Despite his critique of modern society, Marx is considered to be a philosopher of the Enlightenment. That is , he believes in the Enlightenment notion of progress in relation to historical development and in a project of universal human emancipation. Expressing the sentiment that humans can gradually take control of their own destiny he writes that freedom ‘can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under collective control instead of being dominated by it as a bilnd power’ (Marx 1981 : 959).