The interpretation of the Marxist notion of “natural form” in Echeverría: meanings, definition, and critical sense

Abstract

The article explains the meaning of the notion of “natural form” of use values, formulated by Marx, recovered especially by the Ecuadorian philosopher Bolívar Echeverría. The purpose of the text is to analyze Echeverría’s reinterpretation of the notion of “natural form” of the work process as a structural behavior of human existence, through an analysis of the meanings of the term, its definition and characterization of its main elements. The text is divided into six sections, each of which has the following topics: 1) the description of the texts by Marx and Echeverría on which we base ourselves; 2) the relevance of the notion of “natural form” in Marx’s works; 3) we try a phenomenological approach to the research that Marx carried out from critical materialism to reveal the protosocial substratum that underlies the “value form”; 4) we address the ambiguity of the term “natural” in our topic; 5) we explain the transnatural characteristic of human existence and the foundation of the social fact; 6) we make nine clarifications that are relevant to Echeverrian definition of the “natural form” of the work process; and 7) in the last section we make some critical notes whose objective is to avoid a substantialization of the notion of “natural form”, in addition to distinguishing between the critical function of this notion with respect to the possible readings that associate it with a form in itself of resistance.