Thesis XII

Carrol Cox cbcox at rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu
Thu Jun 25 06:56:05 PDT 1998


Mat writes:
> [SNIP]


> The point is to change it, but Marx never said that that means we stop
> interpreting it[SNIP]


>
> There are also times when interpretation actually changes the world.

It seems to me that the eleventh thesis is most illuminating if it is seen as an epistemological rather than an "ethical" or pragmatic statment. Talking to himself as he struggles to work out his understanding of social relations, he aims at dissoloving those "mysteries which mislead theory to mysticism," and his preliminary conclusion can be paraphrased as an assertion that knowledge always emerges from practice, rather than (in the first or last instance) practice from knowledge. It seems to me that Marx, writing this thesis, would have deeply repudiated Ezra Pound's Platonic slogan of "ideas into action"; action into ideas and therefore a continuing critique of both practice and theory.

If one begins in the isolated human mind, and then asks how can I (we) know the world, the result is epistemology and mysticism. Marx is denying that it is possible to ask that question, because wherever we find ourselves (even when "we" were homo habilis or homo erectus), we are always already involved in a complex of social relations of which we always already have (corrigible) knowledge, our task being not to discover if knowledge is possible or "real" (which is given to us by our existence as social animals) but of explaining how that knowledge operates and correcting it.

Carrol



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