“The more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself — his inner world — becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater the product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.” - Karl Marx
“Each man, finally, outside his professional activity, carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a “philosopher”, an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought.” - Antonio Gramsci
Philosophy as Consciousness
In his famous essay Marxism and Philosophy, German revolutionary Karl Korsch argues that the orthodox Marxists of the Second International ‘shoved [philosophy] unceremoniously to the side.’ He borrowed this phrase from Engels, who criticized Ludwig Feuerbach’s handling of Hegelian philosophy. The American communist movement of the twenty-first century also participates in a similar “unceremonious” treatment of philosophy. In the leftist-activist picture of the world, Marxist theory is the tried-and-true method of communist revolution. The methods and approaches of dialectical and historical materialism can be applied to capitalist society without much modification. No activist consciously believes the base and naive view that Marx told us precisely what to do in his work, as this would be an unfair and ridiculous strawman view to place on them. However, the activist treats the basic claims of orthodox Marxist theory as though it tells us enough about “what is going on” in capitalism, and any more fundamental assessment will undoubtedly be considered retreading an already beaten path. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. No further philosophical development is required.
Whenever philosophical or theoretical concerns crop up, the communist revolutionary reminds us that Marx has already ended the debate and “debunked” all thought outside himself, a silly dogmatic deferral to the long-dead German thinker. The American communist has a so-called “Hegelian” perspective, giving Marx the title of “Last Thinker.” Marx represents the end of philosophy since all non-Marxist philosophy can be considered idealism. Whenever philosophical or theoretical concerns crop up in our thinking, it is the task of the communist revolutionary to remind us that Marx has already put an end to such idealism and debunked all thought outside himself. Heavy is the head that wears the crown! This dogmatic attitude leads to a curiously ironic form of pretentiousness regarding theory. The activist judges the so-called theoretician as an “armchair” insofar as she engages in actual, thoughtful contemplation instead of doing what we consider “real life work,” carried out “on the street.”
A workhorse's only function is to pull a plow across a field. If the workhorse ever decided to stop, for any reason whatsoever, it wouldn’t function as a workhorse anymore. It is only as functional as thoughtless, and its thoughtlessness keeps it constantly pulling the plow. The workhorse can’t contemplate its position—it is a beast of burden. We could say that the workhorse isn’t conscious of its activity in some sense. This isn’t to say that it isn’t aware of what it's doing or doesn’t perceive its activity, but that it lacks intent. The workhorse doesn’t decide to plow fields by its own volition. It just carries the plow for reasons we assume have nothing to do with conscious choice on the part of the workhorse.
The communist movement is a workhorse in that its practice is unconscious - an activity that lacks a contemplative element and, therefore, lacks volition. It tirelessly pulls the plow of vague anti-capitalist activity. So-called “revolutionary” praxis functions within the context of another movement—the liberal-progressive struggle against the conservative reaction. It merely expresses sentiments with a “sufficiently” radical veneer—sufficient enough to appear antagonistic to liberalism and nothing more. In other words, the communist movement, to liberalism, is controlled opposition. Because of this, communist energies are consumed by liberalism due to a lack of “consciousness” to remain independent. Sadly, it becomes a beast of burden, but worse off than our example workhorse. The workhorse appears apathetic to being one, but the communist movement is under the illusion it has some kind of corrective consciousness, that is, some sort of error-correcting apparatus to keep it on course. This illusion propagates and maintains itself through misunderstanding classical propaganda, like Mao’s Criticism and Self-criticism. However, what results from this misunderstanding is imperative. The communist says, “We need to remember to be self-critical,” and never gets around to self-criticizing. This conception is not born from a conscious, self-correcting communist movement. This is just phrase-mongering.
What’s crucial here is that this unconsciousness prevents the movement from correcting its course. Self-correction is necessary due to the goal-oriented nature of politics since there is a “direction” to aim towards, a course we can “steer off” of. However, the communist movement in America has isolated sectarian critiques of its practices. This writing is another such sectarian critique, different only in that it is conscious of its structural limitations. But in general, we present critiques under the assumption that movements are conscious merely because the people within them are conscious.
To escape this workhorse mentality, we must “objectify” the self-reflection required in communist practice. We need to treat the movement as though it has some kind of “head” or “consciousness”—an abstract structure that is the active, organic, collectivized apparatus of critique and self-reflection. In other words, we should employ a helpful metaphor for identifying communist discourse and conversation. That metaphor is consciousness—it is giving the workhorse a brain.
Again, the modification of our consciousness is “clearing the head” of the communist movement. Why would we need to “clear our head”? Whoever argues that no such intervention is required for American communism is delusional, merely coping with the hopelessness of the current movement by sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting, “I can’t hear you!” like a petulant child. Is it not evident that communists are failures in America? Do I need to spend even a single sentence proving this? Our collective mind is muddied with thoroughly bourgeois attitudes and approaches to practice. Without intervention, a sort of psychoanalysis of this collective “brain,” we are stuck in the hamster wheel of communist non-revolution, i.e., activism.
This modification of our consciousness must be total and comprehensive. It cannot leave any stones unturned. It has to be on a level that, culturally at the very least and not objectively, can penetrate every dimension of our thinking—all the “formal” and “informal” spheres of knowledge. I say culturally rather than objectively because no such objective modification exists. Any modification is tied to a definite cultural-historical-social context.
