Marx's Rebellion Against Lenin

Norman Levine

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137309259
• eBook ISBN: 9781137309266
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia economica

Marx's Rebellion Against Lenin, by negating the Leninist-Stalinist theory of dialectical materialism and tracing Marx's political philosophy to the Classical Humanism of Aristotle, overthrows the stultifying entrapment of Stalinist Bolshevism and contributes to the revitalization of Marx's method.

1

Heidelberg as the Birthplace of Marx’s Method

Bibliographical preface

In Marx’s Discourse with Hegel I discussed the extinction of two texts of Marx, The Economic–Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology. For a more detailed discussion of this vanishing I refer the reader to pages 2–3 and pages 205–206 of that book.

In relation to The Economic–Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 the penetrating analysis of Jurgen Rojahn proved that this work of Marx was originally a series of disconnected drafts penned by Marx as he wrestled with the problem of rewriting 18th and 19th century political economy on the basis of his theory of labor. Working with the resources of the Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe (2) Rojahn established that David Ryasanov collated these multiple unfinished drafts into a collection he entitled The Economic–Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. I agree with Rojahn’s scholarship and will not use the title The Economic–Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Rather, I substitute the title “The Manuscripts” and will use this title throughout Marx’s Rebellion Against Lenin. I use the title “The Manuscripts” as a means to remind the reader that these are individual drafts, workbooks, and not a unified manuscript.

This does not mean that each of these individual drafts do not in themselves have merit and provide valid insights into Marx’s struggle to reform political economy on the basis of Hegel’s theory of labor. This is particularly true in relation to Marx’s exercise “Private Property and Communism” and “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” the last workbook of “The Manuscripts.” In this outline Marx wrestles with the Hegelian dialectic and in so doing provides vital insights into his own appreciation of the dialectic and I will make use of this sketch throughout Marx’s Rebellion Against Lenin.

In addition, recent research by Terrell Carver and Inge Taubert / Hans Pelger proved that The German Ideology was originally compiled by V. V. Adoratskii from two separate compositions of Marx. Adoratskii divided The German Ideology into two parts, the first part entitled “Feuerbach” and the second and more intensive part entitled “The Leipzig Council.” However, the “Feuerbach” section was collated by Adoratskii from disconnected drafts of Marx and was essentially a creation of Adoratskii. The disappearance of the “Feuerbach” chapter entails the evaporation of The German Ideology as a singular manuscript. But the invalidity of the “Feuerbach” chapter does not extend to “The Leipzig Council” and in Marx’s Rebellion Against Lenin I will refer to “The Leipzig Council” and only mean that writings of Marx contained in these chapters.

I

This chapter is devoted to a study of the origins of Marx’s method of social explanation. The origins of Marx’s theory of interpretation received its genesis at the University of Heidelberg in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This is not to say that the professors at the University of Heidelberg were Marx before Marx. They were not, but they did put forth a series of methodological procedures which provided the structures for Marx’s interpretive principles (1). The professors at Heidelberg in ethics, property, anthropology, mythology, law, political philosophy, and the theory of the state, injected a series of methodological procedures into the historical discourses of the late 18th and early 19th centuries’ social sciences and these philosophical currents were decisive in shaping Marx’s theory of historical explanation. Heidelberg was an indispensable center for the rise of German Historicism, a vital influence in German academic studies, and Marx’s method was an expression of German Historicism. (2)

