Karl MARX 1818-1883
Writings:
Theses on Feuerbach 1844
The Holy Family 1845
Manifesto of the Communist Party 1847/48 (with Frederick Engels)
Das Kapital Part I 1867, other parts posthumously published by' Engels.
More recent emphasis has been placed on
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844, and
The German Ideology, Marx and Engels, 1845/46.
Cf. Lenin:
Marxism as a bringing together of German Philosophy (Hegel and post Hegelian),
French Socialism and English Economics.
(A) General Notes on.the
philosophical side of Marx:
Marx's own philosophy is fundamentally a humanism, a teaching about
human beings in their full social and historical reality. The official communist 'Dialectical
Materialism', the metaphysical world view of communism, owes more to Engels, Lenin and Stalin than to Marx and may be regarded
as belonging rather to the "scholastic" or theological stage of
Marxism.
(1)
Considered as a humanistic philosophy,
it emerges essentially as a critique of
Hegel but borrowing quite a lot from Hegel in the process.
Under the influence of Hegel, Marx was convinced of both the historical and
the social character of human beings.
What Marx adds to this is an emphasis on the importance to both of these
of the relationship of human
beings to concrete, physical nature, the
relationship in which they earn their daily bread.
·
Human beings are the product of
history, of a process of humanization, a process of becoming. This process is a collective one: the
individual is only a participant, and. can be understood
only within this collective history.
·
Human beings produce this history of
which they are also products and to that extent produce themselves; but they do
so always under the prevailing circumstances of the moment, circumstances not
chosen by the human actors at that moment themselves. So far also Hegel.
·
Marx: the most important of these
circumstances are the means by which and the relationships within which human
beings produce their daily sustenance --human being is the being that produces
itself, in its social and historical character, fundamentally through the
transformation of nature in labour.
·
Summing up putting the last first:
human being creates itself in a dialectical relation to Nature,
is a dynamic rather than a static being and individuals are not to be
understood outside the ensemble of their social relations.
(2) One of the central notions of Marx's humanism, the key term, though the
term itself tends to disappear in the later Marx, is the notion of alienation, also 'estrangement' ' = alienation
with respect to other people. The
process of self-creation of human beings by human beings, on both the
individual and social-hi8torical level, is a dialectical process of alienation
and transcendence of alienation. You
have to go out from self, express yourself, do something, relate to other
people and to nature, if you want to find yourself. But development through alienation applies
also to the historical development of humanity, and in both cases it has a
positive significance.
A few other particular ideas related to this process which Marx also gets from Hegel but with a rather stronger emphasis than in Hegel himself:
(a) How the most downtrodden, alienated class in society, e.g. the proletariat, are not just riff-raff but the bearers of the future;
(b) The importance of human labour in the process of self-creation of man and woman.
The central text for both ideas is Hegel's dialectic of master and slave in
the Phenomenology of Spirit.
In respect of this process of
development through alienation and transcendence of alienations however Marx
does make some changes and additions:
(i) The process of going out of oneself in order to come back to oneself can get sick:
·
This happens in the labour
process: instead of finding him or herself in their work, they become dominated
by it, by what they produce and the circumstances in which they must produce
it, they are not at home in their work, alienated in the work itself;
·
This happens also in
religion, this expression of and protest against our real misery, in
which we set up, in contrast, what we would like individuals and community to
be. Unfortunately we put this over against ourselves, in another world, we put the saints on a pedestal and the blessed
community in heaven: what might be a spur to our activity in religion is turned
into an opium to keep us quiet. The
alienation, the objectification in the outer, is itself alienated and
estranged, and far from enabling him or her to find themselves by giving to him
or her what they could be, further inhibits their finding of themselves, chains
them even more strongly in their place.
According to Marx the only thing to do is abolish religion, not directly
however but by abolishing that real misery of real human beings which necessitates
it.
This element of sickness has to be pointed out and criticized, for the sake
of its overcoming.
(ii) For Hegel the subject of the process 'of self-development or self-realization is Mind
--Mind coming to self-consciousness through Nature and History, culminating in the philosophical understanding which Hegel's philosophy provides.
Whereas for Marx this emphasis on Mind and mere spiritual contemplation is
a lot of hogwash, abstract, unreal, itself a kind of sickness: the
subject of the historical process is always human society,
composed of concrete individual sensuously real human beings relating
themselves to nature and to each other, the relationships reflecting and
determining the extent to which they have become fully developed human beings, human
existence coming to coincide with the nature and potentialities of human
essence.
