realizing our species-being

One thing that I completely agree with the Young Marx on is the need for society to move beyond its fetishism of the right to liberty in the form of private property (i.e., the right to enjoy and dispose of property without regard to others, esp. in terms of corporate 'persons') and towards a realization of its species-being.

Unlike those who assume 'human nature' is a fixed, static thing that's naturally greedy, competitive, etc., I take the position that much of what we label human nature is fluid and changeable yet strongly conditioned by the world around us, especially by the economic 'base' of society, i.e., the way society reproduces itself. Hence the forces and social relations that are embodied within any given mode of production help to shape and influence the ideas and interrelationships within that society (which, in a global context, includes those between nation-states as well as between individuals).

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, for example, Marx famously writes:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

Within capitalism, what Marx terms the 'coercive laws of competition' force individual capitals to compete with one another and exploit labour as much as they can in the pursuit of profit; and at the same time, these coercive laws of competition force individual workers to compete with fellow workers, locally as well as globally, for jobs that provide the wages they depend on to survive. And this, in turn, influences and reinforces relations (individual, national, etc.) that are built upon or grow out of this socio-economic foundation.

The problem is, civil society is a decidedly communal endeavour. And as Marx saw it, our species-being is an "ensemble of social relations," which are mutable, rather than an "abstraction inherent in each single individual." The logic of capitalism and the social relations arising out of it, however, structure a society in which we create the bare "semblance of a human existence" instead allowing our nature its full expression, leading to everything from alienated labour to the fostering of profitable industries that harm our very existence.

And I think no area demonstrates this more than the environment and the negative impact the contradictions inherent to capitalism have had on it, with its crises, coercive laws of competition, and accumulation for accumulation's sake that compel businesses and individual capitalists to put profits over all other concerns.