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Anthropology and the Human Subject
By Brian Morris Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2014 Brian Morris
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4907-3104-9
CHAPTER 1
Karl Marx and Historical Materialism
1. Prologue
2. Hegel and Dialectics
3. Feuerbach and the Human Subject
4. The German Ideology
5. The Materialist Conception of History
6. The Critique of Marx
7. Reflections of Marx's Humanism
8. Dialectical Science
9. Postscript
1. Prologue
'The history of the twentieth century is Marx's legacy', so wrote a much-acclaimed biographer of Karl Marx (Wheen 1999). Given that Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro all claimed to be his heirs, this may well be true, but it hardly adds to our understanding of one of the great intellectual figures of the nineteenth century. In any case, as Wheen acknowledged, Marx would undoubtedly have repudiated the politics and tyranny associated with the Soviet Union under Stalin and the Chinese State under Mao, both of which were forms of state capitalism under a party dictatorship and far, far removed from Marx's embracing of democratic politics and his conception of a communist society. As Sidney Hook succinctly put it:
"Marx was a democratic socialist, a secular humanist, and a fighter for human freedom. His words and actions breathe a commitment to a way of life and a critical independence completely at odds with the absolute rule of the one-party dictatorship of the Soviet Union. (1971: 2)" or any other party dictatorship.
Leszek Kolakowski (1978) began his important study of the history of Marxism with the words, 'Karl Marx was a German philosopher'. Indeed he was, but he was something more, an economist, a revolutionary scholar with an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of many fields of study, and something of a prophet. In many texts, he has been compared with Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad, given the unique influence of his ideas on human history, as well as with intellectuals of the rank of Aristotle, Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein, given Marx's impact on the development of human sciences (Singer 1980, Callinicos 1983a). He was indeed something of a colossus, even though his fame largely stems from the fact that Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all transformed his ideas into a state ideology.
Born in Trier in the German Rhineland, Marx (1818-1883) went to study law at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. He soon turned to philosophy, and it is of interest that his doctoral dissertation was on the contrasting materialist philosophies, Democritus and Epicurus—the atomistic Democritus emphasising necessity while the more empiricist Epicurus emphasised chance. For Marx, of course, chance and necessity were both aspects of the material world and dialectically related. Marx had hopes of becoming a university professor. Instead, he became a journalist and editor of a liberal newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, published in Cologne. But his radical views soon upset the Prussian authorities, and in October 1843, at the age of twenty-five, Marx moved to Paris, having recently married. There he began associating with many radical philosophers and socialists who lived in the city, then a Mecca for political dissidents—Louis Blanc, Max Stirner, Michael Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Bruno Bauer. From these radicals, Marx learnt much, as he had an encyclopaedic mind. Yet he was to subject the writings of these radicals to harsh, even scathing critiques. Most important, however, was his meeting in the summer of 1844 with Friedrich Engels, with whom he was to form a lifelong friendship and intellectual collaboration. The relationship between the two men and the degree to which they shared a common philosophical world view, has long fascinated Marx scholars (see Sheehan 1985: 48-64).
Prior to going to Paris, however, Marx wrote a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the Right (1843), which consisted of an annotated and detailed examination of Hegel's political philosophy. Only the introduction to the critique was published in Marx's lifetime, the main text not appearing in print until 1927. While in Paris, Marx also wrote, in the summer of 1844, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. These manuscripts focused mainly on economic issues, but also included in the final section, a discussion of Hegel's dialectics. This work was not published until 1932. Since then, it has invoked a good deal of controversy, for it was interpreted by Erich Fromm (1961) as portraying Marx as an existentialist, or a socialist humanist. The Manuscripts have been seen by Davis McLellan (1973: 105) as the first drafts of a major work on the capitalist system, which eventually appeared, much revised and expanded, in 1867 as Das Capital.
In February 1845, Marx moved to Brussels, and in the following two years, produced three important texts which, in varied ways, outlined his own distinctive philosophical world view, familiarly known as 'the materialist conception of history' or historical materialism. These books were The Holy Family (1845), a critique of the left-Hegelian ideas of Bruno and Edgar Bauer, which included praise for Proudhon's What Is Property (1840) as pioneering empirical study of private property; The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) which, in contrast, is a devastating critique of Proudhons mutualism, which Marx dismissed as a petit-bourgeois ideology; and finally, The German Ideology (1845). This is a critique of Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner, whose book The Ego and His Own (1845) had recently been published. The manuscript book The German Ideology written like The Holy Family jointly with Engels, remained unpublished until 1932. According to Engels, it had been abandoned, left to the 'gnawing criticism of the mice', and served mainly as a form of 'self-clarification' (Marx and Engels 1968: 584). It has been described as one of Marx's major achievements although it consists largely of a hostile and satirical diatribe against Stirner's anarcho-existentialist philosophy. More important are the early chapters devoted to Feuerbach, which outlined what Engels was to describe as a 'new world outlook', historical materialism, or the 'materialist conception of history' (1968: 585).
