Early in his career, Marx formulated his view of human nature in one of his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’: ‘… the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’ (T 172). That statement involves an important insight—human nature is affected by the prevailing social relations, and so is different in different kinds of society—but it is misleadingly one-sided. There are elements of human nature that are inherent in most (if not all) human individuals. Changing the social relations, or the economic basis of society, will not
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