Marx and Engels on human production.

As I indicated in Part 2 of this extended article, in fact I am confident that by Karl Marx studying Epicurus this ancient elite character could not have helped him to anticipate or understand what would ecologically and climatically be occuring in the 20th and 21st centuries. I therefore find it far more sensible and useful to critically study Karl Marx, because although a) he in addition to Adam Smith, provided later generations with one of the most thorough and detailed analyses of the capitalist mode of production which is the mode which still dominates and determines how humanity socio-economically relates to the biosphere, and b) because some ‘Marxists’ in good faith are still relying on Marx’s detailed sociological researches to help them understand and solve the biological and ecological problems now facing humanity. But of course, ‘faith’ of any kind, good or bad was an anathema to Marx and should be so for any revolutionary-humanist. Reliable evidence and careful scrutiny is what is needed. In his extensive notes (published as the Grundrisse) prior to the completion of his major three volume work on economics known as Das Capital, Marx indicated his focuss. He wrote;

“The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [ Stamm ]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clans…..All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society.”.”(Grundrisse. Introduction. Emphasis added. RR.)

This extract makes clear that Marx’s starting point was anthropocentrically focussed, because he asserts that the ‘greater whole’ to which the individual human being is dependent upon and belongs to, is not biological nature, but sociological humanity (i.e. specific human societies). As with the bourgeois economists, that he had studied at length, Marx’s starting point was the production of necessities, through a specific form of human society. Therefore for Marx, the biological realm of nature, (in his studies and conclusions at the time) was just something seperate to humanity, from which useful aspects of it are appropriated by socially organised individuals. Marx, at that particular time was of course commencing a polemical critique of the capitalist mode of production, not a study of life on earth, consequently this anthropocentric focus continues when later in Capital Volume 1, he wrote;

“The soil (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in the virgin state in which it supplies man with necessities or the means of subsistence ready to hand, exists independently of him, and is the universal subject of human labour. All those things which labour merely separates from immediate connexion with their environment are subjects of labour spontaneously provided by Nature”. (MARX. Capital vol 1. Emphasis added RR)

It is clear from the first sentence that the distinction and relationship between humanity and nature is still being imagined by Marx in the form of two realms of independent existence. On the one hand – a) sociologically organised humanity and on the other, b) biologically organised nature. According to Marx, the realm of nature (soil and water) simply supplied the realm of mankind with necessities for their labour. For Marx, ‘nature’ only added value to agricultural production and not to humanities general existence or to all humanities manufacturing processes. To Marx, the act of human labour merely separated natural things from their immediate connection with nature. The fact that nature in the form of different species oxygenated the air and provided the organic base-line materials which become the ‘things’ which humans and life in general need to survive, are entirely missing from this anthropocentrically focussed world perspective. For example, writing about the rent obtained from agriculturally productive land, Marx supports the points he is making in Capital Volume 2, by quoting Adam Smith directly and extensively;

“This rent may be considered as the produce of those powers of nature the use of which the landlord lends to the farmer. It is greater or smaller according to the supposed extent of those powers, or, in other words, according to the supposed, natural or improved fertility of the the land. It is the work of nature which remains after deducting or compensating everything which can be regarded as the work of man. It is seldom less than a fourth, and frequently more than a third of the whole produce. No equal quantity of productive labour employed in manufacture can ever occasion so great a reproduction. In them nature does nothing; man does it all ; and the reproduction must always be in proportion to the strength of the agents that occasion it. (Capital Volume 2, chapter 19, section 1. page 363. Emphasis added.RR)

Really! Nature does nothing and man does it all? Does the human species transform natural gasses, from one form to another by photosynthesis as the specialist cells do in plants; or does human species create the initial food chains that combine plant species with the suns energy that plant based chloroplast cells help metabolise in photosynthetic plants and transform this result into edible vegetable materials? These are after all, are the base-line nutrition sources that support all life forms which continue all the way up to the top carnivores, which feed on animals living on grasses and leaves!

Furthermore, nature in the form of the minute prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells are the basis of everything living in the past and present; and their life-cycle productions, although minute and unseen, is continuous. Indeed, non-human biological species do nearly everything that is not immediately inorganic! As will be pointed out later, Marx of course was either unable, due to lack of knowledge, or unwilling to criticise this anthropocentric aspect of Smith’s analysis. In fact his only criticism of Smilth within this chapter is the fact that Smith just considered simple reproduction and not reproduction on “an extended scale”.

So what was being articulated by Marx, in the above cases was a commonly held 19th and early 20th century anthropocentric assumption, that prevailed during these pre 21st century hierarchical mass society periods and was also articulated by all those intellectuals that came and went before them. The assumption was that the two realms of humanity and nature had always been (as far as Abrahamic religions were concerned) or had at some evolutionary stage become ‘separate domains of existence’. In retrospect, these two options were perhaps all that a superficial sociological and biological understanding at the time could reach or maintain. Furthermore, by then – and ever since within anthropocentric based ideology – the dominant, most powerful and creative part of life on earth was no longer seen as the complex inter-connected, inter-dependent biological domain of nature, but the sociological domain of so-called ‘civilised’ humanity.

