On Marxism - American Reformer

A Spectre Haunts the Rubble of the Past

What does it mean to be a Marxist? Americans have a particular fear and antipathy toward Marxism as the eternal enemy of democracy and capitalism, and thus look for it under every rock and behind every bush. Successfully accusing someone of being a Marxist—or of adhering to ideologies supposedly derived from Marxist philosophy—is a tried and true formula for destroying their public reputation.

Current discussion revolves around two issues: what is the relationship of modern “wokeism” to historical Marxism, and is it possible to maintain the form (or method) of Marxism while changing its substance? These questions are related: if Marxism is primarily a methodology or form, then a substantive evolution from Marx’s original economic and class analysis toward modern cultural, racial, and gender relations within that original framework is possible. If so, perhaps “wokeness” is the skeleton of Marx animated by a new woke spirit.

To resolve these questions, and to know what it means to be a Marxist, we must understand Marx himself. My argument is that form and content are fully fused within the Marxian dialectic, because it is a material dialectic, not an idealistic dialectic like Hegel’s. The collapse of formal and material causes is also true of Hegel, but it is harder to see than in Marx. To understand these matters, we must start with Hegel, since Marx and Engels explicitly worked from and presupposed Hegel’s thought.

The Negation of the Negation

Countless oceans of ink have been spilled interpreting and explaining the writings of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel was a towering intellectual figure in post-Kantian German philosophic and romantic thought. He was a systematic thinker whose studies and writings covered numerous topics, from logic and philosophy, history and politics, to art, aesthetics, and ethics. He is probably best known for The Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind (1807), in which he presents his theory of knowledge through the concept of Geist (Spirit or Mind). Hegel’s philosophy was unique in that he envisioned philosophy as a process realized in and through history. His lectures on the philosophy of world history reveal the core of his method to be an idealistic dialectic of the Absolute Mind actualizing its own self-consciousness. Hegel firmly believed that history was heading somewhere definitive, and that its endpoint would manifest in an ideal political state.

Hegel was motivated by trying to resolve stubborn problems in epistemology and metaphysics, most importantly, bringing together subjective experience and objective reality. In addition, Hegel sought to rescue human reason and freedom (and thus ethics and the political state) from the grasp of nature, which he viewed as a limited and finite realm devoid of God and dictated by fate. He was searching for an existentially satisfying explanation for all that had happened, and in part, he put forward his philosophical idealism as a theodicy for God—to explain the role of evil and to justify the course of history.

Hegel’s solution to these problems was to propose that world history is philosophical and rational, by which he meant that it is pervaded by, superintended over, and the result of the working of Geist or Absolute Mind. World history is not merely the recollection of past events or facts; neither is it cyclical or purposeless. Instead, history has a rational design that guides it as it progressively unfolds from one epoch to the next. Reason governs the world because world history is providentially overseen by and is itself the unfolding of the World Spirit or Absolute Mind (Geist). For Hegel, the most important aspect of history was Geschichte, which was consciousness in history that told a story of struggle and development from a beginning to a final form. Hegel called this ‘world history’, where Geist was present and active. While it did not exclude many of the normal and mundane events of history (the historia rerum gestarum), it transcended them by using them as the means to accomplish the great res gestae (achievements) of the Geist.

The essential substance of the Idea of the World Spirit is freedom. For Hegel, Geist’s freedom is when it has obtained a perfect state of being in which its subjective consciousness has objectified its own being such that it only comprehends itself. Hegel described this as thought becoming thinking reason, in which the process of thinking is no longer an attribute of any particular subject but the concept of thought itself thinking. This is the final end for which the Idea has been striving, and its accomplishment marks the moment at which Geist is a completely self-sufficient Being, having united all antinomies (subject-object, universal-particular, appearance-reality, noumena-phenomena, etc.) into a single whole that overcomes even death.

Hegel envisioned this process happening through a dialectical idealism. Working off of Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic between understanding and pure reason (which begins with the Transcendental Unity of Apperception between a subject and its own mental states), Hegel constructed his dialectic, but this time using concepts, not terms. This is why Hegel speaks of Spirit, Thought, Being, Reason, and so forth, in a personified and anthropomorphic way, instead of Aristotelian logical terms of X and Y, or A and B. Hegel envisioned his logical dialectic as a process of Aufhebung, or diremption, where a concept is divided into two and then synthesized into a greater whole. For example, the concept of Being does not make any sense without the presence of its negation—Nothing. Being and Nothing are antinomies that oppose each other in a fierce struggle. This struggle brings forth a new concept at a higher plane that simultaneously transcends both prior concepts yet also incorporates them into a new and harmonious concept: Becoming. Becoming is then opposed by Ceasing, which yields a higher notion of Determinate Being (i.e., less abstract and more limited or incarnate). This process continues until all contradictions and antinomies are resolved when the Absolute Mind obtains full self-consciousness and complete freedom.

