| Abstract: |
This article explores why a deep understanding of Marx's project is essential
for developing an adequate science of society. The imperative to re-examine
Marx's project has been made evident not only by the incapacity of the
fragmented contemporary social sciences to grasp the causes and necessary
responses to capitalism's current crises, but more urgently what is arguably
humanity's greatest challenge -- avoiding ecological devastation and perhaps
even ecocide. Due to space limitations, this article cannot address these
pressing issues directly. Instead, it focuses on how Marx's approach offers
the most promising scope and method for addressing challenges such as these.
Marx viewed humanity's struggle to overcome nature's scarcity as causally and
dynamically related to social organization and social consciousness. Critical
to this breadth, and what is yet more alien to the Anglo-American social
science tradition, Marx unfolded a theory of our self-creation, the manner in
which products of our manual and intellectual labor act back upon us to create
us socially and intellectually. To the extent that we lose consciousness of
this authorship, we are unfree. We are controlled by our own creations,
frequently in harmful manners. Our full freedom, and therefore our capacity to
come to terms with contemporary challenges requires a social science with the
breadth of Marx's that enables us to recover awareness of our authorship of
our social creations and thereby be empowered to control them, as opposed to
being their victims. |