The M ediation o f Nature through Society

83

On this basis we may glance briefly at the problem o f

utopia, to be dealt with in detail in Chapter Four; the just
society would be a process in which men would neither
simply coincide with nature nor be radically distinct from
it.100
It was pointed out earlier that the analysis o f the division
o f wage-labour and capital in A lan amounts to an analysis
o f the exchange-value character o f the commodity, which is
independent o f its use-value. T h is analysis is particularly
directed towards the commodity-form o f the products o f
labour in bourgeois relations o f production, a fact which
allows us to explain what in M a n the dialectician would
otherwise be a peculiar circumstance: wherever he described
the labour-process as a metabolic interaction between man
and nature, he confined him self to an enumeration o f its
moments, purposive activity o f labour', object, and instru
ment, 101 moments which are abstract because they are valid
for all stages o f production, and disregarded their specific
historical determinations. Where labour appears as the cre
ator o f use-values, it is for M a n a necessary condition,
independent o f forms o f society, for the existence o f man]
an eternal natural necessity, which mediates the metabolism
between man and nature, and hence makes possible human
life in general.10*
In M a n s view, the general nature o f the production o f
use-values was not altered by the fact that it took place in
the service o f the capitalist, and he therefore considered the
labour-process independently o f the particular form it
assumes under given social conditions 10* as a process %
which man through his own acts mediates, regulates and
controls the metabolism between him self and nature. 104
T his does not mean, however, that the Thom ist philosopher
M arcel Reding, who views dialectical materialism as an
ontology, is right to-interpret this passage in the sense that
for M arx the most general structures o f man and labour
are supra-historical and timeless. 10*
T he change from one historical epoch to another is by no
means without impact on the moments o f the labourprocess. In A Contribution to the Critique o f Political
Economy, M u x insisted that all work done on nature isonjjy