ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Georg F. W. Hegel’s views about labor were abstract and philosophical, and that his standpoint was that of political economy. While Marx made numerous references to the corporeal organization of human beings throughout his writings, he never systematically developed the idea. Marx recognized the sociality of human beings and that being human was, in fact, actualized in their relations with other individuals, in their participation in historically specific communities. Marx portrayed the linkages of consciousness in his famous base–superstructure architectural metaphor: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. “Developmental contingency,” a concept elaborated in another context by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, affords us a useful, shorthand description of Marx’s views about historical change.
