ABSTRACT
Human beings have many needs. There are many conditions which must be met if they are to survive, and to live in health, security and comfort. Animals may feel pleasure and pain, they may lead lives which are contented and happy, or full of suffering, fear and disquiet. But only a man or woman is capable of experiencing life as something full or empty, worthwhile or worthless, meaningful or meaningless. More defensible and more relevant to Marx’s aims, however, is the idea that there is some intimate connection between species consciousness and self-consciousness. But ‘self-consciousness’ here should not be understood in an austere, epistemologist’s sense, as the subject of the Cartesian cogito or the Kantian ‘unity of apperception’. Marx’s diagnosis of capitalist alienation identifies human fulfillment with self-actualization, and identifying an alienated, unfulfilled life with one in which the need to develop and exercise our essential powers is frustrated.
