Introduction

pp. 1-9

in: Peter Archibald, Marx and the missing link, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989

Abstract

We have just now emerged from a period of theorizing by Marxists where individual human beings have often been discounted as epiphenomenal. Their psychic characteristics have been conceived as nearly totally derivative of social relations, ideology, or social for mations as a whole, and as having little impact upon social structuration and change. To the extent that such characteristics have any role at all in this mode of theorizing, they have usually done so only passively. For example, because human individuals have an expanding coterie of needs the production of commodities is also said to expand (automatically). That such individuals are also the conscious and active producers of their own social relations and ideology, who demand that (certain of) their needs be met and (sometimes) become agents of social change when these needs are not met, has often been lost in the fray.