The ‘human’ in a communist society might reappropriate transhumanism and technologically rework itself. A nascent communist society could either choose or be forced (by ecological collapse, perhaps, or the aftermath of war) to radically modify the physical form of the human, including its cognitive apparatus, metabolic system and body. Marx himself recognized that ‘man [sic] produces man’ (2007: 103). As István Mészáros noted, for Marxists there can never be ‘a point in history at which we could say: “now the human substance has been fully realized.” For such a fixing would deprive the human being of his [sic] essential attribute: his power of “self-mediation” and “self-development”’ (1970: 119). While transhumanism has origins in socialist thinkers (Bogdanov 1984; Haldane 1924; Bernal 1969), it came of age in radical libertarian circles and proliferated with little criticism of capitalism (Hughes 2012). If transhumanism is understood, as it defines itself, as an ‘intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities’ (Humanity+ n.d.), there is, as one of the authors of this book has argued (Steinhoff 2014), nothing inherently anti-communistic about it, despite its longstanding liaison with capital. This perspective is easily associated with Marx’s humanist and high modernist moments, for as transhumanists acknowledge, their philosophy ‘can be viewed as an extension of humanism, from which it is partially derived’ (Humanity+ n.d.). Ongoing transhumanist techno-transformations could, however, raise increasingly difficult problems about the nature of the communality to which communism refers. While our respective stances on these issues differ, we all agree that Marxists should seriously engage with transhumanism, to decouple it from its blindly capitalist trajectory, reflect on Marx’s own high modernist tendencies, and delineate a social project to embrace or escape.
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inhuman power