Welcome to the third entry in the Marx in Moments series. These are three-minute reads, examining key Marxist concepts in a clear and accessible way. This week, we focus on Marx’s concept of Species-Being, which is the foundation for understanding our relationship to our work and the planet.
“An animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally… Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.”
I’ve never cared for conversations about humanity’s ‘true nature’; I find them pointless. We can’t prove it—and even if we could, it would have changed by now as we evolved. Besides, if our nature really were rooted in greed, the point would be to change it for the sake of our survival. However, I do find Marx’s concept of Species-Being interesting—not just in its materialist grounding, but also in its ecological implications.
What does Marx mean by species-being? Our essence, according to Marx, is not a fixed “nature”; rather, it is the dependency that defines the first biological fact.1 We need to eat, sleep, and stay warm to survive; because of this fact, we are a part of nature. We do not come before it or above it—we are in it. This is a two-way relationship where we are transforming ourselves as we transform the land. To sustain, we must interact with nature—we have material needs, we think of ways to meet these needs, we then build what we need out of nature to complete the process. This process—production—socially reproduces us. This is essence; this is species-being. It is not rooted in an idealistic notion of what is right or just—it is simply rooted in what is materially true. Although it goes further than a simple means of survival.
Marx also argued that the way we consciously think of, plan, and execute this production separates humanity from other animals. Animals produce singularly—to survive.1 Humanity produces singularly and universally—for need and for pleasure. In producing, humanity reproduces not just objects but the entire social and natural world. Marx called this ongoing exchange the social metabolism: the continuous, material process through which human beings and the natural world produce and reproduce each other. A rational social metabolism would ensure that this universal productive capacity serves the reproduction of both humanity and nature together.
This metabolic relationship runs deeper than production alone. The concept of nature as inorganic body, for Marx, goes beyond biological necessity. Nature’s imprint permeates our consciousness through art, science, and culture. Our intellectual and aesthetic existence is rooted in our sensuous engagement with the natural world. The stuff of nature, often seen as economic inputs, is the substance of human consciousness itself. Nature is not a “toolbox”—it is the material necessity for physical and social becoming. We cannot return to nature in a naïve, pre-industrial manner, but we can construct an economy that has a consciously rational relationship with nature.
Under capitalism, we have reduced our exchange with nature to a simple means of survival, leading to the instrumentalization of nature (inputs for production). Thus, when Marx discusses alienation, it has an ecological dimension—if you disrupt the balance between humanity and nature, you disrupt humanity from its primary sense of being. John Bellamy Foster calls this disruption the metabolic rift: the systematic rupture of the natural cycles that sustain both human society and the natural world, produced by capitalism’s subordination of the metabolism to the logic of profit, rather than need.
Species-being is not a nostalgic concept—it is a materialist one. The question it poses is not how we value nature, but how we organize our relationship with it. Under capitalism, that organization conforms to the logic of profit. The metabolic rift is what that logic produces. The alternative is a consciously rational metabolism, built on the recognition that we are not above the natural world but irreversibly, materially, a part of it.
Marx in Moments Series:
- Marx in Moments 01—The Materialist Conception of History
- Marx in Moments 02—Alienation
Notes:
1. Species-being shouldn’t be read in a normative sense—as if capitalism is wrong because it violates some ‘fixed ideal of human essence.’ Marx himself moved away from purely philosophical formulations after The German Ideology. However, the materialist insight—that human beings are defined by their needs and their metabolic relationship with nature—runs continuously through Marx’s work. Reading species-being as a materialist description of this metabolic relationship rather than a philosophical ideal means it is fully consistent with Marx’s immanent critique of capitalism: the metabolic rift is not capitalism failing to live up to an ideal, but capitalism materially disrupting the natural conditions of its own existence.
2. We now know this isn’t entirely correct.