Hegel called the emergence of the new concept at a higher plane of existence the ‘negation of the negation’ and even though at times he speaks of ‘antithesis’ as part of the dialectic, the ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ formula is an artificial construct later interpreters invented to make sense of Hegel’s thought. A better way of conceiving the Hegelian conceptual dialectic is of tensions or contradictions inherent within a concept that naturally and necessarily produces conflict that brings about a qualitative metamorphosis into a new concept. (It is this notion of dialectic that Marx and Engels would later incorporate into their materialist philosophy as a way of explaining economic and social relations and their development through time.)

More could be said about Hegel, but the key is to grasp that Hegel presents his logical dialectic as reality itself. By replacing the fungible terms of Aristotelian logic with concepts having a determinate and ineluctably unfolding nature, Hegel essentially collapsed formal and material causes into a single idea (dialectical idealism). Thus, for Hegel, history, present reality, and the inevitable future cannot be understood apart from the dialectical movement of Absolute Mind.

The Rational Kernal of Dialectical Materialism

It is popular to present Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ philosophy of logic and history as merely the rejection, or inverse, of Hegel’s. On this view, whereas Hegel emphasized Geist and idealism, Marx and Engels were thoroughly materialistic and economic in their analysis. While much of this is true, there is a deeper and more complex relationship between them, one that reveals both methodological dependence and philosophic development. This can be seen in two ways: first, throughout their work, Marx and Engels continued to use the basic framework of Hegel’s Aufhebung dialectic to analyze economic and social relations; and second, Marx and Engels believed their rejection of Hegelian idealism was justified as a development of Hegel’s dialectic—the negation of the negation of Hegel’s system.

Beginning with the second point, Marx and Engels were not shy about their critique of Hegel’s thought. In his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx noted that in early 1845 he and Engels, “resolved to work out in common the opposition of our view to the ideological view of German philosophy,” which he made clear, was “in the form of a criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy.” Marx and Engels were not just opposed to post-Hegelian philosophers like D. F. Strauss and Bruno Bauer (and even Ludwig Feuerbach to a degree), but they believed that Hegel’s own idealism was useless on its own. Hegel’s world history of Geist or Spirit working in and through the world of men required that humans conform themselves to be appropriate vessels for the Idea so that they might unite with universal consciousness and become free. This made humans passive receptors to an external will and thus unable to control their own histories and destinies. Marx and Engels, by adopting a critical methodology—what Marx called a “ruthless criticism of everything existing,”—were determined to make practical what Hegel’s philosophy had treated as completely theoretical and abstract.

For Marx and Engels, the task of philosophy was ruthless criticism of the way the world was in order to expose human self-alienation, and the task of history was to “establish the truth of this world” and transform it into a new humanity and a new society. In fact, due to their focus on practical philosophy, Marx and Engels believed that to be the true theory, philosophy, and abstract thought was a consequence of practical acts, and that any theory was only as good as it reflected and accurately described the material reality of the world and the needs of flesh and blood humans. This is the primary meaning behind Marx’s famous final aphorism in his Theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Hegel was a philosopher and his idealism arrived dead on the doorstep of nineteenth-century European discontent. Marx and Engels, however, were to change the world, and they did so by transforming the meaning of history and philosophy using the Hegelian dialectic.

The fact that Marx and Engels did not merely reject Hegel’s philosophy for a de novo invention of their own is most clearly seen in comments Engels makes in his book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. In his discussion of the dissolution of the Hegelian school, Engels offered the following enlightening remarks:

Hegel was not simply put aside. On the contrary, one started out from his revolutionary side, described above, from the dialectical method. But in its Hegelian form this method was unusable … this ideological perversion had to be done away with. We [Engels and Marx] comprehended the concepts in our heads once more materialistically. … Thereby the dialectic of concepts itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world, and thus the dialectic of Hegel was placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet. This materialist dialectic … has been our best working tool and our sharpest weapon.

Viewed from one angle, the materialist dialectic is the direct inverse and opposite of the Hegelian idealist dialectic. Yet the way Marx and Engels arrived at the materialist dialectic was by applying the dialectic to Hegel’s idealism itself. Writing before them, Ludwig Feuerbach had advanced the method of “transformational criticism” to advocate humanism as the antinomy of Hegel’s idealism (by inverting the subject and predicate of God and man). Whereas for Hegel the self-alienation of Geist manifests historically in the life of mankind and the state, for Feuerbach, man’s self-alienation appears in religious worship of a self-projected God. For Hegel, religion was one means by which men could become conscious of the Idea, and the Idea could fulfill its goal of pure self-contemplation; for Feuerbach, religion was a sign of man’s self-estrangement and so had to be discarded for humanity to know itself and realize its potential. Deeply influenced by Feuerbach, Marx and Engels appropriated his transformational criticism of Hegelian inversion in order to construct their materialist dialectic.

