Karl Marx and the Philosophy of Praxis (RLE Marxism)

Gavin Kitching

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138888036
• eBook ISBN: 9781317498827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

In this major study, first published in 1988, Professor Kitching builds on recent scholarship on Marx and Wittgenstein to provide an incisive, readable account and critique of the whole of Marx's work. He presents the philosophical, economic, and political Marx as one thinker, and argues that the key to understanding Marx is his commitment to a 'philosophy of praxis'. This sees thought as just part of that purposive activity (or praxis) which distinguishes human beings from other creatures. This is the first book to analyse all of Marx's thought from a Wittgenstein perspective; in doing so, it clarifies and deepens our understanding of Marx.

CHAPTER 1

MARX, HEGEL, FEUERBACH, AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS

INTRODUCTION

It was Lenin who first suggested that Marx’s work could be seen as a compound of three elements, German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism.¹ I think that this is a broadly accurate characterization and I have followed it in the construction of this book.

Thus, this first chapter deals with the influence of German philosophy, especially that of Hegel and Feuerbach, on Marx’s thought. Chapter 2 then examines Marx’s theory of history upon which the influence of Hegel in particular was profound. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with Marx’s economic theories. These are presented in chapter 3 and criticized in chapter 4. However, I also try to show in these chapters that Marx’s economic theories were themselves profoundly influenced by his philosophical views and that the principal problems in his economic theory derive from his having viewed classical political economy through the prism of what I call his ‘philosophy of praxis’. Chapter 5 analyses Marx’s views on revolution and communism and demonstrates that his philosophy of praxis continued to influence his conception of communism until the end of his life. This is true even though his study of classical political economy introduced a greater element of apparent ‘realism’ into his later writings on this subject.

Chapter 6 is concerned with Marx’s views on class, on the state, and on ideology and contrasts his approach to these subjects with that of more modern Marxist literature. It is suggested that the latter is often seriously defective, mainly because it has departed from the philosophy of praxis which gave Marx’s own writing on these subjects its power and purpose. The final chapter (chapter 7) analyses what I believe to have been Marx’s most important intellectual legacy, his ontology, or what I call his ‘picture of reality’. This picture is shown to be seriously misleading in some ways, in that it often serves to weaken or undermine Marx’s own accounts of dynamic historical processes, and, more particularly, has implications or connotations which are directly at odds with the philosophy of praxis.

In short, Marx’s philosophy of praxis – which I introduce and analyse in this first chapter – provides the guiding thread of interpretation and criticism of this entire book and is, I believe, illuminating both of the most profound strengths and of the most serious weaknesses in Marx’s thought.

Overall then, although the order of treatment of Marx’s ideas in this book follows Lenin’s prescription, I have not given equal weight to all three of the elements within it. On balance this book devotes somewhat more space to the presentation and analysis of Marx’s economic and philosophical ideas than to the political or sociological aspects of his thought. This is because I believe that it is Marx’s philosophical views, rather than his political commitments, which provide the clue to the most profound continuities in his lifetime’s work, and in addition my experience of teaching Marx has led me to the view that most students find his economic theories particularly difficult to grasp and even more difficult to criticize. One of my hopes for this book, in fact, is that it will lead to a wider comprehension of Marx’s economic theories (especially among non-economists) and that it will also provide a brief and comprehensible account of their major weaknesses. I am also of the view that much Marxist sociology is neither very good Marxism nor very good sociology, and chapter 6 in particular tries to say why I believe this, and why I believe that sociology students in particular are prone to the most profound misapprehensions about Marx (even, perhaps especially, when they consider themselves his most enthusiastic devotees!). Putting this somewhat polemically, I would want to insist that Marx was not a sociologist and that he is often most profoundly misunderstood when he is considered as such.

There is one further introductory point before we proceed to the main business of this chapter. It is frequently said, by commentators both friendly and hostile to Marx, that he was one of the great intellectual ‘system builders’; that he, along with his life-long friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, erected a massive system of thought, perfectly finished, perfectly – indeed rigidly – coherent and ‘scientific’, and to be accepted or rejected as a whole because of that monolithic internal coherence.

This is not the Karl Marx that readers will meet in this book. To be sure, as I said in the Preface, Marx aspired to an integration of philosophical, historical and socio-economic perspectives on the world, and to that extent the thought of his mature years forms a unity. But when close analysis is made of Marx’s more specific formulations, when attention is directed to his specific philosophical and methodological prescriptions and to his explanations of specific historical, political, and economic phenomena, then any sense of a monolithic system disappears. In its place a close encounter with Marx reveals a thinker who was a magnificently fertile, but somewhat chaotic spinner of ideas, theories, and insights. Karl Marx sometimes contradicted himself, continually changed explanatory emphasis in different contexts and different moments in his life, and above all continually revised and criticized his own ideas in the light of both changing circumstances in the world and of his own deepening understanding.