In 1848, Marx, in collaboration with Engels drafted the famous Communist Manifesto outlining the doctrines of the newly formed Communist league, an international association of working men. Translated into many languages, the text came to be recogonised by Marx and Engels as a significant 'historical document' and a classic expression of their views. It is a pamphlet that begins with the words, 'A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism' and ends with the famous appeal: 'Working men of all countries, unite!' It was, of course, in the Manifesto that Marx and Engels famously declared that the history of all hitherto existing societies, at least since the dissolution of tribal society and the emergence of the state, had been the 'history of class struggles' (1968: 31-63). For Marx and Engels, class struggle was thus always an important factor in understanding the dynamics of contemporary capitalism.
With revolutionary movements and struggles occurring throughout Europe, Marx attempted to continue his political activities. But eventually reaction prevailed, and Marx was forced into exile. He came to London in August 1849 expecting his stay would be brief. But here he remained for the rest of his life, a political émigré, supported by his journalism and by financial gifts from his friend Engels. He took no part in active politics until the foundation of the International Working Men's Association in 1884. But his political activities were relatively brief, although his writings on the Paris Commune 1871 and his political disputes with the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin were important in clarifying Marx's own political ideas. (For useful accounts of the life and thought of Karl Marx see Berlin 1963, McLellan 1973, Wheen 1999.)
Only a few years ago, Marxism was seen as being at a very low ebb and presented as having 'an inglorious past and no future' (Sheehan 1985: xv). Apologists for global capitalism like Vernon Bogdanor described Marx as a 'relic' from the past, and Marxism was seen as a religious cult that had no contemporary relevance. However, over the past decade, ever since the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, there has been a resurgence of interest in Marx, both as a social theorist and as a major critic of the capitalist economy. The literature on both Marx and Marxism is therefore now vast. I have no intention of trying to review this literature. Here I will focus only on two topics: Marx's social theory and his suggestions for a new kind of science and his conception of the human subject, as both a natural (biological) and social being. (For useful studies of Marxism from an orthodox Marxist-Leninist perspective see Cornforth 1954, 1980, Mandel 1979, Callinicos 1983a, Bensaid 2002).
2. Hegel and Dialectics
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 represent not only, as McLellan suggests, a first draft of Capital, but also a loose, initial synthesis of the 'three sources' of Marxism. For in an important sense, as Lenin famously declared, the genius of Marx was to continue and complete the three main ideological currents of the nineteenth century: English political economy, French socialism, and classical German philosophy. Importantly, Marx's research on these was substantive, as he spoke all three languages, and as Lenin noted, there is an essential consistency and integrity in Marx's views (1967: 7).
But Marx subjected the main representatives of these three currents of thought—Ricardo, Proudhon, and Hegel—to trenchant criticisms, while absorbing many of the essential tenets of their work. The notes of the Manuscripts themselves focus on a number of key concepts—capital, labour, alienation, species-being, dialectics, communism—and these reflect the combined influences of Hegel, Feuerbach, Proudhon, and Adam smith.
What Marx was essentially engaged in was combining Hegel's philosophy with its emphasis on the historicity of being and a dialectic form of understanding—while rejecting its idealism—with the philosophical materialism of Feuerbach, with its emphasis on our earthly existence and on the human subject rather than on the Hegelian geist (as spirit or universal mind). Unlike Feuerbach, however, Marx stressed that humans are not only biological beings, with a shared humanity, but also fundamentally social beings, whose essence was expressed in their history and in the changing forms of social life. Naturalism or humanism, for Marx, was the 'unifying truth' of both idealism (Hegel) and materialism (Feuerbach) (Marx 1975: 389). In contemporary terms, what the young Marx was attempting was to combine humanism (Hegel, history) with naturalism (Feuerbach, science) to form a 'new outlook' historical materialism.
Although Marx sometimes dismissed Hegel's philosophy as 'pantheistic mysticism' (1975: 61), it is clear that he accepted some of the basic premises of Hegelian metaphysics.
'The importance of Hegel's phenomenology', he wrote, 'and its final result—the dialectic of negativity as the moving and producing principle—lies in the fact that Hegel conceives of the self-creation of man (humanity) as a process ... that he therefore grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man—as the outcome of man's own labour' (1975: 336).
