Who Are You: Marx and the Sum of All Social Relations
title: "Who Are You: What Does the Sum of All Social Relations Mean?" date: "2026-07-18" category: "life-growth" author: "Zhigeng"
Who Are You: What Does the Sum of All Social Relations Mean?
The famous Marxist thesis that human essence is the sum of all social relations was probably first encountered in middle school. To be honest, I only truly understood its meaning decades later, in 2018, after the event of 104-year-old renowned Australian ecologist David Goodall purchasing a one-way ticket to Switzerland for euthanasia.
I. The Lesson of the Wolf Children
Before being inspired by the Goodall case, whenever I taught this principle in class, I would use the example of the Indian wolf children. This example has force, but it is ultimately too distant from our lives; its power to shake the mind is insufficient.
I first heard the story of the Indian wolf children when I was in elementary school. At the time, beyond finding it novel, I had no deeper understanding.
The event occurred in 1920 in Midnapore, India. Someone discovered two young girls living with a wolf pack in a wolf den: the older about eight years old, the younger about two. They could not walk upright, moving on all fours; they could not speak, only howling like wolves; they feared light, being nocturnal; they would not eat cooked food, only raw meat; when drinking water, they would lap it up with their tongues.
Reverend Singh took them to an orphanage, attempting to restore their humanity. The younger one died quickly. The older lived to age seventeen, but until her death, she had learned fewer than fifty words, and her intellectual level remained at about that of a three-year-old.
Here is the question: were these two children human?
In the biological sense, the answer is indisputable: of course they were human. They had human DNA, human brain structures, human bodies. In the biological sense, they were 100% human.
But consider it from another angle: with whom did they live? Wolves. Whose behavior patterns did they learn? Those of wolves. To whom were their emotional bonds tied? Wolves. Where was their sum of social relations? In the wolf pack.
No one knows where they came from or who their parents were. Thus, in the social sense, they were 100% wolf.
Raised in a wolf pack, the wolf children were filled with the habits of wolves. Every non-human behavior they acquired precisely mirrored the set of social relations they possessed. Their sociality was complete and real—only, it was the sociality of wolves.
II. Marx's Thesis
In the spring of 1845, the 27-year-old Marx, in Brussels, jotted down a hurried set of notes. This manuscript, later known as the Theses on Feuerbach, contained only eleven theses, fewer than 1,500 words in total. Yet when Engels reread it over forty years later, he called it the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook.
The sixth thesis contains that famous assertion: Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.
First, Marx negated a mode of thinking that had prevailed for two millennia. From ancient Greece to Feuerbach, philosophers had been asking: what is human essence? Some said reason, some said virtue, some said self-consciousness, some said love. All these answers shared a common structure: understanding human essence as some kind of intrinsic attribute carried within each person, innate and unique like DNA.
The problem with this mode of thinking is that it imagined the human being as an isolated individual who could exist apart from society, and then searched within this isolated individual for some eternal, unchanging human nature. But this is merely an abstraction; no such isolated individual has ever existed in reality. From the moment of birth, every person is situated within a network of social relations woven from parents, family, language, class, nation, and era.
In its reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations—this is Marx's thesis: you are not someone who first possesses a human nature and then enters society; your human nature is precisely constituted by the social relations in which you are embedded. You are your parents' child, your teacher's student, your friend's companion, your company's employee, your nation's citizen, the product of your era. The sum of all these relations is not a label attached to you but the very answer to the question of who you are.
Marx's choice of words is significant: sum, in the original German das Ensemble, does not mean the sum of parts or an accumulation. It means an organic whole. Just as a symphony is not the accumulation of instruments, just as a dish is not the accumulation of ingredients, who you are is not the accumulation of your various identity labels—it is the unique whole generated through the interaction of these relations.
III. The Biological and the Social: The Dual Attributes of the Human
The story of the wolf children helps concretize Marx's thesis.
Those two young girls possessed complete human biological attributes—DNA, brain, bodily organs, everything was there—but they were deprived of human social relations: no mother taught them to speak, no playmates taught them rules, no social environment told them you are a human being.
In the social sense, they did not become human.
Our current standard formulation is that humans possess the dual attributes of the biological and the social: the biological gives you the possibility of becoming human—with a human brain, you can potentially learn language—but it is the social that determines what kind of human you can become.
The wolf children's brains were human brains, but the software written into those brains was not human language and culture but the behavioral patterns and social rules of a wolf pack. The same hardware, loaded with different software, becomes a different species in the social sense.
The hardware is, broadly speaking, the same for everyone, but the software varies by person, by society, by era—and the differences can be enormous.
