![]() The doctrine of historical materialism holds that the impetus of human historical development is the economic antagonism between various social classes. Even though many of his later economic and scientific arguments have been refuted theoretically, empirically, and politically, the philosophic humanism that underlies them still has great appeal for many intellectuals. In recent decades there has been a surge of interest in this period of Marx’s thought. It is clearest in The German Ideology and Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Historical materialism is Marx’s central philosophic doctrine. Alienated Labor and Historical Materialism Freedom of religion and privacy of conscience are belied by the economic conditions which are the real bases of consciousness. Men have formal rights and equality, but their rights have no power, and we are unequal in our conditions. While natural rights theorists claim to have allowed for religious and personal freedoms in the realm of civil society, Marx claims that this conception divides the human being from himself, giving him neither a real public nor a real private existence. “On the Jewish Question” contains a rare instance of Marx’s confrontation with the philosophy of natural right and the formal conception of freedom in the so-called bourgeois democracies. He believed in the desirability, necessity, and even the inevitability of socialism before he worked out the logic of its genesis. It is important to note that Marx’s political understanding predates his materialism. Marx indicates his turn to materialism in The Holy Family, “On the Jewish Question,” “Theses on Feuerbach,” and especially A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Exposing the human roots of religion has no effect if one wishes to change man’s relationship to the “divine” what must be done is to destroy the material conditions that make religious alienation necessary. Marx was impressed by this argument but criticized it as incomplete because it focused only on consciousness. Feuerbach explained that the attributes of God are actually human attributes mankind, alienated from his true self, experiences that alienated self as an oppressive power he is forced to worship. Most importantly, Feuerbach criticized Hegel’s speculative method as an obfuscation of the reality of human experience, and set for himself the task of demystifying it. These men were radical atheists who insisted that Christianity was an expression of human alienation and needed to be destroyed in order to make way for a new, humanistic religion. Marx, however, considered himself an acolyte of the German Left, or Young Hegelians, a group that included David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Max Stirner. Hegel himself supported a version of the Prussian state and respected Christianity as a partial representation of the whole truth. Marx was formed by Hegel’s writings, and accordingly most of his early work is an attempt to understand the implications and shortcomings of Hegel’s thought. The Hegelian Background of Marx’s Thought All of these issues originate in the central Marxian concern for properly relating theory to practice, and can be seen expressed in various forms in Marx’s treatments of Hegel, his doctrine of historical materialism, and even in his economic teachings. On the level of practical politics, Marx and his followers debated the nature and proper scope of the intellectual leadership of workers’ parties, the need for revolutionary transformation of state structures, and the question of the inevitability of the transformation from capitalism to socialism. Marx claimed that philosophy is based on its revolutionary and practical character, or “praxis,” in light of the knowable direction of history. This tension can be restated as a concern with the perennial problem of the relation of theory to practice. Central to any interpretation of Marx or Marxism is a treatment of this tension. Despite this general split, however, in all of his work, Marx wavers between a focus on the transformation of consciousness, and an insistence on the primacy of material conditions for the formation of consciousness. Marx’s work is generally divided into two periods: the more philosophical, idealist, early Marx and the more mature, scientific, and materialist Marx. The reader should consider, however, whether any of his writing can be read except in the light of his expressed revolutionary purpose. He is best known for his passionate attack on capitalism, but he also presents us with serious philosophic and cultural arguments. Karl Marx’s work offers a significant, powerful critique of modernity on several fronts.
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