Therefore,  these examples by Marx, and those yet to come, are yet more evidence of the anthropocentric inversion of reality by pre-twentieth century intellectually constructed logic, which is based upon two symptoms common to all anthropocentric fixations: a) a lack of knowledge of the complex, sophisticated and integrated reality of the biosphere and b) a human acquired arrogance and dogmatic certainty by intellectuals who already think they understand enough about social and biological life on earth to make such assumptions and proclamations. I supply this next quote from Engels, for those remaining among us who think Engels remains a reliable intellectual to consider in the present circumstances we humans are facing regarding life on earth. This following quotation, also reveals Engels operating through the 19th century periods common intellectual lens of anthropocentric arrogance and ignorance whilst he was looking back to ancient hierarchical mass societies. Therefore, in this anthropocentric paradigm of thinking he was fully in line with Marx, when he wrote;

“Given the historical antecedents of the ancient world, and in particularly of Greece, the advance to a society based on class antagonisms could only be accomplished in the form of slavery. This was an advance even for the slaves….(it) now at least saved their lives, instead of being killed, as they had before, or even roasted , as at a still earlier period. ….Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained by large-scale industry has made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without exception, and thus to limit the labour-time of each individual member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general affairs of society, whether theoretical or practical,” (Engels. AntiDuhring. Part 2, section 2.The Force Theory. Emphasis added. RR)

Engels provides no evidence for any of these prejudiced assertions, which makes this assertion bad enough and whilst it would be unfair to Marx and Engels to blame them for their ignorance of things that in the 18th and 19th centuries were yet to be discovered, however, I suggest this particular case is somewhat different. This is because hunter-gather communities, on Islands and continents, had been extensively, if crudely, and often unsympatheticaly, studied by the 17th and 18th centuries, and amongst these studies there is reliable evidence that nutritionally focused labour was distributed among all adult members, and often children. Furthermore, there is no reliable recorded evidence that captured human beings were routinely killed or “roasted”, after any serious battles between pre hunter gatherer or pastoralist groups. Not in Africa, North and South America, Asia, Oceana, or Mediterranean Europe, pre Sumer, Egypt, Babylon, Greece etc.

Even under hierarchical mass society regimes of slavery, humans were considered valuable sources of skills and labour, even if considered valuable for nothing else. In pre-hierarchical socio-economic societies, killing and cannibalism were an extremely rare and desperate phenomenon. Such extremely rare symptoms, only surface in the most extreme cases of the absolute absence of none human nutritional resources and not always then. In fact at that evolutionary period of relatively low human hunter-gatherer density numbers, who were located within vast areas of coastal, inland, river, plain and forest, resource-rich environments, the evidence for whole-scale cannibalism is lacking. More broadly, deadly intra-species animosity and cannibalism, rarely if ever existed in any insect or animal species including the hominid and homo sapien species. We need to ask those in the 21st century, who assert anything different about the distant past, for relevant and convincing evidence and for the path their logical deductions have taken in order for them to conclude that there was something worth seriously fighting over – to the death – regularly in pre-historical periods.

The anthropological evidence that does exist, indicates that when any unresolved persistent personal tensions occured, among human groups (as well as other animal groups) these tensions could be resolved by one or more individuals relocating to another of earth’s resource rich environments or areas. Which is precisely what other animals and non-human primates, where they still exist, continue to do. Finally, it should be noted that Fredrick Engels was thoroughly conversant with Marx and Marx with Engels, although the latter was not always as rigorous as Marx, Engels was at the cutting edge of 19th century anthropocentric thinking, when he wrote the following about prehistoric humanity.

“As men originally made their exit from the animal world – in the narrower sense – so they made their entry into history; still half animal, brutish, still impotent in face of the forces of nature, still ignorant of their own; and consequently as poor as the animals and hardly more productive than they.” (Engels. AntiDuhring. Part 2. Section 4. Emphasis added. RR)

This short extract (along with previous extracts and those to come (in part 4) reveals so much about the anthropocentric arrogance and ignorance of even the sharpest critics of the capitalist mode of production in the 19th century. From left to right from secular or religious all intellectual types viewed themselves as representatives of humanity who were superior to everything not human. In the above case, even those who opposed the capitalist mode of production for its inhumanity, considered our ancient hominid and homo sapien predecessors, as brutes, impotent in face of the forces of nature and hardly more productive than animals. Yet they produced standing stones practically everywhere, not just at the UK’s ‘Stone Henge’.

In fact, when these hominids and later homo sapiens are studied archaeologically and without anthropocentrically biased prejudice, they are revealed as – living examples of how sophisticated and adaptable the forces of nature can be. Early humans were not at all ignorant or impotent with regard to nature, but had taught themselves (and each other) practical skills, languages, music, art and forms of social living, whilst being an integral and complementary part of the species network of life on earth. Moreover, this is a species network matrix, that underpinned and enabled the above eventual 19th century arrogant deprecation of the evolution of Homo sapien life on earth to be made by one of that centuries most conscious multicellular species to have evolved.

Roy Ratcliffe (February 2026)

MARX and ‘MARXISTS’ on ‘Life on Earth’ (Part 4) will conclude this consideration of how many of the remaining followers of Marx and Engels, have failed to critically consider and assess the limitations of the two 19th century revolutionaries, Marx and Engels due to their existence within a two hundred year old social and scientific paradigm of thinking.