Culturally, philosophy is considered a total and comprehensive modification of consciousness in the American and broader Western context. An excellent description of this cultural attitude comes from the philosopher Richard Rorty's work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: “Philosophy as a discipline thus sees itself as the attempt to underwrite or debunk claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art, or religion. It purports to do this on the basis of its special understanding of the nature of knowledge and of mind. Philosophy can be foundational in respect to the rest of culture because culture is the assemblage of claims to knowledge, and philosophy adjudicates such claims.” He claims that philosophy sees itself as occupying the privileged position of assessing all the other fields of knowledge. There is increasing skepticism of this supposed role of philosophy, but historically, it has been considered in the fashion that Rorty claims. This view on philosophy certainly affects the form and content of philosophy—the practice of philosophy also has this “underlying” and “foundational” mood, rendering it sufficient for comprehensively contextualizing the other fields of knowledge.
If we take philosophy as the modification of consciousness, we should ask ourselves what form this modification should take. This requires another general meta-perspective on philosophy—that philosophy is not a neutral but partisan endeavor. This partisanship is class-based—when they practice it, the various classes “stamp” the endeavor of philosophy. For example, take the “divine right of kings”. The concept is philosophical, and within philosophy, it has the “imprint” of the king and his court—or, more accurately, of his entire class. This is a dubious claim, and it will be partially justified below when we discuss the philosophy of praxis. For now, it is more pertinent to accept the perspective that the classes “stamp” philosophy, at least with a grain of salt.
Communists, too, are partisans in philosophy. Communists have a (class) goal, so not only is partisanship required, but the very activity of philosophy is partisan in itself. This challenges the dominant cultural perspective on philosophy—the discipline isn’t seen as having an underlying class consciousness; it is “class-neutral” in the minds of non-Marxists, both within and beyond philosophy. To bring the point back to the beginning—the form of the modification of communist consciousness, the way we ought to perform the “clearing of the head” is simply to critique bourgeois thinking—critiquing all such “idealisms” that exist in all thinking, philosophy, and beyond. Again, we do this comprehensively in philosophy because philosophy, given our attitude toward the endeavor and the foundational content it provides, is equipped for the complete radicalization of thought. Therefore, philosophy's direct role in communism is an ideological struggle to correct the communist movement's direction. Its general role is an ideological struggle against not just the communist movement but all of mankind. We will return to the discussion of philosophy after a brief detour into some of the problems of American communism and a discussion of the ideas of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.
The War of Position, Intellectuals, and Philosophy
Everyone who remembers high school history knows that in 1991, a great epoch, the Cold War, came to a dramatic end. On the 26th of December, the USSR was formally resolved by its weak supreme body. This came after a long process of typical state failure: economic crisis and stagnation, ethnic divisions, corruption, etc. It came as a surprise to no one. Just two years prior, President Reagan made his famous demand to Gorbachev to “tear down that wall” that separated Germany into the communist East and the liberal West following the end of World War 2. This event arguably ended the Cold War, the dissolution being the formal end only.
The ruin and subsequent misery of the USSR were counterbalanced by the success and subsequent glee (perhaps schadenfreude) of the United States. The West declared victory over the Soviets, and liberalism declared victory over communism—and, to a slightly lesser extent, socialism. This liberal victory manifested as the Western neoliberal turn under the Reagan-Thatcherite rejection of the prevailing postwar New Deal politics. The so-called Washington Consensus declared that the highly sought-after “Third Way” between communism and fascism has finally revealed itself—a capitalist political system grounded in the “liberalization” of the economy—free markets, free trade, deregulation, austerity, and the like.
What did the neoliberal turn mean for communism in the West? Most importantly for us, the utter weakening of the Western communist parties (which had already been extremely weak since the 1970s, this being only the final nail in the coffin). The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had officially disbanded about a month before the fall of the Soviet Union. The global communist movement lost its leading party, as the Soviets funded and commanded, to varying degrees of intensity and success, the major communist parties abroad.
So now, in the early twenty-first century, we, as American communists, exist in the shadows of this great fall. We primarily fund our activities and answer to ourselves entirely. It is not that the existence of the CPSU was the “light” that illuminated the American communist movement, but without it, it seems that we are totally in the dark. But, given half a century of the red scare politics of the Cold War, coupled with the neoliberal victory, we can objectively see how politically powerless we are, coupled with the fact that we cannot rely on international support. The last time American communism posed a threat to the liberal order was during the New Deal Era. This intriguing period can be understood in classic works on American Communism like Draper’s “The Roots of American Communism” and Pecinovsky’s “Let Them Tremble.” I won’t be discussing the glory days of the CPUSA here. In terms of military analogies, my main point is to highlight that the current period for American communism is one of total retreat and licking wounds.
Gramsci thoroughly explores this “retreat” as a dialectic linked to other crucial dialectically related objects - force, consent, and the state and civil society. We will touch on these dialectical relationships shortly. The dialectic is between the “war of maneuver” and the “war of position.” He admittedly appropriates these ideas from military science and applies them to politics. The two concepts can be understood as “epochs,” as periods of political struggle corresponding to attacking and gathering. At first glance, or intuitively, it appears that the two terms of this dialectic are merely another way to talk about the typical dichotomy of offense and defense. But looking more closely, we see that the war of position is actually a period of active culmination, of ‘building up’ for a final political victory. Defense is far too passive a concept to identify entirely with the war of position, although defensiveness is undoubtedly a characteristic of that stage. During this phase of political struggle, forces fight to take control of “decisive” positions (such as a commanding hilltop), to use Gramsci’s own words. He tries to correct our intuition that associates passive defense with the war of position in a somewhat enigmatic and seemingly backward passage describing the essence of the war of maneuver: “In politics, in other words, the war of maneuver subsists so long as it is a question of winning positions which are not decisive so that all the resources of the State’s hegemony cannot be mobilized. But when these positions have lost their value for one reason or another, and only the decisive positions are at stake, one passes over to siege warfare; this is concentrated, difficult, and requires exceptional patience and inventiveness.” This passage is crucial for understanding the war of position. Locations that are not decisive only come to the fore of struggle during the war of maneuver because that stage presumes that a war of position was prior, that the most integral areas of struggle have already been conquered so that the war of maneuver is an epoch subordinate to the war of position. Keep this subordinate status of maneuver in mind.
The other dialectical tensions related to the maneuver/position are those of force/consent and the State/civil society. Cultural hegemony is the central phenomenon of all of Gramsci’s writings, and it lies on the side of, or parallels, consent and civil society. The ruling class, via the State, dominates the subaltern classes by directly employing military and legal compulsion—this is force. Cultural hegemony is the indirect domination of the subaltern classes via the relations and structures of civil society. It entails ideological and cultural hegemony, targeting the oppressed classes on the superstructural level. It is not force but instead consent. The war of maneuver is the assault on the State, on direct domination. So, in parallel, the war of position is an assault on civil society for indirect domination.
All this is to emphasize that we, in the American communist context, are currently in a war of position, and it will be this way until we can “storm the winter palace,” so to speak. Gramsci criticizes Trotsky as the “political theorist of frontal attack in a period in which it only leads to defeats.” What a succinct and relevant critique of contemporary ultra-left terrorism (propaganda of the deed)! The American state and civil society are so entrenched that they can be easily considered the strongest bulwark against worldwide revolution. Its military is the greatest the world has ever seen, bolstered by an obscene yearly defense budget. Its legal system is oblique yet sufficient for anti-revolution. This is its resiliency, and it characterizes primarily the American economic system we know all too well - capitalism. Civil society also exhibits such resiliency—the American ideological and cultural universe feels impossible to break with. Indeed, it is, at least from the perspective of a frontal attack of the Bolshevik type. For Gramsci, the Communist Party played a “directive and organizational” role in the revolution and, therefore, in the war of position.
Intellectuals, for Gramsci, are not only professional scholars—all men are intellectuals. It is common to conflate intellectuals with what he calls “professional intellectuals,” scholars and technicians who make their living by scholastic engagement. But intellectuals carry the stamp of their class—the role of intellectuals is to organize, develop, and articulate the dreams, visions, and aspirations of their class. They are the living embodiment of the worldviews of their class. The Communist Party is optimally made of “organic” intellectuals who are not professionals but still play the same role for that historic class we all know—the working class (although historically, this tends not to be the case). Now, we can return to the role of philosophy in communism—philosophy is the most abstract and thoroughgoing theoretical development of the worldview of the working class, practiced by intellectuals of the Communist Party. In the war of position, communist politics is primarily this ideological-cultural “gaining of decisive positions.” To gain such positions is an intellectual endeavor as much as it is “non-intellectual activities” like protest participation. Philosophy underpins intellectual endeavors due to its thoroughgoing and abstract nature. Ideology and culture, although they affect the world, are intellectual. For this reason, they must be tackled on the philosophical plane.
Gramsci claims that all men are intellectuals but that not all men function as intellectuals socially, for only “professional” intellectuals bear this responsibility, at least in the sense of social ‘legitimacy.’ This interesting position is intimately tied to his view of philosophy, for he echoes a similar sentiment about philosophy—that “all men are philosophers.” Unlike intellectuals, Gramsci does not include social functions to distinguish “organic” philosophers from “professional” ones. Instead, he argues that all men are philosophers because we all hold onto a “spontaneous” philosophy, revealed in our use of language and contained in our conception of both “common sense” and “good sense.” This can be confusing since Gramsci’s use of “common sense” is not the same way we use it in the English context: he uses “good sense” in the way we would use common sense (to delineate everyday practical sense), while he uses “common sense” means a hodgepodge of loosely knit ideas and conceptions that everyone holds.
Gramsci does, however, distinguish proper revolutionary philosophy from spontaneous philosophy. For philosophy to be revolutionary (challenging ruling class ideology and cultural hegemony), it must be rigorous, critical, and systematic to match the level of previous bourgeois philosophies. The role of philosophy in communism, therefore, is the same as before—ideological-cultural struggle on the broad terrain of abstraction. However, for Gramsci, the problem of communist philosophy is to avoid creating new abstractions that seek not to revolutionize but extend and re-articulate old abstractions. We can imagine how relevant this is to American communism—the American (Western) communists tread along each of these erroneous pathways at different periods, to varying degrees of intensity and consistency. One example is in the treatment of the conclusions of Marx in a hopeless dogmatic way: the idea that Marx “lays bare” an absolute truth against the falsities of “idealist-bourgeois” philosophical positions that came before Marx and that still carry on after his famous “debunking.” Gramsci strives for transcendence within the context of spontaneous and sophisticated philosophies but undermines them in the spirit of a new way of thinking—the communist worldview. He advocates for the starting point to be common sense since, within common sense, bourgeois ideology and cultural hegemony (contingencies that can be subject to radical transformation) lay dormant. Bourgeois ideology is unconscious—it lives deep within things like our use of everyday language. To clarify this point with a concrete example of where we can start is with our most elementary assumptions about life and culture, expressed in common idioms. We can investigate and critique the phrase “Money can’t buy happiness.” Bourgeois ideology sets up the question—the fact that we have to state that money cannot buy happiness means that there is an ideological assumption that happiness can even be bought. Anyways, thinking is identified not as a neutral human act devoid of any stamp of class but as a mindset underlined with specific and historical modes of thought that reproduce and maintain class society. For Gramsci, this is ultimately a struggle to raise the intellect and consciousness of the proletariat so that it can adequately usher in a higher civilization unmuddied by the oppressive frameworks of bourgeois rule.
Gramsci’s Philosophy of Praxis
We have now twice defined, emphasized, and supported the role of philosophy as 1) a general ideological struggle and 2) the intellectual work of the war of position. At this point, we can return to the foundations of Marxist “philosophy” (or anti-philosophy, as we will see shortly). Gramsci, as stated earlier, was in prison while writing his Notebooks, so he was forced to rename people and concepts so that his writings could spread past the fascist prison censors who reviewed them. He used Ilitch for Lenin, Bronstein for Trotsky, and the “founder of the philosophy of praxis” for Marx. The philosophy of praxis also refers to a concept in the tradition of Western Marxism. It is both an “anti-philosophical yet philosophical” doctrine (a phrase we will use repeatedly in this essay) that joins together four different “centers” of thought: Gramsci himself, the young Karl Marx, the young Georg Lukács, and the Frankfurt School. To maintain conciseness, we will only review the first three here. We will start with Gramsci.
Gramsci calls his philosophy of praxis “absolute historicism.” Historicism explains human phenomena (social, political, cultural, psychological, ideological, etc) in terms of the historical process that led to it. In other words, when it is trying to grasp a thing, it sees history as the primary determining factor in what constitutes the nature of that thing. Historians are necessarily historicists, and Marxists, as historical materialists, are no different. What characterizes Gramsci’s absolute historicism as a philosophy of praxis is that it is absolute in an ironic sense because it rejects the absolutism of metaphysical historicist narratives. This will become much clearer in the section below on Hegel, but, briefly put, Hegelian philosophy is very much an absolute metaphysical historicism that absolute historicism seeks to overcome. Absolute historicism is absolute only in its very rejection of absolutes—a parallel to the “anti-philosophical yet philosophical” nature of the philosophy of praxis across various Marxist thinkers. For Gramsci, there are no eternal questions in philosophy. These questions arise from particular social and historical contexts, so absolute historicism, as his philosophy of praxis, searches for a way to emphasize and strengthen this perspective. The problems of philosophy are the problems of society in abstract form—this is the central idea of all the strains of the philosophy of praxis. So, resolving social contradictions also means the disappearance of the philosophy of praxis. We will reaffirm this sentiment in Marx and Lukacs below.
Hegel and Feuerbach
Before directly addressing Marx's philosophy of praxis, we can understand his philosophy by honing in on his intellectual work during the crucial years between 1843 and 1846. During this time, he wrote his most philosophically foundational works: On the Jewish Question, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and last but not least, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach. We will use his thesis to present his philosophy of praxis. This philosophy was constructed on his reading of two central figures, Georg Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach. These two thinkers are certainly not the only two figures in Marx’s early intellectual space; he engaged with a comprehensive range of thinkers and schools of thought—from the ancient Greek philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus to the economic doctrines of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. But Hegel and Feuerbach are the most relevant for our purposes here.
If Hegel and Feuerbach are the two central figures, then in a parallel sense, we have three central ideas that preoccupied young Marx: human nature, alienation, and praxis. In this section, I hope to bind Hegel, Feuerbach, human nature, alienation, and praxis to express Marx’s version of the philosophy of praxis. We begin with Hegel, an often dizzying figure to read and comprehend.
The first place we should start in Hegel seems evident to anyone with even a marginal understanding of the great German thinker—with dialectics. Dialectical thinking originates in the Socratic method, a philosophy that follows a process of questioning beliefs and subsequent refinement of those beliefs. Old beliefs are refined into new ones only insofar as they admit logical contradictions. However, dialectics in the context of Hegel means something far more ambitious and non-intuitive than this classical form. Instead of fleshing out each dimension of Hegelian dialectics, we’ll focus on its relevant core.
Dialectics is all about motion. It is a mode of progression that phenomena undergo in their evolution. Hegel makes the strong and ambitious claim that everything progresses through the dialectic. It is the absolute “force” (not necessarily something “objectified” like force in physics) of the world, for everything subject to change in the universe hides a latent dialectic, illuminated only through rigorous philosophical contemplation. Dialectics always involves two distinct elements in tension with each other, these elements being internal to the thing that is in motion. The key is that the relationship of tension determines the thing's motion. A thing changes as its contradictory elements try to resolve or mediate their struggle. This will become clearer shortly.
A fundamental but easily misunderstood core concept of Hegelian dialectics is sublimation. We will make this concept the focus of dialectics to ward off the reduction of dialectics to thesis-antithesis-synthesis, an erroneous simplification that never appears in the work of Hegel (it comes from the German idealist Fichte, a contemporary of Hegel). Sublimation is the best one-word translation of the German word Aufhebung, which Hegel identifies with the general form of all motion. It translates to many different, contradictory definitions, but here we will highlight what I feel are the three best descriptors: 1) to “lift,” 2) to “abolish,” and 3) to “preserve.” To illustrate how these terms are incorporated in the concrete motion of all things, we will examine an abstract, somewhat overly mathematical example. Suppose that thing (object, phenomenon) Z1 is evolving into Z2 and contains elements X and Y. Further, suppose that these elements are in dialectical tension so that, as stated earlier, their relation determines the change that Z1 is currently undergoing towards Z2. X and Y both “seek resolution,” either totally on the side of X or Y or some happy medium that avoids a one-sided resolution. This resolution is on some sliding scale between those three options. According to Hegel’s dialectical schema, a resolution is inevitable for Z1 to become Z2 (we can see here how becoming is crucial to Hegelian thought, as it is the first resolution between being and nothing). Here’s where the contradictory translations of “aufhebung” apply—there is some truth within both X and Y (we’ll briefly justify this claim when we discuss reason, rationality, and Spirit below). According to Hegel, their resolution preserves the truth within both X and Y. It also abolishes, to some extent, the “falseness” within them. After all, if they contained only truth and no falseness then there would be no need to change; X and Y would be final, stable, and absolute. There would be no necessity for the struggle for their evolution. Ultimately, they, and Z1 itself, are lifted to a “more true” form, Z2. Z1 is getting closer to its truth via the evolution characterized by the struggle and subsequent resolution between X and Y.
Spirit is the heart and soul of Hegel’s philosophy, and he first developed his concept in his magnum opus, The Phenomenology of Spirit. He attempts to reconcile and synthesize two other concepts in intellectual thought: Reason and God. Reason in the modern philosophical context is an abstraction of the general logical faculties of human beings. Although related, this is not the ancient Greek conception of Reason, which Hegel tries to reconcile with God. Reason, in this sense, is a subject with its own telos or end goal. It is something universal and positive that mankind partakes in and manifests individually. Rationality is the actualization of Reason, the identification of understanding and what is understood (an Aristotelian form of early idealism). This is a challenging perspective to wrap our heads around. We are doing an injustice trying to sum it up here, a consequence of the larger injustice of attempting to encapsulate Hegel’s Spirit here. Nonetheless, we must stretch our minds here to continue to Marx. Hegel thinks of Reason as something beyond mankind, which mankind merely participates in and manifests.
We have an easier time understanding what Hegel means by God—the God of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. He identifies the universal Reason described briefly above with the God of the Abrahamic religions. Hegel’s issue is that even this Greek perspective on Reason is, ironically, too abstract. He asks how exactly Reason manifests itself in the world. Here, he introduces Spirit. Spirit is his attempt at explaining how the overly abstract concept of Reason becomes manifest and how everything in the world—from mankind to plants and animals to inanimate objects to thought—is that manifestation.
Spirit is, first and foremost, all-encompassing. Everything in reality is tied to Spirit. Spirit is also not static nor complete but developing. This is another bizarre and dizzying perspective crucial to Hegel’s entire thought. Becoming is pivotal here. Without touching on Hegelian dialectics, we can understand phenomena through movement, through some abstract process—a journey. The Phenomenology is often called a “bildungsroman” or “coming of age” of Spirit.
We can introduce consciousness and self-consciousness to this ambitious yet implausible schematic. Again, we must take this for granted - that Spirit, the Reason-God subject, can be aware of things. Specifically, the journey of Spirit is its attempt to know itself. After all, Spirit is all-encompassing, so there isn’t anything to know but itself. Its teleology is advancing towards a final goal, what Hegel calls Absolute Knowing. In brief, Absolute Knowing is when Spirit has absolute self-consciousness—when it knows itself in its entirety. The precise details of this final goal are far beyond the scope of the present discussion. Understanding that Spirit is on the journey towards this “mysterious” goal is sufficient.
Dialectical progression, as described earlier, characterizes the journey of Spirit towards Absolute Knowing. Here, we need the concept of negation to introduce alienation when we get to Marx. The moment that Spirit reaches an understanding is temporary stability, like Z1 in our abstract example above. Spirit reached its current state by negating a previous form—we could think of that as “Z0”. The nature of Spirit is to challenge this stability immediately. This overcoming is called the negation of the negation. When Spirit overcomes the moment of stability, it is said to “sublimate” that moment in the way described above. The subsequent moment in Spirit’s journey achieves self-contradictory sublimation by maintaining parts of the previous moment, the true parts, but also raises this moment to another so that the prior is unrecognizable, hence the destruction or negation of the previous moment. Once the next moment is reached, we are back at the beginning, at a new temporary stability, novel in that it is “closer to truth” than the previous moment—closer to the ultimate goal of Spirit—Absolute Knowing.
This process is Hegel's explanation for all such struggles, all things that try to overcome some gap. It characterizes the essence of history, society, nature, war, conflict, education, etc. Reality is the Spirit's struggle towards Absolute Knowing and total self-consciousness. For this reason, Hegel makes the ambitious claim that all that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real—objective reality is wrapped up in the dialectical progression of Reason.
Because of the ‘absoluteness’ of Spirit, history itself is included in this grand narrative. The history of mankind, from pre-civilization to the modern day and beyond, has a teleology—it is moving with Spirit towards the final goal of Absolute Knowing. Again, the ramifications of this claim and the full weight of Absolute Knowing are far beyond the scope of this essay, but we can say what the goal of history is. For Hegel, it is the absolute freedom of mankind, its liberation from the continual dialectical struggles of society, war, poverty, ideology, etc. In our case, we’re interested in how this delineates the role of philosophy. Hegel gives philosophy a “privileged” role—to “comprehend what is” is the task of philosophy. However, we are also confronted with a great limitation. Due to the contingent existence of the individual philosopher, each philosophy that develops is only the thinker's own “time apprehended in thoughts.” As the philosopher apprehends this time, the world moves onward, so this apprehension is retrospective—it encapsulates a world that has just been superseded by current reality, which a philosopher can never really grasp at the current moment. Hence, one of Hegel's most beautiful and fascinating claims is that “The owl of Minerva (knowledge) spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.” The idea that History is progressing towards absolute freedom and the philosopher's role are two Hegelian perspectives that profoundly shape Marx’s philosophy of praxis. As for praxis itself, it is a concept that is thoroughly Hegelian. However, it is better explained below when we start to talk directly about Marx’s philosophy of praxis.
Ludwig Feuerbach was a materialist follower of Hegel whose critique of the great German “idealist” profoundly impacted the young Marx. Feuerbach was also very critical of the German idealist, specifically regarding the religiosity of Hegel’s thinking. This is where we come to alienation for a second time, the first instance being the negation of the negation that Spirit undertakes in its journey towards Absolute Knowing. For Feuerbach, the essence of Christianity, with its grand narratives of Father God, Christ as the savior of mankind, the kingdom of heaven, etc., was alienation. Religion seizes the most intimate and earthly aspects of mankind and catapults them way above humanity, straight into the abstract realm of the Divine. Our hopes, dreams, desires, passions, and visions, essentially our subjective worldviews, are taken up to the sky. Feuerbach’s attack on Hegel attempts to unveil the mystical nature of Hegelian religiosity, thereby bringing our “humanity” back down to its proper place in our world. He thought of the Christian worldview as merely projecting man’s natural essence onto an inaccessible terrain. This inaccessibility is the crux of the general concept of alienation in Marx, which we will describe later. Feuerbach’s social hope was for mankind to become conscious of such alienated projections and overcome them—he wanted the world to abandon religion. He, like Hegel and Marx and many other philosophers like Kant, had a view of “New Man.” Feuerbach’s New Man was post-Christian, and he used Hegel to articulate this vision.
Marx’s Philosophy of Praxis
Now, we can finally return to Marx and begin to develop his philosophy of praxis. Between 1843 and 1846, he laid the philosophical foundation for his intellectual journey, and we can understand these foundations by detailing how Hegel and Feuerbach appear in Marx via core concepts in Marx’s thinking. To trace a rough theoretical schema, Hegel appears in Marx through the dialectical method and the idea of praxis. On the other hand, Feuerbach appears through Marx’s conception of human nature (species-being) and alienation (as we briefly touched on earlier). Before discussing these thinkers and concepts concerning young Marx, I present a “baseline” for Marx’s revolutionary thought: the dialectical problem of reason and need. Marx outlines this dialectic in one of his early works, On the Jewish Question. This dialectic is grounded in another familiar dialectic, state and civil society, discussed in the previous section.
Marx is as much a sociologist and social psychologist as a philosopher (though to categorize him squarely in any of these camps is to do his body of work a great disservice). He points out that the state is the realm of reason—society “demands” that the state be the site of rational order. This manifests in the citizen's identity, as to be a citizen requires following some kind of law and order provided by a state. This opposes private man, the subject of civil society, which, claims Marx, the ruling class treats as something inherently irrational. Civil society is a mere private and irrational residue compared to the public and rational state. They are considered by bourgeois society to be in dialectic tension for two reasons: 1) each term requires the other to survive, and 2) together, they develop in tension and struggle. To illustrate 1), the state without civil society is usually characterized as grotesque, overregulated tyranny.
In contrast, a civil society without the state is considered anarchy, where our private, “bestial,” irrational passions are given free rein. As for 2), the state and civil society are always in brutal contradiction—the state is always trying to expand its control and order through de jure and de facto means. At the same time, the private sphere constantly struggles to evade such means in the spirit of freedom (think Jeffersonianism, a dominant undercurrent in American thought).
Marx illustrates the fundamental issue of class society in On the Jewish Question through this dialectic. The problem is that such a divide creates an untenable gap for bourgeois society. Civil society can never meet the “demands of reason” that the state imposes on the citizen since the citizen is simply a private man whose interests are free and thus at fundamental odds with the interests of state society. On the other hand, the state cannot meet the “demands of need” that civil society calls for—this is just class oppression, the so-called “primary contradiction” of all prevailing society. Overcoming this gap was the task that Marx set for his early philosophy.
Marx agrees with Hegel’s characterization of philosophy—the first part of his famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach—that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world…”. He thinks Hegel did “end” philosophy with his system. This agreement is the thrust for the philosophy of praxis that we will explore in the second half of this thesis when we present the core idea in the young Marx’s thought.
Marx’s earliest engagement with Hegel comes from commentaries on passages from Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s most thoroughgoing socio-political work. Against the foundational concept that the “real is rational and the rational is real,” Hegel advocates a fundamentally reactionary socio-political stance on the state and civil society, that the prevailing bureaucratic Prussian state is a universal object in that it represents the interests of all classes in the most rational form possible. While appreciating the concreteness of Hegel’s inquiry into society and politics, Marx argues against this perspective, disassociating universality from the state apparatus. In the Introduction to these commentaries, he claims that the hitherto political revolutions have merely liberated specific classes and not mankind itself. The most outstanding example of class liberation in this regard is the French Revolution, which freed the French bourgeoisie from the tyrannical grips of the nobility. He then moves on to a dialectical, self-negating conclusion about political revolution and class—that only a class that manifests the end of the very notion of classes can liberate mankind. This is the “universal class” of the proletariat, whose interests are not tied fundamentally to maintaining prevailing civil society but to the “absolute freedom” that Hegel identifies with the end of history. Marx recognized the gap between the state and civil society, which his philosophy sought to close. Philosophy cannot close this gap on its terrain—it is only through the proletarian revolution that the demands of reason can be merged with the demands of need. The inability of philosophy to carry out this task is essentially Marx’s philosophy of praxis, which, again, will be presented after fleshing out Marx’s philosophical foundations in Hegel and Feuerbach. But for now, we can start to see the fascinating core elements of the philosophy of young Marx.
Marx is a dialectical thinker in the style of Hegel, and he retained this style throughout his entire life, not just in his young philosophical phase. Immediately after the phase in question, he and Friedrich Engels developed dialectical and historical materialism as the dual historical-socio-philosophical perspectives of the proletarian revolution. Getting back to the years 1843-46, however, we see that in a metacritical sense, he seeks to sublate Hegel’s philosophy itself—to preserve its radical kernel (the dialectical method, the limitations of philosophy, the end of History, absolute freedom) while abolishing its falseness (mystification, idealism), thus lifting the whole Hegelian philosophy to its more “true” form.
