“Zoon politikon” para Marx

This article discusses Marx's use of the famous Aristotelian phrase "man is a political animal [ ]" at three different moments in his theoretical development: in the texts of 1857-8, namely the Introduction of 1857 and the Forms that preceded capitalist accumulation, which are part of the Grundrisse; in book I of Capital: critique of political economy (1867); and in the excerpts on Lewis Morgan's Ancient Society, written in 1881, later published as part of Marx's so-called Ethnological notebooks.Thus, we analyze how Marx interprets the Aristotelian expression, and to what extent it is possible to consider that he disagrees with the statement that "man is a political animal [ ]".It is understood that Marx places the statement in its historical context, as a "characteristic of Classical Antiquity", but that it also refers to an important universal feature: the sociability of the human being, that is "if not a political animal, in any case a social animal".With these inferences, Marx opposes theorists who take the isolated individual as their historical starting point, naturalizing civil-bourgeois society.In this sense, this analysis is not only relevant as a mere Marxian interpretation of Aristotle, but also for the unveiling of two fundamental concepts for Marx, which are intrinsically connected: the ontologically social character of the human being and the historicity of politics, which ultimately provides the basis for overcoming the State itself as a human creation

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