1 Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt on Democratic Political Creation: From Councilism to Cochabamba Christopher Holman Published in 2014 in Telos 169, pp. 84-105 http://journal.telospress.com/content/2014/169/84 Introduction One of the central contradictions that can be identified in the philosophy of Karl Marx is that between the theory of the individual that Marx would most comprehensively develop in 1844, and his theory of political action, or more precisely, his conception of the place of the political within a socialized humanity. Specifically, Marx seems to fail to develop a model of politics which is capable of affirming his model of human essence. In the 1844 Manuscripts, through an analysis of what are taken to be the four interrelated moments of alienation, Marx develops an understanding of a specifically human being which is defined in terms of the negative capacity of this being to generate the conditions of its own existence via the perpetual creation of new subjective and objective actualities. The human essence is conceptualized as a form of free, spontaneous, creative, and aesthetic activity that is actualized through participation in processes of productive objectification. It is seen as a type of praxis in which the individual, by setting in motion – through activities of labor – reflective processes of creation, and acting communally with her other species-beings, overcomes simultaneously both the nature of the objective world and the nature of itself. Now, whereas Marx considers the actualization of the human essence – the realization of the species-being as the creative and self-overcoming being – as an intrinsic good in-itself, politics seems to be reduced to a mere means to the extent that it aims only at the instrumental construction of a social formation capable of facilitating this actualization. That the political