ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the problem of potential human nature in socialist thought — and particularly in Marx's thought. In the early Marx get a view of man as capable of living in spontaneous cooperation with his fellow men, self-consciously determining himself in a free society where there is no exploitation and no unsatisfied natural need. In his society the individual have the two essential qualities of being a 'complete' individual, all-round and also being harmonious, capable of integrating the many facets of his personality. The 1844 description of unalienated man was written before Marx's working out of historical materialism in The German Ideology. But in the late 1840s the emphasis on the nefariousness of the division of labour and the necessity of its abolition is in Marx. Marx is so keen on its abolition that he sometimes rather confusingly talks of labour itself being abolished.
