Karl Marx
(1818-83)
Ish Mishra
Ish Mishra
19th Century witnessed many revolutions in
the realm of the social movements as well as the social theories (super-base
syndrome). The ordinary people, the working population, the wretched of the earth [Fanon] who entered in the arena of
political theory through Rousseau in the 18th century, found a
profound spokesperson in the genius of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels in the 19th.
Marx, as a student of jurisprudence, history and philosophy, at a time when
Hegelian-ism was the dominant paradigm and trend in the academia, turned Hegel’s
philosophy of inverted reality upside down and declared, “in practice man must
prove the truth”. [Theses on F] Thus
rejecting the easy way of discovering the truth through myths, revelations and
authority based on some obscure God or prophet or Hegel, Marx had made his
intentions very clear by charging that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world ; the point
however is to change it.” [Philosophy
of Poverty]
The journey of Marx’s this clearly un-Hegelian,
activist view of philosophy, began with his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Rights as the subject of
his doctoral theses. Unable to find a job in academics, in 1842 he began to prove the truth in practice through his writings, as a journalist of a
democratic newspaper in Cologne, Rheinische
Zeitung, and the paper was suppressed by the Prussian government. Marx
moved to Paris, where he came in contact with Proudhon, the leading French
socialist intellectual and Bakunin, the Russian anarchist and his
country-cousin, Engels, who became his life long companion. In 1845, under the
pressure of the Prussian government, expelled from Paris ,
Marx moved to Brussels London
Marx began his analysis of existing bourgeois social
order with Economic and Philosophical
Manuscript (EPM) in 1843 carried it forward in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and took it to
a logical conclusion in the 3 volumes of Capital
completed in 1867.
Marx was a materialist and an atheist before he
systematically began to criticize Hegel’s Philosophy
of Rights. He made two opposing streams of liberal philosophy – Hegel’s Dialectical idealism and Feurbach’s metaphysical materialism -- as his reference point, challenged
and transformed them. He challenged and reversed the prevailing notion that
men’s consciousness determines material conditions and reversed it. “It is not
the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social
existence that determines their existence.”
[Preface] He began his analysis of Capitalism based on his thesis, “the anatomy
of civil society has to be found in political economy.” Pre-Marxian social analysis emphasized the
law and the politics. Marx shifted the emphasis to economics and seeks the
explanation of historical changes in the economic structure of the society, the
basis on which rise political and legal superstructure.
The mode of production of
material means of existence conditions the whole process of social, political
and intellectual life.
Marx rejects the history of social changes in terms of
monarchs, their court ladies and fellow dynasts or in terms of wars and
battles. Marx attempts to locate the deeper causes of historical changes beyond
the wars and triumphs. Men began to distinguish themselves from other animals
by producing their own means of subsistence and hence the major causes of historical
changes lie in the mode of production.
At a certain stage of their
development the material productive forces of society come into conflict with
the existing production relationship, or – this merely expresses the same thing
in legal terms a legal expression for these with property relationship in which
they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of productive forces, this
relationship is transformed into their fetters and then begins an era of social
revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later, to the
transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
The Communist
Manifesto begins by proclaiming, “the history of hitherto societies has
been the history of class struggles between the haves and have-nots with irreconcilable
antagonistic class interests, as individual does not exist in isolation but as
an integral part of a large social aggregate.
The epoch of bourgeoisie has simplified the antagonism by “splitting the
society into two great hostile camps: bourgeoisie and proletariat”. The law of
the social changes from primitive communism to slave system to feudalism and to
capitalism led Marx and Engels in the Manifesto to conclude the end of
capitalism by more advanced Forces of Production – the Working Class -- for the
same historical reasons and its replacement by socialism that will lead to a
classless society and the state shall whither away.
Marx’s writings are difficult to be placed in any of
the existing disciplines as Marx himself was opposed to compartmentalization of
the study of laws of social dynamics as the society is one organic whole. In
fact they cover almost all the existing disciplines. Marx is the first social
thinker to use the neglected government reports and statistical material in the
study of social and economic problems. Marx’s analysis of capitalist system
influenced the course of history in such a way that the entire intellectual and
political spectrum of the world got split into two broad camps in to Marxist
and anti-Marxist camps in the same way as capitalism has split the world into
two broad classes with contradictory class interests.
Dialectical
Materialism
The term Dialectical Materialism was not used by Marx himself but by subsequent Marxists to
delineate the synthesis of Marx’s critiques of Hegel’s Dialectics, which he
called idealist and Feuerbach’s materialism, which he called mechanical or
metaphysical. For the first time the term Dialectical Materialism was used by
Plekhanov in 1891.Five years after Marx’s death Engels expressed his and Marx’s
gratitude in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End
of Classical German Philosophy (1988) “To Feuerbach, who after all many
respects forms the link between Hegelian philosophy and our conception”. For
the “influence which Feuerbach, more than any post Hegelian philosopher”
had upon them Engels acknowledged his
“undercharged debt of honor”. [SW: 585].
Diamat (dialectical materialism) was one of the key words
in the discussions among the first generation of Marxists, after Marx. Diamat
is considered to be the Marxist philosophy -- the worldview -- related to and
supported by, what is known as Marxist science -- historical materialism.
