THE AUTHORS AND THE ACTORS OF THEIR OWN DRAMA

PAGE 3

NOTES TOWARDS A MARXIST THEORY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS PART 1

Alf Gunvald Nilsen

To thoroughly examine all these questions, is it not to make real profane history of the men in each century, to represent these men at the same time as the authors and the actors of their own drama? But from the moment that you represent men as the actors and authors of their own history you have, by detour, arrived at the actual point of departure since you have abandoned the eternal principles from which you at first set out

Karl Marx The Poverty of Philosophy

Introduction

Marxism is a body of theory that emanated from and was crafted for social movements. Indeed, the work of Marx and Engels is arguably best understood as a distillation of the experiences, debates, theories and conflicts faced by the popular movements of the nineteenth century, and their work in turn sought to contribute to the further development of these popular movements. It is a paradox, then, that Marxism does not brandish a theory that specifically explains the emergence, character, and development of social movements (see Cox, 1999). However, it is precisely its origins in and orientation towards the crucible of forces and struggles that have shaped and continue to shape the modern capitalist world that endows Marxism with a prescient relevance in terms of understanding and advancing of the forms of oppositional collective action commonly grouped under the social movement rubric. Unearthing this relevance and rendering it coherent requires some groundwork. In this article, I seek to make an initial contribution in this direction.

Contrary to what some might expect, the groundwork I have in mind consists neither of a discussion of forces, relations, and modes of production, nor of a discussion of base and superstructure. In fact, it does not even consist of a discussion of class and class struggle. Rather, the groundwork revolves around a discussion of what I find to be the very bedrock of Marxs historical materialism, namely a particular philosophical anthropology, a particular conception of species being and/or human nature, the defining feature of which is the rupturing of the subject-object dualism that has permeated Western philosophy (Geras, 1983; Fracchia 2005). The centrality of this notion of species being in historical materialism in turn leads to a positing of praxis as the animating force of social and historical change: [h]istory does nothing history is nothing but the activity of human beings pursuing their own aims (Marx and Engels, 1975: 93; see Larrain, 1986: Chapter 4; Bensad, 2002: Chapter 1). This, in turn, will constitute the ontological point of anchorage for a Marxist theory of social movements.

This point of anchorage entails moving away from a core feature of most established perspectives on social movements be it resource mobilization theory, political process theory, the contentious politics paradigm, or indeed new social movements theory namely the political reductionism noted by Melucci (1989), in and through which social movements are equated with extra-parliamentary institutions engaged in campaigns centred on an appeal or objection to state action (Geoghegan and Cox, 2001: 5). Rather than a particular institution, I propose that social movements be understood as conflictual processes in and through which social groups develop forms of praxis in order to contest or maintain relations of power in a social formation. Instead of taking the systemic status quo for granted and approaching social movements as relatively marginal phenomena that may momentarily or temporarily ripple the smooth societal surface, we assume a direct link between social movement practice and the making and unmaking of social structures: [s]ocial movements are not a marginal rejection of order, they are the central forces fighting one against the other to control the production of society by itself and the action of classes for the shaping of historicity (Touraine, 1981: 29).

The groundwork is carried out through the following steps. Part one of the article presents a discussion of Marxs conception of species being. I start by presenting a definition of species being as the ability of human beings to satisfy their needs through the conscious deployment of capacities in historically evolving social formations. I move on to discuss the constituent elements of this definition at some length with a particular focus on how Marxs philosophical anthropology constituted an aufhebung of the mind-body dualism of Western philosophy. Following this, I present a discussion of questions of constancy and change in the understanding of species being that is proposed. In this section I elaborate on the notion of praxis, and the semiotic/cultural aspect of praxis. In the final section I engage with the sociality and historicity of species being, i.e. how human species being is simultaneously socially constituted and socially constituting and how the developmental character of praxis animates processes of change in social formations.

In part 2 of the article I turn to the development of a conceptual apparatus for the analysis of social movements. I start by presenting a definition of social movements as the development of praxis in relation to human needs, and relate this back to my discussion of species being in part one of the article. I move on to argue that a Marxist theory of social movements needs to address the collective action of dominant groups. I suggest the concept social movement from above to this end, and discuss the central resources of power that enable social movements from above to maintain and extend the hegemony of dominant social groups. The focus then shifts to the collective action of subaltern social groups what I call social movements from below. Social movements from below, I submit, originate as situated responses to specific constraints upon the development of human needs and capacities but may be widened and deepened through collective processes of learning. I suggest a series of heuristic concepts that will allow us to analyze the potentially expansive development of movement processes and discuss how such processes are animated by praxis. Finally, I sketch out a perspective on how organic crisis and epochal changes in social formations are rooted in struggles between social movements from above and below over the structuration of human needs and capacities.

Marxs Philosophical Anthropology and the Aufhebung of Philosophy

I define human species being as the ability of human beings to satisfy their needs through the conscious deployment of capacities in historically evolving social formations. The definition from which I start is crafted from passages in Marxs work where the most fundamental elements of historical materialism are expressed. While I do not seek to deny that Marxs work was characterized by change, development, and indeed inconsistencies at times this definition of species being arguably runs as a guiding thread throughout Marxs work from the early days of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to the mature magnum opus Capital. This section seeks to elaborate each of the constituent elements of the definition offered needs, capacities, the conscious character of human deployment of capacities, and its social and historical character by drawing on these passages in Marxs work, as well as interpretations and elaborations put forward by later generations of Marxist writers.

The centrality of needs in historical materialism is of course brought out by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology when they argue that the first historical act is that of producing the means to satisfy essential material needs the need for food, shelter, habitation, and many other things (Marx and Engels, 1999: 48). These are needs which are constant and fundamentally corporeal: they are bodily needs whose satisfaction is the absolute precondition of human existence and which provide the impetus and telos of production (Fracchia, 2005: 49). These needs are thus also a limit upon human activity; they are corporeal constraints (ibid.: 46) that prevent human beings from making history just we please.

