[lbo-talk] Ambigious Doug

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Thu Jun 26 14:57:34 PDT 2003


On Thu, 26 Jun 2003 19:25:11 +0000, Randy Steindorf <grsteindorf at hotmail.com> wrote:


> See Lenin on the component parts of Marxism. In this case, the philosophy
> of Marxism is dialectical materialism.

I'm way overposted today (again...) but, just a comment on diamat.

Wasn't that Plekhanov? Engels vulgarizations. Nowhere in Marx is there the two words in sequence, "dialectical materialism."

See, books I looked at long ago, "Dialectical Materialism, " by Gustav Wetter or those ABC's of vulgar marxism (that he repudiated later in life, see, "Communism and Philosophy, " by Maurice Cornforth, Lawrence and Wishart, circa 1980) that Int'l. Publishers put out by Maurice Cornforth that he wrote in the 50's.

On marxism and science see, by Gavin Kitching, http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01026-6.html (On Kitching see the Danny Postel piece recently, mentioned here, crazedloveblog ... Postel covers a debate flowing in African Studies for the Chronicle of Higher Education. A specter is haunting African studies -- the specter of Gavin Kitching. ...) http://www.crazedloveblog.blogspot.com/archives/ 2003_03_01_crazedloveblog_archive.html

On Engels, see Frederic Bender, Jr. anthology, "Engels vs. Marx: The Tragic Deception, " if memory serves. (Though to be fair, see Terence Ball anthology from Cambridge Univ. Press on Engels and, to if not not for him Marx and Jenny and all their kids would have staved w/o Engels moneies.)

And, one of my faves, unorthodox, critical marxist (as distinguished in his terms, from scientific or scientistic marxists, like that Althusser who juggled test tubes marked Ideological State Apparatus and Interpellated Subject Position today I'll take a fellated subject position, if I was that is Lukacs, Identical Subject-Object Of History As Embodied In The The Party CC That Has The Keys To All Of Life's Ontological Questions And Has A Direct, Unmediated Epistemological Privilege... ), Alvin Gouldner, in his, "The Two Marxisms, " http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Marx/app2.htm

Back to diamat. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith- cyril/works/millenni/smith2a.htm Marx at the Millennium by Cyril Smith 2 How the "Marxists" Buried Marx, cont’d http://www.marxismalive.org/pilling1.html Reply to Cyril Smith at a UK SWP organized conference on Marxism(s) Althusser from, "For Marx, " http://www.marx2mao.org/Other/FM65i.html     >...(3) This 'epistemological break' divides Marx's thought into two long essential periods: the 'ideological' period before, and the scientific period after, the break in 1845. The second period can itself be divided into two moments, the moment of Marx's theoretical transition and that of his theoretical maturity. To simplify the philosophical and historical labours in front of us, I should like to propose the following provisional terminology which registers the above periodization.

    (a ) I propose to designate the works of the earlier period, that is, everything Marx wrote from his Doctoral Dissertation to the 1844 Manuscripts and The Holy Family by the already accepted formula: Marx's Early Works.

    (b ) I propose to designate the writings of the break in 1845, that is, the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology which first introduce Marx's new problematic, though usually still in a partially negative and sharply polemical and critical form, by a new formula: the Works of the Break.

    (c ) I propose to designate the works of the period 1845-57 by a new formula: the Transitional Works. While it is possible to assign the crucial date of the works of 1845 (the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology )

to the break separating the scientific from the ideological, it must be remembered that this mutation could not produce immediately, in positive and consummated form, the new theoretical problematic which it inaugurated, in the theory of history as well as in that of philosophy. In fact, The German Ideology is a commentary, usually a negative and critical one, on the different forms of the ideological problematic Marx had rejected. Long years of positive study and elaboration were necessary before Marx could produce, fashion and establish a conceptual terminology and systematics that were adequate to his revolutionary theoretical project. That is why I propose to designate the works written between 1845 and the first drafts of Capital (around 1845-57), that is, the Manifesto, the Poverty of Philosophy, Wages, Price and Profit, etc., as the Works of Marx's Theoretical Transition.

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    (d ) Finally, I propose to designate all the works after 1857 as Marx's Mature Works. This gives us the following classification: 1840-44: the Early Works 1845: the Works of the Break. 1845-57: the Transitional Works. 1857-83: the Mature Works.

    (4) The period of Marx's Early Works (1840-5), that is, the period of his ideological works, can itself be subdivided into two moments:

    (a ) the liberal-rationalist moment of his articles in Die Rheinische Zeitung (up to 1842).

    (b ) the communalist-rationalist moment of the years 1842-5.

    As my essay on 'Marxism and Humanism' briefly suggests, the presupposition of the works of the first moment is a problematic of Kantian-Fichtean type. Those of the second moment, on the contrary, rest on Feuerbach's anthropological problematic. The Hegelian problematic inspires one absolutely unique text, which is a rigorous attempt to 'invert' Hegelian idealism, in the strict sense, into Feuerbach's pseudo- materialism: this text is the 1844 Manuscripts. Paradoxically, therefore, if we exclude the Doctoral Dissertation, which is still the work of a student, the Young Marx was never strictly speaking a Hegelian, except in the last text of his ideologico-philosophical period; rather, he was first a Kantian Fichtean, then a Feuerbachian. So the thesis that the Young Marx was a Hegelian, though widely believed today, is in general a myth. On the contrary, it seems that Marx's one and only resort to Hegel in his youth, on the eve of his rupture with his 'erstwhile philosophical conscience', produced the prodigious 'abreaction' indispensable to the liquidation of his 'disordered' consciousness. Until then he had always kept his distance from Hegel, and to grasp the movement whereby he passed from his Hegelian university studies to a Kantian-Fichtean problematic and thence to a Feuerbachian problematic, we must realize that, far from being close to Hegel, Marx moved further and further away from him. With Fichte and Kant he had worked his way back to the end of the eighteenth century, and then, with Feuerbach, he regressed to the heart of the theoretical past of that century, for in his own way Feuerbach may be said to represent the 'ideal' eighteenth-century philosopher,

