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I am checking a couple of possibilities to see if I can be helpful about the Smith/Marx,
innate/learned distinction.
 
But, regardless of secondary articles, I wonder what it means to say that self-interest is
innate for Smith, even in the Wealth of Nations. Surely Smith gives many examples of
peoples and classes (the aristocracy, for instance) who seem not to act in any sound sense
of self-interest (unless you use the reductio ad absurdum[or ad subjectivum] that whatever
individuals choose to do is in their self-interest, in which case of course Marx would fit
that too). Is it that in Smith there is a true innate human nature, just waiting to be let
free by the expansion of the scope of market economies?  (If so, that suggests that
economies with limited or constricted markets can modify human nature?)
 
Or is there some other sense of innate or hard-wired in Smith that I am missing? 
 
It seems to me that Marx has a case that labour -- the shaping and re-shaping of nature
and of oneself, under circumstances given from the past -- is what constitutes human being
(or human beings), and history is the story of how that labour has played out.
 
 
Peter G. Stillman 
 
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