As human beings, we are in turn endowed with capacities that enable us to transform our environment through productive activity so as to satisfy our needs. We are, as Marx put it in Capital, capable of mediating, regulating and controlling the metabolism between ourselves and nature, and of appropriating the materials of nature in a form adapted to our own needs (Marx, 1990: 283). Like needs, human capacities are fundamentally corporeal in character; they consist in bodily instruments i.e. bodily organs that are deployed as tools of various kinds and the bodily dexterities that are developed through the deployment of these bodily instruments (Fracchia, 2005: 47, 48). Bodily instruments and dexterities enable human beings to transcend the confines of narrow ecological niches, to adapt to a multitude of environments, and to develop artificial instruments that further extend the range of capacities at our command (ibid.: 49). If needs are our corporeal constraints, capacities are our corporeal enablements.

Needs and capacities corporeal constraints and corporeal enablements constitute the Anlage (facility, arrangement, installation, or disposition) as a generic category for the predispositions which can be said to be intrinsic to human corporeal organization (Fracchia, 2005: 45-6). Needs and capacities are not to be thought of dualistically as polar opposites, but dialectically as opposites in unity in that constraints and limits give definition and form to an organism that would otherwise be the living contradiction of a shapeless form and thus impels the organism to focus its energies to exercise and develop the capacities and dexterities that it does have ibid.: 52). Our corporeal constraints present challenges that provoke the production of artefacts ranging from material goods to symbolic forms (ibid.: 52). In short, needs and capacities can be thought of as opposites in unity brought together in human practice and activity where capacities are deployed to satisfy needs.

The exclusively human characteristic (Marx, 1990: 284) of the activity through which this mediation occurs is that it is conscious: we reflect upon our needs and the ways in which we deploy our capacities to satisfy them: Conscious life activity distinguishes human beings immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that they are species beings (Marx, 1981a: 68). It is in calling attention to this that Marxs philosophical anthropology carries out a revolutionary move in the form of a fundamental redefinition of the concepts of subject and object (Fracchia, 1991: 125). The legacy of the first philosophers was a mind-body dualism in which the human subject was defined as the knowing subject and the object was defined as the object of knowledge (Fracchia, 1991: 155). What Marx carried out was a materialist redefinition of subject and object in which subjects were posited not merely as knowers but also as makers of objects, and where objects, conversely, were posited not merely as objects of knowledge but as belaboured objects; this was Marxs aufhebung of philosophy (ibid.: 157; see also Rooke, 2003) .

The rupturing of the mind-body dualism was first articulated in the concept of objectification (Marx, 1981a 69) which was so central in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Objectification stands as the dialectical category which depicts the interaction of subjects with the world, both natural and social (Fracchia, 2005: 44). Some twenty-eight years later, the same notion was put forward in Capital in the exposition of the characteristics of the labour process, which he posited as the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature common to all forms of society in which human beings live (Marx, 1990: 287, 290). I shall refer to this exclusively human characteristic of the mediation of needs and capacities through conscious activity as praxis and submit that in historical materialism praxis is not only the fundamental ontological category, but also the substance of history as development (Rooke, 2003: 77).

Having said this, I need to comment briefly on the distinct conceptual vocabulary generally associated with the study of the structuration and historical development of objectification and/or the labour process in Marxist theory: forces of production, relations of production, and the mode of production. Drawing on Cole (1999: 66) and Callinicos (1988: 52), forces of production can be defined as the productive capacity [of human beings] to transform the natural environment into use values and as consisting of the labour process, the particular technical combination of labour-power and means of production employed in order to transform nature and to produce use-values, thereby determining a particular level of productivity. Relations of production can be defined generally as the social relations through which people interact to be able to produce and as consisting of the relationship of the direct producers to the means of production and their labour-power, the nature of any non-producing owners and the mode of appropriation of surplus-labour from the direct producers by any such owners. The mode of production, finally, is made up of [t]he dialectical unity of the forces and relations of production (Cole, 1999: 67).

The centrality of objectification and the labour process and the associated conceptual vocabulary in Marxs thought has led to allegations of an inherent economism in historical materialism by non-Marxists and indeed of assertions of the same from certain orthodox Marxists. The gist of the argument is that there is in Marxism an exclusive and deterministic focus on the production, consumption, distribution, and exchange of material use-values and the matrix of social relations of class spun around these moments of the economic process as the basis of everything that exists. What I am trying to communicate here is that the basis of everything that exists is not the economy, but our generic capacity to create use-values through interaction with the natural and social environment to satisfy our needs, and to do so in a conscious manner. I am concerned, that is, with the generic features of situated, practical engagements with determinate otherness (Cox, 1999: 91) be it human or non-human otherness which in turn yields worlds of artefacts material, social and semiotic (Fracchia, 2005: 44). It is, after all, this our species being that enables us to engage in those activities that constitute the moments of the economic process and to create and change those social results that we conceptualize as forces, relations and modes of production (see Geras, 1983; Sayer, 1987; Larrain, 1986).

Let me now turn to the last component of my definition of species being: historically evolving social formations. No human being is an island, and human nature is not an abstraction inherent in each single individual, but rather the ensemble of social relations (Marx, 1999: 122). This, I submit, should not be read pace Althusser (1969: Chapter 7) as Marxs rejection of the idea of species being but rather as an assertion that our predispositions, our anlagen towards the conscious satisfaction of needs through the deployment of capacities are actualized through social relations. Marx and Engels brought this out in their exposition of the fundamental conditions of history, where the satisfaction of needs appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship (Marx and Engels, 1999: 50). To paraphrase Eagleton (1999: 151), the transhistorical or universal features that these predispositions constitute are always socially instantiated; we deploy our capacities to satisfy our needs in cooperation with other human beings, and thus create lattice-works of social relations lattice-works which make up a given social formation that persist as the simultaneously enabling and constraining conduits of praxis (I elaborate on this below).

However, as much as social relations are persistent, they are also dynamic they change over time, sometimes in a molecular manner that hardly causes a ripple on the seemingly pacific surface of society, and sometimes in a seismic manner that strikes along intrinsic fault lines to the core of a social formation, causing it to burst asunder. Crucial to Marxs philosophical anthropology is the argument that the historical processes of change in those social formations in and relations through which we go about the business of satisfying our needs through the conscious deployment of our capacities is fundamentally related to the very development of those needs and capacities: the whole of history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature (Marx, 1995: 160). This transformation, in turn, is two-sided in that it on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances, and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity (Marx and Engels, 1999: 57). Constancy, Change and Praxis

In the preceding section I started out by portraying human nature in constant and universal terms, and I did so with good reason. That human beings have needs and capacities is a fact across space and time; that these needs and capacities are mediated through conscious human activity praxis is always and everywhere the case; that this occurs through social relations that change over time is also a universal fact. But at the point where the exposition touched upon social formations that change over time, the treatment of species being as constant was ruptured as I referred to changes in needs and capacities to explain changes in social formations. Our species being suddenly went from stasis to motion isnt this a grand contradiction?