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the synthesis of sensualist materialism and ethico-historical idealism, the real union of Diderot and Rousseau. It would be difficult not to speculate that Marx's sudden and total last return to Hegel in that genial synthesis of Feuerbach and Hegel, the 1844 Manuscripts, might not have been an explosive experiment uniting the substances of the two extremes of the theoretical field which he had until then frequented, that this extraordinarily rigorous and conscientious experiment, the most extreme test of the 'inversion' of Hegel ever attempted might not have been the way Marx lived practically and achieved his own transformation, in a text which he never published. Some idea of the logic of this prodigious mutation is given by the extraordinary theoretical tension of the 1844 Manuscripts, for we know in advance the paradox that the text of the last hours of the night is, theoretically speaking, the text the furthest removed from the day that is about to dawn.

    (5) The Works of the Break raise delicate problems of interpretation, precisely as a function of their place in the theoretical formation of Marx's thought. Those brief sparks, the Theses on Feuerbach, light up every philosopher who comes near them, but as is well known, a spark dazzles rather than illuminates: nothing is more difficult to locate in the darkness of the night than the point of light which breaks it. One day we will have to show that these eleven deceptively transparent theses are really riddles. As for The German Ideology, it offers us precisely a thought in a state of rupture with its past, playing a pitiless game of deadly criticism with all its erstwhile theoretical presuppositions: primarily with Feuerbach and Hegel and all the forms of a philosophy of consciousness and an anthropological philosophy. But this new thought so firm and precise in its interrogation of ideological error, cannot define itself without difficulties and ambiguities. It is impossible to break with a theoretical past at one blow: in every case, words and concepts are needed to break with words and concepts, and often the old words are charged with the conduct of the rupture throughout the period of the search for new ones. The German Ideology presents the spectacle of a re-enlisted conceptual reserve standing in for new concepts still in training . . . and as we usually judge these old concepts by their bearing, taking them at their word, it is easy to stray into a positivist conception (the end of all philosophy) or an individualist-humanist conception (the subjects

  page 37

of history are 'real, concrete men'). Or again, it is possible to be taken in by the ambiguous role of the division of labour, which, in this book, plays the principal part taken by alienation in the writings of his youth, and commands the whole theory of ideology and the whole theory of science. This all arises from its proximity to the break, and that is why The German Ideology alone demands a major critical effort to distinguish the suppletory theoretical function of particular concepts from the concepts themselves. I shall return to this.

    (6) Locating the break in 1845 is not without important theoretical consequences as regards not only the relation between Marx and Feuerbach, but also the relation between Marx and Hegel. Indeed, Marx did not first develop a systematic critique of Hegel after 1845; he had been doing so since the beginning of the second moment of his Youthful period, in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843 Manuscript), the Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843), the 1844 Manuscripts and The Holy Family. But the theoretical principles on which this critique of Hegel was based are merely a reprise, a commentary or a development and extension of the admirable critique of Hegel repeatedly formulated by Feuerbach. It is a critique of Hegelian philosophy as speculative and abstract, a critique appealing to the concrete-materialist against the abstract-speculative, i.e. a critique which remains a prisoner of the idealist problematic it hoped to free itself from, and therefore a critique which belongs by right to the theoretical problematic with which Marx broke in 1845.

    In the search for Marxist philosophy and in its definition, it is clear that the Marxist critique of Hegel should not be confused with the Feuerbachian critique of Hegel, even if Marx started it in his name. The decision as to whether or no the critique in Marx's writings of 1843 is Marxist (in fact it is Feuerbachian through and through) makes a major difference to our idea of the nature of Marx's later philosophy. I stress this as a crucial point for contemporary interpretations of Marxist philosophy, by which I mean serious, systematic interpretations, based on real philosophical, epistemological and historical knowledge, and on rigorous reading methods -- not mere opinions (books can be written on this basis too). For example, there are the writings of Colletti and Della Volpe in Italy, which I regard as of the greatest

  page 38

importance, because in our time they are the only scholars who have made an irreconcilable theoretical distinction between Marx and Hegel and a definition of the specificity of Marxist philosophy the conscious centre of their investigations. Their work certainly presupposes the existence of a break between Marx and Hegel, and between Marx and Feuerbach, but they locate it in 1843, at the level of the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right! Such a simple displacement of the break profoundly affects all the theoretical conclusions drawn from it, and not only their conception of Marxist philosophy, but also, as a later work will show, their reading and interpretation of Capital. This 'epistemological break' concerns conjointly two distinct theoretical disciplines. By founding the theory of history (historical materialism), Marx simultaneously broke with his erstwhile ideological philosophy and established a new philosophy (dialectical materialism). I am deliberately using the traditionally accepted terminology (historical materialism, dialectical materialism) to designate this double foundation in a single break. And I should point out two important problems implied by this exceptional circumstance. Of course, if the birth of a new philosophy is simultaneous with the foundation of a new science, and this science is the science of history, a crucial theoretical problem arises: by what necessity of principle should the foundation of the scientific theory of history ipso facto imply a theoretical revolution in philosophy? This same circumstance also entails a considerable practical consequence: as the new philosophy was only implicit in the new science it might be tempted to confuse itself with it. <SNIP>



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