Russ

The act of writing a memoir is not just about saying, “Look at me,” but rather about enabling yourself and defining who you are, in part by revisiting particularly fraught experiences, analyzing them from all angles and complicating them in the retelling.

In other words, there is no such thing as “human nature” in the abstract. Rather, as society changes, so also do the beliefs, desires and abilities of men and women. The way people are cannot be separated from the sort of society in which they live.

Socialism is a good idea, people say, but it will never happen, because you can’t change human nature. Any attempt to create a society free of poverty, exploitation and violence is bound to run up against the fact that human beings are naturally selfish, greedy and aggressive.

The proposition that men and women are first and foremost producers radically challenged basic assumptions about society that had been accepted by almost all earlier thinkers.

It follows that human beings are fundamentally social creatures. It doesn’t make any sense to conceive of people as existing outside society. Here Marx was challenging the political economists, who based their theories on the notion of the individual in isolation from society, and explained the workings of the capitalist market as arising from the

If production is a social activity, then it follows that changes in the organization of production will bring about changes in society, and therefore, since “the essence of man is the ensemble of the social relations,” changes also in people’s beliefs, desires and conduct.

Production by an isolated individual outside society . . . is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without human beings living together and talking to each other