No, it is not; it is an expression of the dialectic of constancy and change in human nature, a dialectic in which some of the potentialities and needs of the human species have developed at the same time as some of the potentialities and the needs are the same (Geras, 1995: 157-8). As a way of thinking this dialectic of constancy and change, we can draw on McNallys (2001: 7) notion of the human body as an indeterminate constancy. With this term he refers to how, while bodies have a relatively fixed biological constitution, sociohistorical processes extend and modify bodily existence and experience. Similarly, I think it is a fecund perspective to conceive of human species being generally as an indeterminate constancy that take and shifts shape through manifold and pliable forms of social life. We have seen how human beings are defined by transhistorical attributes of a fundamentally corporeal character. These constitute the constant element in this dialectical equation. However, these transhistorical attributes simultaneously constitute that which renders possible an infinite though not unlimited range of changing manifestations of human being that is of socio-cultural forms (Fracchia, 2005: 40; emphasis added). Let us move on to consider just what it is about praxis that makes change possible; let us move on to consider the indeterminate element of the dialectical equation.

In order to grapple with change in species being, we need to elaborate on praxis. Praxis is, above all, marked by the imprint of consciousness in that it yields a result which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally (Marx, 1990: 284). Now, it should be clear from my discussion of the aufhebung of philosophy above that conscious reflection was not for Marx a faculty elevated above and beyond the this-worldly realm in which human beings go about the business of satisfying their needs through the deployment of their capacities. Reason, rationality, and reflection do not constitute an unadulterated ideational realm, but rather one among many faculties inherent in us, all of which are mired in the [material] realm of necessity (Fracchia, 1991: 155). Our Ideational capacities are at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life (Marx and Engels, 1999: 47). Now, what is it about this consciousness which is always afflicted with the curse of being burdened with matter (ibid.: 50) that makes it so central to understand change? When we experience a need, we reflect upon how best to satisfy that need within our given social and natural parameters. The plan of action which we come up with is actualized through a determinate deployment of capacities. This determinate deployment of capacities then in turn becomes the object of reflection in that we reflect on our experience of how we did things yesterday in terms of what this might tell us about how we could do things differently today so that our lives might be different tomorrow.

Praxis is thus a dynamo of change that perennially engenders new needs and new capacities for the satisfaction of these needs. Indeed, when Marx and Engels (1999: 48) postulate the existence of certain constant needs the satisfaction of which constitutes the first premise of all human existence, they simultaneously emphasise the inherently developmental character of the satisfaction of needs: the satisfaction of the first need (the action of satisfying and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act (ibid.: 49). As Grumley (1999: 56) argues, human needs are located within a historical dialectic where the totality of needs unfold in a dynamic process fuelled by labour which stimulates a dynamic of enriched needs which in turn engage activities that generate capacities and a spiral of ever-new needs.

Now, when I stress the conscious character of human activity, that we develop new needs and new capacities through reflection on past experience and so on, I am not postulating a conception of people as instrumentally rational actors with a 20-20 vision of means and ends and costs and benefits, constantly going about the business of calculating maximum utility. I am talking about the relationship between social being, experience and consciousness a relationship which is always semiotically and culturally mediated. Let me elaborate.

Experience can be defined as the practical and tacit knowledge that we as human beings generate about the material (social and non-human) world through our encounters and interactions with this material world i.e. practical-tacit knowledge about social being garnered through social being. This practical-tacit knowledge thus constitutes an attribute of individuals by reason of their social character, their participation, active or passive, in relations with others within inherited structures (Wainwright 1994: 107). Social being, experience and consciousness are intrinsically related as changes take place within social being, which gives rise to changed experience: and this experience is determining in the sense that it exerts pressures upon existent social consciousness (Thompson, 1995: 9-10). In sum, our experience of social being constitutes the stuff that consciousness starts from; experience moulds our understanding of the world and our place in it and this understanding in turn propels us to act or not to act in determinate ways. Experience thus becomes the unruly body of half-submerged knowledge that mediates between objectively existing conditions and social consciousness of these conditions. Emergent new needs and thus also the need to develop practices to satisfy these needs emanate from processes of change in social being which we come to experience as a lack of a nebulous something. This experience of a lack in turn exerts pressure upon our extant consciousness of how capacities are deployed to satisfy needs or indeed on what kind of practices are deployed to satisfy what kind of needs. The outcome of these reflections might in turn be an explicit articulation of these new needs and the capacities that constitute a necessary condition for their satisfaction.

Now, conscious reflection on experience indeed, experience itself is profoundly semiotic and profoundly cultural. Human beings, that is, generate signs and meanings and indeed elaborate systems of signs and meanings, i.e. culture as part of our situated engagement with otherness. Marx of course phrased this insight in terms of the necessity of distinguishing between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out (1981b: 21). Now, Marxs formulation might seem to indicate a dualism with the material transformation of the economic conditions of production constituting the objective side and the ideological forms through which human beings become conscious of conflicts and fight them out on the subjective side of things objective is objective and subjective is subjective, and never the twain shall meet. This needs to be qualified. As McNally (2001: 97) reminds us, signs, meanings, and our ability to deploy those signs and meanings in language are not the result of arbitrary mappings of concepts onto the world. Rather, semiotic mediation originates from corporeal representations that inform the activity of organisms in the world (ibid.: 97). The image schemata deployed in semiotic mediation, he argues, have as their referent recurring patterns in our lived experience of space, time, objects, and their relations and meanings in turn emerge in the course of practical activity (ibid.: 97). Having emerged through the course of practical activity, meanings then come to have a conditioning impact on that practical activity.