To sum up, alienations,
despite their positive historical significance, have
to do with concrete, physical human beings, and are there to be transcended or
overcome. Marx is in the business of
pointing them out, both their element of positive significance and their
element of sickness, in order for their overcoming. This notion of a critique of alienations links up meanwhile with another notion of
Marx, the idea of
(3) Philosophy as Praxis:
Philosophers such as Hegel and Feuerbach fail to realize that the most important relation of man to the world is not one of contemplation, theoria, but of praxis, of doing, of practical human-sensuous activity:
The question whether objective truth
can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical
question. In practice a person must
prove the truth, that.is the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his or her thinking. The dispute over the reality or non-reality
of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic.question. (Second Thesis on Feuerbach)
Philosophy reached the limits of speculative achievement in Hegel's system,
but Hegel's system is an idealism,
it approaches reality through ideas, concepts, seeking to understand, to
possess in consciousness the rational character of the real. It is confined to pure thought and the whole
movement of the System ends in absolute knowledge.
Hegel's system is standing on its head; to be put right and fulfilled it
needs to be turned upside down, and set on its feet, on the solid ground of
material reality.
For the question now is not how to understand reality
but how to bring reality to perfection, how to realize the immanent end towards
which the real is tending.
The task of philosophy cannot be achieved by further speculation, but by
carrying over Hegel's dialectical method to bring about a transformation of
reality. Thus, Thesis XI of the Theses on Feuerbach:
The philosophers have only interpreted
the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
--by putting thought to the service of revolution, making thinking itself a "practical-critical" or practical human sensuously real activity, an element of revolutionary practice.
This, Marx sets out to do himself.
(4) He does it by what is, in effect, a
particular kind of critique of
alienations:
Feuerbach's critique of
religion is a critique of religious alienation of man, and it remains
within the intellectual, speculative sphere.
Marx sets out to a critique of all the alienations of human beings,
considered as concrete situations in which people are really lost, a stranger
to their true selves. And its aim is,
not to explain reality, but to transform the real into a more human world. According to Feuerbach,
there is only one alienation, the religious one.
For Marx, there are several: religious, philosophical, political, social,
economic, and the religious is by no means the most important, and all the
others are secondary effects of the economic, and this takes us to the
centre-piece of Marx's thought, his theory of history, his HISTORICAL MATERIALISM.
A critique of alienations, in order to function as praxis,' has to do a number of things.
·
It has to distinguish, to describe the
alienations, to bring them to consciousness.
·
But it has also to give a causal
analysis, and to indicate somewhat how they may be cured.
It is Marx's Historical Materialism which gives us an understanding of how
the various alienations may have come about and what they depend on, and gives
us the clue as to how they may be cured.
It is not the whole of Marx's philosophy but it holds the critique of
human alienations together and enables it to become a form of praxis.
(B) Marx's HISTORICAL MATERIALISM:
:as distinct from Dialectical Materialism
which is a general philosophy of matter and nature -an invention of Engels, but accepted by the later Marx as a suitable
horizon for his own Historical Materialism.
Historical Materialism is:
·
a theory of history, of how humanity makes
itself through history, Marx's variety of "infrastructural thinking"
about human beings and history;
·
an understanding of history which
insists on the importance within it of the development of human labour,
·
a theory of history according to which the development of the 'means of production' and the 'productive relations' or relations of
production constitute the driving force of history as a process of
humanization. A distinction is made
between a superstructure and an infrastructure, and the theory
means that developments in the super-structure are to be explained at least in
general line by reference to the infrastructure: in any given historical
society the superstructure is a reflection of the degree of development of, and
of the tensions within, the infrastructure.
The infrastructure consists of the conditions of production the
means of production and the relations for production;
the super-structure: social
classes, the legal system, the state, forms of consciousness.
1. looking
at the theory synchronically or
statically first of all:
forms of consciousness, inc. art, religion, philosophy
state apparatus
superstructure
legal system
social classes class struggle
--determines---reflects------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
relations of
production
infrastructure
means of production
conditions of production
Explanation of terms:
determines: not meant to
imply makes to exist --consciousness for example is a natural characteristic of
human beings -but rather: decides the content of, but not necessarily down to
the last detail, in general terms.
infrastructure: human beings producing their life in
interaction with nature, in the work place (sometimes the home), together with
their fellows.
Conditions of production: concrete physical conditions within which human beings produce their lives:
natural resources, climate, situation etc.
means of production: whatever people use in the process of labour
--tools, instruments, machinery, also knowledge and skills;
relations for production or productive
relations: men and women produce their life in a social way. productive relations
are particular ways of co-operating in labour, the
economic structure of society, e.g. as in feudalism, or as in the factory
system, more or less corresponding to the means of production at our disposal.
