Comrades and friends,
In the First Thesis on Feuerbach, Marx distinguishes his materialism from all previous materialisms, including Feuerbach's, by activating the subject in an objective reality, a real world, unlike the idealist subject which is not really active. Marx's materialist subject is and active, not passive like those of contemplative, objectivist or vulgar materialisms. This revolutionary subject is a practical-critical activist.
This practical-critical subject is key to the changing of the world of the eleventh thesis,for only subjects are active, objects are passive. The eleventh thesis , as Matt said, does not say stop interpreting the world and change it. It implies continue interpreting the world and change the world based on that interpreting. The critical thinking ,or questioning and answering, of the First Thesis is essential to the interpreting of the Eleventh.
In the same vein, Lenin said without revolutionary theory (critique, interpretation and contemplation), there can be no revolutionary movement or action, activity , practice. Marxist ethics is practice,or what is to be done, conduct, acts; in unity with theory.
Marxism unites epistemology and ethics in this way: practice is the ultimate test of theory, defining practice as experimentation and industry after Engels (see _Materialism and Empirio-Criticism_ by Lenin). The test of whether we know a thing (the thing-in-itself) is whether we can make it.
Marx was a politicaleconomist, not just an economist contemplating the macroeconomy like an astronomer the stars with no thought of intervening in its clocklike movement, predicting its objective movement without intending to intervene by influencing the mass subject. This metaphor of the economist drifted into Economism (trade unionism pure and simple,leave politics to the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, an old "left" conservatism) that Lenin argued against in What is to be done ? Economics and politics , political economy,both are what is to be done. "Labor" issues are not the sole top priority of activity for radicals, according to Marx,Engels and Lenin.
Thus when they gave first prominence to the slogan "workers and all oppressed peoples of the world, unite ", they placed the national and other social questions as THE central class questions. The main thing to be done by the working class is not to focus only on labor union pure and simple, day-to-day , shop floor, "economist" issues solely, but that and the obstacles to world,regional, natinonal and local working class unity, which are mainly racism, patriarchy, and national chauvinism.
So, for example, Marx said, "Labor in white skin can never be free,while labor in the Black skin is branded" , meaning the number one labor/"economic" question is sort of an "identity" question from the terminology of this list. There is no "pure and simple" labor question independent or prior to the main dominating/dominated identities within the working class that thwart its fighting potency. These are the first questions for labor before its final conflict with capital.
Charles Brown
James Farmelant writes:
>
>
>On Thu, 25 Jun 1998 08:56:05 -0500 (CDT) Carrol Cox
><cbcox at rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu> writes:
>
>>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
>>
>
>One of the admirable things about Carrol's explication of Marx's
eleventh
>thesis is that it makes apparent the affinities between Marx's
treatment
>of epistemology and John Dewey's pragmatism. In fact Dewey developed
>a critique of epistemology that was very similar to Marx's. Like Marx
>Dewey believed that the so-called problems of how knowledge of the
>external world, of other minds, etc. which have long bedeviled
>epistemologists
>arise when we take the perspective of the isolated subject who is
trying
>to deduce the world from discrete bits of sense-data. Dewey showed
>(as Marx had done before him) how when we abandon this perspective
>these problems are not so much as solved as dissolved because the
>assumptions which underlie these problems are themselves untenable.
>Indeed, Dewey like Marx realized that these assumptions reflected the
>perspective of societies rooted in a division between mental and
physical
>labor.
>
>It should not be too surprising that both Marx and Dewey should have
>arrived at similar treatments of epistemology. Both thinkers began
>their intellectual careers as Hegelians and the Hegelianisms of both
>thinkers evolved in the direction of naturalism.
>
> Jim Farmelant
>
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