Humans according to Marx, thus only realise their species through labour, through the cooperation of humankind and as a result of history—though under capitalism they have become estranged from the full recognition of their humanity. But Hegel's philosophy was seen as limited and 'one-sided' for Hegel tended to equate the human subject with 'self-consciousness'; the 'vital, sensuous, concrete activity' of humans in their 'self-objectification—in the creation of culture—was reduced, Marx felt, by Hegel to a 'mere abstraction' (1975: 396).
Engels many years later was to stress the importance of Hegel's philosophy and the dialectical outlook, which both he and Marx embraced. He described Hegel's philosophy as 'epoch-making' and said that Hegel had a truly encyclopaedic mind, and wrote:
"for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process i.e. as in constant motion, change, transformation, development. (Engels (1969): 34)"
Marx always and continually paid tribute to Hegel as a dialectical thinker. It is therefore, I think, somewhat misleading to view Hegel as a 'monkey' hanging around Marx's neck (Harris 1980: 145) or that Marx made a radical epistemological leap from ideology to science in renouncing the Hegelian dialectic (Althusser 1969). He never did renounce dialectics, but rather incorporated it into his own understanding of science. His dialectics was a materialist form of dialectics and thus very different from that of Hegel. It was, in fact, Marx wrote, its direct opposite (1957: lix).
The Hegelian dialectic, Marx wrote, in its rational form, enables us to recognise that all historical forms are transient and is of its very nature, critical and revolutionary. But for Hegel, human thought and culture is transformed into an independent subject, and given the name Idea: the real world is then viewed simply as a manifestation of the abstract Idea. Thus Hegel equated thought and being, and so the dialectic in Hegel's hands, Marx wrote, became something of a mystification. So although Marx was keen to describe himself as a disciple of the German philosopher, he concluded, in these famous lines, that
"In Hegel's writings, dialectic stands on its head. You must turn it right way up again if you want to discover the rational kernel that is hidden away within the wrappings of mystification.(Marx 1957: lix)"
A good deal has been written on the concept of dialectics. Some have dismissed the notion as a form of mystical mumbo-jumbo. Kropotkin long ago suggested that the 'dialectical method' was reminiscent of medieval scholasticism and was thus obsolete, having been replaced by the scientific method of induction and deduction (Baldwin 1927: 153). Likewise, Mario Bunge considered dialectics as an unhelpful legacy of Hegel and essentially obscurantist, though he acknowledged the importance of Marx and Engels as materialists and as pioneer social scientists (1999: 133).
What then, exactly, is the 'dialectical method' as conceived by Marx and Engels?
To answer this question, it is perhaps best to turn to the writings of Engels, whose own intellectual and philosophical interests were extremely wide-ranging. Engels was in fact especially interested in the development of the natural sciences, and like Kropotkin, he was particularly excited regarding the new metaphysics of nature that had been heralded by Darwin's evolutionary theory.
Engels conceived of dialectical thought as entailing a materialist conception of nature (and history) that was directly based on the scientific developments that had occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century. He saw this new conception of nature as 'mode of thought' as directly opposed to what is described as 'metaphysics'—whether in terms of Hegel's idealism or the static Newtonian conception of the universe that Engels referred to as 'mechanical materialism'. For Engels 'dialectics' essentially implied three principles—an emphasis on process, temporality, and change, a conception of totality or holism, and a stress on 'contradiction'. We may briefly outline each of these three principles in turn.
Engels has often been portrayed as a crude positivist or as a mechanical materialist. This is, I think, extremely unfair to Engels and displays a woeful misunderstanding of his work. Such criticisms are often disguised criticisms of scientific rationality itself in favour of some form of religious mysticism or aim to uphold—even after Darwin—a radical neo-Kantian dualism between humanity and nature. But Engels was perceptive of the scientific revolutions that had occurred in the nineteenth century, which had completely transformed our understanding of nature. These developments above all, Engels suggested, proved that 'nature also has a history in time' (1969: 35). Thus the first principle of dialectics is the view, expressed long ago by Heraclitus and the Stoics, that all things in the universe are in a process of change. Thus nature is historical at every level, and no phenomenon of nature simply exists—it has a history, it comes into being, it endures, changes, and develops, and finally ceases to exist. Aspects of nature may appear to be fixed or stable, or in static equilibrium, but nothing is permanently so.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Anthropology and the Human Subject by Brian Morris. Copyright © 2014 Brian Morris. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
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