The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx

Andrew Pendakis, Imre Szeman, Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis, Imre Szeman, Jeff Diamanti

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350189843
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474278720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: History & Theory of Philosophy

There are very few figures in history that have exerted as much and as varied an influence as Karl Marx. His work represents an unrivalled intervention into fields as various as philosophy, journalism, economics, history, politics and cultural criticism. His name is invoked across the political spectrum in connection to revolution and insurrection, social justice and economic transformation.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx is the definitive reference guide to Marx's life and work. Written by an international team of leading Marx scholars, the book offers comprehensive coverage of Marx's: life and contexts; sources, influences and encounters; key writings; major themes and topics; and reception and influence.

The defining feature of this Companion is its attention to the new directions in Marxism that animate the theoretical, scientific, and political sides of Marx's thought. Gender and the growing importance of Marxist-feminism is treated as equally important to clarifying Marx today as traditional and diverse categories of critique such as class, capital, and mode of production. Similarly, this Companion showcases the methodological and political importance of Marxism to environmentalist politics. Finally, the volume examines in detail non-European Marxisms, demonstrating the centrality of Marxist thought to political movements both within and beyond the global north.

This book is the ideal research resource for anyone working on Marx and his ideas today, and as an entry point, if you are approaching Marx's thought for the first time.

Part I

Key Writings

A. Key Texts

1

Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843–1844)

Jerilyn Sambrooke Losch

Marx begins his “Introduction” to the “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” with a scathing critique of religion that contains some of his most frequently cited prose. The “criticism of religion, ” he boldly claims, “is the premise of all criticism” (Marx 1972a: 11). A few paragraphs later, he famously declares religion is “the opium of the people” (12). In an essay meant to introduce his critique of Hegel’s most sustained work of political philosophy, it is not immediately apparent how these bold proclamations about religion relate to the political arguments that Marx aims to advance through his reading of Hegel. One might read Marx here as a staunch secularist, insisting that it is only once people relinquish their commitments to religion that they can achieve political and eventually human emancipation. Read in this way, the “criticism of religion” frees people from the shackles of religion so that they can pursue a purer form of emancipation. Such a secularist reading of Marx’s early writing overlooks, however, the sophisticated theoretical work the criticism of religion does for him. Marx does not simply dismiss religion as false or delusional: instead, the criticism of religion provides the conceptual tools Marx will employ to critique “merely political” emancipation.

When Marx published the “Introduction” to “The Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” in 1844, he had not yet revised the full Critique for publication. This extensive critical analysis of Hegel’s political writing remained unfinished in Marx’s lifetime and was first published in 1927. The contrast between the introductory essay and the main text is striking. While the “Introduction” has a bold, polemical style, the Critique (such as it was, posthumously published) offers a careful, paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of Hegel’s lengthy Philosophy of Right. The differences between the two raise many questions, but central to understanding the gap between the Critique and its introduction is Ludwig Feuerbach’s criticism of religion, which Marx uses to generate new insights into Hegel’s political philosophy.¹ The “Introduction” demonstrates Marx’s early thinking about how the criticism of religion is central not only to a critique of Hegel’s political philosophy but, more importantly, to Marx’s own goal of bringing about the revolution of the proletariat.

Marx is indebted to Feuerbach for the main assertion that “man makes religion; religion does not make man” (Marx 1972a: 11).² People attribute their human capacities to a being external to them, beyond the human world, and then construe themselves as having been made in the image of this magnificent Other. As they project their capacities onto a separate being whom they then grant power over them, they hinder their own freedom.³ Understood in this way, religion is a product of a world where people know neither themselves nor each other, unaware of what they could together become. The “criticism of religion” demonstrates that “the fantastic reality of heaven, ” where people seek a supernatural being, simply contains their own reflection (11). Having learned this in the realm of religion, Marx argues, “[man] will no longer be tempted to find only the semblance of himself—a non-human being—where he seeks and must seek his true reality” (11). Marx extends Feuerbach’s central insight by suggesting religion is not the only context in which people collectively and historically confuse a semblance of themselves for the reality of themselves. In other words, Marx brings Feuerbach’s criticism of religion to bear on social and political institutions like the representative liberal state.