Georg Friedrich Hegel was a faculty member at Heidelberg from 1816 to 1818, before moving to the University of Berlin, and Historicism was a cardinal feature of Hegel’s philosophy. However, other Heidelberg professors were also applying historicist methods to their own disciplines. Friedrich Creuzer, a close colleague of Hegel at Heidelberg, applied historicist protocols to the study of mythology. Hegel possessed a high regard for the work of Creuzer and employed him as an authority in two of his works. In his 1827 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel makes eight references to the work of Creuzer, particularly Creuzer’s Mythologie und Symbolik. (3) In his 1821 The Philosophy of Right Hegel again refers to Creuzer’s Mythologie und Symbolik (4) in support of his discussion of civil society. Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut related historicist protocols to the investigation of law. Peter Feddersen Stuhr utilized historicist procedures in his investigation of the origin of the state. In addition to these faculty members, two students at Heidelberg attached themselves to Hegel as their philosophical inspiration and continued the application of historicism to their own areas of scholarly expertise. One such student was Eduard Gans, who eventually followed Hegel to the University of Berlin and devoted his life to fusing historicism and the study of property. Another Heidelberg student who Hegel also helped find a position at Berlin was Leopold von Henning, who specialized in connecting historicism to ethics. (5) Lastly, the studies of C. H. Schultz in the field of botany also need to be singled out. A colleague of Hegel at Heidelberg, Schultz drew attention to the physiology of the plant and was an important influence in persuading Hegel of the scientific validity of the organic method.

It is improper to claim that Hegel founded a Hegelian school at Heidelberg. It is proper to assert that Hegel’s colleagues at Heidelberg were responding to the same philosophical currents which influenced Hegel, that Hegel and his colleagues mutually supported and reinforced each other and that the work of these colleagues conformed to a historicist perspective.

Historicism was the German contribution to the 17th and 18th century European Enlightenment. Historicism was uniquely a German product, an outgrowth of philosophical and cultural trends that were expressions of the nation’s individualized development. A major principle of German Historicism was the belief that change and process were the dominating forces in social evolution. Change and process were the results of human decisions and socio-economic discoveries. Historicism was one example of the secularization of social theory during the Enlightenment.

Historicism was a revolution in Euro-German thought and negated many previous methods of interpreting history. It rejected the natural law tradition, the belief that the laws of nature determined the evolution of human society. It also negated religious interpretations of human events, the conviction that a God was the engineer of societal progression, lovingly steering humanity toward salvation. It also disavowed any belief in a moral teleology supervising the course of human and social events. (6)

Historicism replaced natural law, religious supernaturalism and moral teleology with time. The determining influence in the events of history was time; or, the events of history were determined by totally secular factors, or causation was located in social, economic, political, geographical and human psychological determinations. Historicism redefined history and history was now defined as the practical activities of the human species.

A vital explanatory category of Historicism was the concept of Organicism, or the conviction that a society was best explained if a holistic strategy was employed. Organicism meant the application of an organic model to the interpretation of a society. Organicism was built on the relationship between whole and parts. A society was looked upon holistically, the end, purpose, functional goal of a society formed the destination of that organism and each part, each separate element, contributed to that terminus.

In order to grasp the emergence of the organic model of explanation it is necessary to take into account two major breakthroughs in early modern European history. The first was the explorations beginning in the 15th century and the second was the development of the biological and geological sciences in the middle of the 18th century.

The explorations created the discipline of anthropology in Europe. The explorers who opened the Western Hemisphere, Australia, South Pacific, China, Japan, India, the Levant and Africa to European contact exposed Europeans to different stages of historical development. From the advanced Chinese Empire to the global trade hegemony of the Ottoman Empire, the decline of Hinduism and Buddhism of a decaying India, to the savagery of Sub-Saharan African and Australian tribes and the sexual promiscuity of the Polynesian Islands, the Europeans were made aware of anthropological serial progression. They developed a global perspective and a stage theory of history. The savages of Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, the Caribbean and the Amazon were considered as the first stage in the successive advance of the human species.

Hegel’s The Philosophy of History presented this succession of historical periods as consisting of five stages. In his The Philosophy of Mind, the third book of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Hegel commented extensively on primitive existence, and the first section of The Philosophy of Mind was entitled “Anthropology. The Soul.” (7) In The Philosophy of History Hegel commented on the primitive anthropological tier of human development in the section of the “Introduction” entitled “The Geographical Basis of History.” (8) The greater part of The Philosophy of History is divided into four tiers: the Oriental World, the Greek World, the Roman World and the German World. (9) In total, Hegel offered a five stage theory of the evolution of the human species.