Thus, the creation of tools and the creation of signs can be understood as being homologous in terms of the mediating role they play in our situated engagements with otherness: we create signs, a class of artificial stimuli that act as means to control behaviour Hence the relation between world and subject is never simply unidirectional, but is constantly mediated by tool and sign (Bakhurst, 1990: 207-8). The creation of tools and signs is thus crucial to the social organization of the deployment of human capacities to satisfy human needs: Just as the tool helps us to master nature, so the sign enables us to master our own psychological functioning (ibid.: 208). Indeed, as a consequence of our capacity to engender complex symbolic matrices, our relation to the world is thus always already one of semiotic mediation. These complex symbolic matrices the systems of mediation (ibid.: 209) in turn constitute culture understood as the products of social history which are preserved in human activity, in what might be called the interpretative practices of the community (ibid.: 209). Culture, then, is simultaneously socially constituted and socially constituting (Roseberry, 1989: 19, 42). Culture is socially constituted in that it emanates from the practical activities that revolve around the social organization of the deployment of human capacities to satisfy human needs; it is a product of past and present activity (ibid.: 42). Culture is socially constituting in that these practices are always already endowed with and thus conditioned by meaning; it is a part of the meaningful context in which activity takes place. I now proceed to discuss the final constituent elements of the definition of species being its inherent sociality and historicity.

The Sociality and Historicity of Species Being

The sociality and historicity of human species being are intrinsically related. The former sociality refers to how the conscious deployment of capacities to satisfy needs is always already constitutive of and constituted by forms of social organization; that is, human beings go about the business of satisfying their needs in a cooperative manner and this cooperation throws up social formations which in turn come to constitute a condition for the deployment of capacities for the satisfaction of needs. The latter historicity refers to how the inherently developmental character of human species being animates processes of change in these social formations. While a given form of social organization constitutes a condition for the deployment of capacities to satisfy needs, the very fact that these needs and capacities develop as well as the direction in which and degree to which they develop might come to generate pressures toward change be it in the form of modifications that leave the deep structure of the social formation intact, or in the form of transformations that give rise to radically new forms of social organization. This section sets out to elaborate some conceptual devices which may allow us to grapple with these aspects of species being.

That Marx held no brief for conceptions of species being as a fixed unchanging essence inherent in the individual is made abundantly clear in his tirade against the transhistorical individual rational actor that prevailed in the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo. This entity, he argued, was an illusion and nothing but the aesthetic illusion of the small and big Robinsonades (Marx, 1981b: 188). This tirade is followed up with the following assertion of the intrinsic sociality of species being: Man is a [social animal] in the most literal sense: he is not only a social animal, but an animal that can be individualized only within society (ibid.: 189). As human beings, we do not exist as monads; we are always already embedded in social relationships with other human beings. While needs and capacities inhere universally in each and every one of us as the fundamental attributes of species being, their acquisition, satisfaction, deployment and development is a thoroughly social affair. Furthermore, the capacities we deploy to produce the objects towards which needs are directed are of course acquired and developed through our socialization into an extant set of social relations: we learn through our social relations with other human beings how to deploy our capacities to satisfy our needs. It is through social relations that the means by which we go about the business of satisfying our needs are actually made available to us as tools and raw materials. It is through co-operative organizations characterized by a certain division of labour that productive activity itself is carried out, and through these relations the results of this productive activity are distributed and consumed. Drawing on Giddens (1979: 69, 70-71) conceptual vocabulary, these specific sets of social relations a lattice work of relations which constitutes the structure of society (Collier, 1994: 140) can thus be considered as enabling in that they provide the means through which the deployment of capacities to satisfy needs can be initiated. Structures, that is, enable the actualizations of our anlagen or predispositions for conscious deployment of capacities to satisfy needs, and for the development of new needs and corresponding new capacities. In short, structures enable praxis.

Now, while the existence of structures might enable human beings to make history, it is also the reason why they do not make it just as they please (Marx, 1984: 10). Structures, that is, constrain the ways in which we deploy our capacities to satisfy our needs, and the direction in and degree to which we develop new capacities and new needs. Now, the question of how structures constrain needs and capacities is one that can be grappled with fruitfully, I think, through Williams (1977) distinction between positive determination as the exertion of pressures and negative determination as the setting of limits. A particular structure will exert pressures towards the articulation of needs in specific ways for instance, in capitalist societies, the need for means of subsistence will be articulated as a demand for commodities on the market and thus also for the deployment of capacities to satisfy needs in a specific way again, in capitalist society, our capacity to create use-values that serve as means of subsistence is not deployed in the form of direct production for self-consumption, but through the sale of that capacity as labour power for a sum of money with which commodities can be purchased on the market. On the other hand, that same particular structure will close off other, alternative articulations of needs and alternative deployments of our capacities; collectively organized production and distribution of use-values according to a socially defined criterion of the need for means of subsistence is anathema to capitalist structures, and is therefore unlikely to occur on a significant scale in capitalist societies.

Furthermore, pressures are exerted and limits set to the development of needs and capacities. For example, contemporary technological innovations have rendered it possible to develop new forms of satisfying the need for cultural expression and cultural experience, for instance in the form of file-sharing and digital gift-economies that allow music to be circulated freely on the internet, outside the orbits of the market. The efforts to pass legislation against this emergent form of creating and sharing cultural expressions and the attempts to regulate the circulation of music on the internet through the establishment of web-based music stores controlled by the entertainment industry constitute examples of how limits are set to the degree to which new needs and capacities are allowed to develop and how pressures are exerted for such development to assume a direction that is commensurable with extant structures. I suggest that the exertion of pressures upon and the setting of limits to the articulation of our needs, the character of the deployment of our capacities to satisfy those needs, and the direction and degree of development of those needs and capacities that occurs within a given social formation engender what can be called a dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities. This structure is consistently reproduced over extended periods of time (Sewell, 1996: 842) and in turn underpins the reproduction and relative stability of the social formation in which it is embedded.