Marx would not have liked that characterization of himself. As we shall see in chapter 3, he thought of himself as a scientist who had erected a scientific system of thought, and he also showed a rather unfortunate tendency to change his mind while pretending he had not done so. Or, to be a little more generous, Marx was the kind of thinker who always presented his ideas in a forceful, even dogmatic manner, a manner which often disguised the fact that what was being dogmatically asserted at one moment was precisely what had been dogmatically denied at an earlier time.

None the less, and despite this tendency, Marx’s favourite motto was de omnibus dubitandum (‘doubt everything’)² and it seems clear, at least to me, that he applied that motto conscientiously to his own work. Indeed one could wish that subsequent generations of Marxists had applied it as conscientiously as he did both to their own work and to his. For, as I shall try to show in what follows, I do not believe that intellectual consistency is always a virtue or that intellectual inconsistency is always a vice. On the contrary, it is the tensions, inconsistencies, even point-blank contradictions, in Marx’s thought which make it so exciting to read, even today. For a rich and diverse world merely becomes pallid and grey if processed mechanically through some rigidly coherent intellectual system. Absolute coherence and consistency can usually only be purchased at the cost of extreme simplification of ideas. Marx was never willing to pay this price. Faced with a choice between acknowledging and trying to do justice to the complexity of human society, or ignoring or denying that complexity in order to make it fit his theory, Marx always opted for the first alternative. He was always closely attentive to new empirical findings about the world, always willing to change or adapt his ideas in the light of new evidence. What this means of course is that Marx was constantly reformulating many of his ideas, constantly revising them, qualifying them, shifting emphasis within them.

Thus, when that lifetime of intellectual exploration and reformulation is laid ‘end to end’, when we look at it, or try to look at it, as a whole, then of course we find inconsistencies, even contradictions. As I shall also try to show, some of these contradictions are merely apparent and disappear once they are seen in historical or political context. Others however are real enough and point to intractable difficulties and weaknesses in Marx’s thought. Later in this book I shall be especially concerned with some fundamental contradictions and weaknesses in Marx’s economic thought, but even here I shall show how it is possible to use some of Marx’s economic ideas to reveal the flaws in others. Indeed, like all truly great thinkers, Marx himself often provides one with the intellectual tools with which to criticize his own ideas. And this is a part – an important part – of what I meant by saying earlier that consistency is not always a virtue nor inconsistency always a vice. For it is through the very analysis of the inconsistencies and contradictions in Marx that one can both see the limitations of his ideas and see how to amend and develop those ideas to deal with changed historical times.

MARX’S PHILOSOPHICAL FORMATION

From the time that he enrolled as a student at the University of Bonn in 1835 (when he was 17 years old) until he went into political exile in Brussels in 1845, there is no doubt that the most powerful intellectual influence on Marx was the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and some of his followers (the so-called ‘Young’ or ‘Left’ Hegelians). In fact, as a young man in Germany, from his late teens until his late twenties Marx is best described as an Hegelian intellectual. He was engaged in a strenuous attempt to grasp Hegel’s very difficult philosophy, to apply it – especially in a critique of religion and religious belief and then to reformulate it in ways more acceptable to his own developing ideas. This last clause is vital, for it captures what Marx did – he reformulated Hegel’s philosophical ideas. He did not by any means totally abandon them, and in fact once reformulated ‘materialistically’ (to use Marx’s own word) they continued to influence his thought profoundly from the late 1840s until his death nearly forty years later.

In a famous ‘Afterword’ to the second German edition of Volume 1 of his great book Capital, written in 1873, Marx said:

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking (which under the name of ‘the Idea’ he even transforms into an independent subject) is the demiurgos³ of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the idea is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought.

The mystifying side of the Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly 30 years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion.

And Marx goes on to say:

The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.⁴

So Hegel (that ‘mighty thinker’ as Marx calls him) developed, according to Marx, a mode of analysis, or a method, which has a ‘rational kernel’ but which Hegel himself presented in a ‘mystical’ or ‘mystified’ form. That method or mode of analysis is ‘the dialectic’ or ‘the dialectical method’. Thus, if we are to understand Marx we must understand Hegel, and also the critique of Hegel made by another of his youthful followers, Ludwig Feuerbach. For Marx’s own critique of Hegel was deeply influenced by Feuerbach’s, though going beyond it in important ways.