The explorations provided the factual evidence for a stage interpretation of the history of the species and advances in the natural sciences, especially biology and zoology, provided the validity of viewing each of these historic moments as organisms. The organic interpretation of each of these stages was based on the principle that all of these civilizations were dominated by a specific ethos. The ethos was the whole, and each particularity in the whole was both sustained by and contributed to the preservation of the whole. The universal ethos of Oriental civilization rested upon the fact that subjectivity was absorbed into nature. The totalizing ethos of the Greek stage was the discovery of individuality, the liberation of humankind from the domination of nature, and the Roman world witnessed the perfection of subjectivity through the appearance of Jesus Christ.

I will go into greater depth on the constitution of the organic method of explanation in later sections of this chapter. However, in order to fully understand the conquest of German Historicism by the organic model it is necessary to allude to the rise of the biological sciences in the 18th century and the impact this development exerted on the “Parmenides of Berlin.” (10)

Volume Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences is called The Philosophy of Nature and offers Hegel’s exposition of the natural universe. The Philosophy of Nature is divided into three sections, Mechanics, Physics, and Organics. Published in 1817, while Hegel was on the faculty staff at the University of Heidelberg, Hegel devoted the section of mechanics to the laws of gravitation and the solar system of both Newton and Kepler; the section on physics analyzed chemistry, the atom and the law of attraction; the section on organics to the study for the most part of plant and animal life. The third and concluding volume of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences was The Philosophy of Mind, which exclusively focused on the biology and the rationality of the human species. It is important to note that Hegel’s section on organics immediately preceded his discussion of the genesis of the human soul and its rational powers. Hegel used the organic method as an introduction to the activity and powers of determination of the human species. The organic section legitimized the morphological methodology of explanation.

Displaying a profound sense of history, Hegel was aware that the classification of animals was perceived in the 4th century BC by Aristotle. The development of comparative anatomy did not wait until the 18th century French naturalists, but Aristotle initiated the study of animal types, animal morphology. (11)

Hegel took the work of C. H. Schultz as proof of the viability of the organic method when applied to plants. The Philosophy of Nature contains two sentences in which Hegel acknowledges the influence which the work of Schultz exerted upon him. The book of Schultz that most influenced him was The Nature of the Living Plants or the Plant and the Kingdom of the Plants. Hegel was particularly impressed by his book because it drew attention to the energy of life contained in plants, the naturalistic energy to survive and grow. (12)

Another author who instructed Hegel on the organics of plants was Lorenz Oken in his book Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie. (13) Although Hegel mentions Oken in his 1817 lectures in Heidelberg, by 1821 the political atmosphere changed under the conservative reactionary policies of Prussian King Frederick Wilhelm IV. The Prussian monarch assumed that Naturphilosophie was an introduction to atheism and in 1821 the monarch banned the teaching of Naturphilosophie in the Prussian educational system. (14)

Although Wolfgang Goethe received his international notoriety as poet and playwright in the Enlightenment style he was also drawn to naturalistic studies. Goethe published two studies on botany, Zur Morphologie and Die Metamorphosis der Pflanzen. (15) Goethe’s work was another proof of the viability of the organic method of explanation and in a later passage in The Philosophy of Nature Hegel defined the chief characteristics, the specific logics, of the morphological approach:

As its own product, as self-end, animal life is End and Means at the same time. End is an ideal determination which is already existent beforehand; as that, in the process of realization which must fit in with what exists determinedly beforehand, nothing new is developed. The realization is equally a return ... into ... itself. The accomplished End has the same content as that which is already present in the agent – as the organization [of life] is its own end, so too it is its own Means, it is nothing merely there – in other words, that which is sublated is reduced to Means, is itself End, is itself product. As that which develops the motion, the animal organism is the idea manifesting only the differences of the motion; and thus each moment of the motion contains the others, is itself system and totality. These totalities, as determinate, produce in their transition the whole which system is in itself, is a One, as subject. (16)

This paragraph is significant because it presents the entire liturgy ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Heidelberg as the Birthplace of Marxs Method
• 2  Marx and the Civic Humanist Tradition
• 3  The Disappearance of Marx in Lenin
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index