This being said, some basic qualifications and elaborations are called for. Firstly, a dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities is not static; it is, rather, a dynamic entity which is subject to constant revision even in the course of reproduction, and such revision goes on constantly even when the overall structural framework tends to be maintained (Sewell, 1996: 842-3). Furthermore, such modifications of a dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities are in turn related to the real development of conflictual relations (Bensad, 2002: 18) between dominant and subaltern groups. The position of a social group as dominant or subaltern in a given social relation is rooted in differential access to and control over resources of power which in turn affects the extent of [its] control of social relations and the scope of their transformative powers (Sewell, 1992: 20). The constitution and reproduction of a social formation and thus also the character of the pressure exerted and the limits set to the deployment/satisfaction/development of our capacities and needs, and the dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities which emerges from this occurs in a conflictual process of contention, struggle, and argument (Roseberry, 1995: 80) between dominant and subaltern social groups. In this process, challenges are made and encountered with ripostes, the contending parties test their strength against each other and draw truce lines in the social landscape through concession, accommodation and compromise, and such truce lines in turn become objects of contestation as new rounds of contention, struggle and argument unfold. A dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities, then, is to be thought of as an internally contradictory totality in a constant process of change (Rees, 1998: 7).

I shall sketch out what I consider to be the basic ideal-typical forms of action through which dominant and subaltern groups seek to effect modifications in an extant structure of entrenched needs and practices. On the basis of superior access to economic, political and cultural resources of power and thus superior control of social relations and greater transformative powers dominant groups typically seek to mould the articulation and form that dominant structures of needs and capacities assume and exert pressures and set limits on the development of new needs and capacities in ways that not only reproduce or maintain, but also extend their hegemony. This typically revolves around the reversal of subaltern victories from previous rounds of contention, struggle and argument in the form of concessions to and accommodations of subaltern demands and the dissolution of the moral economy (Thompson, 1993) that has emerged around these. The most recent example of this would of course be neoliberal restructuring, both in the welfare states of the North and the developmental states of the South (Harvey, 2005; Walton and Seddon, 1994).

Subaltern social groups typically seek to lessen the burden of domination and to carve out a space for the greater accommodation of their specific needs within a given social organization. Ranging from covert resistance to overt opposition, subaltern contestation typically takes the form of: (a) resistance to attempts by dominant groups to alter the social organization of needs and practices so as to extend their power e.g. peasant revolts against the landlords attempt to increase taxes, commoners bread riots in the face of rising prices, or workers evasions of the sharpening of shop-floor discipline; (b) demands for modifications in the way a need is articulated and satisfied within a given social formation so as to incorporate to a greater extent their own particular needs e.g. the demands for recognition raised by racial and sexual minorities, the development of submerged counter-cultural networks, or the demand for enfranchisement raised by social groups deprived of political and civil rights. Still, the basic point here is this: the outcome of such struggles is modification, not transformation. However, structural transformations do occur Bastilles are taken, Winter Palaces are stormed, Berlin Walls fall, and they do so when subaltern social groups organize to and exert sustained pressure for change. How do we account for those periods in history when a dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities and the social organization in which it is embedded is fundamentally ruptured and replaced by something new and altogether different?

This is the point at which we have to investigate the historicity of species being. A fecund point of departure for this investigation might be found in Williams (1977: 121, 125) insistence that within a given cultural system there will be complex interrelations between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specific and effective dominance and thus that no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human invention. Translated to the language of needs and capacities, we can say that within any given social formation there will be complex interrelations between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specific and effective dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities, and thus that no social formation or dominant structure of needs and capacities ever in reality includes or exhausts the development of new needs and capacities through human praxis. As a way of getting to grips with these movements and tendencies, Williams makes a distinction between the residual and the emergent as entities that will relate in different ways to the dominant in the internal dynamic relations of any actual process (ibid.: 123, 122). The residual refers to experiences, meanings and values that are lived and practised on the basis of the residue of some previous social and cultural institution or formation (ibid.: 123). I shall not concern myself with the notion of the residual here, but rather with the emergent understood as new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and new kinds of relationship [that] are continually being created (ibid.: 123).

Now, what I want to suggest is that we think of such meanings, values, practices, relationships and kinds of relationship as crystallizing around those new needs and capacities that are continually created through praxis. As I argued above, the establishment of a dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities does not freeze the development of needs and capacities and, albeit conflictual, the modification of such a structure does not necessarily entail the rupture of the social formation in which it is embedded. With Williams, we can argue that new needs and capacities can be elements of some new phase of the dominant [structure] (Williams, 1977: 123). However, new needs and capacities may also constitute elements which are substantially alternative or oppositional (ibid.: 123) to the dominant structure of needs and capacities, and to the extent that they are, they thrust against this structure and contain the potentiality for its transcendence.

In thinking about the character of such needs and capacities, Agnes Hellers (1976: Chapter 4; see also Grumley, 1999 and Tormey, 2001: Chapter 2) concept of radical needs is useful. In Hellers work the concept of radical need is developed in conjunction with her discussion of capitalism as a social formation with a structure of needs in which there exists certain needs that are not satisfiable internally to that social formation (ibid.: 76). Capitalism ushers in a social system where needs are not allocated by birth but by status ascribed according to political and economic status and where markets and exchange value give rise to a quantifiable structure of needs [which] has an emancipatory function insofar as it liberates individuals from naturally ascribed stations and provides them with the opportunity of more actively shaping their own needs and structures (Grumley, 1999: 55). Radical needs, argues Heller (1976: 77), are members of the capitalist formation and not in themselves the embryos of a future formation. They are needs which are spawned within and thus intrinsic to capitalism; they cannot be eliminated from its functioning (ibid.: 77).

So what exactly is it that makes these needs radical then? What is it that makes them substantially alternative or oppositional to capitalism? Radical needs are radical by virtue of the transformative consequences of their satisfaction: it is not the Being of radical needs that transcends capitalism but their satisfaction (Heller, 1976: 77). An example from Hellers text might clarify what is meant by this. Capitalism generates a need for universality by dissolving all hitherto existing watertight compartments between specialized forms of labour and depends on this need for its functioning. However, the full satisfaction of this need would require the transcendence of capitalism as the capitalist division of labour nevertheless serves as a barrier to the development of universality (Heller, 1976: 92). Indeed, overcoming the extant division of labour is a precondition for the satisfaction of the need for universality born within capitalism in the form of the substitution of the detail-worker of today, crippled by the life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation by the fully developed individual to whom the different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquiring powers (Marx, cited in Heller, 1976: 92-3).

