[lbo-talk] Some dumb questions on "Theses on Feuerbach"

[Matthias Wasser]

One: when Marx refers to human activity as "objective," and that Feuerbach
doesn't comprehend this, does he mean that it is alienated, in the sense of
corresponding to the Hegelian world of objects? If so, what does he mean
when he says that Feuerbach only sees consciousness as genuine as human
activity and practice as "fixed in its dirty-judaical manifestation," which
would seem to imply that Feuerbach sees consciousness as subjective and
practice as objective? My first instinct is to say that either I'm getting
tripped up because there's a subjective/objective flip that occurs between
the transition between Hegel's idealism and Feuerbach's materialism, or that
Marx is again pointing out that practice (labor) is the genuinely human
(subjective) thing transformed into the alienated (objective) thing. Or at
least that's how I'd read it in light of "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy in
General."
(In general I read CHPG as "Hegel thought matter (nature) was alienated
spirit (consciousness), Feuerbach spirit (religion) alienated matter
(humanity), but actually matter (commodities) is alienated matter (labor.)"
Incorrect?)

Two: my instinct is that when he says Feuerbach's materialism "divide[s]
society into two parts, one of which is superior to society," he accuses
Feuerbach of having a one-directional view of the base-superstructure
relationship, and not understanding religious or ideological activity as
_itself_ concrete material activity. (Or that's my reading in light of
Korsch's "Marxism and Philosophy.") If this is right then is this also what
he's talking about in Thesis I, and in general through this period when he
refers to labor as real and consciousness as unreal is he just being sloppy
with his terms, or contradicting himself, or am I not apprehending the terms
themselves correctly? Partly I'm trying to figure out the relation to the
line in Econ + Phil where he says (something to the effect) that religion is
nothing but the social relation between parishoner and parson (and the
relation of _that_ to the line in CHPR, where he says Luther internalized
the laity-priest contradiction.)

Three: the relationship between his attack on Feuerbach's simple,
essentialist idea of human nature and his own conception of species-life -
isn't species-life likewise insufficiently historicized in view? Or is it
just that basic species-life, labour and ability to construct social
relations, is ahistorical at its "core," but has the power to create
supplemental, historic human natures of which that which Feuerbach
discovered reflected in Christianity is only one example? Does this
reproduce the naive base-superstructure understanding, or does Marx _have_
such an understanding here, or..?

In general I see (unless I'm wrong) how the Theses are an attempt to resolve
a number of contradictions he finds unresolved in Hegel and Feuerbach -
subjective-objective, matter-spirit, consciousness-practice, social
practice-individual practice - but am too uneducated and muddled in my
thinking to se the relations between them, and whether (this is the big
confusion) he mostly only means to transpose the dialectic from religion to
economics or whether he's making an attack on the form itself.