Conclusion

When Marx tried to interpret human history as the self-creation and movement of human practices, he “opposes [his theory] to both idealism and the older forms of materialism” (Wellmer 1976, p. 231). Unfortunately, the approach Marx developed in his early years is abandoned by himself. His understanding of human practices was confined to a narrow perspective of material production. Instead of developing the conception of “naturalism,” he argues later that human individuals are fully determined by their social relations and modes of production. In the end, the concepts of material production and human labor are “materialized” further as the continuous development of productive force, which is independent of human will. In the orthodox version of Marxism, social consciousness has nothing to do with the natural capacities of humans. It is fully dependent on social existence, in which economic production is the determining basis of all superstructures.