문화적 마르크스-창조적 인간, 자기 실현, 자유

Abstract

The new millennium has brought out so many changes in most area cf our experience. The emergence of market society is a crucial part of these changes. Market society refers to a form of community which is dominated by market rationality, that is instrumental, utilitarian, functional rationality. The idea of market provides a crucial way of rethinking the major changes in the lives under the advanced capitalism and market models play a primary role in restructuring our understanding of our own community. Human knowledge, basically a vital relation between the self and the outer world, working as an expansion of human self, becomes mere information producing an output with exchange values. On the other hand, general human capacity to develop the ability of thinking and feeling and responding is rapidly marginalized. people are becoming more skeptical of the values these human capacities has cultivated. This is why market society is hostile to the human capacity called culture. Culture is the spiritual, intellectual and emotional resource which satisfies the need for more qualified, more vital and more creative life. In these processes, self-realization is achieved and this is what makes us human being. Marx, especially the young Marx, is the first major thinker who explored the antagonistic relationship between capitalist mode of being and human cultural capacity. The young Marx defines human beings as creative beings. For him human creativity is a synonym for human labor, the productive activity which expands not only the new realm of nature but also human power of self-realization. Thus, the real problem of capitalism is not so much that it leads to social and economic injustice as that it deprives a human being of his creative energy. At least for the young Marx, communism aims at a production of "rich human being with rich human needs" whereas capitalism produces a being only with a "sense of possessing." We call this aspect of Marx "cultural Harx," This paper attempts a cultural understanding of Marx by exploring the key concepts of the early Marx such as human creativity, alienation, self-realization and freedom.