economic determinism, or even to describe it as ‘social-ist’
as opposed to individualistic. For one thing Marx’s very
definition of ‘communism’ was a stateless community in
which “the free development of each is the condition for
the free development of all” – and not the other way round
as so many, not having read this definition in The
Communist Manifesto itself, all too readily assume. More
importantly, the primary aim of Marx’s work from its
earliest beginnings lay not in expounding some
‘economistic’ theory of society or individual consciousness,
but rather in exposing how, in societies founded solely on
economic property relations, relations between human
beings are shaped by and ultimately reduced to relations
between things – commodities. Similarly, as the Jewish
thinker Martin Buber put it, the ‘I-It’ relation, a relation to
some ‘thing’ or ‘It’ – or to the human being perceived as a
thing or ‘It’ – replaces an authentic relation of beings, an ‘I-
Thou’ relation. The relation of human beings to nature too,
takes the form of an ‘I-It’ relation, thus reducing both
human beings and nature to what Heidegger called a mere
‘standing reserve’ of exploitable natural or human
‘resources’.
“In our age the I-It relation, gigantically swollen, has
usurped, practically uncontested, the mastery and the rule.
The ‘I’ of this relation, an ‘I’ that possesses all, makes all,
succeeds with all, that is unable to say Thou, unable to
meet a being essentially, is lord of the hour.”
Martin Buber