HEGEL

G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), a lecturer and professor of philosophy at the Universities of Jena, Heidelberg and Berlin, is one of the most difficult of all philosophers to understand. His most important works are The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), The Science of Logic (1812), The Philosophy of Right (1821) and The Philosophy of History (1830–1). He invented a whole philosophical language of his own which is hard to follow even in German and reads even more strangely in translation. For this reason, as much as any other, his work has been subject to the most conflicting interpretations. Indeed such conflicts began even before his death, for he was influential among both conservative and radical intellectuals in the Germany of his day, with conservatives emphasizing some aspects of his thought and radicals others. Given this difficulty, I have chosen not to include long quotations from Hegel in an introductory text of this sort, but to provide a summary of Hegel’s central philosophical ideas, especially those which most influenced Karl Marx and the other ‘Young Hegelians’ in the Germany of the 1820s and 1830s.⁵

Hegel is usually termed an ‘idealist’ philosopher, indeed he is often considered the greatest, or at least the most extreme, idealist philosopher. In its philosophical use the adjective ‘idealist’ (and the noun ‘idealism’) derive from ‘idea’ not from ‘ideal’ (as in the most common modern English usage). Thus, an idealist philosopher holds to some version of the view that the world is known through the mind, through ideas.

According to this view then, all the objects in the world (chairs, tables, clouds) are objects of perception. They are known to human beings only through their minds. Perhaps, if human beings had the capacity to metamorphose their atoms and molecules and become chairs, tables, or clouds this might not be the case. Perhaps then human beings could ‘know’ a chair by actually becoming a chair (although this itself is a rather confusing idea, in that chairs cannot be said to ‘know’ that they are chairs!). But in any event, since such a metamorphosis is not possible, since human beings cannot do this, the only world they know, the only world they can know is the-world-known-through-the-mind. Indeed the known world is, by definition, the world that human beings know, since, arguably, human beings are the only living entities which engage in the practice or activity called ‘knowing’. But if this is true (says the idealist philosopher) then what is the distinction between ‘the world’ and ‘the (human) mind’? If I say ‘I know the world through my mind’, it sounds as if there is something separate from my mind – the world – which I know. But if I cannot know anything about the world except through my mind, then it follows that what my mind tells me about the world is what the world is. ‘Mind’ and ‘world’ are one.

There was however another tradition of philosophy (to which the seventeenth-century English philosopher, John Locke, and the great ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ philosopher, David Hume, belonged) which seemed to have a reply to all this. This alternative tradition, which is still very much alive, is generally called ‘empiricism’ and its counter-position to idealism runs broadly as follows.

‘All this stuff about “the mind”’, said the empiricists, ‘is just so much unscientific nonsense. All you mean by “the mind” – all you can mean – is the human brain, and the brain, just like any other object in nature is investigable scientifically. We can find out how the brain works.’ ‘Moreover’, said Locke and others, ‘the brain is connected to the world by something palpable and understandable, the human sense organs – the eye, ear, nose, sense of touch etc.’ Thus Locke argued that it is through their senses that human beings obtain the basis of all their knowledge of the world.

At the beginning of life, the human brain is like a large blank screen or sheet of paper. As life commences that screen or that blank sheet of paper begins to be filled by what Locke called ‘sense impressions’ or sense data (colours, sounds, shapes, smells). Then, through a process of childhood learning, human beings begin to ‘associate’ these sense impressions both with one another and with certain objects in the world. Once they have acquired, through these sense impressions, a basic core of simple words corresponding to simple objects, they then gradually build up more complex sets of ideas and concepts by combining and contrasting these more simple ones. This learning is shown in the expansion of the vocabulary of nearly every human being from more simple to more complex words as they grow up.

Thus empiricist philosophy, in contrast to idealism, claims that there is a connection between mind and world, a connection via sense impressions and their impact upon the brain, an impact which is scientifically investigatable and understandable. According to this view then, human knowledge of the world is knowledge of something external to the mind. ‘Mind’ and ‘world’ are not one, are not inseparable. Human beings are not trapped, as it were, inside their minds.⁶

In the seventeenth century this view seemed to carry the day among intellectuals and in some ways it underpinned the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century faith in ‘science’ and ‘reason’ which was such a hallmark of that European intellectual movement which is generally referred to as ‘the Enlightenment’. However, in the late eighteenth century it was called fundamentally into question by the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant was in turn perhaps the greatest single inspirer of Hegel’s philosophy.

To simplify greatly, Kant pointed out that the empiricist account of knowledge was obscure and vague in one crucial respect – in its account of how simple sense impressions become ‘associated’ or ‘combined’ into more complex ideas and concepts. For example, one coul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Note on editions
• Introduction
• 1 Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach, and the philosophy of praxis
• 2 Marx’s theory of history
• 3 Marx’s economics: a presentation
• 4 Marx’s economics: a critique
• 5 Marx on revolution and communism
• 6 Much ado about comparatively little: class, state, and ideology
• 7 Marx’s dubious legacy: a picture of reality
• Conclusion
• Notes
• An annotated select bibliography on Marx and Wittgenstein
• Index