abstraction inherent in the isolated individual, and relocates the nature in the relations where alone it is realised. Species-being, the founding name of that nature, is the character of a being whose life activity is free, conscious, universal and social, whose needs and capacities develop with the production that satisfies and creates them, and whose frustration under estranged arrangements is therefore a measurable injury rather than a mood. The vocabulary receded. The standard stayed, in the labour process chapter’s definition of human work, in a footnote’s two levels, and in the final volume’s realm of freedom. Readers who hold the abstraction reading can follow the whole arc without amputating either end of it, and the arc, held whole, is the strongest reason for thinking the reading right.

That is also why the concept repays the attention this article has given it, beyond the needs of any single examination or dispute. Species-being is the point at which Marx’s work declares what it is about at the deepest level: not the movement of abstractions, not even the fate of a class considered as an economic category, but the fate of a kind of being, whose members make their world consciously and together, and whose arrangements can be asked, with a straight face and a precise standard, whether they let that making flourish or force it to consume itself. Every other concept in the system can be expounded without answering that question. The system as a whole cannot, and the manuscripts, for all their youth, knew it first.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does species-being mean?

Species-being, Gattungswesen in the German, is Marx’s name for the character of human life activity: human beings are species-beings because they make their own kind and their own activity an object of thought and will, producing freely, consciously and universally rather than by instinct under the pressure of need alone. The term does not denote a hidden substance inside each person. It denotes the form of the activity by which the species lives, together with the needs and capacities that form of activity presupposes and develops. Because the essence is located in activity, it can be exercised well or badly, developed or frustrated, and that possibility is what allows the concept to serve as the standard against which alienation is measured throughout the early writings and, in transformed vocabulary, in the mature work as well.

Q: Where did Marx get the idea of species-being?

Marx took the term and its basic structure from Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Essence of Christianity of 1841 argued that the perfections attributed to God are the human species-essence projected outward and contemplated as an alien being. Marx kept Feuerbach’s machinery, an essence of the kind externalised into a power that confronts its source, and relocated every part of it. The essence became free conscious production rather than reason, will and love contemplated in abstraction. The alien power became capital and the product of labour rather than God. And the remedy became the transformation of production relations rather than the recognition Feuerbach trusted. Behind Feuerbach stands Hegel, in whose philosophy the genus already functions as the universal living through its individuals, so the concept reached Marx with a two stage history that his own version completes by making the species historical and practical.

Q: Did Marx believe in human nature?

Yes, on the strongest reading of the whole corpus. Marx believed in a human nature in general, specifiable through the needs and capacities human beings share as a natural and social kind, and he held that this nature is always modified in the forms particular epochs give it. The evidence is cumulative. The German Ideology opens its account of history with premises about living human individuals and their physical organisation. The Grundrisse treats the development of human needs and powers as internal to the analysis of capital. And a footnote in Capital states the position as a rule: whoever would judge human acts must deal first with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. What Marx rejected was not human nature but a picture of it, the abstract essence sealed inside the isolated individual.

Q: Did Marx abandon species-being in his later work?

The word largely disappears; the conception does not. Gattungswesen belongs to the Feuerbachian vocabulary of the manuscripts, and as Marx rebuilt his method for the critique of political economy the term was retired along with that vocabulary. The structure it named, however, reappears at the foundations of the mature work. The labour process chapter of Capital defines human labour by the conscious anticipation of its result, contrasting the worst architect favourably with the best of bees, which is the manuscripts’ free conscious activity restated as an economic axiom. The Grundrisse develops the theme as the cultivation of the social individual and the expansion of human powers. The third volume closes the system with the realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself. Abandonment would require the later work to stop leaning on these structures. At the load-bearing points, it leans.

Q: What does free conscious activity mean?