Dialectical materialism is union of two main strands of philosophy – the
materialism of the enlightenment era of scientific revolution, which Marx calls
metaphysical or mechanical and the dialectics of Hegel, which he calls idealist
or ideological -- that Marx inherited, rejected and transformed.
According to
Hegel, reality is wholly or basically constituted by thoughts or ideas. Drawing
the distinction between the appearance and inner world – the essence – Hegel
claims that the inner reality is concealed by, and is reverse of its phenomenal
form. “By the law of this inverted world, then, the selfsame in the first world is unlike of itself and
unlike in the first is equally unlike to itself……. what by the law of first is sweet, is, in
this inverted reality, sour; what is there black is here white.” In reaction to
this Marx asserts, as said before, that truth must be proved in practice in
this world and not in the obscurities of its inversion, the abstract ideas. In
the labyrinth philosophical jargons Hegel obfuscates the reality transporting
Plato’s World of Ideas into the
vocabulary of classical German Philosophy and his Ideal state into Prussian monarchy. According to Hegel, “Looked at one surface this inverted world is
anti-thesis of the first in the sense that it has the latter outside itself and
repels that world from itself as an inverted reality; that the one is the
sphere of appearance, while the other is the inherent being; that one is the
world as it is for another, the other world again as it is for itself.” [Phenomenology of Mind, Larrain; 122]
But unlike
Kant, for whom, the inner reality was so different from phenomenal that it
could not be known, Hegel’s these two worlds are not dichotomous. Appearance is
the manifestation of the essence and essence is the truth of appearance.
“Thus the super-sensible world, which is the inverted
world, has at the same time reached out beyond the other world has in itself
the other, it is to itself conscious of being inverted, i.e. it is the inverted
form of itself; it is that world itself and its opposite in a single unity”
Through the contradiction of essence and appearance,
Hegel reached the ‘distinction per say,
in the ‘form of infinity’ or ‘absolute motion’. This is the ‘ultimate nature of
life, soul of the world, the universal life-blood’, which itself is ‘every
distinction that arises, as well as that into which all distinctions are
dissolved’. [Phenomenology of
Mind, Larrain; 123] This means that the internal distinction is
self-identity and self-consciousness, if so the distinction between appearance
and essence in the natural world is a reflection in the distinction between
self-consciousness, materiality itself becomes the inverted and the distinction
between consciousness and its object is thus eliminated. As Marx put it in his
critique of Hegel,
“The main point is that the object or consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness, self-consciousness as object.” [EPM,
Larrain; 123]
Hegel identifies alienation with
objectification in terms of producing object. Consciousness is absolutely alien
to itself. Objectivity therefore is alienated self-consciousness. To overcome
alienation, i.e. to re-appropriate self-consciousness implies to transcend the
objectivity. And consciousness is the essence, the reality; hence the process
takes place in consciousness. To overcome the alienation and inversion it
entails, is merely the recognition by the consciousness that the objectivity is
its own inverted creation. As Marx puts it, “the appropriation of man’s
objectified and estranged essential powers is therefore firstly only an
appropriation which takes place in conciseness in pure thought.” [EPM, Larrain:
123] Thus the notion of inversion is defined in epistemological terms as
the natural consequence of the process of production of thought and the
simultaneous production of reality, as it’s opposite.
Marx takes the inversion from Hegel and reverses the
thesis. By means of their conscious practice, humans produce objective power
that forms the basis for the relations of production and forces of production.
Objectification of human practice is not alienating in itself but result of the
lack of control over that objective power. Alienation is result of particular
kind of inhuman objectification in which the men and women don’t control its
results but are controlled by them. For Hegel, “it is not the fact that the
human essence objectifies itself in an inhuman way, in opposition to itself but
that it objectifies itself in distinction from and in opposition to
abstract thought.” [Phenomenology of
Mind, Larrain; 124] For Hegel inversion is inherent in the
self-consciousness and for Marx, it is an attribute of a particular social
condition. The consciousness does not generate the
inverted objective reality but the inverted reality generates the inverted
consciousness. If the religion is the inverted consciousness of the world it is
because state and society that invented the religion are an inverted world. In
Hegel’s criticism, Marx writes, ‘having superseded religion and recognized it
as a product of self-alienation, he still finds himself confirmed in religion
as religion. Here is the root of Hegel’s false
positivism or his merely an apparent criticism’. [EPM, Larrain: 125] Prussian State
In German
Ideology, Marx and Engels extensively criticize Hegel’s conception of
history and objective reality as the inverted appearance of self-consciousness,
which in turn is the inversion of reality. In this conception human activity
appears as the product of something other than itself and consciousness being a
product of man’s head, appears as the producer. According to them this is the
inversion of order between consciousness and material conditions. Explanation
of material practice from consciousness is inversion of the reality that
consciousness is determined by material practice.
German ideologists were fighting against the illusions of consciousness,
which they believed, constituted the real chains for men and women instead of
fighting against the German social and political reality. This inversion is not
just the epistemological distortion produced by consciousness but its origin
lie in reality itself – upside down standing on its head and hence needs to be
set right by turning it upside down.
