ch5 beginnings[1]

7/24/2019 Ch5 Beginnings[1]

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Guide to Marxist Philosophy, Social Theory and Economics

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Chapter 5: The

beginnings of scientific

socialismBY SIMON

The beginnings of scientific socialism when Freddy met

Charlie

The year 1843 was the end of the Left Hegelians as a distinctintellectual current. Feuerbach, Bauer and Karl Marx all diverged alongdifferent paths, only Marx formally began the break with Hegelianismas a pure philosophical tradition and moving towards a revolutionaryand entirely new system. This had to occur increasingly in debate withhis old comrades in the Left Hegelian tradition. Rosa Luxemburgargued that this criticism was the first step on Marxs road torevolutionary politics a necessary clarification against the idealisterrors of his contem oraries. As Marx became more critical of the

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other young Hegelians, it became increasingly necessary to turn backto Hegel himself to understand where the problems came from.Between 1843 and 1844 Marx carried out this work which set thestage for his later more developed theories.

The Young Hegelian movement were advocates of Feuerbachscriticism of religion which he had put forward in The essence oChristianity 1. Feuerbachs argument was that it was not God that hadmade humanity but that the idea of a God was in fact the result of ourown alienation from ourselves. This power idea immediately leantitself to humanistic and anthropological understandings of humannature, it allows us to look back on the history books which are full ofthe interventions of gods and living deities and see in them humanitiesalienation from itself. We attribute to God all the things that we couldbe, loving, forgiving, angry, jealous and so on, and whilst giving it adivine sanction we strip these things from our own souls. Once we seethat the supposedly all powerful and omnipresent god is in fact simplyour own projections actually we can begin to place everything in itsright order, that our nature is intrinsic to us, and not the result of someoutside being and that we are part of a material condition which givesrise to such ideas as religion or spirituality. Feuerbach flips Hegelssubject and predicate around, beginning the task of turning Hegel theright way up. This contribution to the Left Hegelians thought isperhaps one of the most influential on the young Marx and Engels writing in Paris, Marx uses the subject-predicate flip repeatedly in hiswritings in Paris and it can be found at other key stages throughout hiswork.

It was 40 years later that Engels

really clarified the importance ofFeuerbach in their moves fromidealism to materialism, throughthe critique of religion andwhere it comes from. His book,Ludwig Feuerbach and the endof classical German philosophyis an open and clear defence ofmaterialism and dialectics

APTER

Introduction: What is being discussed?

Chapter 1: The Enlightenment

Chapter 2: The breakthrough in philosophy

Chapter 3: Hegel and the completion of

German idealist philosophy

Chapter 4: The early utopian socialists

Chapter 6: The materialist dialectic

Chapter 7: Historical Materialism

Chapter 8: The method of abstraction

Chapter 9: Alienation

Chapter 10: Social Oppression

Chapter 11: Surplus value, the working class

and ideology

Chapter 12: Boom and bust and the limits of

capitalism

Chapter 13: Revolutionary crises under

capitalism

Methodology I: Scientific Socialism as aWorld-view

Methodology II: Marxism and determinism

Chapter 14: The capitalist state, workers

state, socialism and communism (the riddle

of history solved)

Chapter 15: The Second International

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written by Engels towards theend of his life. Almost as astatement of intent in theforeword he explains that he andMarx have not returned to thesubject of philosophy for manydecades, but that it was aformative part of their earlydevelopment into communists.Then came FeuerbachsEssence of Christianity. With oneblow, it pulverized thecontradiction, in that without

circumlocutions it placed materialism on the throne again. Natureexists independently of all philosophy. It is the foundation upon whichwe human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up.Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings ourreligious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of ourown essence. The spell was broken; the system was exploded andcast aside, and the contradiction, shown to exist only in ourimagination, was dissolved. One must himself have experienced theliberating effect of this book to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm wasgeneral; we all became at once Feuerbachians.