Free conscious activity is the manuscripts’ compressed definition of the species character of humanity, and each term marks a distinct feature. Activity locates the essence in production, in what human beings do, rather than in a contemplative property they possess. Conscious marks the presence of the result in imagination before it exists in material, so that the producer works to a plan that can be criticised, revised and taught, as the architect differs from the bee. Free marks emancipation from the direct command of physical need: human beings produce when need is absent, and most characteristically in that freedom. Together the three terms describe making that is self directed, planned and undertaken for ends beyond survival, and they supply the criterion by which estranged labour, compelled, other directed and reduced to a means of survival, registers as a frustration of the species character.

Q: How does species-being relate to alienation?

Species-being is the standard and alienation is the measurement. The four relations of estranged labour in the manuscripts are each defined as a determinate failure of the species life: the product confronts the producer as alien, so objectified activity enriches an external power; the activity itself is coerced and other directed, so it loses the marks of free conscious production; the species life is thereby inverted into a mere means of individual survival, which is the third relation and the one in which the concept appears explicitly; and individuals are set against one another as rivals, which is the fourth. Without the standard, the four relations would be a list of workplace complaints. With it, they form a derivation showing how one disorder, the frustration of the characteristic human activity, ramifies through product, process, species and society. The concept is therefore not a companion theme to alienation but its measuring instrument.

Q: Is species-being a religious or a philosophical idea?

It is a philosophical idea with a religious chapter in its biography, and confusing the biography with the doctrine is the commonest error in this area. The term reached Marx through Feuerbach’s criticism of religion, where the species-essence was the key to explaining God as humanity’s projected nature. Marx’s use reverses the direction of the analysis: instead of explaining a religious object, the concept explains production, property and the worker’s relation to the product, and it functions as an instrument of social criticism. Nothing in the manuscripts asks for worship, reverence or faith, and the standard the concept supplies is drawn from the observed forms of human activity rather than from any revelation. The most accurate description is that species-being is a philosophical anthropology, a claim about what human beings are and do, forged inside an argument about religion and then turned to purposes its inventor did not intend.

Q: What does producing according to the laws of beauty mean?

The phrase completes the manuscripts’ contrast between human and animal production. The animal forms things by the single standard of its own species and under the compulsion of need. The human producer, who can apply the inherent standard of every kind of object, is thereby able to form things by a standard that is neither need nor utility: the rightness of the thing’s own form, which Marx calls the laws of beauty. The claim is that aesthetic making is not decoration added to production once necessity is served, but a signature of the species activity itself, visible wherever making outruns need and obeys the object’s measure. Decorated tools and vessels from the earliest strata of the archaeological record are its standing evidence. Within the theory, the passage widens free conscious activity beyond the factory and prepares the mature work’s vision of human powers developed as an end in themselves.

Q: Does the sixth thesis on Feuerbach reject human nature?

No. It rejects a way of picturing human nature, and the distinction is the most consequential piece of close reading in the Marx literature. The thesis denies that the human essence is an abstraction inherent in each single individual, an internal and silent generality linking people only in the philosopher’s mind. It then locates the essence, in its reality, in the ensemble of the social relations. Neither move denies that human beings, as a kind, have needs, capacities and a characteristic form of activity. Norman Geras made the point canonical in Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend in 1983, showing that a criticism of a conception of a thing is not a denial of the thing. The later corpus confirms the reading, since the mature Marx continues to ascribe general needs and powers to human beings and states the two level view, nature in general and nature as historically modified, in his own voice.

Q: Why do critics say species-being is unscientific?

The charge, in its strong Althusserian form, is that a philosophical anthropology of free conscious activity is a normative ideal masquerading as a description: it defines humanity by an activity most labour fails to exhibit, it cannot be derived from the analysis of production, and it judges social forms by their distance from the ideal rather than explaining them by their laws of motion. On this view Marx’s science begins where the anthropology ends, in 1845. The charge has force against careless uses of the concept, and the vocabulary’s recession in the mature work is a fact its defenders must concede. Its weakness is that the standard it condemns is drawn from observed forms of activity, that the mature theory continues to rely on the definition of human labour at its foundations, and that the alternative, a social science with no characterisation of its human objects at all, is not obviously more scientific than the framework it would replace.

Q: How does species-being differ from a fixed list of human traits?

A trait list is static and disputatious: it proposes that human beings are selfish, or cooperative, or aggressive, and then argues about the entries. Species-being names no temperament at all. It specifies a form of activity, free conscious universal production, together with the needs and capacities that activity presupposes and the social relations in which alone it exists. The content of the developed needs and capacities is historical and open: new powers appear with new production, and the senses themselves are educated by the world production builds. The conception is therefore better pictured as a structure with two levels, a general endowment of the kind and its determinate development in each epoch, than as an inventory. This is also why it resists the folk conclusions usually drawn from human nature talk. It entails neither natural selfishness nor natural selflessness, and arrangements are judged by what they do to the powers, not deduced from a temperament.

Q: What should a student cite when an essay question asks about Marx’s view of human nature?

Cite the texts that decide the question rather than summaries of them. The core exhibits are the estranged labour section of the Paris manuscripts, for the definition of the species character as free conscious activity; the sixth thesis on Feuerbach, read for what its negations actually negate; the opening premises of The German Ideology, for living individuals, their organisation and their needs as the first premise of history; the Bentham footnote in the first volume of Capital, for the distinction between human nature in general and human nature as modified in each epoch; and the architect and bee passage in the labour process chapter, for the definition operating inside the mature economics. The secondary citation that organises them is Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, from 1983. An answer built from these exhibits, with the concession about the vocabulary’s recession stated plainly, covers both readings and judges between them on evidence.

Q: Why do animals produce only under need in Marx’s contrast?

Because the contrast is an analytical device rather than a piece of zoology. Marx needs a limit case in which production appears stripped of the features he takes to define the human form: production driven by immediate physical need, executed by an inherited pattern, confined to the standard of the producer’s own species, and yielding a product inseparable from the producer’s body. Set against that narrow case, human production shows its distinguishing marks by difference: freedom from need’s direct command, the plan held in imagination, the universality of standards, and the product standing free of the maker. The argument would survive corrections from animal behaviour research, since clever planning or decoration in another species would complicate the letter of the 1844 text without dissolving the distinction between activity governed by instinct and need and activity that has become conscious, self directed and an end in itself. Marx is comparing forms of activity, not awarding prizes to species.

Q: How does the passage on the laws of beauty connect species-being to art?

The connection runs through the definition of the activity itself. If the species character is production that is free, conscious and universal, then making that obeys the inherent standard of its object and outruns necessity is the species activity in one of its purest forms, and art is that form institutionalised: activity valued by the rightness of the thing made rather than by the need it serves. Marx’s phrase about forming things according to the laws of beauty therefore places aesthetic production inside the essence rather than among its luxuries, and it predicts the place art occupies in the mature vision, where the development of human powers as an end in itself is the content of freedom beyond necessity. For the study of Marx’s aesthetics the passage is foundational but should be handled precisely. It establishes that art is a signature of unestranged activity. It does not by itself supply a theory of artistic value, of genres, or of criticism, and presentations that expand it into one go beyond the text.

Q: What should a researcher check before attributing an essence doctrine to the later Marx?

Check four things. First, the level of the claim: the later Marx’s doctrine, on the continuity reading, is a two level conception of needs and capacities, not the Feuerbachian vocabulary of 1844, and attributing the vocabulary to Capital misstates the position as badly as denying the conception. Second, the textual basis: rest the attribution on passages where the later work lays foundations, the labour process analysis, the Bentham footnote, the Grundrisse on the social individual, the realm of freedom passage, rather than on stray phrases. Third, the editions and translations, since several arguments in this field turn on the scope of negations and on words such as Wesen and Gattung, whose English renderings vary. Fourth, the counter evidence: the recession of the vocabulary and the genuine methodological break with Feuerbachian criticism must be stated and absorbed, as the abstraction reading absorbs them. An attribution that survives those four checks is scholarship. One that skips them is allegiance.