Praxis and Method (RLE: Gramsci)

A Sociological Dialogue with Lukacs, Gramsci and the Early Frankfurt School

Richard Kilminster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317744405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This sociological critique of the 'philosophy of praxis' looks at the importance of the concept in the social theory of leading influential Western Marxists such as Lukács, Gramsci, Korsch, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Adorno in the inter-war period. It offers a detailed critique of Marx and Hegel, and explores the validity and implications for sociology of two of Marx's ideas which the later theorists made the centre piece of their social theory: first, that true theory is authenticated by praxis, and second, its corollary that certain major social transformations should and would in practice render sociology redundant.

Part one

Marx’s theory of praxis

Practical philosophy, or more exactly stated, the Philosophy of Praxis, which would realistically influence life and social relationships, the development of truth in concrete activity – this is the overriding destiny of philosophy.

August von Cieszkowski

1 A starting point

It is a mistake to believe that there is one authentic, pure or correct interpretation of Marx’s thought (or that of any other theoretician for that matter) which can be held up as what he ‘really’ meant. All interpretations of this kind are selective and historical since they relate to the different contexts and interests of the expositors and the stage of social development at which they are thus elaborated. There is a tendency among Marxist commentators, for obvious reasons, to portray Marx’s writings as more consistent than they are and to suppress omissions, errors, blind spots and unresolved tensions; in short, to transform Marx into a myth. The deification of Marx also carries the temptation to assume that his criticisms of his various theoretical combatants (Hegel, Feuerbach, Bauer, Stirner, Ricardo, Mill, etc.) are definitive, final and unambiguously devastating. It is a theme of this study on the contrary that, seen from a later stage, Marx’s assessments of other theorists emerge as frequently selective, partial or simplified in the interest of mounting a critique of societies from the prestigious standpoint of a ‘science’ of socialism. This contention is followed through in particular in relation to what I argue is Marx’s invalid critique of Hegel to demonstrate the selective emphasis present in Marx’s interpretation which can be seen to have been uncritically perpetuated later on in the tradition by some of the neo-Marxists treated in this study.

From outside the Marxist camp, however, the older style of ‘refutations’ of Marx with varying degrees of hostility on the grounds of say failure of his predictions, ambiguities in conceptualizing base and superstructure, erroneous labour theory of value, totalitarian implications, etc. (Leff, Joan Robinson, Popper), has it seems given way in recent years to a tendency in Marxian scholarship positively to seek out unresolved dilemmas, ambivalences or tensions in Marx’s work. (This tendency is paralleled in Hegelian studies in the controversy over the supposed conflict in Hegel’s work between system and dialectic.) Inconsistencies in Marx’s theorizations are often related to such a tension, sometimes held to be Marx’s profound perception of an inherent contradiction in the ‘human condition’ or perhaps the twin horns of a philosophical dilemma which has dogged men from the dawn of history. Tensions or dilemmas championed in Marx’s work include those between rationalism and empiricism (Easton);¹ the common one between voluntarism and determinism (in at least Lobkowicz, C. Wright Mills, Robert Vincent Daniels);² the Hegelian notion of development versus the Darwinian philosophy of life (Hyppolite);³ ideas as distorted emanations of the class struggle whilst retaining faith in Reason (Bendix);⁴ ethical relativism unreconciled with objective moral superiority of socialism (Kamenka);⁵ scientific method based on observed data versus speculatively assumed contradictions in the world (H. B. Acton);⁶ future-oriented Marxian man-as-praxis versus the attitude towards the past essential for human historicity being underivable from such practicity (Rotenstreich);⁷ between eschatology and dialectics (Avineri);⁸ and between regarding human history as essentially open-ended but at the same time trying to foist an empirical closure upon it (Poggi, Bauman).⁹ Both the mythologizers and the wilful debunkers generally only incidentally contribute to our understanding of Marx’s thought, whereas I think that the revelation of tensions takes scholarship in a far more illuminating direction. However, not only must we be alert to the temptation to hypostatize ambivalences in Marx into timeless co-ordinates of human existence (i.e. the creation of another myth); but also be aware of the danger of remaining in the minutiae of exegesis in Marx’s specific theoretical terrain when his transcendence has already been bespoken by the historical process itself. Sociologically speaking, close analysis is required to supplement this work by locating the perceptions of the tensions in Marx to their elaboration from various standpoints at a subsequent stage of development as aspects of later social configurations, through which mediations alone the tensions have their total historical existence.