There are two inversions – inversion of
consciousness and the inversion of the objectified social practice. The former
is ideology and the latter, alienation.
As Engels with due credit
analyses Hegel’s famous statement:
All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real, as “tangible sanctification of things that be,
a philosophical
benediction upon despotism, police government, … and censorship. But according
to Hegel certainly not that everything exists is also real without further
qualification. For Hegel the attribute
of reality belongs only to that which at the same time is necessary:
In the
course of its development reality proves to be necessity”
Everything from Prussian monarchy with its oppressive
laws and institutions were real and hence rational and necessary so was the
Roman republic and the Roman Empire which
supers it. It is true about colonialism etc. That means to say whatever exists
is real and necessary and hence rational and once that ends becomes unreal and
irrational. Revolutionary inference of Hegel’s this maxim is that whatever
exists is subject to perish including capitalism. …….
Moribund reality being transformed into a new viable
reality, “peacefully if the old one has enough intelligence to go to its death
without a struggle; forcibly if it resists this necessity. Thus Hegelian
proposition turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself”. [SW:
587]. The proposition of rationality of everything, which is real, implies all
that exists deserves to perish. This implicit rejection of the eternity and
absoluteness of truth is essentially the rejection of the theory of final truth
that once discovered can be remembered by heart through generations.
“Truth lay
now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of
science, which mounts from lower to higher levels of knowledge without ever
reaching, by discovering so-called final truth, a point from which it can
proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do but fold its hand
and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it has attained.”[SW 588]
It holds as
true for philosophical knowledge as for any other knowledge and practical
action. All successive historical systems are transitory stages in the endless
course of development of human society from lower to higher, each stage is
necessary.
The Feuerbachian materialism claims that the reality
is wholly or basically material. The
Essence of Christianity placed materialism at the center. Nature exists independent of all the
philosophy. Nothing exists outside nature and man and the concept of higher
being/supreme power created by religious fantasies are the fantastic
reflections of our own essence. Inability to look at the history as a process.
He did not want to abolish but perfect the religion to be absorbed in the
philosophy. Marx saw in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion proposing the man as
the highest being, for man forms a starting point for a truly revolutionary
philosophy. His claim that Hegel had reversed the role of subject and predicate
treating man as an attribute of thought leads Marx ‘to turn Hegel on his head’
and his genetic method of inquiry into genesis and function of social
institutions was carried forward by Marx in materialist interpretation of
history.
Dialectical Materialism does away with exclusion. It
considers reality to be a dialectical combination of both with the primacy of
material world. Marx reverses Hegel’s primacy and absoluteness of ideas and
explains that the reality is neither a static substance nor an abstract idea
but a causally connected totality, internally unified and contradictory.
Dialectical materialism rejects the absoluteness or primacy of ideas and unlike
mechanical materialists does not reduce the ideas to matter as their ultimate
identity. Reality is dialectical and
contradictory. Its contradictions put it in the process of motion bringing
about evolutionary quantitative changes and when these contradictions are
matured, revolutionary qualitative changes with genuine novelty take place and
lead the history into a new epoch. In this sense, the laws governing nature
society and human thought are dialectical and science attempts to discover
them.
A scientific study of capitalism discloses that the
bourgeois society has a material base: its economic structure with
irreconcilable contradictions, and their gradual intensification would
inevitably produce a revolutionary transformation of the whole society from
capitalism to socialism. In Capital Marx
attempt to formulate such laws.
Dialectical Materialism holds that material and ideal
are opposites in a unity – with the primacy of matter over mind. Matter can
exist without mind but not the vice versa. Mind historically emerged from
matter and remains dependent and acts upon it.
For example, specific natural sciences form a unified hierarchy with
physics as the base but are not reducible to physics. Physics gives the idea of mind-independent reality! The
dialectics asserts that this concrete
reality is neither static
nor a thing of undifferentiated unity but a differentiated, dialectical unity
of contradictory opposites and their conflict is the driving force of constant,
progressive change. The laws of Dialectical materialism characterize the whole
reality and hence cannot be put in the category of classical notion of
philosophy dominated by normative epistemology. Engels claims in Anti-Duhring
that philosophy has been superseded by science but theorizes theoretical thinking that seeks “to
bring the individual spheres of knowledge into the correct connection with one
another. In doing so, however natural science enters the field of theory and
here the methods of empiricism will not work, here the theoretical thinking can
be of assistance.” But in this
non-empirical theoretical thinking, “the interconnections are not built in the
facts but discovers in them, and when discovered to be verified as far as
possible by experiment. Theory constructs the concepts of the interconnections
but does not constitute the interconnections, which exist independently of the
theory, in material reality.
Basic laws of dialectical materialism can be summed up
as:
- · Law of dialectical constitution and contradictions of the reality, i.e. the law of unity of opposites.
- · Law of transformation of quantity into quality; gradual, evolutionary, quantitative changes give rise to revolutionary qualitative changes.
- · Law of negation of negation; one opposite negates the other and in turn is negated by an advanced historical development, which is different from, but, preserves the elements of both.
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