Now, what I want to propose here is that we conceive of radical needs not as capitalism-specific, but in generic terms as needs that can be developed through human praxis within the parameters of any given social formation and dominant structure of entrenched needs, but the satisfaction of which requires and/or entails the transformation and transcendence of that social formation. Moreover, I suggest that we expand the conceptual vocabulary and talk of radical capacities as well as radical needs, and thus of sets of radical needs and capacities. Such sets of radical needs and capacities may become the motives of the practice which transcends the given society (Heller, 1976: 90) when social groups develop new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship around them. If such a process takes place, we can say that what occurs is the forming of the structure of the new society within the shell of the old in the form of the coming into being of an emergent structure of radical needs and capacities. The practice which transcends the given society would then be mobilization and collective action by those social groups from whose praxis this emergent structure of radical needs and capacities has emerged in the first place oppositional collective action that consciously, explicitly and actively seeks the transformation and transcendence of a dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities and the social formation in which it is embedded so as to fully satisfy the radical needs and capacities that are frustrated and constrained within this structure and formation.

I shall end this section by qualifying and elaborating on this latter argument in two important ways. Firstly, the following question needs to be answered, at least provisionally: who will be the bearers of projects which seek to realize an emergent structure of radical needs and practices? As the discussion so far suggests, the immediate answer will be: subaltern groups, for the simple and obvious reason that it is these groups who will be at a disadvantage within a dominant structure of entrenched needs and practices subalterns bear the burdens of domination and who therefore stand to gain from its dissolution. Furthermore, it would of course be irrational for already dominant groups to undermine or end their position of dominance through the pursuit of the full realization of a set of radical needs and capacities. As the discussion of modifications in extant structures of entrenched needs and practices above will have made clear, this does of course neither entail that dominant groups do not make concessions to the demands of subaltern groups, nor that they may not seek to alter such extant structures. However, when such concessions are made, they are contained in a form which does not threaten the overall reproduction of the extant structure and social formation, and when alterations in extant structures are pursued by dominant groups, they will tend to be changes that consolidate, maintain, or extend dominance typically through the reversals of concessions made to subaltern demands.

This being said, it should be noted that the positionality of dominant and subaltern is relative and processual. Consider, for example, anti-colonial struggles. It goes without saying that this is a struggle for radical needs and capacities self-determination by a subaltern group the colonized against a dominant group the colonizer the realization of which will entail structural transformation the end of the colonial order and the onset of national sovereignty. However, in such struggles one might find that within the seemingly united subaltern group there might be internal differentiations between dominant and subaltern. One might find an elite among the colonized population whose aspirations to dominance were frustrated by their ultimate subjugation to the colonial power, but who was in possession of a political language typically acquired through their schooling in the institutions of the colonial power that could be used to challenge their overlords and mould a unified oppositional subject typically the people in whose name the struggle is carried out. The structural transformation that follows an anti-colonial struggle might in turn witness the disintegration of that homogenous oppositional subject and the manifestations of a new hierarchical structure where that very elite ascends to a dominant position within a newborn nation-state (see Silver, 2003). Similar arguments can be made about the decline of lancien regimes and the bourgeois revolutions of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. An emergent capitalist class situated in a formally subaltern position vis--vis the traditional ruling groups monarchy, aristocracy, and clergy but in a position of dominance vis--vis tenants and serfs vindicated radical needs and capacities through the establishment of forms of economic organization and a restructuring of the body politic. The sum of these changes was the constitution of a new social formation (see Gill, 2003: 44-47). As tempting as it is to try and move towards a resolution of such intricacies through the construction of a fine-meshed typology of different relations of domination and subjugation in different ideal-typical historical situations and transitions, I shall resist that temptation here with the assertion that these equations have to be worked out through the analysis of specific episodes of transformational struggles.

Secondly, the distinction that I make between entrenched and radical needs and, concurrently, between struggles the outcome of which is modification and transformation respectively, should not be read as a distinction between watertight compartments. Radical needs and capacities do not appear 'suddenly like Athena, from the head of Zeus, in complete armour' (Chattopadhyay, 1990: 101). Rather, whatever something is becoming is in some important respects part of what it is along with what it once was (Ollman, 1993: 29), and so too with radical needs: they emerge from the development of already extant needs and capacities through praxis, and their crystallization as forces which might bring about qualitative change transformation as opposed to quantitative change modification is necessarily long, drawn-out and highly contingent. As human beings develop new needs and capacities within the parameters of dominant structures and formations, they will firstly try to accommodate those needs and capacities with extant social relationships by adapting them to extant structural parameters, or by carving out some kind of space where such needs and capacities can flourish without appearing as an overt threat to the established order of things and thus also without risking repression by that order.

Similarly the struggles of subaltern groups themselves may start out as projects for modification either resistance to the efforts of dominant groups to extend their dominance, or demands for greater accommodation of their needs and gradually evolve into projects for transformation. As Calhoun (1982: 7; see also Vester, 1978) points out, the initial phases of workers collective action in the early period of the Industrial Revolution was characterized by community as the crucial social bond around which solidarity crystallized, and theirs was a defence of past practices and traditional values. It was only later that either formal or informal patterns of organization extended to unify the class subjected to capitalist exploitation and a new analysis of exploitation came to be characteristic of workers radicalism (Calhoun, 1982: 7).

Furthermore, if an alternative and oppositional project crystallizes around a set of radical needs and capacities, its trajectory remains contingent. First among the factors that generates such contingency is that of repression and opposition instantiated by dominant groups in response to the challenge that has been made, and which might or might not quell the realization of an emergent structure of radical needs and capacities. Second, there are the contingencies that attach to the fact that those periods in history when all that is solid melts into air will tend to witness not just one but many articulations of radical needs and capacities quite possibly rooted in different subaltern groups, or groups defined by different degrees of subalterneity which are incommensurable, and among which some will emerge as hegemonic and others will be marginalized. Indeed, as Hill (1991) and more recently Linebaugh and Rediker (2000) have documented so compellingly, the era that witnessed the decline of lancien regime was not only exclusively characterized by the designs of an emergent bourgeoisie, but also by the radical-democratic visions of a demotic popular class represented by such groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and many others. These visions, however, were marginalized as the bourgeoisie attained the upper hand in the eras struggles over hegemony (see Gill, 2003: 46-7). Toulmins (1990) study of the two origins of modernity one being the humanist lay culture of the sixteenth century Renaissance and its embrace of plurality, ambiguity and scepticism; the other being the philosophy of the seventeenth century Enlightenment with its embrace of rationalism, certainty and universality and the triumph of one over the other testifies to similar dynamics. Again, I shall refrain from the establishment of typologies of such dynamics and point towards the analysis of concrete and specific periods of transition as the most fecund approach to the theorization of such complexities.

