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Man, Nature and Social Production

Man according to Marx is a creative being .He with his labor acts upon the nature and tries to change it. Man can never get satisfied with the existing conditions and always look out for a change. Work provides the most important and vital means for man to fulfill his basic needs, his individuality and humanity.

Man uses his labor which is the essence of human being. In the process of acting upon nature with the help of his labor and transforming it for his benefit man gets satisfaction. At this stage his work becomes a fully satisfying activity, encompassing both himself and the community of fellow human beings. Work through an individual activity becomes a social activity as well. In the process of acting upon nature man gets involved in interaction process with other human beings and gradually society moves towards the stage of complexity. In the process man engages himself in social production. All type of relationships and institutions emerge in society in this process with the economic process as infrastructure and other sub systems including culture, religion etc as super structure. According to Marx without culture there can be no production possible. The mode of production includes the social relations of production which are relations of domination and subordination into which human beings are either born or enter involuntarily. Class is an economic as well as cultural formation. Thus human beings are also in the process of social production which is a very wide concept including almost all the subsystems of society, culture, religion, economic production etc.

The interaction between man and nature produce significant consequences as in his social production man is in constant touch with the nature.Maclver writes that the revelation of the manner in which the environment mold itself and modified by the life of the group is one of the achievements of the social sciences. The relationship between physical environment and social phenomena has been of particular interest for sociologists leading to development of ecological school stimulated by investigation of R.E Park and E.W Burgess at the University of Chicago.