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JL: In your critique of Arendt’s Darwinian-Hegelian reading of Marx (as well as in Chapter 5), you center the concept of species-being, insisting upon its continued significance to Marx’s mature body of work. Critically, you argue that it is through species-being that the economic and organizational dimension of the communist critique is united with its political dimension. If human social needs are historically constituted, the species-being concept in and of itself poses a normative critique: all forms of organized economic activity are ends that posit normative, historically specific social ontologies. What do you see as the political significance of reframing the species-being concept as an ethico-political question in our contemporary conjecture?

ML: This aspect of Marx’s thinking has not featured strongly in the most interesting, recent work on Capital and its philosophical elements. The hesitancy has been that any idea of social ontology must imply some sort of dubious, transhistorical argument that any form-specific discussion of value would have to abandon. I see this binary as a destructive one, not just because it becomes hard to read the passages in which Marx directly invokes ideas of species-being, which remains consistent in his work, but because it eschews attempts to provide an account of what Marx takes a human life to be and why he finds the specific form of life under capital to be deficient. There is a normative rejection of the way in which human life is dominated by the logic of capital, which prevents us from cultivating the potential for a rational form of life. Marx forms this view from a critique of the alienation of labor, which he considers to be life-activity, because in rationally making and remaking our lives together, we can be free.

Species-being is not a romantic concept calling for a return to some earlier essence, but rather the idea of what human life could be based on whatit is to be a rational being. Marx articulates his idea of life through the ways we are both rational and historical beings. Through all his work, Marx takes labor to be a social form of practice that shows our historical nature. But, crucially, we’re also rational beings in ways that make us distinct from other forms of animal life. On the basis of this capacity, we can critique this form of life and analyze alienation, taking the potentialities of human life as our standpoint. Furthermore, that our practices are normative has implications not just on the ways we live our lives, implicitly, but on the types of explicit questions we ask ourselves: whether it’s about how we decide to reproduce family life, who does the care work, but also, say, the workplace, questions of industrial matters, whether you will go on strike, and so on.

-- The Normativity of Marx’s Aristotelian-Hegelianism: An Interview with Michael Lazarus

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