Thus, within the Aufhebung dialectic, spiritual idealism generates its own opposite—humanism. The struggle between them commences with the negation of the negation (i.e., the negation of humanism), yielding the harmonious synthesis of Marxist materialism. Just how the movement of Geist is described by Hegel as the essential kernel bursting forth and husking off its outer shell of existence in order to actualize a new way of being, so Marx described his materialist dialectic as the “rational kernel” within the “mystical shell” of Hegel’s dialectical idealism. It may be difficult to see how materialism harmonizes idealism and humanism but consider that Marx disavowed a static conception of mankind as having a consistent nature. Instead, humans were capable of creating and re-creating their own natures, which allowed them to become divine in the real world—the actualization and application of the Hegelian world of divine reason and self-consciousness to humanity. Materialism fuses the divine of idealism with the earthly (and atheistic) aspects of humanism, which is why Marx could proclaim in a letter to his father in 1837 that “if previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its centre.”

From this basic framework, Marx and Engels proceeded to apply the Aufhebung dialectic throughout their economic, social, and political works in a consistent materialist way for the purpose of affecting societal transformation. Marx believed that everything in society was determined by the productive forces of man. In capitalist systems, the mode of production was labor, which was understood to include the worker-capitalist relationship, the division of labor, and the introduction of machinery. Labor (as well as money) under capitalism contained within it inherent contradictions that produced human alienation or estrangement: alienation between the worker and his product, between the worker and their activity of labor, within the laborers themselves as free beings, and between man and man in society. Capitalist labor tended to create stunted, undeveloped, and twisted humans, manifested in the conflict between day laborers (the proletariat) and capitalists (bourgeoise).

This conflict would eventually lead to a revolution by the proletariat (the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ such as the Paris Commune) that would abolish both classes, revolutionize labor, and end human alienation in a classless, communist society. Just as for Hegel the self-consciousness of Absolute Mind—the subjective self-consciously reveling in its own objective existence—is necessary for the resolution of all things, so for Marx, the self-consciousness of the proletariat as both slave and not-master (and thus superior to the master per Hegel’s master-slave dialectic), is a necessary development in the possession and freedom of oneself, the overthrow of capitalism, and the final emergence of communism. On a grand scale, then, Marx and Engels employed Hegel’s Aufhebung dialectic to argue that capitalist labor contains within it the seeds of its own destruction—alienation—and this alienation would produce class struggle and revolution that would lead to a communist society (the ‘negation of the negation’) where exploitation and suffering would cease, and the brotherhood of mankind would flourish.

Implications

As for Hegel, Marx and Engel’s use of the dialectic of diremption was an anti-Aristotelian logical analysis of history and eschatology. If Determinate Being was a more incarnate evolution of pure Being within Hegel’s system, then the transformation of ideal concepts into material life (classes, labor power, capital, production, etc.) represented an absolute concretization of Hegel’s idealism. The collapse of formal and material causes in Hegel is carried over into Marx’s thought, but with more force due to its material nature. This means that any attempt to abstract a form or methodology from Marx while rejecting in toto his dialectical materialism of economic analysis and class struggle is to abandon Marxism. In no possible world did Marx think you could be a Marxist by keeping the ‘oppressor-oppressed’ antinomy, and yet have the proletariat and bourgeoise switch places. Nor could you swap in other non-economic ‘identities’ (race, gender, sex) to replace the economic classes. This would be to undo the very nature of labor and capital as well as the progressive and inevitable unfolding of a future communist society without class distinction or the state.

It is well-known that Marx wrote his doctoral dissertation on Democritus, who, along with Leucippus (and later the Roman Lucretius, who was deeply influential on Machiavelli), were Greek philosophers famous for their atomism. Atomism was an early form of materialism that posited that everything is composed of atoms falling through a void. To account for change, the atomists postulated that randomly and by accident these atoms would sometimes “swerve” and bump into each other (Cicero gives a detailed account of Greek atomic theory in the first book of De Finibus). For the atomists, the atoms and thus the universal are eternal; they account for all that is, everything that happens, and all that will be, without recourse to God, creation, or providence. All change is a product of accident (or fortune). Life is reduced to material existence.

In the forward to his dissertation, Marx quoted Prometheus’s confession (“in simple words, I hate the pack of gods”) and then applied it to philosophy as “its own aphorism against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human consciousness as the highest divinity.” Marx’s materialism left no room for God or Hegel’s providential movement in history, which necessitated the deification of man. Man reaches the heights of divinity when his consciousness is awakened, and he is stirred to act to overthrow his oppressors and better his situation. While experienced as choice and agency, this is actually the necessary outworking of Marx’s scientific dialectic.

The essence of Marxism, then, is the atheistic reduction of life to economic and material relations but interpreted within a dialectic of natural and inevitable conflict that moves history progressively forward toward eventual resolution in a universal and homogenous existence. It should be clear to our readers that we are neither atheists nor materialists (although we believe material life created by God is good), and in everything that we do, we oppose the spirit and advance of communism. There is no husk of Marxism haunting our journal, but only the rubble of past idols and ideologies tried before the throne of the King of Kings and found wanting.

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