BODY AND CAPITAL IN MARX

CORPOREAL HUMAN NATURE IN THE ECONOMICPHILOSOPHICAL MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844

Abstract

This paper will follow a path that intends to go beyond the
bifurcating interpretations between ahistorical essentialism and historicist
relativism with regard to the theoretical elaboration of “human nature” by the
young Marx, analyzing it from the conception of the body as a dialectical unit
between nature and history as it appears in his Manuscripts of 1844. Why does
Marx focus on a theoretical elaboration of the production of human corporality
while criticizing work under capital in these Manuscripts that represent, in his
trajectory, the beginning of his studies on political economy and the inauguration
of his dialectical materialism? From an analysis of the notebooks that make up
these Manuscripts, we will demonstrate that there is a theorization of the body
that involves transhistorical aspects - the vital connection with the “inorganic
body” that is the earth - and historical in the form of mediation of this relationship
and that such theorizing has the methodological value of providing historicalmaterialist
premises as a counterpoint to the ahistorical premises of political
economy as well as the inversion of the Hegelian dialectic under the starting
point of the “corporeal human”, enabling a point of view from which we can
overcome a way of “pathological” mediation.