Schematically, in that latter vein, we can note that the ramifications of the concept of praxis became theoretical issues for social and political theory from the First World War onwards in the works of the writers of the ‘Western’ Marxist tradition, some of whom are dealt with in this study, whose orientation was primarily philosophical and permeated by fin de siècle anti-positivism. The preoccupation with the epistemological aspects of the notion went hand in hand with the preoccupation within Marxism to seek the urgent further praxis of the proletariat (following their mass action in various places during the war and immediately after) to save capitalist society from the ‘abyss’ through socialist revolution, for which 1917 provided a practical precedent. At the same time the ideologues of the nascent Soviet State came under fire from these theoreticians who saw Marxism as jelling into an implacable, closed orthodoxy informing Bolshevik consolidation, against which they thus formed a heterodox reaction. The theoretical vocabulary of the Western Marxists called up the activistic elements of the Marxian doctrine, notably the early Marxian stress on the ‘realization of philosophy’ in practice, and the implied sublation of the historically transitory Marxian science of historical materialism itself in the praxis of the proletariat.¹⁰ As is very well known, this tradition became polarized theoretically against the increasingly axiomatized, ideologically frozen Soviet orthodoxy, the debates between which have been relived and reworked more recently by elements of the New Left who have resurrected the earlier concern with praxis and have tended to regard those in the Lukács-Gramsci–Korsch–Frankfurt tradition as the carriers of the ‘authentic’ Marxism shamelessly distorted by the Soviet theoreticians. Here we have in mind for example the tendency associated with the American journal Telos.

Marxists generally have always engaged in debate with other doctrines and theoretical positions prevalent at various stages of the development of Marxism. Hegelianism, Proudhon, various political economists, Vogt, Dühring, the Machists, and so on were combated in theory by Marx and his successors at various points as part of informing current practice within the labour movement. The preoccupation in the post-Lukácsian tradition with the epistemological, philosophical and theoretical questions of the relation between theory and practice was similarly elaborated in a dialogue with contemporary theories, notably a sociology which was largely seen as positivistically inspired, as were the ‘orthodox’ Marxists who were also being combated. In the work of the ‘renegade’ tradition the concern with praxis also led to further theoretical reconstructions of the genesis of Marx’s thought (in particular his relation to Hegel, which was especially restressed) and created an importance for additional figures such as Cieszkowski, Ruge and Moses Hess. Marx’s relation to thinkers such as these was to supplement his already established genesis in the arguments of those anxious to prove above all that Marx’s ‘definitive’ articulation of the level of social development of his time and its tendencies was a praxis orientation. This research provided these later Marxists with a theoretical pedigree to justify the political action they contemplated or advocated at the time.

Again, much of that work has been handed down to later theorists to form routine theoretical positions. For example, the methodological critiques of ‘bourgeois social science’ and the unquestioning hostility towards ‘positivism’, which have become part of the reality of contemporary sociology, originated partly in this historically specific tradition of Marxist theory. But they have become perpetuated as theoretical issues in the contemporary context long after their original hortatory purpose has been forgotten. This study reconstructs the genesis of this legacy. Its focus is on the post-Lukácsian activistic strand of Marxist social theory between the wars and up to about the mid-1940s, treated mainly immanently in terms of theoretical issues for sociology associated with the concept of praxis. This focus has meant that two of the most prominent and influential contemporary heirs of that tradition and of orthodox Soviet historical materialism – respectively Jürgen Habermas and Louis Althusser¹¹ – are not directly dealt with, even though their work handles the same kinds of issues in a new historical situation and also significantly undertakes yet further reconstructions of the theoretical antecedents. However, from time to time various followers of Althusser are discussed in the text and, since the Critical Theorists of the 1930s laid down philosophically some of the basic categories from which the second Frankfurt generation has moved off in their efforts to ground a critical sociology, the first four chapters of Part four can be regarded as a prolegomenon to a study of Habermas.

For all these reasons, we have eschewed commencing with a full-scale exposition of the concept of praxis in Marx and of its significance for his work as a whole and then applying the misleading method of placing this exposition up against what the later writers made of it. This subject not only represents a very well-worn area of scholarship from many perspectives in recent years, but also the nature and significance of Marx’s social thought cannot be naively assumed as self-evidently available for such an approach since an interpretation would certainly be mediated by the work and influence of the later neo-Marxists who appropriated this their own ‘pre-history’ in the theoretico-political fashion mentioned earlier. The permeation of sociological culture and expository texts with various traces of these past debates and researches about Marx and the relation between Marxism and sociology is indeed exemplified in the focus and emphases of this study itself. It would be easy uncritically to perpetuate aspects of a historically specific post-Lukácsian Marxist socio-historical self-understanding through the act of reinterpreting that socio-genesis again through the same spectacles, when a potentially more adequate, critical appropriation is possible from a later stage of development. It is through following this line of reasoning that I, for example, take the post-Korschian Western Marxist point that Marx was indeed the only overt ‘philosophical social scientist’ or ‘scientist of human emancipation’. But I argue that that neither exhausts the significance of the Marxian theoretico-social configuration nor demands that we inflate that historically local character (as have some of the writers discussed here) into the inauguration of an absolute dualism of a social science of emancipation versus a social science of justification into which all sociology must be placed.

