Ingeniero, Angela Mae M.

Bachelor of Arts in Political Science 2-A

 How is Marx's concept of human nature different from Machiavelli?

 How did Marx utilize his concept of human beings to critique capitalism?
 Do you agree with Marx's critique of capitalism and the potential of a human being to
be freed from it?
Human nature is a concept that denotes the fundamental dispositions and characteristics—
including ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—that human is said to have naturally. Human
nature is often used to denote the essence of humankind or what is ‘means’ to be human. It
includes the core characteristics (feelings, psychology, behaviors) shared by all people.
The concept of human nature has a lot of meaning based on the observation or experiences, or
philosophy of the philosophers like Karl Marx and Niccolo Machiavelli. Karl Marx's view on the
concept of Human nature is a species-being—material by which they materialize their species-
being; social—that human nature is a product of social interaction. Marx appears to say that
human nature is no more than what is made by the ‘social relations'. Social relations are held to
‘determine’ the nature of people, they are not the only such determinant. However, Marx's
statements where he specifically refers to human nature which is more than what is
conditioned by the circumstances of one's life; Biological creatures that engage in the natural
world. While Niccolo Machiavelli concluded human nature. He analyzed the way in which many
people acted, and look for the common trait in a man to conclude about human nature.
Machiavelli agreed with Hobbes to some extent that people are generally self-interested.
Humans may be trustworthy in prosperous times, but they will quickly turn selfish, deceitful,
and profit-driven in times of adversity. Such statements about human nature are often offered
up as justifications in the book of The Prince that Machiavelli wrote. Machiavelli's view about
the nature of Human is that man possess both good and bad qualities but will lean towards his
self-interests when all things are equal. Thus, Human is a fickle creature.
The Dialectic of Determinism, which is the doctrine that all facts and events exemplify natural
law, is where the thought of Marx's premise. The way in which the people organize the end of
production necessarily determines the broad outlines of their social structure, their political
system, and the ideologies they have to justify or attack the status quo. From this sense,
dialectic “refers in part to the interrelationships of all phenomenon, and any phenomenon can
be understood only in terms of its broader context.” For instance, it may be difficult to
understand the characteristics of capitalism without knowing its initial growth and
development in the context of feudalism and mercantilism. One cannot understand either the
behavior of the proletariat without knowing its present origins or the demands and interests of
the bourgeoisie. From the perspectives of the dialectic, the more complete and scientific
knowledge is the greater awareness of the phenomena as they interact with other phenomena
in the environment. Each man defines himself only as interacts with nature (the material
demands of his environment) and with the social reality around him. “Dialectical Materialism”
aptly describes Marx's political thought.
Marx believed that the reason why nations change is that clauses of men within the nation
begin to oppose each other. The history of the world should not be regarded as a history of the
rivalry between status but, more fundamentally, as a history of the rivalry between classes.
I agree with Karl Marx's view of capitalism and how He critique it. Karl Marx views capitalist
society with immense equality—that the majority of the people in society suffer from poverty
and wants. Workers who operate the machinery of production are those who suffer the most
from the effects of industrial, notwithstanding that they also receive the least amount of what
they produce. If in the society of the few, who are economically powerful, do not even perform
manual labor yet they enjoy most of the wealth produced by manual labor; then this indeed
economically and morally wrong. The way to determine the value of a given commodity is to
compute the labor that is necessary to produce it. This is the labor theory of value. Since the
capitalist is not a worker, he does not produce value, but the worker is not compensated for the
total value of the commodities that they produce. What is taken from the worker by the
capitalist is surplus-value, a concept introduced by Marx to describe how the capitalist exploits
the worker.
It is important to note that the writing of ‘Communist Manifesto' by Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels adopted the label “Communism” to distinguish their political ideas from those of the
early Utopian socialism who’s the vision of the economic system was based on the premise
that, if capital voluntarily surrendered its ownership of means of production to the state and on
the workers, unemployment, and poverty would be abolished. Because of this, classes ceased
to exist; and as a result, political instability and socio-economic conflict were things of the past.
Karl Marx’s visions of the future could be viewed from his attempts to extrapolate major trends
in capitalist society and the tendencies toward monopoly and the division of capitalist society
into two major classes; I.e., the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat.