Marx’s Materialism
(Marxism and the Position of Contemplation)
by P.K. Gandakin
January 6, 2025
I. Marx’s Understanding of Materialism
A. Thought and Existential Pathos
B. Marxism as Practice, not Picture
C. Theory and Practice (Ideology as an Objective Force)
D. More on Marx’s Materialism
II. Philosophy and Practice
A. Verificationist or Objectivist Marxism
B. Non-Conceptual Materialism and Idealism
C. Hegel and Existential Pathos
I. Marx’s Understanding of Materialism
“By the little which now satisfies Spirit,” writes Hegel in the preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit, “we can measure the extent of its loss.” By the little which satisfies communism today, we too can measure how much it has lost.
Whereas once Marxism was purported to be a rupture with all hitherto existing society, and all hitherto thought, today it conceives itself as nothing more than the logical extension of the intellect and institutions of existing liberal society. Who champions the essential values of liberalism today—the centrality of the concept of rational argumentation, the essence of man as homo economicus, the unity of industrial and moral progress, etc.— more fervently than our modern Marxists? Who else obstinately arrays himself against the enemy, while wholly adopting his opponent’s language and theory? But if theory is a reflection of practice, it cannot but be so, insofar as the practice of American communism, just like its thought, is a residual aftereffect of liberalism.
The origins of this deviation are less difficult to establish than its content. Since the beginning, Marx has been interpreted by his followers as a ‘systematizer’ in the style of the ‘great philosophers’ like Kant or Hegel rather than as the anti-systematic and anti-philosophical critic he saw himself as. The very “position of contemplation” that Marx criticizes his idealistic and impractical contemporaries for is the position adopted by his devotees. And so we can only repeat Marx’s own horrified assertion in the face his contemporary adherents theoretical gymnastics—that if these folks were Marxists, “je ne sui pas Marxiste!” And following him? First, the revisionism of the Second International, followed by the mechanism and economism of the Third International…and the entire intellectual history of Marxism possesses the appearance of a series of thinkers correcting and supplementing their subsequent deviations from ‘correct’ Marxism.
Today, another revisionist form of Marxism is predominant: this verificationist and objectivist Marxism reproduces the logic of metaphysics and speculation, Marx’s favorite objects of critique. It characterizes our practice, and must be challenged if communism seeks to move beyond marginality into the stream of real world history. It does so because after decades of retreat, and the massive growth and development of bourgeois intelligentsia, it does not know what else to say. The real social base of Marxism has been erased (if it ever meaningfully existed in the United States in the first place)—and how can a consistent materialist hold that a correct theory can be produced in isolation from a mass social practice? The only remaining point of reference for politics is the (anti-communist) masses and their (anti-communist) intelligentsia—from where else, then, can a Marxist get their bearings?
A solution is not forthcoming—the seeking of a solution, as this essay will argue, is not only impossible, but essentially wrong-headed. Marxism is not a theory or a doctrine but a way of thinking. None of its text is valid, and its method is contingent. Marxism is a not a theory that is determined by its formal intellectual content, neither a method that can be isolated and described, but—like all thought—an existential pathos which only has meaning in the way it structures our practice.
A. Thought and Existential Pathos
Marx fixated on understanding the role of thought in the world his entire life. We find evidence for it first in his university dissertation on the Greek philosophers Epicurus and Democritus, in which he puts forward his basic understanding of idealism and materialism. This theory, dialectical materialism, was Marx’s attempt to both criticize philosophical idealism and move beyond the traditional paradigm of philosophy as well as the distinction between materialism and idealism itself.
Marx, in other words, was not a materialist rather than an idealist. For Marx, vulgar materialism was just as bad—if not worse—than idealism, and both positions remained limited in his eyes by their speculative origins. Rather, he rejected both and saw them as limited ways to understand the world.
Early in Marx’s intellectual career, it is already clear he rejected the objectivist understanding of theory, which understands ideas as representations or pictures of the objective, external world. For Marx, there is no objective external world and objective representations of that world. There is only human practice.
Therefore, thought functions as a mode of practice, as a way of relating to the world, rather than as a picture or description of the world. Questions about whether an idea or belief are “true” or "false” are moot for Marx. An idea is not an object that can be judged according to objective truth: it is a practice that only exists as it relates to a particular, subjective existence.
In his dissertation, Marx argues this point against traditional academic philosophy. He argues that trends such as Epicureanism and Stoicism have been only analyzed in a limited, metaphysical style. But a proper, materialist analysis means seeing these philosophies as the objective forms of subjective practices, rather as collections of beliefs. In other words, these philosophies were not just abstract doctrines possessed by a generic thinker, but “prototypes of the Roman mind, the shape in which Greece wandered to Rome.” A description is not enough to understand them; philosophy, for Marx, is also a given person’s way of living.
Marx links this distinction between the formal content of an ideology and its role as existential pathos to another distinction: that of speculation and practice. For Marx, speculation was the traditional style of philosophizing that was not able to understand human practice. By separating the formal content of a theory from its practical effect on consciousness, philosophy, or “the position of contemplation,” was incapable of understanding thought from a materialist perspective. He writes:
It seems to me that though the earlier systems [of philosophy] are more significant and interesting for the content, the post-Aristotelean ones, and primarily the cycle of the Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic schools, are more significant and interesting for the subjective form, the character of Greek philosophy. But it is precisely the subjective form, the spiritual carrier of the philosophical systems, which has until now been almost entirely ignored in favor of their metaphysical characteristics.
Here we see Marx already drawing the distinction between his own method, which attempts to understand ideas as existential pathos expressed not in words but our actual activity, versus the “metaphysical” type of philosophical analysis (which analyzes on the basis of formal content of ideas).. The only way to understand the difference between different thoughts, then, is by understanding the way that thought was realized in a given person’s actual life—in the real activity of that idea’s “spiritual carriers,” i.e., the people who possess those ideas and realize them in existence.
This means that in his dissertation, Marx is proposing and attempting to implement a novel type of philosophical analysis. Instead of trying to compare the theories of Democritus and Epicurus in the form of two separate doctrines with separate sets of propositions they agree with, he attempts instead to understand the differences as realized in different forms of subjective practice. This means, conversely, that thought is only that subjective practice, and he reduces the formal and doctrinal to the secondary after-affect of the way that believing a particular philosophy represents how we engage with the world as a whole. He writes:
We see as a difference of practical energy that which is expressed in the passages above as a difference of theoretical consciousness. We consider finally the form of reflection which expresses the relation of thought to being, their mutual relationship. In the general relationship which the philosopher sees between the world and thought, he merely makes objective for himself the relation of his own particular consciousness to the real world.
This does not mean that the theoretical differences are meaningless for Marx. But it does mean the meaning of theory cannot be located in their ability to formally represent the external world. Marx is not asking what ideas separate Democritus and Epicurus, or which one of their theories most closely resembles reality. He is examining instead “the relationship of the philosophical system which is realized to its intellectual carriers, to the individual self-consciousnesses in which its progress appears.” For Marx, this intersection of objective idea and subjective existence is the only truth there is—it is impossible to abstract away from the particular, existing human being to find what is capital-t True from a ‘God’s-eye view.’ The only way to understand “the difference in the theoretical judgements of Democritus and Epicurus” is “in the disparate scientific energy and practice of these men.”
This emphasis on subjectivity and practice is the real core of dialectical materialism. For Marx, materialism means that the world can only be understood according to practice, not to reason. The latter he identifies with idealism—the desire to treat ideas as a distinct type of object from any other object (such as gross matter), whether that means treating ideas as superior to matter in the way of traditional idealism or as epiphenomenal and derivative to matter in the style of mechanical materialism. The essential congruity of both views is the “position of contemplation”: the idea that the best way to understand the world is through the model of a reasoning man contemplating and attempting to understand the world before him. And it is in this vein that Marx writes, “Abstract spiritualism is abstract materialism[, and] abstract materialism is the abstract spiritualism of matter.” In both cases, the schema of philosophy predominates and Marx’s practical materialism is replaced with a fixed dualism between object and subject, and matter and idea.
The scope of this critique is much wider than it may currently appear. Where theory is backwards, sophistication in theory is suspect. Marx is not merely criticizing idealism or philosophy in the abstract, but engaging in a thorough critique that attempts to entirely restructure our understanding of the world. For Marx, communism is more than a simple economic arrangement—it is a way of life. The currently predominant understanding of Marxism as a pseudo-Popperian ‘scientific’ theory that depends on verification is an excellent example of the way in which Marx’s practical core is subverted to reintroduce idealism into his theory. As will be seen, this means a larger and more essential challenge to the popular understanding of what Marx is saying as a whole.
B. Marxism as Practice, not Picture
First, we will develop the concept of objectivist Marxism, reconstructed from analysis of the characteristic model of interactions in American communism. Take the first questions that define the initial contact between an individual and Marxism as a theory: 1. What is Marxism? (i.e., what are the beliefs, principles, methods, etc. that fall under the theory called ‘Marxism’?) 2. Is Marxism true? (i.e., does Marxism accurately describe reality? Are the predictions Marxism makes accurate?)
We are not concerned with the specific answer to each of these questions at this point. Instead, each of these questions presuppose certain qualities in Marxism that characterize the modern understanding of the theory. The first is that Marxism is a What?—that Marxism is an object that can be learned and communicated, and so is a type of knowledge in its nature. In fact, it is a collection of analyses and propositions—specifically, then, we know that Marxism as an object is an intellectual doctrine. The second question asks whether Marxism is true, and (assuming we are asking a Marxist) the presupposition is that Marxism is true, which is taken to mean that at is verifiable/verified in practice and its formal claims accurately represent the objects of the real world.
What do we call a coherent intellectual doctrine that is evaluated on the degree to which it accurately reflects reality? I think it is appropriate to say that such an object is, at least in the popular conception, a systematic science. Neither Marx nor countless other philosophers understand a ‘science’ to mean this, but this is nevertheless the definition internalized by Marxism itself and which openly gives credit to its origin in the twentieth century. Naturally, this also comports with the pop science understanding taught in the American curriculum about the scientific method.
What makes this clearer is that objectivist Marxism or Marxism-as-systematic-science are not here proposed to function as an uncritical dogma. In fact, both bourgeois philosophy of science and Marxism are already well-prepared on this point: the famous practice as the criterion of truth. Practice plays a two-fold role: it is both the origin of the ideas that are called Marxism (and ideas more generally), and the origin of the data that verify (or falsify) these ideas. From one view, both functions are the same. Both concern the relation of an individual to the idea or objective reality, which is mediated through practice. If a certain act is successful, then that indicates that the idea that guided it is a correct idea. If it is unsuccessful, then that means that the idea is incorrect. This means further that the idea and reality are put in a certain relation, viz., representation, or correspondence. To say Marxism is true is therefore not just to say merely that there is data that is proof for its statements, but also that these statements are a more or less accurate representation or ‘picture’ of reality that corresponds with how reality ‘really is.’
This seems like an elaborate way to explain something very simple: that man has ideas that he tests by putting them into practice (and that Marxism has been shown to be correct in practice, or through study of social practice). Take as emblematic here the following section from Lenin’s The Three Sources and Components of Marxism:
The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defense of bourgeois oppression.
It is easy to read this as dogmatic, but that is not necessarily the best reading. Lenin is here just stating the role of practice as ‘the criterion of truth,’ or as a means of verification of the idea. Rephrased in those terms, he is saying that the idea (“the Marxist doctrine”) is understood to accurately ‘correspond’ to reality (“is true”), and, as a consequence, is effective (“omnipotent”). Or, put in another way, that Marxism is only effective because it is true, i.e., that its efficacy verifies the accuracy of it as a theory. That Marxism is also “comprehensive and harmonious” only reflects the fact that science is here theorized as being systematic in scope.
In brief, objectivist Marxism understands Marxism as 1) a set of descriptive intellectual propositions, that 2) are placed in a verifying relationship with practice in the form of experimental testing, and which 3) is systematically organized (i.e., non-contradictory, comprehensive, and complete in essentials). Finally, Marxism must be applied: it is a knowledge that must be brought to reality in practice.
The first to explicitly identify and theorize the critique of representationalism in Marxism was communist theoretician and politician Louis Althusser (1918-1990). In his seminal and groundbreaking Reading Capital (1965) he comprehensively criticizes the philosophical model of correspondence (which is also identified with empiricism, theology, idealism, etc.)—the mind as pictures of the external world—and criticizes its presence in Marxist theory.
In contrast to this systematic view is Marxism understood as an essentially anti-systematic (alternatively: anti-metaphysical, or dialectical) theory. Under this lens, Marxism can neither be verified or falsified as a representation of reality because it is not, in the first case, a representation of anything at all. Instead, it is a practice. It cannot be argued for or justified—it cannot be verified or refuted—but only lived.
C. Theory and Practice
Marx rejects the notion that ideas are descriptive: that ideas ‘represent’ an approximate picture of the external world. Rather, he argues that ideas are practical: ideas do not represent the world, but stand in for the actual subjective existence of a person in the world. The separation between idea and practice Marx draws is also an attempt to unite them. Ideas, and the connections between them, can be placed under Marx’s dialectical materialism into relation with each other. As such, an idea is understandable not according to ‘what it says,’ but as an existential pathos, i.e., in the way that it affects and structures our practice.
Take, for example, Marx’s theory of the base and superstructure (B/S). The base is supposed to be the economic factors and relations, which then determines the superstructure of ideology, culture, law, etc. In its plainest formulations—formulations which are found explicitly in Marx—it’s a superficial theory of economic determinism. But Marx never actually resorts to crude economic determinism in his analyses, and repudiates it. How can these two facts be squared? We should reject the idea that the B/S model (or any theory ‘about’ the world) is a representation. Rather, we should see it as a theoretical practice that allows for further meaningful analysis. Marx is providing a paradigm for communists to work with—not information that he wants us to copy down.
Most importantly, this is substantiated in Marx’s own treatment of ideology and of factors belonging to the ‘superstructure’. If the B/S model is supposed to be an accurate depiction of reality, then Marx should default to it in his analysis. Instead, we see the exact opposite: Marx is consistently inconsistent in his use of concepts and his analyses. In Bertell Ollman’s Alienation, he takes this ambiguity in Marx as the starting-point of his study of Marx’s theory. Summarizing the situation, he writes:
The most formidable hurdle facing all readers of Marx is his ‘peculiar' use of words. Vilfredo Pareto provides us with the classic statement of this problem when he asserts that Marx’s words are like bats: one can see in them both birds and mice. No more profound observation has ever been offered on our subject. (3)
The strongest argument against the notion that Marx followed the type of correspondence theory above described was that his intellectual practice seems fully antithetical with what that theory implies. Rather than apply a consistent theory to events, it is almost as if Marx theorizes sui generis in relation to an event, giving novel meaning to old concepts without even the slightest hesitation.
Marx and Engels saw this ambiguity as desirable. Ollman writes:
It seems that Marx’s terminology, besides being new and unusual, is also inconsistent, the same word meaning different things at different times. Rather than seeing this as a fault, Engels proclaims it a virtue, and says this was necessary to express Marx’s understanding of the society he describes. Engels argues that we should not expect to find fixed, cut-to-measure, once and for all applicable definitions in Marx’s works. It is self-evident that where things and their interrelations are conceived, not as fixed, but as changing, their mental images, the ideas, are likewise subject to change and transformation, and they are not encapsulated in rigid definitions, but are developed in their historical or logical process of formulation. (4)
If it were the case that these concepts shifted in meaning over time, it could be more effectively argued that this fluidity does not represent a characteristic aspect of Marxist theory but a gradual learning and a growing. But this is decidedly not the case. In The German Ideology, for example —Marx alternatively uses the term “productive forces” to mean the technical means of production, the objects and acts of labor (“the bringing into cultivation of fresh land”), the presence of exchange (“trade”), the antagonism (and the removal of the antagonism) between town and country, and even the “communal economy” itself taken as a whole. Examples of these are endless in Marx. Mundane things like the act of people getting together (“cooperation”) are objective force and precondition for capitalism in Capital, alongside a “miserly” instinct.
This ambiguity is extended to the relationship between terms, as well. For example: the base/superstructure model as the theory that the economic structure or relations determines the political, legal, ideological, etc. part of society. This model is often reinterpreted in a less economistic way by positing that the relation between the economic base and ideological superstructure is ‘dialectical,’ ‘two-way,’ ‘reciprocal,’ etc., basically, that the superstructure also plays a role in affecting the base. This is a paradigmatic application of the above theory of practice as a ‘criterion of truth’; once it was recognized, the story goes, that the superstructure also has an influence on the economic base, the theory of the superstructure was granted influence to more accurately ‘fit’ this reality. Marx has no time for such theoretical parlor-tricks, because, for him, the original base/superstructure model is not a representation of history to begin with. In The Poverty of Philosophy, for example, Marx expresses the characteristic technologically reductive formulation of the base/superstructure model as meaning that the technical means of production directly produce certain forms of social organization (“the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist”). Again in the same chapter, he also writes the following:
An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society. For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself, it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. [my emphasis]
In other words, the “productive forces” do not only involve the technical instruments or methods of production or even social forms of organization—but even the “revolutionary class itself” conceived sheerly in its function as a political force! Even if it is accepted that cultural traditions and mores, legal norms, social habits, etc., relate to the structure of production in some way or the other, it seems prima facie absurd to hold to any theory of the productive forces which include within that category political ideology; and, by extension of this point, to state that will, initiative, rhetoric, spirit, etc., can be conceived from the economic deterministic perspective as “productive forces” in their own right.
There is also, of course, the fact that in his “concrete political and economic studies” Marx does not rely on technology or economic factors as a determinative and explanatory,. Instead, he treats each event as “invariably complex” and involving “a cluster of factors from every walk of life and from every level of social analysis” (8). The distinction between this approach and the one that privileges ‘applying’ Marxist theory is glaring. In the latter case, little attention is paid to “concrete” works in favor of more abstract, ‘descriptive’ works which are supposed to ‘explain’ a certain truth. For example, criticizing electoralism Marxistically means guiding the recalcitrant voter to read State and Revolution in order to ‘understand why voting doesn’t work.’ Anarchism is ‘refuted’ with On Authority, and Capital has already explained once and for all the structure of capitalist economy. In the face of so much effective ‘application,’ what else could be said except about Marx’s ambiguity except that “Marx is a bad Marxist”?
Ollman, however, disagrees. The ambiguity and flexibility in Marx’s work which eschews the notion of ‘application’ of theory to an event is not evidence of inconsistency, but of “virtue.” Marx is not engaging with a static object, but a living, changing subject. And with that in mind, “we should not expect to find fixed, cut-to-measure, once and for all applicable definitions in Marx’s works” (4). He writes:
It is self-evident that where things and their interrelations are conceived, not as fixed, but as changing, their mental images, the ideas, are likewise subject to change and transformation, and they are not encapsulated in rigid definitions, but are developed in their historical or logical process of formulation. (4)
In other words, the ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. Life is not something that can be described, but is something which must be lived. Marx “alters his classification boundaries [] to suit his changing purposes,” and mixes claims of economic determinism with those that treat “religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc.” as each being “particular modes of production” (9). The first obstacle for the claim that Marx theories thought as a representation of reality is that he never treats his own thought as representative of reality, but just a limited, one-sided way of practicing and existing.
This explains how ideology can both be the opposite of the ‘productive forces’ while also being itself a ‘productive force’ in other contexts: what Marx is trying to do in his work is not ‘tell us the way things are,’ but engage with the world from a certain perspective. “Marx is saying that for this factor, in this context, this is the influence most worth noting, the relation which will most aid our comprehension of the relevant characteristics” (17). Marx is not developing a formula to understand the world, but a tool with which to engage with it both practically and intellectually. In the Introduction to his Critique of the Philosophy of Right, Marx writes:
The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself.
What immediately stands out is that theory is capable of being “a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” On one hand, this could be understood activistically as the claim that the propagation of an ideology is the means of actualizing it. But this point can and should also be understood as a comment on the structure of ideology itself. Ideology is the intellectual understanding an individual possesses of the world, of his social relations, of his own practice, etc. But, if the emphasis is placed on the actually existing individual rather than the intellectual understanding, the claim that theory becomes a material force by its gripping of the masses means that the significance or ‘truth-value’ of an ideology is not located in its formal content or the particular descriptions or assertions it makes about external reality but specifically by the relation it has to the objective existence or concrete practice of an actual subject that possesses that ideology. In other words, concrete ideology is an existential pathos—an idea that is only understood in the transformative relation it has to the practice of a given subject in the medium of existence. For that particular subject, within his objective existence, through the perspective of his concrete practice, ideology is the actual decision. The formal content of ideology is true to the individual who acts on the basis of that ideal, but, for us, who examine that ideology externally, it is clearly relative or contingent, or simply false. But this is only because the ideas that we understand the world through are meaningful for those of us existing in the world not according to the truth-value of their propositional content or their ability to ‘reflect’ more or less accurately a static external reality but because they actually structure our practice and drive our existence.
D. More on Marx’s Materialism; Examples
The emphasis on practice is always an emphasis on human practice. So far, we have shown that it seems Marx must rely on rejecting the correspondence model of knowledge if one wants to interpret his corpus as internally consistent despite its innumerable contradictions, i.e., negatively. But Marx also positively takes his method as a reduction from a given concept to the actually existing subject—not only in his dissertation, as seen earlier, but in his more mature writings as well.
In the 1844 Manuscripts, the most obvious example, Marx insists on the primacy of beginning with actually existing man in understanding the world. Although criticized for its ‘humanism’, Marx doesn’t offer an essentialist theory of human nature in this text. His emphasis on ‘man’ is not an emphasis on a certain, transhistorical concept of man, but on the fundamental role that human subjectivity plays in our understanding and engagement with the world. Without taking this subjectivity into account, the most thorough and ‘human’ understanding of the world is impossible. Marx argues, for example, that the fault of Political Economy is that it “conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor” because it does not consider “the direct relationship between the worker (labor) and production” (). The product of labor itself only “the summary of the activity of production,” so “in the estrangement of the object of labor is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labor itself.” In every case, Marx is intentionally attempting to understand certain objective concepts—the product of labor or the fact of estrangement—by rejecting their objective content and seeing them in their subjective mode, as the “activity of production” or the relationship of individuals to their labor respectively. In general, this shift is where Marx sees his fundamental philosophical break with Political Economy. Although both he and the discipline are asking the same questions, Political Economy is only apprehending them in a purely objective and limited mode. Unlike the Political Economists, Marx says, “when we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labor,” this has to be understood in a very specific way: “we are asking about the relationship of the worker to production.” What labor is in the formal sense is secondary to what it is in the existential sense—what it is in actual existence.
Marx’s relationship to traditional Political Economy is deep and complex. But if we take for now the presumption that Adam Smith and Ricardo were his essential precursors in economic thinking, what he praises Smith for specifically in the 1844 Manuscripts emphasizes this same point. Marx writes:
Engels was therefore right to call Adam Smith the Luther of Political Economy. Just as Luther recognized religion – faith – as the substance of the external world and in consequence stood opposed to Catholic paganism – just as he superseded external religiosity by making religiosity the inner substance of man – just as he negated the priests outside the layman because he transplanted the priest into laymen's hearts, just so with wealth: wealth as something outside man and independent of him, and therefore as something to be maintained and asserted only in an external fashion, is done away with; that is, this external, mindless objectivity of wealth is done away with, with private property being incorporated in man himself and with man himself being recognized as its essence.
Again we return to the center of human activity—but this time explicitly tied to Marx’s understanding of Political Economy. For him, there was no genuine division between the different academic fields. For him, his theory of practice and politics was as essential to his understanding of economics as the study of economics itself was. This should also make clear that Marx was not providing clear models with distinct categories, but actively saw his project as against that.
What makes Marx a radical in his approach to human practice is that he sees it as constitutive: subjective existence of men is the starting-point for materialist analysis. This is often missed because there is an academic consensus that works such as the 1844 Manuscripts are marred by ‘humanism,’ referring to Marx’s supposed belief in a human essence in his early works. While there is a latent humanism in Marx’s writings, especially around this time, even by the time of 1844 Manuscripts he had already rejected its basic paradigm. When Althusser originally criticized humanism, he rightly identified certain theories and thinkers, like Sartre, as depending on an essentialist theory of human nature. And he was also correct that Marx’s early works, especially the Manuscripts, were usually the basis for these interpretations of Marx. But despite this legacy, the essentialist humanism Marx is accused of is simply not present. Take, for example, the concept of alienation. The humanist and essentialist Marx, apparently, argued that there was a ‘pure’ human nature that was being ‘corrupted’ by capitalism, and that, to realize this ‘true’ human nature it is necessary to abolish capitalism. While this sort of romantic and reactionary critique of capitalism certainly does exist, it is not Marx’s own view. For him, alienation is not just a thing or a relation but a practice. Further, as a practice, it is the original source of objective alienation: for Marx, capitalism is not essentially defined by private property or even capitalists, but a specific type of social practice. He argues that private property is “the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself,” rather than the other way around. And as a human practice, alienation is as much a part of ‘human nature’ as non-alienated, communistic practice might be. When Marx writes that “the history of industry” is “the open book of man’s essential powers,” he is not merely repeating the Enlightenment conceit celebrating the ability for man to create—he is saying all of the history of industry, both the good and the bad, is who man essentially is. People interpret the 1844 Manuscripts as Marx saying “this is what man is like,” but, really, this is a misinterpretation of his understanding of practice in this text. Marx is saying the exact opposite: man is simply his real existence.
We have only selected a few sections of the Manuscripts. An honest read of the text, however, will show that there are numerous statements in the text where Marx more or less says this outright, and that the humanist accusation has only limited application to understanding the early Marx. In other words, Marx is fundamentally rejecting the humanist approach to man. He is not saying man is this, he is saying man is everything. Marx’s conception of human nature is negative: Man is a universal which is empty and so contains everything in it. Marx is not attributing a specific human nature to man, but, by saying everything is mediated through human practice, saying that man has no real ‘nature’ at all. Marx’s intellectual career began with the themes of the dissertation—of understanding objective thought through the lens of subjective human existence—and what characterizes his early work is not a humanist affliction but a clumsy attempt to begin theorizing practice as the crux of his dialectical materialist approach.
We see this throughout the rest of his works. In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, for example, Marx analyzes Hegel’s political theory and differentiates it from his own. If we take Marx’s word that he ‘found Hegel on his head and put him back right-side up’, the specific way he explains where he differs from Hegel in his materialist method is highly insightful. Throughout this critique, Marx develops both his emphasis on the essentiality of human practice and his notion of human practice as a universal that is not reducible to a specific essence. Marx’s criticism of Hegel revolves around the latter understanding the world through analysis of concepts rather than analysis of man. He writes that when reading Hegel:
It is evident that the true method is turned upside down. What is most simple is made most complex and vice versa. What should be the point of departure becomes the mystical result, and what should be the rational result becomes the mystical point of departure.
This ‘upside down’ method Hegel applies to the State in his analysis (which Marx turns right-side up again) conceives “the activities and agencies of the state in the abstract.” For Hegel, it is enough to analyze what the state is. But this means he “forgets […] that the activities and agencies of the state are human activities.” “The state,” he mocks, “is an abstraction; the people alone is the concrete.” The analytical upshot of this position is inherently tied to Marx’s notion of practice as a negative universal: Marx does not believe, in other words, that one can understand the state by analyzing what the state is, or the history of the state, or how the state functions, but only by analyzing man. And because man, and consequently practice, has no essence, this means that there is no way to ‘know’ the world objectively.
This is, in fact, exactly what Marx reproaches Hegel for. Hegel is the philosopher; he is in “the position of contemplation” and in that position is able to “know” the state as an object. This means that Hegel’s analysis of the state cannot capture practice, which proves the limits of objective knowledge. Under Hegel’s view, “the purpose of [people’s] existence is not this existence itself” but, apparently, the realization of “the Idea” (9). His analysis does not look at real individuals, but finds “the logical Idea in each element” (12). The President, for example, is conceived to have this function or this role—rather than being understood as a living actor that is part of a living and ever-changing political practice. When political actors are reduced to concepts—when a particular President in a particular historical situation is understood as an abstract “President” with essential qualities—then “the real subjects […] become their mere names” (12). Instead of understanding the world, we instead simply apply static concepts to a changing reality and “these determinate things are and remain uncomprehended because they are not understood in their specific essence” (12). Again, for Marx, this can only be done by reconciling objective knowledge with subjective existence and human practice: “The separation of the in-itself and the for-itself, of substance and subject,” he writs, “is abstract mysticism.”
This does mean that Marx reduces everything to human practice. This is exactly why it is incorrect to describe him as a humanist, or as of seeking to ‘apply’ theory or ‘translate’ theory into practice. For him, theory is a practice. Human essence is human activity. He writes:
Hence the absurdity of Hegel's conceiving the activities and agencies of the state in the abstract, and particular individuality in opposition to it. He forgets that particular individuality is a human individual, and that the activities and agencies of the state are human activities. He forgets that the nature of the particular person is not his beard, his blood, his abstract Physis, but rather his social quality, and that the activities of the state, etc., are nothing but the modes of existence and operation of the social qualities of men.
Marx does not contrast an ideal and pure human nature to a corrupted reality—he sees that ‘corrupted’ reality as human nature. But this is neither a condemnation nor a celebration. Marx attaches no moral value to the concept of human nature, either good or bad. If capitalism is alienating, and if capitalism makes us suffer, it is not because we have deviated from an ideal essence but because we live in a way that is alienating and causes suffering. Marx does not assert that capitalism is alienating because it conflicts with our essence—he does not really argue for alienation at all (although he details its modes of expression), and that should be telling. It is almost like Marx is saying: capitalism is alienating, and treating this as a fact of experience rather than an argument. And if one does feel as if their life is alienated, then they can keep reading; if not, then they can close the book—Marx’s bet (and my own) is that most people, however, will agree with him.
Further, this negative concept of practice is essential to understanding Marx as a whole. In Capital, this approach is key to understanding the specificity of Marx’s critique of Political Economy. As noted, Marx is not only disagreeing with Political Economy, but challenging their fundamental approach. Marx believes that Political Economy is too attached to the objective forms of social practice and cannot understand the latter as a result. For him, this is tied to capitalism as a mode of life. In the famous opening chapter of Capital, he discusses this objectification in the context of commodities:
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. […] There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.
For Marx, commodities are “summaries” of activity—just like all other objects. When people exchange commodities, such as trading shoes for a coat, Marx is making the point that they are really exchanging their labor. If I purchase a coat that takes three hours for a tailor to produce, I am functionally purchasing those three hours of the tailor. I am not buying a coat—I am asking a person to make something for me. Under capitalism, however, this simple relationship between people appears in “the fantastic form of a relation between things.” Similarly, when we refer to concepts such as the ‘State’ or ‘capitalism’ in isolation from the living people that are their real origin, we also substitute abstractions for human practice.
This, of course, means that Marx’s theory of capitalism is tied essentially to his pragmatic commitments. Again in Capital, take, for example, his concept of value. It is common to debate whether value is ‘created’ during the act of production or exchange. Is value the product of a working person? This misses the point of value entirely: value is not a quantity, it is a proportion that is used as a heuristic for Marx to understand the organization of practice in a given society. Value is not a thing that accumulates, but “a relation of social production” that “expresses the connexion between a certain article and the portion of the total labour-time of society required to produce it.” Ultimately, this means that Marx’s vision of communism is not merely of a different form of economic organization but also a different mode of life. Marx’s communism is not merely the collectivization of property, but a transformation in the way that we relate to labor itself. When Marx depicts communism in Capital, he does not tell us about collective ownership but about “a community of free individuals” who “consciously appl[y]” their labor power. Marx’s target is not ‘capital’ in the abstract, not even capitalists or capitalism as a system, but of capitalist production as a way we life. For him, again, everything boils down to analytically to practice.
II. Practice
Earlier, we developed ideology as an existential pathos, and linked this approach with dialectical and historical materialism. The immediate reaction to attempts to incorporate for subjectivity a constitutive role in Marxism and dispute the theory’s status as an ‘objective science’ that follows the verificationist method is negative. But the popularity of the latter approach is ground not in any sophisticated study of Marx, but in base conformity to the principles and ideology of modern bourgeois society. Our most scientific and advanced age has produced with it a most scientific and most backwards communist movement. This only too comfortably corresponds with vulgar conceptions of the B/S theory: the ‘scientific’ Marxist sees the base or external reality as being a static object with essential truths that are uncovered through study or practice, with the latter conceived as an experimental method. Theory, in other words, is ‘verified’ and proven to be true or false via ‘practice.’ This, however, turns the ideal into an abstract independent plane of propositions and reality into a static object that is structured along the pattern of the mind. Practice, meanwhile, has lost any significant independent role. Let us see whether such an approach is Marxism or a lobotomy of Marx.
Marx begins his project with a sweeping criticism of both traditional materialism and idealism. He did not intend to affirm materialism over idealism, but engage in a critique of both that would lead to a philosophical approach that reconciled and advanced past both. He did this by incorporating subjectivity into materialism and “real, sensuous activity” into idealism. Further, he says this directly. In Theses on Feuerbach, Marx’s opening thesis begins with the statement that:
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.
In this opening, Marx immediately distinguishes himself and his project from the objectivist materialism represented by Feuerbach which treats the world as an “object.” Instead, for Marx, “reality” itself can only be understood as “practice”—which means that it can only be understood “subjectively.”
A. Verificationist or Objectivist Marxism
The most immediate and popular-vulgar interpretation is that Marx in these Theses is simply exhorting individuals to ‘do things.’ This is, however, more of a cultural attitude than a real interpretation, but it is buttressed by the most famous quote of Marx contained in this work as the final and concluding thesis:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Marx’s criticism of philosophy should not be understood as a one-sided dismissal but, as can additionally be seen by the recurrent presence of philosophical thought on his entire corpus, a significantly more sophisticated criticism that retains the contribution of philosophy to society and Marxism more specifically.
This look at the activistic interpretation of the Theses of Feuerbach leads, however, naturally into the much more common and serious interpretation of the work as being a theory of practice as verification of the correspondence of ideas with objective reality, or the ‘criterion of truth.’ This verificationist or objectivist approach is fundamentally flawed. The verificationist interpretation minimizes the role of subjectivity within Marx and basically adopts Feuerbach’s conception of objective materialism in an inverted form that retains Feuerbach’s essential points. Feuerbach understands reality as an object, and hence something that can be studied and analyzed formally. For Feuerbach, this means he “regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude,” insofar as the “theoretical attitude” allows for man to reason and utilize that reason to form concepts that allow them to modify their relation to each other and to nature, e.g., by forming tools and developing science, but also by creating ideologies that lead to or otherwise influence the structure of society. The best example of the latter is Feuerbach’s understanding of religion, which Marx uses as a contrast for his own approach. Religion was developed by reasoning man, perhaps for the social function of cohesion, or as a means of interpreting man’s relation to nature, etc. At the same time, religion for Feuerbach is an alienating ideology that separates the material world from an abstract, religious one, and in that capacity separates man from an understanding of his own genuine human essence. He also believes that religion, as a product of reasoning, can be abolished through rational criticism, and it is on this front that Marx begins to dispute him. He writes:
Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis.
But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.
For Marx, Feuerbach is correct in identifying the character of religion as alienating and a separation between the material world and spiritual or ideal one. At the same time, he rejects the idea that rational criticism can supplant religion, instead considering it as merely a component of revolutionary practice conceived as a whole. If religion is not “destroyed in theory and in practice,” the task is left incomplete.
Verificationist or objectivist Marxist follows the same line of reasoning of Feuerbach but, at the last step, replaces rational criticism with revolutionary practice. This substitution, however, has a reflexive effect on the whole chain of argumentation. That revolutionary practice is necessary for social change, and not just rational criticism, means also that the role of reason in the construction of concepts has to be reinterpreted. Whereas Feuerbach emphasizes the role of rational critique because he privileges the process of ideal concept-formation as essentially independent and the distinction between man and animal, verificationist Marxism grounds the process of concept-formation not in the process of reasoning but in the development of ideas as they are ‘tested’ against objective reality through the medium of practice and successively modified to better conform to that objective reality. In Marx’s second thesis, he writes:
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
The interpretation of this passage by verificationist Marxism is simple and straightforward, and centers around the idea that “[m]an must prove the truth… of his thinking in practice.” The model of ideal development is experimental and scientific: Man has an idea and he engages in an action that depends on the truth of that idea. If that action is unsuccessful, then this means that the idea is false, and this leads to the formulation of a new idea. If, however, the action is successful, this “prove[s]” the truth of that idea “in practice.” Consequently, the process of development of knowledge is understood as being a series of successful and unsuccessful acts of ‘verification’ through which we accumulate or reject objective truth-propositions about the world. The primacy placed on verifying acts means, at the same time, that what structures this process is not Feuerbach’s continuous application of reason to experience but the reflexive modification of reason through the testing of those ideas against the qualities of matter through the medium of practice. Again, however, matter or reality is still conceived in this way of thinking necessarily as an object which the ideal must be contrasted with externally.
Here, Feuerbach’s conception of reality as an object that a subjective individual interacts with rather than effectively constitutes is retained. The ideal is limited to being an attempt to ‘understand’ reality, while practice is limited on one hand to being an attempt to ‘modify’ reality and on the other being a way for the ‘understanding’ sought by the mind to progress through the process of experimental verification. Meanwhile, the expansion of human freedom and the development of society is conceived as tied to the accumulation of truth-propositions achieved through this process of verification which allows man to better cognize objective reality and modify their subjective beliefs and social relations to more effectively conform to it. The result of this procedure, however, is that reality is conceived “in the form of the object or of contemplation,” i.e., as something that can be understood in its whole as a set of static and ideal propositions that are possessed by a rational mind. Whether these truth-propositions are derived through induction or deduction, rationalism or empiricism, etc., the assertion of their absolute descriptive truth can only mean that external reality is exactly the same as mind in its structure. As a consequence, objective reality can only either be objective thought or the subjective thought of an Absolute Mind, and the positing of the superiority of the concept of matter over mind is only the positing of the superiority of the concept, i.e., the superiority of mind—over mind itself!
B. Non-Conceptual Materialism and Idealism
This criticism of objective materialism is not novel. It is, however, obscure in our modern age due to the modus vivendi achieved between idealism and modern science, which was itself the driving goal of the project of German idealists such as Kant and Hegel (which should be kept in mind when one considers Marx’s claim to have turned the latter ‘on his head’). If verificationist Marxism seeks to sophisticate itself, it only has to turn to the rich tradition of idealism for nourishment. The theories of Plato’s forms, Bishop Berkeley’s objective idealism, positivism or early pragmatism, etc. lay out essentially the same line of arguments as above without pretensions of following Marx, and are more intellectually interesting for it. If verificationist Marxism understood its relation to idealism and attempted to enter a fruitful discourse with it for the purposes of enriching Marxism, it may actually succeed in that objective. Unfortunately, it pretends that idealism is nothing more than solipsism and, by doing so, sneaks in actual idealism through the backdoor—without even realizing it is doing so. In any case, the criticism of objectivism, whether in idealist or ‘materialist’ forms, is an ancient one, and Marx was certainly more than well aware of it. This, probably, explains to some extent his affection for dialectics, or figures like Heraclitus, who conceived of reality as interminable flux outside the field of concepts and rationality.
This does, however, bring us to the next ‘stage’ of materialism. If reality is structured in the form of thought, materialism has one, obvious response: to claim that external reality is non-conceptual, irrational, etc. and outside the realm of thought or mind. Importantly, this is precisely why materialism has been an almost non-existent and disreputable trend within the history of Western philosophy, which considered its domain the use and analysis of reason. Ernesto Laclau discusses this point at length:
What actually distinguishes idealism from materialism is its affirmation of the ultimately conceptual character of the real; for example, in Hegel, the assertion that everything that is real is rational. Idealism, in its sense of opposition to materialism and not to realism, is the affirmation not that there do not exist objects external to the mind, but rather that the innermost nature of these objects is identical to that of mind—that is to say, that it is ultimately thought. (Not thought of individual minds, of course; not even of a transcendent God, but objective thought.) Now, even if idealism in this second sense is only given in a fully coherent and developed form in Hegel, philosophers of antiquity are also predominantly idealist. Both Plato and Aristotle identified the ultimate reality of an object with its form—that is, with something ‘universal’, and hence conceptual. If I say that this object which is in front of me is rectangular, brown, a table, an object, etc. each of these determinants could also be applied to other objects—they are then ‘universals’, that is form. But what about the individual ‘it’ that receives all these determinations? Obviously, it is irrational and unknowable, since to know it would be to subsume it under a universal category. This last individual residue, which is irreducible to thought, is what the ancient philosophers called matter.
The “ancient” conception of materialism, which emphasized the world’s irrational character and took the form of concepts such as that of the Heraclitean flux, is not the same as the trend of materialism that developed in Europe immediately before Marx. Thinkers like Feuerbach instead, as discussed above, moved away from a concept of matter that emphasized its incompatibility with objective thought towards one that considered matter as a thought-object and, as a consequence, understood reality in a fundamentally idealist way.
This allows us to reinterpret some earlier-quoted sections of Theses on Feuerbach in new ways. We earlier saw how verificationist or objectivist Marxism understood the following thesis:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Having rejected the objectivist approach, however, this thesis can be properly situated within Theses on Feuerbach as a larger philosophical claim rather than a personal criticism of laziness or so on on the part of the class of philosophers specifically. A different interpretation may be as follows: philosophers have so far “only interpreted the world,” which is to say that their approach to the world has only been through the medium of intellectual interpretation and mediation, leading them to understand that world along the lines of the structure of thought or reason. “The point is to change it” is hence again not a straightforward call to action but an emphasis that what is primary about the structure of reality is not reason but practice—and that reason, philosophy, etc. are only particular forms of practice. Philosophy, consequently, cannot be understood ‘objectively’ as the neutral investigation of truth but as one practice among many serves a function in how we as individuals engage with each other and the world. This is far from a feel-good statement about the utility of philosophy, though; it means that philosophy has to be structurally conceived as being incapable, within its own domain, of capturing the sum of practice of which it is only one component among many. In the same way that within, for example, the field of economics, we cannot reach any conclusions about the concepts of other fields such as Modernism in art or populism in politics, but must resort to another field that mediates both, such as political economy, within the field of philosophy access to absolute truth is necessarily precluded insofar as the mediating term of praxis is outside it.
Further, this brings us closer to understanding ideology as existential pathos. The statement earlier examined can now also be reinterpreted:
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
The emphasis is not now that “man must prove the truth… of his thinking in practice” as an act, but as a structural comment on the necessary conditions for the concreteness of ideology itself. If it is given that reality is non-conceptual and irrational, no idea or ideology can ever correspond to it. The ideal cannot exist independently because it is constantly being undermined by the flux of matter. Thinking itself has to be reinterpreted. The ideal is no longer the product of the application of reason to experience or practice, but simply the way that a particular individual subjectively thinks about and proceeds through existence. What it means to “prove the truth… of thinking in practice” is therefore not the testing of a truth through instrumental action, but that ideology only has reality insofar as it expresses itself in practice. The actual content of that ideology is meaningless; “the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question” because absent an objective reason, or the presence of an external reality that conforms to the structure of reason, an ideology has nowhere to ground its reality except in its relation to subjective practice. This can be clarified by looking at the way that verificationist Marxism is unable to effectively assert that thinking must be grounded in its relation to practice. Because the relation between an idea and practice is of verification, practice has no effect on the actual content of the idea. Rather, the content of an idea is real only insofar as it corresponds to objective reality. Consequently, the question of the "reality or non-reality of thinking isolated from practice” is not scholastic at all; ideas are all isolated from practice except at the moment a particular individual wants to verify the otherwise independent idea through an instrumental action. Practice consequently in this capacity has no relation to the content or importance of the idea, or even its applicability, but only to an individual’s subjective sense of certainty about his beliefs.
Ultimately, however, this does not really bring us to existential pathos. If the object is irrational, it is true that ideology can only be understood as the subjective thinking of an actor represented in that actor’s practice. But ideology is in that capacity purely arbitrary. Reality as irrational or non-conceptual matter is fundamentally incomprehensible—meaning that appearance derived through sensation fundamentally deceptive and unreal. Hence, e.g., the famous saying of Heraclitus that “we step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not,” and similar statements aimed at dissolving otherwise apparent truths. The only positions left for the individual who follows this line of reasoning are nihilism, skepticism, relativism, etc. Existential pathos, however, cannot be purely relative but also in some sense absolute. It is not merely the subjective consciousness of an individual distinct from the world, but the actual existence of the idea as a material practice. Nevertheless, it is not enough to dismiss irrationalism merely because it leads to unsavory philosophical conclusions. Marx’s response to irrationalism is not explicit due to its contemporary unpopularity, but can still be reconstructed from his work. The value of the irrationalist thesis, however, should be emphasized. Through it, philosophy is able to rupture itself and escape the limits of reason by indicating that it must look externally to its own domain of rational argumentation to understand reality and the truth. Marx’s position, in a sense, can be treated as the extension and consistent application of this point by identifying the domain external to reason as practice rather than an irrational objective reality. Clarity on this point will be aided by a brief examination of Marx’s critique of idealism.
Marx’s critique of idealism is well-worn in communist circles and so will be engaged with only briefly. The critique centers around a rejection of the privilege idealism gives to abstractions derived from human activity over that same human activity. Reality cannot be understood through the conceptual; rather, the content of ideas are themselves rooted not in their formal propositions but their relation to concrete practice or objective existence. This is not the same as saying that ideas are rooted in objective or external reality. Most currents of idealism believe that there is, in fact, an objective external reality. Within philosophy, this position is not ‘materialism’ but ‘realism.’ Laclau, again:
A philosophy such as Aristotle’s, for example, which certainly is not materialist in any possible sense of the term, is clearly realist. The same can be said of the philosophy of Plato, since for him the Ideas exist in a heavenly place, where the mind contemplates them as something external to itself. In this sense, the whole of ancient philosophy was realist, since it did not put into question the existence of a world external to thought—it took it for granted.
We have already seen the irrationalist response to idealism, which consists of rejecting that the external world is structured as thought. Marx’s response takes a different angle. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes:
When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever.
If skimmed, this quote seems to support the thesis of the ideal as epiphenomenal. It is important to note, however, that Marx qualifies this point by stating that “abstractions have…no value” only when “viewed apart from real history.” Within history, in other words, the ideal does have value, and a function. He continues:
It is self-evident, moreover, that “spectres,” “bonds,” “the higher being,” “concept,” “scruple,” are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception apparently of the isolated individual, the image of very empirical fetters and limitations, within which the mode of production of life and the form of intercourse coupled with it move.
Here, the role of the ideal becomes clearer. As concepts in themselves, the ideal are “merely the idealistic, spiritual expression.” Their content, as a result, can only be found in the function they play as this “expression.” As an “expression” of “empirical fetters and limitations,” the ideal is the form through which “the mode of production of life and the form of intercourse” move. The mode of production, in other words, does not exist independently, but requires for its movement the ideal as its expression. The ideal, in other words, is the actuality of the mode of production, it is the mode of production as it actually exists concretely. The mode of production taken independently from the ideal, on the other hand, is a static abstraction without reality or life. This, clearly, is the thesis of ideology as existential pathos but with a reverse presentation: rather than reaching the concept through an analysis of the conditions of practice, we instead move from the structure of society, the mode of production, and understand existential pathos as being the conditions of the actuality of that structure.
If we want to return to the emphasis on existence, however, this also is easily found. Marx writes in the same work:
Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process.
Here the critique of idealism is presented in a clear sequence: firstly, that the real truth of consciousness is not found within the terms of consciousness but consciousness as it relates to objective existence; secondly, that this very same objective existence which is inherently bound up with consciousness (“conscious existence”) is the “actual life-process” of men. The criticism of idealism is incomplete if it is taken as a one-sided rejection of the ideal rather than a re-evaluation of its role in human activity. The vulgar materialist approach that refuses to grapple with the constitutive function of ideas in human activity and instead posits ideas as either derivative or externally related to action is unable to make comprehensible, for example, the sentence that follows Marx’s critique of materialism in the Theses on Feuerbach:
Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.
If the idea is taken as either an object possessed by the thinker with its own, internal validity, or an epiphenomena derivative to activity, then it is wholly incomprehensible in what way the history of idealist philosophy could be seen as the history of the development of the "active side” of human activity. Considering the idea as an existential pathos, however, allows us to understand this point as saying that thought, insofar as it functions in objective existence, structures the thought of a particular individual, i.e., that this existing subject acts and understands through the use of concepts, abstractions, reason, etc. Consequently, this means that idealism, although it does not arrive at absolute truth, does, through its examination of the structure of the mind and concepts, elaborates reality as it is for an actually existing subject, i.e., for all of us as existing subjects and so as real people.
C. Hegel and Existential Pathos
With this all in mind, we can move to a criticism of irrationalism. The concept of matter, or reality as fundamentally irrational or non-conceptual, seems to coincide with the concept of the Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself but, as this materialism is unable to appeal to a transcendental or absolute idealism to buttress its position, it resolves itself into a nihilism, skepticism, subjectivism, etc. . As earlier stated, this renders ideology arbitrary, reality fundamentally incomprehensible, etc. The parallels with the obscurantist approaches to the dialectic, which takes it as a pure relativism, are clear (as are the parallels between the crude materialist thesis and idealism).
Again, however, Marx does not adopt any of these positions but attempts to move past them. His transformation consists in the criticism of the irrationalist materialism position for also being one-sidedly objective—i.e., for still taking as reality an object that is ultimately constructed by the mind and occupying “the position of contemplation.” The problem with irrationalism is that it attempts to resolve its dispute with objective materialism and idealism from within the practice of philosophy. Reality is still conceived as an object, just of a different (incomprehensible) type. While irrationalism pushes philosophy to confront its inability to grasp the whole of reality, irrationalism is still one more part of that same domain.
Marx’s solution to this is his emphasis on human practice. As a result, the ‘domain’ of philosophy cannot be understood as reason or thought considered abstractly but in its structure as a practice. Marx does not critique these different trends in philosophy because they each have their own flaws, but because they each have the same flaw: they privilege the particular activity “of contemplation” over human practice as a whole. If it is true that human activity is constitutive and that human activity is not merely contemplation, then philosophy is structurally prevented by the limits of its orientation from capturing the entire truth within its terms. Reality cannot be an object of any type because ‘object’ is a concept limited to the practical position of contemplation, formally expressed as philosophy.
The value of the irrationalist thesis is that it reflects the individual out of the relation of contemplation and back towards existence. Irrationalism indicates that philosophy is not only contingently incomplete but fundamentally incapable of accessing reality. Marx’s relation to irrationalism can be understood as a natural extension of the thesis. But instead of remaining within contemplation and designating the object as irrational, Marx considers “real, profane human activity” itself to be essentially non-conceptual. While the designation of the object as irrational retains the overall validity and apparent superiority of contemplation, the designation of activity itself as irrational reduces the reasoning faculty to being simply one among others, and contemplation becomes just another form of human practice.
This line of logic begins with Hegel’s critique of the unknowable object of knowledge, and a brief excursion in this direction will be illustrative. In the Introduction to his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the approach that guides his phenomenological investigation. Unfortunately, we will only be able to analyze Hegel in extremely over-simplified terms for the sake of brevity. We can understand the method of the Phenomenology as Hegel examining how a particular consciousness develops itself as it critically engages with its own successive epistemological theories; i.e., beginning with sense-certainty, consciousness designates sensation itself as truth, then, after examining the contradictions internal to that approach, it progresses to perception, which takes universals as the truth, so on and so forth. For our immediate purposes, the method Hegel follows is more important than the content of his investigation. Whereas Kantian idealism and objective materialism place the truth-object externally to consciousness, Hegel argues that the distinction between truth and knowledge is in fact a distinction internal to consciousness. He writes:
Consciousness provides its own criterion from within itself, so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself… the essential point to bear in mind throughout the whole investigation is that these two moments, ‘Notion’ and ‘object,’ ‘being-for-another’ and ‘being-in-itself’, both fall within that knowledge which we are investigating.
Is this an idealist thesis? In this limited form, not necessarily. At this point, Hegel is not identifying reality itself with the concept, or attempting to claim that there is no objective external reality, or so on. Rather, Hegel is criticizing the theory of the unknowable object along the same lines as we understood Marx’s critique of irrationalism above: this ‘unknowable object’ is itself the construction of consciousness and is only the logical extension of the activity of that consciousness as it attempts to understand itself and the external world.
To elaborate on this, let us briefly look at the section on Perception. At this stage, consciousness understands reality in the form of being a mediated universal, or an object that contains multiple universals, f.e., a ball (object) that is red, shiny, hard, etc. (universals). For consciousness, this means that reality is consequently both “One” and also “universal.” But this means that reality is contradictory, as the multiplicity of the universals “transcends the singularity” of the Oneness. For example, a red ball is both a singular red ball and a red ball—but red itself can be found in many places where a particular red ball is not, and is therefore not singular. For Hegel, this means that consciousness must resolve this contradiction by separating the singularity of the object and its many universals: for him, this means that these universals are only for us, only red for our eyes, only hard for our fingers, etc., while the object is a singular without qualities, i.e., is not red in itself or hard in itself, but merely a single object. The singleness of the object as the unity of these universals, which is not itself any of these universals, is posited as the truth of reality and independent from consciousness. But what Hegel argues is that this division of the red ball into a subjective side that is dependent on human cognition and an independent side that belongs to reality is a process completed by consciousness. For him, this means that it is absurd to say that the mind has identified an objective, mind-free reality—after all, the mind came up with the division between objective and subjective itself.
Oftentimes, Hegel’s critique is understood vulgarly as the apparent contradiction that to say that the unknowable is unknowable is to know something about the unknowable, rendering it knowable. This understanding takes Hegel’s Phenomenology as not being a phenomenological investigation where the subjective development of consciousness is fundamental but as a half-baked attempt to understand the Absolute through abstract logical reasoning. Hegel’s point is not that this claim is simply a logical contradiction but that the concepts of the truth-object and knowledge itself are within consciousness. Positing an unknowable thing-in-itself outside human consciousness imagines that what we are, and what we are concerned with, is not actual consciousness itself but a mysterious and esoteric abstract thought. He writes:
For consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the True, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth. Since both are for the same consciousness, this consciousness is itself their comparison… 54.
This means that metaphysical systems that conceive of themselves as purely ontological in character fail to remember that they are systems formed by actually existing consciousnesses. As such, they are not objective descriptions of external reality—which could only be formulated by an omnipotent and timeless Absolute mind—but the result of intellectual practices undertaken by particular consciousnesses attempting to understand themselves and that reality. The character or truth of reality is not clearly ‘given’ to consciousness but is constructed by it.
This means that what appears to be ontological is actually epistemological, i.e., that the structure of reality is based on and reflects the structure of knowledge-acquisition and reasoning more generally. Importantly, this leads Hegel to a move that distinguishes him qualitatively from previous idealism (while remaining within the idealist camp). By reconceptualizing the relationship between truth and knowledge away from a relationship of a consciousness to an objective world and instead locating it within consciousness itself, truth itself loses its independence from epistemology and is identified with it. Ontology is epistemology, and vice versa. Epistemology is no longer considered to originate merely in the rational or biological limits of existing human beings but is rather itself part of the structure of Absolute Truth or reality. Importantly, Hegel does not mean by this that truth is non-existent or purely relative. Rather, Hegel takes this conclusion to mean that absolute truth or reality is not an object but a subject, Spirit, Mind, etc.. Truth is transformed from a static proposition to an active intellectual process. In the Preface, Hegel writes:
In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.
We will leave the exposition to the text of the Phenomenology. This essay, instead, will return now to the examination of Marxism.
Marx claims to ‘turn Hegel right-side up.’ This cannot be understood until we have an idea of what exactly is being turned on its head. We have seen how Hegel’s reduction of ontology to epistemology dialectically inverts itself. If ontology is reducible to epistemology, this does not mean, as the unknowable or irrational object implies, that we are unable to access Truth due to the limits of our knowledge. Rather, it means for Hegel that epistemology is ontology and that the act of accessing the Truth is itself internal to Truth. For objective, pre-Hegelian idealism, there is only truth, and only truth has reality. This means, however, that it leaves the status of limited truth—appearance, incomplete knowledge, etc.—obscure. Appearance becomes an epiphenomena or deceptive or unreal or so on in the face of Absolute Truth. For Hegel, however, reality as Spirit means that all of these things that stood outside idealism can now be incorporated within it. Lack of truth, incomplete knowledge, etc. are given an ontological status. The relative is made absolute while remaining relative—this is the essence of dialectics. Marx’s materialist inversion of Hegel can be understood as a rejection of centering consciousness rather than “conscious existence” or practice in this operation. Traditional materialism, which emphasized reality as the object, was unable to understand practice insofar as practice is a relation by contingent existing subjects to the external world and, in that capacity, necessarily incomplete and relative. The only ‘truth’ for it was the truth of the objective world, which meant that practice, and, by extension, the ideal, was merely an epiphenomena. To correct this, Marx applies the same procedure Hegel applies to idealism before him to materialism. Consciousness constructed ontology through epistemology, and epistemology becomes ontology. Man constructs the world through practice and the ideal, and the practice and ideal become “sensuous human activity [and] practice” that can only be conceived “subjectively.” Consequently, the “active” side of practice studied by philosophical idealism is not rejected by dialectical materialism but understood as being how that practice actually is, albeit within philosophical idealism only in a one-sided and limited way.
This leads us to our conception of the idea as an existential pathos. The ideal is not an expression of a relation of understanding to practice, but the only actuality of that practice for an actually existing subject. From this subject’s perspective, ideology is absolute insofar as it transforms his practice into its own actuality. So, e.g., an individual who believes in X performs on the basis of that belief practice Y, which is an actual action and an actual decision that expresses that individual’s relationship to belief X, without which the action would not occur. In this understanding, the truth of idea X is only in its relation to the individual as expressed in practice Y. The subordination of the formal content of the idea to its relation to practice is only the logical extension of the limits imposed on the idea in its ability to reflect or correspond to, or otherwise relate, to reality. At the same time, the formal content of an idea is only subordinate to its relation to objective existence for us, that is to say, externally. For the existing subject, practice is not an event of practice but his actual life-process, and the formal content of the idea functions as an absolute truth, even if it is approximate from a scientific or abstract standpoint, insofar as within that actual life-process the subject stamps the idea with the character of being absolute by incorporating it concretely into an actual and decisive act—wherein all approximation is set aside. At the same time, the rejection of reflection and contemplation as absolute modes of practice does not mean a rejection of the role of reflection and contemplation in practice. The ideal has no anchor in objective reality or the structure of reason, and is itself a practice. Consequently, it is unable to solidify itself formally and its formal terms are always changing. A particular ideal is constantly being replaced by newer and newer ones. In this capacity, and from the capacity of abstract observation, the ideal is also relative. We see as a result that the ideal is both absolute and relative when the practice is considered from different perspectives, and also that there is no unambiguous way of asserting the superiority of one standpoint over the other. This is the historical materialist understanding of the ideal.
If there remain doubts on this score in the direction that we are veering towards idealism or ‘postmodernism,’ the only response is that our critics are the ones not only veering toward but totally adopting idealism, and without the self-awareness to know that they are doing so. Dialectical materialism does not seek to reify the position of “contemplation” but exceed it. Designations at the level of contemplation, while they certainly relate to practice in the way described above, are not categories appropriate to it. “True” or “false” are attributes of ideas when those ideas are considered related to external reality. However, practice, which is not about bringing ideas into correspondence with external reality but is about existence, subordinates these terms. There is no place to look to justify this argument at this point other than Marx and Engels themselves, f.e., the following from Anti-Duhring:
Truth and error, like all concepts which are expressed in polar opposites, have absolute validity only in an extremely limited field… As soon as we apply the antithesis between truth and error outside of that narrow field…it becomes relative and therefore unserviceable for exact scientific modes of expression; and if we attempt to apply it as absolutely valid outside that field we then really find ourselves beaten; both poles of the antithesis become transformed into their opposites, truth becomes error and error truth.
Removing the concepts of reason and contemplation and attempting to drag them into practice is an abandonment of Marxist materialism. The ideal is the existential pathos of practice but, in that role, it is part of practice, not superior to it. The role of the ideal in mediating our relation to our practice and our experience does not obviate that practice. Rational argumentation is not sufficient. As Engels writes:
Now, this [idealist] line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before there was argumentation there was action. In Anfang war die Tat. And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it.
“Human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it,” and the attempt to understand human practice sheerly through the categories of human contemplation, and to then, without a hint of irony, to call this dialectical materialism and a rejection of idealist philosophy—this, also, is ingenious.
This work, while it would be easy, cannot be concluded with a set of prescribed steps that will lead the Marxist movement from the margins of history to the center. Rather, it must end with a call for Marxists to take the hard route: embrace existential pathos (just as Marx himself did) rather than to follow a set of steps proscribed by an understanding of so-called objective Marxism. In fact, any understanding of objective Marxism is inherently moot, because as was shown in this essay, there is no objective Marxism and theory is not descriptive. Marxism and Marxist ideology have no objective definition - they are ways of structuring our practices, not ideas that exist in external relation to the physical world.
As such: understanding Marxism according to a theory that centers practice and existential pathos is the only truthful, effective way forward.