For all these reasons, my interpretation of Marx, the place of the concept of praxis in his thought and his historical significance is scattered throughout the study, in a dialogue with this particular historical cluster of Western Marxists whose legacy in our present sociological culture first forced us to raise the issues discussed in this study, which has taken us back into the historical genesis of Marx’s thought yet again. The brief notes on Marx in the first two chapters thus supplement and help towards uniting the disparate interpretative threads in the text. The standpoint underpinning the study, which guides its particular stresses and emphases, is also elaborated at various points in a debate not only with Marx and with Marxists but with sociology as well, and is more explicitly drawn together in Chapter 18. The work is intended, therefore, to constitute an interlocking theoretical whole of the diverse movements of thought discussed by virtue of its dialogic character, through which the argument passes backwards and forwards across stages of history. The consequent overlapping and interweaving of motifs in the work means that some writers or issues are dealt with under a number of headings and the subjects covered in the individual Parts and Chapters do not always coincide precisely with what their headings announce.

2 Praxis and practice in Hegel and Marx

In the German the word ‘Praxis’ carries more or less the same meanings as the English word ‘practice’, but the dynamic nature of the language can also cope with the two unified connotations given to the term by Marx and by Marxists since Lukács which we will subsequently discuss. In order adequately to encompass these meanings in English, however, entails, I feel, expounding and using a distinction between practice and praxis which will be followed throughout and exemplified in the discussion of the later Marxists. The significance of the concept of praxis for Marx and the meaning of this suggested dualism are best approached through a very brief discussion of the differences as Marx saw them, between his self-mediating historical dialectic, and that of Hegel, since it was through a stand on the status and possibilities of human action within such a dialectic of history that Marx defines his position and which informs so many of the later post-Lukácsian concerns. This analysis will take us also into the related domains of philosophy and critique in Marx.

The Hegelian conception of dialectical development in the social and natural worlds stressed negativity, that is the dissolution, by the negation inherent in it, of what is taken as immediate reality in any process. Specific states of affairs were regarded as overcome by their negation and carried forward into higher stages of development. The processes overall represented a greater and greater realization of something universal or absolute in reality. Hence it was for Hegel an “uncritical” procedure to presuppose as “valid in their own account” the features of the world which the Kantian analytical method of the Understanding delineates and tabulates.¹ Hegel affirms that the processes of such a historical dialectic always have a positive result, since the course of the moving principle of transition embodied in the world (and so also in the logic of its presentation as analysis) “contains what it results from, absorbed into itself and made part of itself”.² Marx, too, always takes the givenness of the thing-like immediacy of the totality at a given stage of development, affirms its immediate force, but then ‘recovers’ its historical presuppositions. This procedure exemplifies critique, i.e. he demonstrates critically how such a state of affairs came about, how it produced itself as part of a more or less blind self-mediating historical process and then how it will tend to resolve its contradictions into a higher stage.³ The relatively blind everyday activity which carries this process along we can term practice: activity in its “dirty Jewish manifestation”, in Marx’s words.⁴ For Marx this overall process carries with it the concomitant rise to class-consciousness of the proletariat whose ‘world-historical’ truth, i.e. the potentiality of what they inherently are as the bearers of the historical negation of capital, will be realized in the making of a truly ‘universal’ society serving the interests of all men under communism.

Methodologically, the dialectic in both Hegel and Marx thus possessed two moments, positivity and the moving principle of negativity, welded together in a historical totalizing process. For the post-Hegelians to embrace the positive moment would be to take what is given as read, irrespective of how it produced itself; i.e. merely to affirm what history has handed down. This emphasis tended politically towards conservatism and quietism. Whereas the negative moment (which attracted the Left Hegelians) carried with it for those who were led to stress its simultaneous power as destruction and creation (e.g. Marx, Bakunin, Hess, Lassalle) a radical and revolutionary meaning.⁵ Such a dialectic was, in Marx’s words, “the scandal and abomination of bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors”⁶ who took the existing state of affairs as a positive, fixed datum, in terms of ignoring both its contradictory genesis and its negating tendency.

Marx additionally claimed, as part of his depiction of this world-historical dialectic, to have overcome the Hegelian philosophy as the science of wisdom, as the ethical consummation of all past philosophies surpassed and contained within it. This aspect is developed at greater length later, but some remarks are necessary here. Within Hegel’s philosophy were mapped as a development all types of experience as well as the embodiment of the most advanced incorporative stage of that contradictory development of self-consciousness beyond its stage of Spirit to Absolute Knowledge, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part one Marx’s theory of praxis
• Part two Georg Lukács: theoretician of praxis
• Part three Antonio Gramsci: practical theoretician
• Part four Early critical theory: the sociology of praxis
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index