p Efforts to disclose the human essence were made long before Marx. But nothing came of them because philosophers entertained idealistic views of society’s development. It cannot be denied, however, that 18th-century French Enlighteners and materialists conjectured that man was a product of the environment and circumstances, but it the same time they regarded the social environment as a modification of human ideas. Pre-Marxist social views therefore spun in a vicious circle: man, his thoughts and emotions were a product of the environment, while the environment was a result of the same human thoughts and emotions. This gave rise to the cult of the abstract man or “man in general”, independent of time and space, a biological being connected with other individuals only through natural, biological relations.

p Marx held an opposite view, namely that the human essence was social. Of course, nature provided the necessary biological material for the rise of man, but the transformation of this material into a human being, a human organism was brought about by social factors, and primarily by labour, by productive activity. Labour, as we said earlier, created man and also found its embodiment in the structure of the human body. Man became man not because he consists of organs, tissue and cells, because he breathes with lungs and nurses children with milk, but because he can work, think and speak, create implements of labour with which he transforms the surrounding world, nature and is capable of entering into social relations with other people.

In the course of his own development, from birth to death, the individual is humanised and socialised, i. e., he acquires human qualities per se, and comes to know his social environment that has been created by the labour and struggle of countless generations. Man cannot act in that 232 environment and assimilate its achievements and experience in isolation from other people. He becomes socialised under the influence of his relations with other people, i. e., social relations, of which he is always a link.