2. It even more obviously violates the entire histori-
cal approach of Marxism which denies that man has
a natural or real or true self from which he can be
alienated. Marx maintained that by acting upon the
external world, nature, and society, man continually
modifies his own nature (Capital, Eng. trans., I, 198),
that history may be regarded as “the progressive modi-
fication” of human nature, and that to argue that so-
cialism and its institutional reforms are against human
nature—one of the oldest and strongest objections to
the Marxist program—is to overlook the extent to
which the individual with his psychological nature is
a social and therefore historical creature. Many of the
difficulties of the view that Marxism is a theory of
alienation and a social program liberating man from
his alienation are apparent as soon as we ask: From
what self or nature is man alienated?, and then com-
pare the implications and presuppositions of the re-
sponse with other explicitly avowed doctrines of Marx.
The attempt by Tucker to distinguish in Marx between
a constant human nature—productive, free, and self-
fulfilling—and a variable human nature—alienated in
class societies—attempting to save the doctrine of
alienation, fails to explain how it is possible that man's
constant nature should come into existence, according
to Marx, only at the end of prehistory, only when the
classless society emerges. In addition, Marx like Hegel
repudiates the dualism between a constant and variable
human nature to the point of denying that even man's
biological nature is constant.
