Examine The Relationship Between Marx And Thomas Hobbes

Human Nature is to many a paradoxical relationship, to Karl Marx and Thomas Hobbes it forms those common elements which act as mans ‘means to life’ and mans eternal struggle with his own chains. For Marx, man’s own body, labour (or rather ‘life-activity’) and ‘spiritual essence’ form his human nature; a symbiosis which Marx calls “man’s inorganic body”. The products of a man's labour according to Marx, are part of his bodily faculty and to remove these objects “estranges man’s own body from him” and corrupts his human nature. Conversely, Hobbes concerns himself more with the motivations of man as being the elements which form his human nature. Hobbes views human nature as mans inherent callous selfishness and hedonism, which he observes as to be ignorant and self-destructing. He correlates ungoverned societies to the true revelation of human nature, a state of the ‘savage people’ which
Marx equates the whole of society into two classes, property owners and property less-workers, where he asserts the owners corrupt the workers through the estrangement the workers labour. He views this alienation as a negatively corrupting force, and equates the ‘activity performed…under the dominion…of another man’ to the ‘devaluation of the world of men’. In divergent opinion, Hobbes see’s society, or rather governance, as a positive corrupting force. To Hobbes, government dominion over man serves to immunise man from his true human nature, he writes, ‘the passions that incline men to peace, are fear of death… such things are necessary to commodious living’. Such in this Hobbes is able to reconcile absolute forms of government, who in a sense act as established forms of fear. Both Marx and Hobbes homogenise their sentimentalities by agreeing that mans human nature can be both positively or negatively corrupted by ones