Concluding Remarks

In the above I have sought to carry out some of the groundwork that is necessary in order to bring out the relevance of Marxism as a theory of social movements. I started out by defining species being as the ability of human beings to satisfy our needs through the conscious deployment of capacities in historically evolving social formations. I discussed needs and capacities as a set of corporeally grounded predispositions that are mediated through conscious human activity and, furthermore, argued that through his insistence upon this mediation Marx decisively ruptured the subject-object dualism of Western philosophy. It is in conjunction with this aufhebung that praxis assumes its centrality in historical materialism as an ontological category and as the dynamo of historical change. Finally in my definitional exposition I pointed out how the transhistorical predispositions of needs, capacities and conscious activity are instantiated through social relations, and how through this social instantiation, a lattice-work of social relations emerge that constitute the structural backbone of social formations that in turn persist as the simultaneously enabling and constraining conduits of praxis. These conduits in turn are subject to change as needs and capacities develop.

I then moved on to address the issue of constancy and change in species being, and suggested that we conceive of it as an indeterminate constancy where the constant element is constituted by transhistorical attributes that are fundamentally corporeal but which simultaneously render possible highly variegated manifestations of species being. I argued that the indeterminate element is fundamentally animated by praxis as a dynamo of change that perennially engenders new needs and new capacities for the satisfaction of these needs as our experience of social being becomes an object of semiotically and culturally mediated reflection.

Following this, I proceeded to discuss the sociality and historicity of species being. I argued that while needs and capacities inhere universally in each and every one of us as the fundamental attributes of species being, their actual satisfaction, deployment and development occurs through social relations. Social relations are thus to be thought of as enabling in relation to praxis. However, structures also constrain the ways in which we deploy our capacities to satisfy our needs, and the direction in and degree to which we develop new capacities and new needs by exerting pressures and setting limits and the outcome of such pressures and limits is the formation of dominant structures of entrenched needs and capacities. Such structures and the social formations in which they inhere are to be thought of as internally contradictory totalities that undergo constant process of change as dominant and subaltern groups contest each other over modifications of such structures. Finally, I discussed developments in needs and capacities that engender structural transformations. I argued that such transformations occur when subaltern groups develop new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship around emergent structures of radical needs and capacities i.e. sets of needs and capacities the satisfaction and deployment of which negates the continued existence of a dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities and pursue the realization of this emergent structure through mobilization and collective action. Structural change as the outcome of such mobilization, I argued, is not an inexorable law of history, but a deeply contingent affair the exigencies of which are best elaborated through the study of concrete episodes of such mobilization.

From this historical materialism flows a sense of history which is quintessentially moored in human beings practically constructing their lives, a sense of history given in the practical process whereby human beings realize themselves, and a sense of history which appreciates that this process of practical construction is not absolutely free but is conditioned by material circumstances and [social] relations which human beings have themselves produced (Larrain, 1986: 120). This, I submit, must be the point of departure for a Marxist approach to the study of social movements. This will invariably an approach in which social movements are conceived of in ontological terms as the animating forces in the making and unmaking of structures of needs and capacities, and thus of social formations as such. Moreover, it will be an approach which situates these animating forces in a dynamic field where dominant and subaltern groups struggle over how the social organization of human needs and capacities is to develop. In part 2 I continue working towards such a theory.

REFERENCES

Althusser, L. (1969): For Marx, London, Allen Lane.

Bakhurst, D. (1990): Social Memory in Soviet Thought, pp. 202-226 in Middleton, D. and Edwards, D. (eds.): Collective Remembering, London, Sage Publications.

Bensad, D. (2002): Marx for our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, London, Verso

Calhoun, C. (1982): The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution, Chicago, University of Chicago Press

Callinicos, A. (1988): Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory, Cambridge, Polity Press

Chattopadhyay, P. (1990): "An 'Anti-Kritik'", pp. 98-107 in Patnaik, U. (ed.): Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The 'Mode of Production' Debate in India, Delhi, Oxford University Press

Cohen, G. A. (1978): Karl Marxs Theory of History: A Defense, New Jersey, Princeton University Press

Cole. K. (1999): Economy Environment Development Knowledge, London, Routledge

Collier, A. (1994): Critical Realism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, London, Verso

Cox, L. (1999): Building Counter Culture: The Radical Praxis of Social Movement Milieux, unpublished PhD dissertation, Trinity College, Dublin

Eagleton, T. (1999): Self-Realization, Ethics, and Socialism, pp. 150-61 in New Left Review 4

Fracchia, J. (1991): Marxs Aufhebung of History and the Foundations of Historical-Materialistic Science, pp. 153-179 in History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 2

Fracchia, J. (2005): Beyond the Human-Nature Debate: Human Corporeal Constitution as the First Fact of Historical Materialism, pp. 33-62 in Historical Materialism, Vol. 13, No. 1

Genovese, E. O. (1976): Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, New York, Vintage House

Geras, N. (1983): Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, London, New Left Books

Geras, N. (1995): Human Nature and Progress, pp. 151-60 in New Left Review 213

Giddens, A. (1979): Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis, London, Macmillan

Gill, S. (2003): Power and Resistance in the New World Order, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan

Grumley, J. (1999): A Utopian Dialectic of Needs: Hellers Theory of Radical Needs, pp. 53-72 in Thesis Eleven, No. 59

Harvey, D. (2005): A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Heller, A. (1976): The Theory of Need in Marx, London, Allison and Busby

Hill, C. (1991): The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, London, Penguin Books

Jasper, J. M. (1997): The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography and Creativity in Social Movements, Chicago, University of Chicago Press

Larrain, J. (1986): A Reconstruction of Historical Materialism, London, Allen and Unwin

Lebowitz, M. (2003): Beyond Capital: Marxs Political Economy of the Working Class, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan

Linebaugh, P. and Rediker, M. (2000): The Many-Headed Hydra, London, Verso

Lysgaard, S. (1985): Arbeiderkollektivet: En Studie i De Underordnedes Sosiologi, Oslo, Universitetsforlaget

Marx, K. (1981a): Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, London, Lawrence and Wishart

Marx, K. (1981b): Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, London, Lawrence and Wishart

Marx, K. (1984): The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, London, Lawrence and Wishart

Marx, K. (1990): Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1, Hammondsworth, Penguin

Marx, K. (1995): The Poverty of Philosophy, New York, Prometheus Books

Marx, K. (1999): Theses on Feuerbach, pp. 123-125 in Marx, K. and Engels, F.: The German Ideology, London, Lawrence and Wishart

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1975): The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, London, Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1999): The German Ideology, London, Lawrence and Wishart

McNally, D. (2001): Bodies of Meaning: Studies in Language, Labour and Liberation, , New York, SUNY Press

Melucci, A. (1989): Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, London, Hutchinson

Nilsen, A. G. (2004): Against the Anti-Politics Machine: Grounding the Theory and Ethics of Development in the Practice of Struggle, Paper for the NFU Conference 2004: Education, Knowledge and Development

Ollman, B. (1993): Dialectical Investigations, London, Routledge

Rees, J. (1998): The Algebra of Revolution: The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition, London, Routledge

Rooke, M. (2003): The Dialectic of Labour and Human Emancipation, pp. 76-98 in Bonefeld, W. and Visquerra, S. T. (eds.): What is to be Done? Leninism, Anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of Revolution Today, e-book available at www.endpage.orgRoseberry, W. (1989): Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History and Political Economy, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press

Roseberry, W. (1995): Hegemony, Power, and Languages of Contention, pp. 71-84 in Wilmsen, E. N. and McAllister, P. (eds.): The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Premises in a World of Power, Chicago, University of Chicago Press

Sayer, D. (1987): The Violence of Abstraction: Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism, London, Basil Blackwell

Scott, J. C. (1985): Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, Yale University Press

Scott, J. C. (1990): Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, Yale University Press

Sewell, W. H. (1996): Historical Events as Transformation of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille, pp. 841-881 in Theory and Society, Volume 25, No 6

Silver, B. (2003): Forces of Labour: Workers Movements and Globalization Since 1870, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Smith, N. (1991): Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, Oxford, Basil Blackwell

Thompson, E. P. (1993): Customs in Common, London, Penguin Press

Thompson, E. P. (1995): The Poverty of Theory or An Orrery of Errors, London, Merlin Press

Tormey, S. (2001): Agnes Heller: Socialism, Autonomy and the Postmodern, Manchester, Manchester University Press

Toulmin, S. (1990): Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago, University of Chicago Press

Vester, M. (1978): Proletariatets Opsten som Lreproces: Fremkomsten af Antikapitalistisk Teori og Praksis i England 1792-1848, Kongerslev, GMT

Wainwright, H. (1994): Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free-Market Right, Oxford, Blackwell

Walton, J. and Seddon, D. (1994): Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global Adjustment, Oxford, Blackwell

Williams, R. (1977): Marxism and Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press

In these notes I draw extensively on my collaboration with Laurence Cox. It goes without saying that the responsibility for the theory as it is presented here is mine and mine alone, but I want to make it very clear that if what follows makes a contribution towards innovation in the study of social movements, that contribution could never have been made if it hadnt been for this collaborative effort.

I use the terms species being and human nature interchangeably throughout this article.

As Fracchia (2005: 50) takes care to point out, these needs are universal and constant as an absolute prerequisite of human existence, but they are of course always satisfied in socio-culturally specific ways they are, as Fracchia argues, subject to socio-cultural refinement or mediation (ibid.: 51).

This of course also entailed a settlement of accounts with Feuerbachs materialism, which, albeit giving pride of place to the material (as opposed to the ideational in Hegelian philosophy), remained trapped within the subject-object dualism as the material was conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively (Marx, 1999: 121).

See Cohen (1978) for an example of the latter.

I give a relatively brief treatment to this component here as I engage with this aspect of species being in a more detailed manner below.

The definite rejection of Althussers claim remains in my opinion that of Geras (1983).

I would like to stress that I focus here on the explanatory as opposed to the normative aspect of Marxs philosophical anthropology. The former relates to human nature as a factor that explains social processes and historical change; the latter revolves around human nature as a benchmark for passing adverse judgement upon social conditions which fail the very needs common and intrinsic to humankind, adverse because they fail them (Geras, 1983: 71). I do not consider the latter to be of less importance, yet elaborating on this aspect is not necessary in relation to the argument I develop here.

I focus here on changes in needs and capacities over time. However, the indeterminacy of course also applies to cultural variegation. However I do not engage in a discussion of this here. Suffice it to say with Fracchia (2005: 37) while human universals, such as biological needs, are malleable and socio-culturally mediated the particularity of their manifestations does not abrogate the universality of needs: if some people refuse to eat what others consider a delicacy, the fact is that both have a minimum caloric requirement.

This sentence paraphrases Cole (1999: 161), who writes: People can choose today, based on the experience of yesterday, how to better organize their activity tomorrow.

This view of culture, essentially cultural materialism, rules out an understanding of base and superstructure as either relatively enclosed categories or relatively enclosed areas of activity (Williams, 1977: 78) an understanding which in fact leads back to what Marx through his aufhebung of philosophy had sought to move away from, namely the separation of areas of thought and activity and the related evacuation of specific content real human activities by the imposition of abstract categories (ibid.: 78).

Marx originally uses the expression Zoon politikon from Aristotles De Republica.

Yet, the actual unfolding of species being of course takes place in specific spatiotemporal locations, which in turn imparts a particular character to the actual manifestations of species being (see Fracchia, 2005: 40).

This formulation draws on and extends Agnes Hellers (1976: 71, 76) argument that all social organizations have a system and hierarchy of need and structure of need.

I need to stress that just as I concern myself with the explanatory aspect of human nature, I also concern myself with the explanatory aspect of radical needs and capacities here i.e. radical needs as an explanation for social and historical change rather than its normative aspect.

See, e.g., Lysgaards (1985) study of the workers collective, Melucci (1989) on submerged networks in Italy in the 1980s, Genovese (1976) on the world the slaves made and Scott (1985, 1990) on everyday resistance for examples of the carving out of spaces where emergent needs may be satisfied.

However, Calhoun makes the following important qualification: their orientation was not simply conservative, or even restorationist, but was aimed at the creation of a radically different social order from that in which they lived, one in which traditional values would better be realized (1982: 8).