Species-Being

It is commonly assumed that an important contribution of Karl Marx to social thought was the recognition of social origins of human being. German philosopher argued that humans do not exist outside of society. At the physiological level people are animals, their human aspect has social origin. However, Marx was not consistent in this statement. Declaring criticism of essentialist views, at the same time, especially in his early works, he referred to the concept of human nature, which suggested that he wasn’t able to abandon that views. In his writings, what is emphasize by Leszek Kołakowski, there is an idea of the ahistorical pattern of human, independent from the cultural, social influences present. That pattern is the basis for the key categories developed by Marks in his early works, such as: alienation, commodity fetishism, false consciousness.

The concept Gattungswesen, while evidently central to Marx's early thought, has received surprisingly little detailed philosophical examination. An obstacle to progress when it comes to understanding the concept is a tendency to miss the import of the dimension of universality that Marx says is crucial to the concept. It has often been assumed that Marx must have in mind membership of the human species, where this is considered as one species among others. But an examination of the concept Gattung as it figures in Hegel (in particular in his Philosophy of Nature) and in particular as it passes to Marx through Feuerbach helps to reveal that a generality of a different order is involved. I trace this trajectory, giving special attention to early writings by Feuerbach (characterized by an unorthodox Hegelianism) that have been largely ignored, and show how a full appreciation of the generality of the Gattung can help with seeming puzzles that present themselves in the interpretation of the Marx of the early 1840s.

The full text is available here
http://puslit2.petra.ac.id/ejournal/index.php/ing/article/view/18742/18473

Several distinguished philosophers such as Rousseau, Hegel, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger paid serious attention to the notion of alienation. The present paper elaborates on the notion of alienation, based on Marx's ideas, and traces it in the character of Tom Wingfield, one of the major characters in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. The Wingfields belong to the middle class living in the capitalist society of America during the Great Depression of the 1930's. The father has left the family sixteen years ago. The son, Tom, is the breadwinner of the family. As a "poet with a job in a warehouse," he is alienated from his labor. As a result of alienation from his labor he is self-alienated. The specialization in the capitalist system prevents him from developing to the total human and alienates him from his species life. The self-alienated worker becomes alienated from his family members and, finally leaves them.

This paper compares Marx's first conception of capital, in 1844, to his conception of the modern political state in 1843. It argues that in 1843 Marx conceives the modern democratic state as realising human 'species-being', that is, the universality and freedom inherent in human nature, but only in the form of 'abstract' universality and freedom, and therefore inadequately. In 1844 he conceives capital in the same way, as an abstract and therefore inadequate realisation of human species-being. Accordingly the transition from capital to communism consists essentially in transforming the abstract universality and freedom realised in capital into a 'concrete' universality and freedom. The paper concludes by commenting on the implications of this early philosophical conception of capital for Marx's later writings.

Dialectical reasoning in Marx and Hegel is premised upon even more
fundamental metaphysical insights. A project such as ours that seeks to
ground emancipatory politics in metaphysics will 􀁢nd its starting point
in the Radical Enlightenment philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Human
history can only be intelligible if it is situated within a rational
conception of nature as a whole. Spinoza’s metaphysical monism
provides this conception.

I once ran a search on Karl Marx’s concept of species-being; it was described by contemporary authors as a principle of social cooperation, techno-scientific competency, and awareness, a tenet of species-centrism and anthropocentrism, and a surreptitious project of imagining the other ethical subject. I found this curious for a concept that Marx himself described as constitutive essence, as the human power that alters our ecologically embedded existence, and as the emergent and engendering attribute of human life. What the search left me with, then, is the opinion that contemporary social, political, and philosophical circles have failed to provide an articulate, clear, and historically accurate depiction of species-being.

This presentation seeks to reconceive the little known concept of biocommunism (Dyer-Witheford 2008; Wróbel 2020a, 2020b) in light of the growing realization that Nature is increasingly knocking down the bulwarks constructed by late capitalism. To reconceive Communism as biocommunism, at present, means to awaken the branch of Marxist thought concerned, not so much with society as with life itself. This concern is similar to both Agamben’s bare life (1998[1995]) and Butler’s precarious life (2004, 2012). Biocommunism constitutes, in my interpretation, a conception of communism much in line with Bookchin’s
idea of social ecology (2006) – which in turn distinguishes biocommunism from both Stalinism and Leninism – instead, biocommunism is anarchic, rather than statist, and plural, as opposed to universal. By starting from Dyer-Witheford’s suggestion of returning
to the young Marx’s idea of ‘species-being’ or Gattungswesen, this presentation aims, on
the one hand, to sketch biocommunism as less techno-optimistic than Dyer-Witheford’s original proposal, and on the  other, as less utopian than Wróbel's conception of biocommunism as an ‘overcoming of  biopolitics’. Instead, I will suggest that biocommunism ought to be concerned with the  present lives in their actual present situations as these present their bare or precarious suffering to the world. In conclusion, I am offering an interpretation of biocommunism as a possible reconception of Communism in an age where uncontrollable Nature has once again become visible. At the  same time, I am also
offering a novel qualification of the earlier conceptions of biocommunism. The latter makes biocommunism a fruitful concept for further research under  the present conditions – climate change, COVID19, etc. – because the qualification suggests  a need to reorient
Communism towards life itself rather than society. Lastly, biocomminism  can provide us with this reorientation without any recourse to positing neither a technological nor a post-biopolitical future.

In this paper I talk about a strange silence that pervades most transhumanist discourse. This silence pertains to the political. Transhumanists frequently make predictions about the future states of complex systems such as the human being and human societies, yet they noticeably tend to leave out mention of anything political. This talk seeks to explain this silence and also to offer a corrective for it.
My contention is that despite all its pretensions to think the human being in a novel, evolutionary way, transhumanist thought continues to posit certain essential qualities to its concept of the human. These qualities are those of homo economicus: or the human defined as atomistic, rational and narrowly self-interested maximizer of profit and utility. The recalcitrance of this conception of the human prevents transhumanists from thinking the political beyond a very narrow scope. This runs contrary to the fundamental directive of transhumanism: to explore new, unfathomed futures for the species currently called human.

Theodor W. Adorno makes the following claim in his 1962 essay “Progress”: “The possibility of progress, of averting the most extreme, total disaster, has migrated to
this global subject alone. Everything else involving progress must crystalize around it.” While this is Adorno’s most explicit articulation of the importance of a global subject, it is not the only one. In multiple places across his work he makes reference to mankind’s current lack of a global subject, and the need for a global subject to develop and intervene. This paper weaves together the first systematic analysis of a “global subject [Gesamtsubjekt]” as Adorno uses it throughout his philosophical work. It explores this concept and takes as its guide three inter- related questions. First, how does Adorno use the concept of the global subject in his work? Second, what antecedent philosophical ideas are influencing Adorno’s understanding of what a global subject actually is? And third, how does understanding Adorno’s utilization of this concept change how we think about his ideas about revolutionary activity in our “administered world”.