Marxism II: Philosophy Made World
Their first thought was God; their second was Reason, and their last was Man, by which they meant 'the Party.'
This essay is part of the series “The Busy Man's Primer on Marxism.” You can read the introduction here.
Engaging with the ideas propounded by Karl Marx is akin to navigating the Byzantine terrains of a major world religion, replete with its own scholastic traditions, intellectual fervor, sectarian divides, and doctrinal conflicts. This essay endeavors to transcend, or rather bypass, these complexities, offering a foundational survey of Marx’s foundational ideas. Our aim is to delineate a comprehensive yet accessible historical outline, one that is characterized by a generous accommodation of the diverse interpretations and evolutions within Marxist thought that are often at war with each other. This approach is not merely a simplistic overview; rather, it is a deliberate effort to provide a nuanced understanding of Marxism's historical trajectory and its impact on the modern world.
Karl Marx (1818-1883) commenced his intellectual journey within the German philosophical world, a point of origin that starkly contrasts with the later self-perception of classical Marxism, the foundational orthodoxy of Marxist ideology. This contradiction highlights the divergence between Marx's philosophical roots and the evolution of Marxism into various ideologically distinct strands of ‘scientific’ and philosophical thought. Educated in the German philosophical tradition, Marx's early intellectual endeavors were deeply entwined with the Young Hegelians, a group of thinkers fixated on actualizing Hegel’s vision of freedom and unity, widely seen as the summit of two thousand years of Western philosophy. This movement, spearheaded by Bruno Bauer, Hegel’s most distinguished disciple, sought to propel Hegelian thought, which tended to become more conservative as Hegel grew older, into radical new realms.
Marx's intellectual evolution was not an isolated phenomenon; he was part of a broader collective of German thinkers, including luminaries like Feuerbach and Kierkegaard, who collectively heralded the dissolution of German Idealism. This philosophical shift marked a transition from a metaphysical framework dominated by Christian theology and German metaphysics to a landscape increasingly defined by atheistic humanism. The collapse of traditional metaphysical structures and idealistic philosophy was epitomized in Ludwig Feuerbach’s poignant expression: “My first thought was God, my second was Reason, and my last was Man.”
This philosophical transformation fostered a line of thought of existential despair and introspection, leading to the emergence of figures like Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig. These thinkers gravitated towards a renewed form of existential faith. In contrast, Friedrich Nietzsche embarked on a quest for a new metaphilosophy through the concept of the Übermensch (superman). Concurrently, a wave of radical atheism surged, further altering the intellectual landscape and contributing to the profound transformation of the world's philosophical and ideological fabric.
It is important to remember how Hegel has fundamentally redefined the nature and purpose of philosophical inquiry as he demonstrated through his philosophical system that all former philosophical doctrines were merely transient stages in an ongoing process of progressive cognition. This long developmental dialectical process of cognition progressing from the simple to the complex is in itself the absolute truth and not the various philosophical statements made by each philosopher. Thus, former philosophers and their followers, who each spent their lives trying to seek and formulate the absolute truth, have misattributed to their thought a finality that does not exist. Each stage may be relatively justified for its time, place, and conditions of its origins, but everything is ultimately transitory and ephemeral. As soon as one adopts such a system, the entire concept of philosophy, which lasted for nearly 2500 years, explodes. Pre-Hegel, the word philosophy meant a system that expressed the single eternal and absolute truth. Hegel made it clear that this is a task for the entirety of the human race in all history and can never be the task of any single philosopher. The only thing single philosophers could do was merely to provide various relative philosophies that served as grists for the mills of time working their way toward the end of history, which is identical to the end of philosophy. In this way, Hegelianism radically transformed Europe’s and the world’s understanding of philosophy. The detonating effect it had on classical philosophy is similar to the detonating effect Darwin had on pre-evolution theories and Freud’s on the idea of the unitary individual ego. As a matter of fact, Darwin and Freud merely applied what Hegel did to philosophy, historicization, living organisms, and human psychology, respectively, redefining the developmental terms of process rather than substance.
The genius of Marx, and which he poured into his work, was that he was able to synthesize much of the German thought that came before him, combined with an intensive study of English political economy and a radical political temperament, and weaving from them a new philosophy, which for Marx was not philosophy anymore, but a scientific theory that rescued, supposedly, the entire legacy of philosophy. Like Hegel’s ability to produce an extensive synthesis of the monumental legacy of German Idealism, Marx synthesized a vast corpus of philosophical production from Britain, Germany, and France. To combine French politics, German philosophy, and English industry was a common European fantasy, articulated earlier by Moses Hess, that Marx was able to turn into both a theory of history and a scientific program of action. (The combination of theory and practice is one of Marxism's central fixations.)
Marx took the Hegelian system, including the philosophy of history, and critiqued the mystification of reality by these mystical doctrines of ideas and essence. He believed that Hegel was a significant thinker in discovering the scheme of history, but Hegel’s vision was distorted by elements that Marxists could later explain in accordance with their own theory. Marx then was going to fix such distortions, “putting Hegel on his feet,” as the saying goes, and bring his system from the world of thought to the real world. The job of philosophy “was not just to comprehend the world but to transform it.” According to Marx, there is indeed a universal history in which there is progress through a single causal law leading to ultimately reconciling the alienated self with the world, but those things are not mystical ideas or world-Spirit, not on horseback or wheelchairs; they are actually not ideas or spirits at all; they are social things, specifically classes made of men organized around material things, specifically the modes of economic production, man’s essential activity in nature. Idealism was nothing but the distorted reflection of the real materialist conditions of life.
According to Marx’s materialism, Hegel indeed got things upside down. Philosophical transformations in the way men think are not the cause of the historical changes in the epochs of society and politics, but rather, they are only reflections of the deeper changes in man’s interaction with the material world through his labor. Ideas are merely parts in a material-based factorial design closer to being outcomes than causes. If this is true, then, according to Marx, and the idea is originally Feuerbach’s, Hegel’s solution to social alienation is not a solution at all but merely a philosophical mirage, a mystification, trying to solve a real social problem in the realm of abstract thought suspended in philosophical fantasies. To give a concrete example, For Marx, Hegel’s conception of alienation, as that of reason from itself, is a misrepresented image of a more profound fundamental alienation of man from his labor. The inversion from idealism to materialism entailed a change in the conception of the essence of man. Idealists believe that man’s essential activity, that which defines his nature, is thought, which man applies to ideas. But if matter, and not ideas, are the real basis of life, then labor, man’s activity upon the material world, is what defines his nature.