Tahir Wood asked:
> Have you published anything like this or could you recommend any other
> texts?
There are interpretations of Marx that acknowledge this aspect. I interpret Gramsci's idea of "hegemony," for instance, as an explicit recognition of Marx's indebtedness to the treatment of subjectivity and its development in German idealism. I say "explicit" because Gramsci himself makes this point about the concept in a discussion (in a letter to Piero Sraffa) of Croce's criticism of Marx's alleged "economism."
"Of what does the innovation brought about by Croce consist, does it have the significance he attributes to it, and in particular does it have the 'liquidating' value that he claims? We can concretely say that Croce, in his historico-political activity, makes the stress fall exclusively on that moment in politics that is called the moment of 'hegemony,' of consensus, of cultural direction, to distinguish it from the moment of force, of coercion, of legislative, governmental, or police intervention. In truth, one cannot understand why Croce believes that this postulation of the theory of history should be capable of definitively liquidating all forms of the philosophy of praxis. The fact is that precisely during the same period in which Croce was shaping this self-styled cudgel of his, the philosphy of praxis, in its greatest modern theorists, was being elaborated in the same direction and the moment of 'hegemony' or cultural direction was precisely being reevaluated in opposition to the mechanistic and fatalistic conceptions of economism. It has indeed been possible to maintain that the essential trait of the most modern philosophy of praxis resides precisely in the historico-political concept of 'hegemony.' It therefore seems to me that Croce is not 'up-to-date' on the research and bibliography of his favorite studies or has lost his capacity to be critically oriented." (Letters from Prison [Columbia University Press ed.], vol. II, p. 169)
Unfortunately this is over-optimistic about the fate of "mechanistic and fatalistic conceptions of economism" in Marxism.
The interpretive tradition most alive to this aspect is "phenomenological Marxism," the best works of which, in my judgment, are Karel Kosik's Dialectics of the Concrete and Enzo Paci's The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man. Paci interprets Gramsci in a way consistent with what I've just said.
Here is an e-mail I wrote to pen-l which elaborates aspects of the ideas and attempts to show their connection to Aristotle as well as to Kant and Hegel.
> Ironically, the "bourgeois thinker" Marshall is, on the question of the
> ontological basis of the role Marx assigns to "class" in his philosophy
> of
> history, more Marxist than some Marxists (at least so it seems to me).
> This
> is because Marshall understood Marx's use of the idea of "class" to be a
> dialectical sublation of the treatment of human history by Kant, Goethe
> and
> Hegel as a process through which the human essence is actualized.
>
> One aspect of the understanding of the human essence underpinning this
> approach is the ascription to persons of the capacity to develop what
> Hegel,
> as I pointed out in an earlier post, called a "will proper" and a
> "universal
> will". This too is a very old idea. Here is Aristotle's statement of
> it in
> the Nicomachean Ethics
> .
>
> "What affirmation and negation are in thinking, pursuit and
> avoidance
> are in desire; so that since moral virtue is a state of character
> concerned
> with choice, and choice is deliberate desire, therefore both the
> reasoning
> must be true and the desire right, if the choice is to be good, and the
> latter must pursue just what the former asserts. Now this kind of
> intellect
> and of truth is practical; of the intellect which is contemplative, not
> practical or productive, the good and the bad state are truth and
> falsity
> respectively (for this is the work of everything intellectual); while
> of the
> part which is practical and intellectual the good state is truth in
> agreement with right desire.
> "The origin of action - its efficient, not its final cause - is
> choice,
> and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end. This
> is
> why choice cannot exist either without reason and intellect or without a
> moral state; for good action and its opposite cannot exist without a
> combination of intellect and character. Intellect itself, however,
> moves
> nothing, but only the intellect which aims at an end and is practical;
> for
> this rules the productive intellect as well, since every one who makes
> for
> an end, and that which is made is not an end in the unqualified sense
> (but
> only an end in a particular relation, and the end of a particular
> operation)
> - only that which is done is that; for good action is an end, and desire
> aims at this. Hence choice is either desiderative reason or
> ratiocinative
> desire, and such an origin of action is a man." (Nicomachean Ethics,
> The Student's Oxford Aristotle, vol. 5, 1139a)
>
> (Here by the way we have the basis of the key distinction I pointed to
> earlier between Marx's materialism and the "scientific materialism" not
> only
> of E.O. Wilson but of critics of Wilson such as Gould and Lewontin.