This materialist perspective is the root of subsequent Marxist politicsand theory. Central to their understanding of their own place in thehistory of ideas was that they stood at the cross roads of moderniywith respect to the primary division in philosophy being between thosethat gave spirit primacy over nature and those that put nature before

the spirit. The point of philosophy now was to analyse the world forwhat it is and fight to change it for the better, to end alienation andessense of humanity back into line with the material world. This newperspective allowed Marx to critique the idealist philosophy of Hegel,to escape from the Absolute and arrive back on a sensuous, movingand socially complex Earth.

Considering the debates at the time, it is no surpruse that Marx startsb criticisin reli ion, the be innin of his stru le a ainst idealism.

Chapter 16: The debates over historical

materialism

Chapter 17: Fabianism in Britain

Chapter 18: Revisionist controversy in

Germany

Chapter 19: Reform or revolution 1914-1919

Part Four The struggle for the soul ofMarxism

Chapter 20: Ultra leftism and the Third

International

Chapter 21: Hegelian Marxism, Lukcs and

Korsch

Chapter 22: Antonio Gramsci theories of

hegemony, civil society and revolution

Chapter 23: Soviet philosophy

Chapter 24: Leon Trotsky and the fight for

the International

Part Five The post war world

Chapter 25: The Frankfurt School and critical

theory

Chapter 26: Maoism in East and West

Chapter 27: The New Left

Chapter 28: Existentialism: a philosophy of

reality

Chapter 30: Structuralist Marxism

Chapter 31: Poulantzas and Eurocommunism

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Engels often had to help Marx complete the

weekly Sudoku challenge

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He wrote in 1844 that the criticism of religion is the premise of allcriticism, a distinctly Feuerbachian and Hegelian phrase. But by this

point Marx was not simply a Feuerbachian, any more than he wassimply a Hegelian. His real breakthrough was to combine materialistideas with the dialectical notion of contradiction and change in thereal world. The next step was to synthesis Feuerbach with Hegel andtranscend both, that is overcome the limitations of both.

As the previous chapters make clear at this point Europe was brewingwith new ideas and social changes. The continent existed in a strangehalf-way house between thoroughly bourgeois salons and factories insome cities and the agrarian, feudal statelets of places like Prussia.

The Hapsburg monarchy still ruled in many countries, an increasinglyanarchronistic aristocracy living in palaces side by side with nouveau-riche industrialists in their mansions. The liberal middle classes werestraining at the bit with ideas of individual freedom and economicautonomy, publishing radical newspapers and pamphlets, agitating forrevolutions and freedom. The year 1848 looms large in this time, aseries of bourgeois revolutions which shook the Europe to its core,with barricades and street battles from Paris to Vienna and thepeople came out against the old monarchies. The cutting edge ofdebate was not whether there would be a revolution, but who wouldlead it and where would it end up. For many liberals the question ofcivil society and increasing the public space against the old regimeswas essential for their political and economic futures. For others thenewly emerged working classes and poor, disenfranchised, physicallyand spiritually crushed by their lives offered hope for a more radicalchange. But this it was not just the working class as victims ofcapitalism, but as agents of their own emancipation which was such

an important aspect of this new world view. The insurrection byFrench workers in Lyons in 1831 marked the start of the Frenchworkers movement. Likewise the Silesian weavers strike in 1844 sawthe arrival onto the scene of the German working class as a socialforce for struggle in its own right no longer waiting for philanthropistsand paternal rich men to lift them out of suffering.

It is in this context that Engels travelled to Paris to meet with Marx in1844 2. Over the course of several da s Marx read En els newl

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published work The Conditions of the Working Class in England. Marxlater claimed that this was what won him to the working class as therevolutionary force capable of overthrowing the old order, although hehad clearly been influenced by his engagement with various workersorganisation in Paris as well.