Marx is not always clear, however, about how this works. Early in the essay, he asserts that “man is the human world, the state, society” (11), without distinguishing between the three (distinctions he considers more fully in “On the Jewish Question, ” which I take up briefly below). “This state, this society, ” he goes on, “produce religion which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world” (11). Marx implies that absolutist and liberal political orders are, like religion, effects of alienation and thus ought to be subject to the same kind of criticism as religion. A few paragraphs later, he explicitly calls for this kind of political critique:

It is the task of history, therefore, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, is to unmask human self-alienation in its secular form now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form. Thus, the criticism of heaven is transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

Marx 1972a: 12

Philosophy must enact this transformation, bringing the tools developed through religious criticism to bear on the liberal state and on political life. By formulating this project in the language of transformation, Marx sidesteps several conventional accounts of secular politics. He does not assume that secular political life is what remains once religion has been revealed as an effect of self-alienation (and hence disregarded). His critical project does not aim to reveal the truly religious nature of secular political life, demonstrating that what was thought to be secular is actually religious.⁴ Rather, Marx argues that both religion and the state are effects of alienated social conditions, and it is only through the kind of criticism that Feuerbach develops in relation to religion that people can take back their own capacities and abilities that they have separated from themselves and granted to the state. Only through the criticism of religion can people accurately understand the state for what it is and obtain freedom from it.

As Marx develops his argument about the task of criticism, specifically in Germany, he adopts a rhetoric of war. This criticism, he says, is “in a hand-to-hand fight, ” and “[a]ll that matters is to strike [the adversary]” (14). The urgency of this language illustrates Marx’s effort to distinguish himself from intellectuals (namely, the Young Hegelians) who seem content to criticize but not act. How, though, does criticism enter this battle? It elicits fear. Each sphere of German society must be made to appear as the shameful part of society, and “these petrified social conditions must be made to dance by singing their own melody to them. The [German] nation must be taught to be terrified of itself, in order to give it courage” (14). Criticism brings to life that which is presumed to be inert, fixed and given.⁵ It terrifies by showing people that what they took to be foundational social divisions are historically produced and thus malleable. Through the work of criticism, these social conditions can be made to appear alive rather than fixed and eternal.

This passage goes some way to explaining why Marx finds emancipatory politics that employ these social divisions to be inadequate. The modern (absolutist) German state, Marx claims, “leaves the real man out of account or only satisfies the whole man in an illusory way” (17). This illusory satisfaction is what Marx elsewhere in the essay terms “political emancipation. ” Marx contrasts Germany with other “modern nations, ” particularly France, explaining that Germany has not “passed through the intermediate stage of political emancipation” (19); he insists, however, that such emancipation is itself an insufficient goal. A “partial, merely political revolution, ” he explains, “leaves the pillars of the building standing” (20). In other words, political emancipation is unable to move beyond the self-alienation on which the modern state and its political order are predicated.

Marx offers his most coherent explanation of this in an essay entitled, “On the Jewish Question, ” published in the same 1844 issue of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher with the “Introduction. ” One of the central arguments of this essay concerns the structure of the modern liberal state—the “pillars of the building” that projects of political emancipation leave standing. In “On the Jewish Question, ” Marx makes explicit how the liberal state, like religion, is a product of human alienation: “The state is the intermediary between man and human liberty. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man attributes all his own divinity and all his religious bonds, so the state is the intermediary to which man confides all his non-divinity and all his human freedom” (Marx 1972b: 30). In an effort to clarify how the operation of the state echoes that of religion, Marx argues that political emancipation from religion parallels political emancipation from private property. When the state no longer considers private property a relevant factor in determining a person’s relation to the state, the person can be said to be politically emancipated from private property. Once someone who does not own property can vote, for example, the state no longer recognizes private property in a political capacity. In a parallel fashion, if the state recognizes people as neither Jews nor Protestants but simply as citizens, people have arguably been politically emancipated from religion. The problem, Marx insists, is that by declaring property or religion—or “birth, social rank, education, occupation” (31)—to be non-political distinctions, the state does not abolish such distinctions but “actually presupposes [their] existence” (31). The state allows private property, education and occupation “to act after their own fashion … and to manifest their particular nature” (31). Furthermore, the state “constitutes itself as universality” in opposition to these distinctions, an insight that Marx credits to Hegel (31). The state declares itself independent from these distinctions so that it can legitimately rule over them. Their existence necessitates the existence of the state.