To understand how Marx developed his concept of praxis, we need to recognize how action relates to Spirit in Hegelian philosophy. As stated above, Hegel is not necessarily an idealist and not a materialist; he can be described as idealistic and materialistic depending on where one looks. His ontological perspective on Spirit, which is that it is the “force of the world,” qualifies him as some kind of idealist, hence, he fits nicely into the tradition of German idealism. However, he goes beyond idealism by offering a coherent perspective on the concrete realities mankind faces. We can refer back to Philosophy of Right to argue that Hegel is, at the very least, as concerned as materialists are with our institutions, and through this, that he is also concerned with our definite, physical, sensuous universe. Human desires, passions, visions, temperaments, or subjectivities are deterministic in the forward march of History. However, the realization of Spirit (Reason) determines these subjectivities. So human action, activity in general, serves as the content of the realization of Spirit, while Spirit’s dialectical progression is its form. This is Hegel’s attempt at sublimating the idealist-materialist split. This is also where Feuerbach and, thereafter, Marx launch their attack on Hegel as the great mystifier.
Feuerbach claimed that Hegel reversed a true subject-predicate relation between his portrayal of Spirit and action. Spirit performs its dialectical journey, describing this journey as human action. But in reality, according to Feuerbach and Marx, Spirit describes the real motive force of history—human action. Action transforms into praxis, which has a specific meaning in the history of philosophy that is often confused with being identical to action. Since the time of the Greeks, praxis means the manifestation of theory, hence the well-known theory-praxis dichotomy. Marx uses this phrase rather than action to highlight the dialectical relation between theory and praxis and to prefigure his conception of revolutionary praxis, which Lenin famously claims cannot exist without revolutionary theory. Marx’s critique of Phenomenology lies in the perspective that Hegel is just describing mankind's journey through History and not of some mystical Spirit as a force manifest in the world. Spirit is just the myth that Hegel uses to represent humanity, which is determined by and only exists on humanity’s terms.
We now come to the final stopping point before simply presenting Marx’s philosophy of praxis: human nature and alienation. Young Marx borrowed the idea of species-being from Feuerbach to conceptualize human nature. The most famous and crucial of his early works is a series of notes called The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which, aside from the Eleven Theses, characterizes the essence of the philosophy of praxis. In it, Marx describes man as a “natural being…endowed with vital powers [which] exists in him [as] instincts” to actively create and produce. Man produces and reproduces his entire being, his subjective experience, and he does this uniquely as homo sapiens—hence species-being. His products of his species-being determine his relation to the world—to society and the planet itself. However, the conditions of the political economy, marked by the relations of the production and reproduction of capital in the capitalist social formation, demand these products of man’s species-being for industry and the market. Hence alienation—that man’s products “confront him as a hostile, alien power under capitalism.” This is the actual gripe that Marx has with capitalist society, that the essential nature of mankind is being robbed from itself by the bourgeoisie, and only the universal class, who suffers the greatest from this robbery, can overcome this alienation through revolutionary praxis, through the socio-political revolution we call communism. Alienation is not an eternal condition and is instead utterly contingent, dependent on a historical journey that brought mankind to capitalism for reasons that cannot be furnished by rational, a priori means. Philosophy, as well as bourgeois knowledge in general, from Plato to Hegel and from Adam Smith to David Ricardo, tries to furnish these means on those inadequate epistemological grounds, hence Marx’s critique of knowledge as furthering man's alienation.
Now, we are finally ready to present Marx’s philosophy of praxis. It is beautifully encapsulated in the second part of the Eleventh and final thesis on Feuerbach - that the “point of [philosophy]” is not merely to “interpret” the world but to “change it.” At first glance, this is just a basic affirmation of the necessarily practical and external aspect of revolution—the leftist-activist criticized at the beginning of this essay would agree with this obvious statement. They would fully support a typical call-to-action against ivory tower anti-politics, which aims to transform and ultimately overcome the scholastic and academic “armchair” tendency of the overly theoretical Marxist who refrains from active political organizing.
What brings Marx beyond this surface level of “practicality” is that he went profoundly further than this, and dialectically speaking, he went through philosophy to reach this conclusion that lies beyond it. Ironically, the philosophy of praxis is both philosophical and anti-philosophical because it has a contradictory perspective on ontology. Ontology is concerned with the fundamental nature of being or things, and it has been one of the prevailing concerns of philosophers since the earliest Greek thinkers like Thales and Parmenides. In a radical and strikingly bizarre maneuver, Marx identifies ontology with history. They are bound into one in a simultaneously critical yet metacritical perspective that claims that the ontological positions, those various conceptions of the general features of reality that appear in philosophy, are really just reflections of “antinomies,” a phrase Hegel uses to describe the gap between the subject and object that his philosophical system seeks to overcome. These antinomies for Hegel were theoretical and epistemological, as they were merely the contradictions and incompatibilities between our subjective experience and the “objective” theories we use to understand that experience. Theory simply cannot grasp what is real for us; what we experience in life cannot be conceptualized. However, philosophy is just raising what we experience in life to a level of abstract consciousness by which life can be understood. This is an intimate justification for the analogy described in the “Introduction” of this essay, where consciousness served as the critical “head” of communist movements. After closely inspecting our life-theory antinomy, we recognize what separates life from theory. It is a social contradiction that, in essence, is the demand for reason from the state and the demand for need from civil society. We do not come to a form of being that closes this gap through philosophical investigation and inquiry, through what Marx called mere “interpretation” in the Eleventh Thesis. Instead, we construct the bridge between subject and object with the communist revolution, with revolutionary praxis, where mankind reaches a non-mystified correction form of Hegel’s “Absolute Knowing,” according to young Marx at least.