Whatever social relations exist, that kind of software is written. Wolf social relations wrote wolf software; human social relations write human software. Your language, your values, what you find delicious or unpalatable, what you consider beautiful or ugly, how you understand love and hate—none of this grows out of your genes; it is all generated in your relations with others.
The richer, deeper, and more diverse a person's social relations, the fuller their existence as a human being. Conversely, when social relations wither, human existence shrinks accordingly.
IV. Two Extreme Cases
If the wolf children illustrate one extreme of sociality—human in biology, wolf in sociality—then the loss of sociality is the other extreme: having once possessed human social relations, and then losing them.
Case One: David Goodall, 104 Years Old, I Want to Die
Goodall was a renowned Australian ecologist who held three doctoral degrees, published over 130 papers, and edited the 30-volume Ecosystems of the World series. At ninety, he was still playing tennis; at 101, he took a train across Australia alone. He lived to 104, his mind still lucid.
But on his 104th birthday, his wish was: I want to die.
Not because of illness—he had no terminal disease. Not because of depression—his mind was entirely normal. It was simply because: his social relations had perished.
His wife had died, most of his friends had died, colleagues had been replaced generation after generation, and no one remembered that he had been a pioneer in his field. The university took back his office; he could no longer drive or go out alone. No one needed him to review papers; no students came to seek his guidance. He had once been woven into a dense web of social relations—colleagues, students, readers, family, friends—and this web, strand by strand, had snapped.
Goodall's social life had withdrawn, withered, and died; he chose to end his biological life. This was not surrender but acknowledgment of a fact: when all the social relations that constituted who Goodall was had come to an end, Goodall as a social person no longer existed. What lay in that bed was, more than anything, a biological organism called Goodall.
Case Two: Alzheimer's Disease—When the Social Self in Memory Disappears
Alzheimer's patients forget everything: who they are, their spouse's name, their children's faces, what they have done, whom they loved, whom they hated, whether they have just eaten, whether they have just used the bathroom...
Yet the vast majority of these patients' biological functions remain: they still breathe, their hearts still beat, they still digest food. What they forget are their social relations—whose husband/wife am I, whose father/mother am I, what work have I done, who are my friends, who have I become in this lifetime...
When the memory of all these social relations disappears, is the remaining organism still him or her?
Family members will say yes, because the family remembers. But for the patient themselves—if a person no longer knows who they are, to whom they are connected, or where they stand in society—this who, in the social sense, has in fact already vanished.
Alzheimer's demonstrates Marx's thesis in a cruel way: when the ensemble of social relations is erased from a person's consciousness, the person no longer exists—only a living body remains.
V. From Sum to Who Are You
Returning to the opening question: who are you?
When asked this question, you would probably answer: I am so-and-so, I am the child of so-and-so, I work at such-and-such company, I like this, I dislike that, I believe in...
Look closely: not a single item in your answer concerns your biological attributes. You would not say I am a carbon-based life form with two hands and two legs. You would not say my DNA sequence is ATGC... Your most natural answer is entirely defined by social relations: your name was given by your parents, your job was given by your employer, your values were given by education and society, what you like or dislike was formed through comparison with others...
You have probably never considered the biological you as the answer to who you are. Your understanding of yourself, your natural, unselfconscious self-cognition, is already answering who am I through social relations.
Going further: if your social relations were stripped away one by one—not your name, not your job, not your family, not your nationality, not your education, not your social class, not your era—then, outside and beneath all these relations, does that pure you still exist?
According to Marx's thesis: it does not.
Not it becomes very empty or loses meaning, but it simply does not exist. Because you without these relations and music without notes are the same logical impossibility. You do not first have a self and then acquire social relations; you are constituted by these social relations—remove these relations, and there is no you.
VI. Humanity Advances with Development
The preceding text distinguished the biological and social attributes of humans, and through the cases of the wolf children, Goodall, and Alzheimer's, unpacked the meaning of the thesis of the sum of social relations.
These are the dual attributes of the human: the biological and the social.
Although animals in nature also have a social dimension, human sociality has become complexified with the development of society and the increasing intricacy of social relations. From animal sociality to human sociality is a qualitative advance.
But the advance of human nature does not stop with the flourishing of sociality. Today's humanity, with the development of the fourth world—cyberspace—has acquired a new attribute: the cybernetic. And with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, the machinic and the futuristic have emerged. These will be addressed in future articles in this publication.
All learning is ultimately the study of humanity. The exploration of human nature knows no end.
Zhigeng Science · July 2026 Trilogy on Human Nature · Part One