More or less corresponding: an interaction, not a straight out determination -it's the discrepancy
that arises between them as the means of production improve that is the seat of
dialectic.
Productive relations at any given stage, are
reflected in the property relations.
the super-structure:
social classes: more than just purely economic, and yet they depend on
the property relations. The privileged
class is the class which possesses the means of production, as distinct from
those who don't.
the legal system or juridical order: the dominating system of law.
Law is merely the privileged classes consolidating their position,
turning fact into what ought to be -so the
content of law also given ultimately by the infrastructure -not every
nit-picking law but the overall bias.
E.g. property laws in the 19th C.
the political order or state apparatus:
which defends the juridical order, is an
executive force to protect the laws of the privileged: tithe executive arm of
the ruling class" --anything more is largely a pretense. The State pretends to defend and to represent
the unity of the people, but it is in its factual reality only an attempt at
validation of the divisions of the people, maintaining and reflecting the
divisions already existing.
forms of consciousness: thought, ethical ideas, art, the religion of a given people --all reflect
the people's way of life, the tensions and divisions on the economic and
political levels: the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling
ideas; the class which is the ruling material force is at the same time its
ruling intellectual class.
Philosophers are not the makers of history, they are its by-products: even philosophy,
or at least the dominant philosophy is a subtle defense of the existing social
relations: e.g. Hobbes in defense of absolute monarchy, Locke in defense of the
status quo after 1688, Hegel, in defense of the Prussian state.
Ideology: according to Marx, every community of people, by a largely unconscious
process, generates a set of ideas that protects its position of power and
affirms its identity over against its competitors.
As for religion: religion is
the opium of the people, a compensation for the upset of power in this
life, whose actual effect is to keep the people quiet (never mind, your reward
will be great in heaven). With the
abolition of classes and the end of human alienation, religion will also
disappear.
2. To consider it now
as a theory of history, a
dynamic process:
(a) The moving
forces of history are the economic forces at work, and these cause history to
develop in a dialectical manner. Once labour has started and basic needs are met, new needs
arise--as needs are met, luxuries become needs --and new means of production
are provoked. So the means of production
are developing all the time, and developing in an organic fashion.
Given the tendency of people in control to want to maintain the status quo,
however, the relations for production and property relations don't
develop so easily. As the means of
production evolve, therefore, there is a growing discrepancy between the means
of production and the presently prevailing productive relations (and anything
which depends on them),
leading to a tension, a contradiction between
them ('thesis' and antithesis), which is manifested as an intensification of
class struggle.
This contradiction demands a resolution, a revolution of a kind, a suppression of the prevailing productive relations by
substituting them with more adapted relations.
This 'synthesis' however in turn becomes a new 'thesis', tensions build
up again and the dialectic continues.
Examples: tribalism becoming feudalism, feudalism becoming capitalism,
and (Marx hopes and postulates) capitalism becoming socialism/communism.
The seat of the dialectical development is not just the means or forces of
production, then, but it is in the infrastructure.
(b) History owes both its development and its development by means of
contradiction and resolution i.e. its dialectical character, eventually to the
fact that it is the history of people striving for self-fulfillment. This explains both the development of new
means of production, the tendency of people in control to want to maintain the
status quo, and in spite of this latter, the shift in the balance of power to
the class or classes associated with more adapted relations of production. The privileged classes are going to hang on
to power as long as they can. Yet the
exploited are also striving for self-fulfillment: they need to be made aware of
the exploitation, and of the possibilities inherent in
the economic situation. When the
economic forces are on their side, then is the time to
act.
(c) Implication: action has to
come at the right time, unless conditions are ripe for it, socialism cannot
succeed (versus Lenin and Stalin afterwards).
On the other hand, a situation may be ripe and still not develop
properly. There is need for political
action, political intelligence and organization on the part of the working
class; and people imbued with Marx's theories are to provide the leadership, to
enlighten and guide this working class (not, in Marx himself, however, to act in their stead or on their behalf -in Marx it is the
proletariat as such which makes the revolution, not the party). Marx makes a distinction, therefore, between
·
the proletariat in itself: in its social/economic condition;
and
·
the proletariat for itself: the same proletariat conscious of its
historical and universal mission.
There is the necessity of awakening, provoking the consciousness of the
proletariat -it is not just something that happens--awakening them to the consciousness
appropriate to the possibilities inherent in the given situation. That is the point of philosophy as praxis,
to clarify history not for its own sake but in order to make history: "The
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however
is to change it."