In the “Introduction, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface Wolfgang Fritz Haug
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Andrew Pendakis, Imre Szeman and Jeff Diamanti
• Part I Key Writings
• 1 Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843–1844) Jerilyn Sambrooke Losch
• 2 The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1844) Judith Grant
• 3 “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845–1846) Andrew Pendakis
• 4 The German Ideology Anna Kornbluh
• 5 The Communist Manifesto (1848) Peter Lamb
• 6 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) Gavin Walker
• 7 The Grundrisse (1858) Nick Nesbitt
• 8 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Simon Choat
• 9 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (1867) Harry Cleaver
• 10 The Civil War in France (1871) Franco “Bifo” Berardi
• 11 “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875) Andrew Pendakis
• Part II Context
• 12 Materialism and the Natural Sciences Maurizia Boscagli
• 13 The Christian State Roland Boer
• 14 Liberalism and its Discontents Terrell Carver
• 15 Philosophical Constellations Christian Thorne
• 16 Nineteenth-Century Social Theory Corbin Hiday
• 17 Industry, Technology, Energy Bob Johnson
• 18 Engels Jordan Kinder
• C. Sources and Influences
• 19 Ancient Philosophy Aaron Jaffe and Cinzia Arruzza
• 20 Hegelianism Andrew Cole
• 21 Political Economy Radhika Desai
• 22 French Socialism and Communism Jonathan Beecher
• 23 Marx’s German and British Political Encounters William Clare Roberts
• Part III Key Themes and Topics
• 24 Abstraction Leigh Claire La Berge
• 25 Accumulation Sean O’Brien
• 26 Alienation Timothy Bewes
• 27 Base and Superstructure Edgar Illas
• 28 Capital Elena Louisa Lange
• 29 Circulation Atle Mikkola Kjøsen
• 30 Crisis Joshua Clover
• 31 Dialectics Carolyn Lesjak
• 32 Exploitation Matt Cole
• 33 Fetishism James Penney
• 34 History and Class Struggle Peter Hitchcock
• 35 Ideology Tanner Mirrlees
• 36 Imperialism Tanner Mirrlees
• 37 Mediation Ruth Jennison
• 38 Mode of Production Jason Read
• 39 Nature and Ecology Philip Campanile and Michael Watts
• 40 Primitive Accumulation Jordy Rosenberg
• 41 Profit Alan Freeman
• 42 Property Christian Schmidt
• 43 Religion Jan Rehmann
• 44 Reproduction Amy De’Ath
• 45 Revolutionary Communism Peter Hudis
• 46 Revolutionary Strategy Peter Hallward
• 47 Social Relations Kevin Floyd
• 48 Utopia Gerry Canavan
• 49 Value Mathias Nilges
• 50 Work David Ravensbergen
• Part IV Reception and Influence
• 51 Soviet Union and Eastern Europe Joseph Grim Feinberg
• 52 Latin America Emilio Sauri
• 53 China Rebecca Karl
• 54 Japan Gavin Walker
• 55 Western Europe Jan Kandiyali
• 56 The Arab World Jaafar Aksikas
• 57 India Dhruv Jain
• 58 Africa Priya Lal
• 59 North America Tanner Mirrlees
• 60 Indigenous Internationalisms Deena Rymhs
• F. Contemporary Theory and Philosophy
• 61 Literature and Culture Sarah Brouillette
• 62 Cultural Studies Jaafar Aksikas
• 63 Ecology and Environmentalism Danijela Dolenec
• 64 Gender and Feminism Leopoldina Fortunati
• 65 Geography Matthew Huber
• 66 Materialisms David Chandler
• 67 Philosophy Panagiotis Sotiris
• 68 Political Economy Justin Paulson
• 69 Political Theory Bruno Bosteels
• 70 Psychoanalysis A. Kiarina Kordela
• 71 Racism Barbara Foley
• 72 Sociology Samir Gandesha
• 73 Technology McKenzie Wark
• 74 Uneven Development Harry Harootunian
• Index
• Copyright