> Marx's
> ontology allows for self-determination and final causation as ultimate
> "causes" - as does Aristotle in the passage I've just quoted; the
> materialism of Wilson and Gould explicitly excludes such causes from
> playing
> any ultimate role in determining what goes on. Among other things, this
> produces logical incoherence.)
>
> Hegel's claim that the human essence is "freedom" is a dialectical
> sublation
> of these ideas of Aristotle.
>
> "That man is free by Nature is quite correct in one sense; viz., that
> he is
> so according to the Idea of Humanity; but we imply thereby that he is
> such
> only in virtue of his destiny - that he has an undeveloped power to
> become
> such; for the "Nature" of an object is exactly synonymous with its
> "Idea".
> .... Freedom as the ideal of that which is original and natural, does
> not
> exist as original and natural. Rather must it be first sought out and
> won;
> and that by an incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual and
> moral
> powers. ... To the Ideal of Freedom, Law and Morality are
> indispensably
> requisite; and they are in and for themselves, universal existences,
> objects
> and aims; which are discovered only by the activity of thought,
> separating
> itself from the merely sensuous, and developing itself, in opposition
> thereto; and which must on the other hand, be introduced into and
> incorporated with the originally sensuous will, and that contrarily to
> its
> natural inclination." (Philosophy of History, pp. 40-41)
>
> As in Aristotle, the potential for "freedom" in this sense - a freedom
> whose
> "concept" includes the idea that "Law and Morality" "are in and for
> themselves, *universal* existences, objects and aims" - defines the
> human.
> For Hegel, human history is the process through which this "idea" of
> humanity is actualized.
>
> In Hegel's account of this, "class" is given an essential role. This is
> found in his treatment of the master/slave "relation of production" in
> the
> *Phenomenology of Mind*. The position of the slave in this relation is
> to
> an important degree positively developmental of "mind" i.e. of human
> self-consciousness. The slave is forced to labour under conditions of
> deferred desire. This, according to Hegel, leads to a kind of
> self-consciousness able to move away from pure "immediacy" and begin to
> reflect on desires and the means of satisfying them. This leads to the
> development of "tools" as embodiments of the understanding of nature
> which
> such reflection makes possible. Tools mediate between desire and the
> satisfaction of desire. Their creation requires a consciousness with a
> sense of future. The development of mind that relations of production
> make
> possible is reflected in the development of "forces of production".
>
> The role Marx gives to relations and forces of production (and, as part
> of
> this, the role he gives to "class" in the development of mind) is a
> dialectical sublation of Hegel's dialectical sublation of Aristotle.
>
> Since "freedom" defines all persons, it is always a mistake to condemn
> individuals (e.g. Conrad Black) for the content of their will. Where
> the
> content isn't "good" it must be the result either of irrationality or of
> mistaken judgment. What characterizes the members of the working class,
> according to Marx, is not the moral superiority of the content of their
> "wills" but the possibility contained in their location in the
> "internal"
> relations of production that define capitalism - their class location -
> for
> the development of a consciousness and will sufficiently close to a
> "universal" consciousness and will to enable them to become the
> architects
> and makers of a society from which all barriers to full human
> development
> will have been removed. It is in this sense that they are to be
> understood
> as the "universal class".
>
> "The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same
> human self estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and
> strengthened
> in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power
> and
> has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the
> proletariat
> feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness
> and
> the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of
> Hegel,
> in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to
> which
> it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature
> and
> its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive
> negation of that nature.
> "Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the
> conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former
> arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the
> action
> of annihilating it.
> "Indeed private property drives itself in its economic movement
> towards
> its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not
> depend on
> it, which is unconscious and which takes place against the will of
> private
> property by the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the
> proletariat as proletariat, poverty which is conscious of its spiritual
> and
> physical poverty, dehumanization which is conscious of its
> dehumanization,
> and therefore self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence
> that
> private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat,
> just as
> it executes the sentence that wage labour pronounces on itself by
> producing
> wealth for others and poverty for itself. When the proletariat is
> victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it
> is
> victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the
> proletariat
> disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private
> property.
> "When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the
> proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to
> believe,
> because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary.
> Since in
> the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of
> the
> semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of
> life
> of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in
> their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat,
> yet
> at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that
> loss,
> but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable,
> absolutely
> imperative need -- the practical expression of necessity -- is driven
> directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the
> proletariat
> can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without
> abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the
> conditions
> of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of
> society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain
> does it
> go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a
> question of
> what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the
> moment
> regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and
> what,
> in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.
> Its
> aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in
> its own
> life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society
> today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of the
> English and
> French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is
> constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity."
> *The Holy Family*
Ted