In the communist world, mankind comes to fully “know itself” because this “knowing” is not the usually understood technical acquisition of knowledge that, in the history of philosophy, is to be reached through rigorous dialectical argumentation in the classical (non-Hegelian) sense. This self-knowing is a dignified life for all of mankind, which only occurs under the horizon of a liberated, unalienated existence. Such dignity is untenable with capitalist exploitation, so only after communism ends the contradiction of reason and need can we live in the whole light of our species-being. We unleash our labor-power consensually, so the products are considered an actual dimension of ourselves, whether these products exist as actual sensuous objects or only in abstract thought. Without the capitalist mode of reproduction, without the bourgeoisie and classes in general, these products no longer confront us as “hostile alien powers” but live with us in harmony. This is all we need to illustrate Marx’s philosophy of praxis, which he appears to somewhat “abandon” as a foundational terrain. He opts for a more “positivistic yet radically anti-positivist” approach to theory later on. However, this isn’t to say that the philosophy of praxis is wholly erased from Marx—it prefigures and structures certain other aspects of Marx’s work. Nonetheless, we will end this essay by demonstrating another somewhat independent philosophy of praxis in young Georg Lukács.
Lukacs’ Philosophy of Praxis
It cannot be overstated how influential the collection of essays History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923, was for the world communist movement, doubly so for Western Marxism. It arguably birthed the tradition of Western Marxism, prefiguring some of its familiar themes—direct engagement with Hegel and other bourgeois philosophies, focus on culture and sociology, etc. It is worth noting that Lukacs reconstructed the arguments of the 1844 Manuscripts without reading the work (it wasn’t published until nine years later). He was able to do this based on his reading of Capital. This justifies the earlier claim that Marx’s philosophy of praxis prefigures and structures his entire work. If this were not true, it would not have been possible for Lukacs to develop this reconstruction. Lukacs had a philosophy of praxis, which, although it shares a decent amount with Marx’s, was independent nonetheless. It focused on his concept of reification.
Our treatment of human relations can define reification: the process by which relations between humans become, only in appearance, relations between non-human things. Lukacs ties the process of reification to Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, which he presents in a chapter in Capital. Briefly put, commodity fetishism is yet another obscurity of reality—we tend to treat the products of labor, the commodity, as having inherent value, divorced from the actual material process of production that created the commodity.
Reification, argues Lukacs in his essay of the same name, is the result of commodity fetishism. To reemphasize the perspective on alienation expressed by Marx in the manuscripts, it is within the social context of capitalism and under the weight of the relations of commodity production that the products of our species-being are robbed from us and confront us as a hostile, alien power. Parallel to that, furthering and extending alienation is the increasing objectification of human history and society—things that are human relations but are given an “objective” character thanks to the demand for technical expertise in capitalist society. As capitalism progresses, there is an intensification and fragmentation of our understanding of its objects—our knowledge is more and more mechanical and “local” rather than dynamic and general. Lukacs argues that reification is this tendency applied to the consciousness of man. Mankind is conscious of its own “products,” its history, and social objects, but this consciousness mimics the fetishistic objectification of commodities. Life becomes a matter not of subjective understanding but of calculation and precision—an apt contemporary example of this is the entire “productivity/hustle/grind” culture that reduces and gamifies the lived experiences of people in advanced capitalist nations.
This type of technical transformation occurs in every aspect of life and society. Scientific methodology reigns over all aspects of subjective experience. We can observe this by focusing on how capitalism “reifies” the typical “pillars of a community”—the home, the hospital, the school, and the church. At home, the familial unit is reduced to a place where the future laborer is first educated culturally, laying down the crucial foundation for further technical advancement. This education extends and becomes more precise and explicit in the school and university, institutions that have already shed their “romantic” and “humanistic” characteristic of acquiring knowledge for knowledge's sake. This essence is replaced by the cold and bureaucratic objective of obtaining skills for a career. The hospital becomes the site of the most egregious sins of the corrupt, for-profit healthcare system. However, the methodological transformation here is not in this exploitation but in the technicality of the professional doctor. The priest or pastor of a church, an institution that needs money to survive, becomes an expert in “gaining tithes” from the congregation. Reification, by way of commodity fetishism, ultimately strips life of its humanity—this is alienation, as reconstructed by Lukacs.
Lukacs’ philosophy of praxis seeks to overcome reification. He returns to the philosophies of Hegel, Kant, and other German idealists to grasp how this overcoming of reification can be possible. Specifically, Lukacs engages with the great “subject-object” divide, the “antinomy” or gap described in the previous section. He concludes that the resolution of this antinomy is first to treat the proletariat as the subject-object of history and then to understand practice in the context of this treatment. The concern with merging subject and object has been fleshed out earlier in our discussion of antinomies. However, generally speaking, it also satisfies a desire for totality. Hegel lamented that the terms of the subject-object relationship exclude the other, leaving us with the gap he calls antinomy. Lukacs argues that Hegel then mythologizes the solution through the Spirit and the dialectic of History. Like Marx and Feuerbach, he sees the kernel of truth necessary for sublating Hegel, and his solution is placing the working class in the role of the subject-object of History.
At first glance, this all appears to be nebulous philosophical nonsense, but it is the “anti-philosophical yet philosophical” tendency of the philosophy of praxis in Marx. It merely structures, for Lukacs, the idea that philosophy cannot realize its solutions, that it alone cannot “change the world” but only “interpret.” Lukacs considered himself a philosopher of Leninism, more precisely of the vanguard communist party. The philosophical gap will be resolved in the communist revolution, in the revolutionary praxis of a proper Communist Party. To treat and act as though the proletariat is the subject-object of history is the same as recognizing the class as “universal” and so historic in that it has no incentive for existence beyond the revolution.
Conclusion
This concludes our brief discussion of the role of philosophy in communism and our exposition of various philosophies of praxis. As stated before, the Frankfurt School is the next major contributor to the philosophy of praxis. However, we should save that for later, after the foremost philosophers of praxis (Gramsci, young Marx, young Lukacs) are internalized. The philosophy of praxis is a rich and powerful tradition that “sublates” the pretentious activism criticized in the Introduction. Instead of “shoving” philosophy (and theory in general) to the side, we seek to rupture with philosophy through philosophy. Hence, the philosophers of praxis advocate the repeated “anti-philosophical yet philosophical” attitude.
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