As a newspaper editor Marx had been a thorn in the side of the localauthorities, who closed down his paper and forced him out of thecountry. It was sitting in the cafs of Paris in exile in the years 1843-44that Marx developed the rough outlines of a theory to which he woulddedicate his life to explaining. He starts with critique of Hegel, acritique of philosophy in general, an analysis of political economy andthe actors of social change. This corresponds to the project ofestablishing a clear methodological basis, then an analysis of thesocial economic relations and a exposition of how the working class isthe revolutionary class under those particular relations. On a moreconcrete level this meant clarifying a method, the theory of historicalmaterialism, the actual epoch that humanity found itself in and finally,a programme for revolutionary change.

As he later wrote in his Preface to an Critique of Political Economy:My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations norpolitical forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or onthe basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, butthat on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life,the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English andFrench thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the termcivil society; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has tobe sought in political economy.

It is from this point that Marx develops a system which will providethe theoretical perspective for the overthrow of capitalism and thecreation of a socialist society. As against the utopian socialists, Marxsmain contribution was to identify the basis of exploitation undercapitalism and subsequently the people who had the agency tochange the system from top to bottom the working class. He alsooutlined a specific theory of society and its functioning which providednecessar illumination into the actions not onl of classes but also

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individuals, not just an industrialist or landlord but also nations andarmies.

Lets take these earliest building blocks of scientific socialism aroundthis time.

He spent much of 1843 reading Hegels Philosophy of Right andundertook a forensic analysis of key sections of it. He systematicallypoured through sections 261 to 313 of Hegels book and draws outsome of the essential features of how Marxism would be differentiatedfrom the other left Hegelian views, and of course from Hegel himself.Crucially some of the concepts developed by Marx in this workremained consistent throughout his political life, undermining the 20thcentury claim that there is a young and a mature Marx, or some kindof epistemological break (as Louis Althusser later argued). Indeednearly all of Marxs fundamental ideas are contained in the 1844works in essence, though in an undeveloped form and sometimesidealist form. What connects the Marx the younger with Marx theelder is that he is concerned throughout his life with the question of

human relations and the nature of social being. Writing in 1843 hesays To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, theroot is man himself. 3Uncovering the real nature of our social being,free from false consciousness, ideology and fetishism is that drives theyoung Marx and Engels, they see the structures of class society as thecause of this alienation, and then proceed to spend the remainder oftheir years expanding these insights into the realm of economics.

This early work stands out from a historical point of view as it is thefirst time that Marx articulates Communism as the solution to the

social ills brought about by capitalism. Only a few years as editor ofRheische Zeitung Marx had resolutely denied the relevance ofcommunism, but in the intervening years he had been radicalisedbeyond being merely a radical democrat. The growth of anindependent working class movement across France and Germanybetween 1831-1844 was crucial to his recruitment to socialism, thesight of a dynamic, new class going into struggle against thecapitalists showed how a society without private property couldotentiall emer e. But the idea of communism as a movement was

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still very new at the time and was under developed as a serioustheoretical standpoint, although traces of it could be found in thephilosophies of the Ancients (Pythagoras and Plato). So, dealing withthe practical questions at hand, the issue that had most perplexed theLeft Hegelians, he sought to understand why Germany could producesuch radical philosophy and yet be so backward compared to thenation states of France and Britain. The bulk of his initial theoreticalwritings is focussed on applying a Hegelian methods to the problemsof historical development of Germany at that time.

The Economic & Philosophical Manuscriptsof 1844 were written overthe course of several months, a writing process that ended just beforeMarx was expelled from France and went to Belgium in early 1845. Atthe beginning of their collaboration, Marx and Engels understood theirimmediate tasks as settling accounts with their youthful ideas. Theywrote devastating but largely unpublished polemics against their peersin the Young Hegelian movement, clarifying their materialist viewsand calling for a break with philosophy and a turn towards politics andaction.

What Marx develops in these Paris fragments and notes is acontinuation of the political economic studying that he had begun thesummer before when he read James Mill, David Ricardo and AdamSmith. Here he integrates the concepts of alienation, through aHegelian critique, and crucially for all his subsequent work thenotion of labour and the transformative effects of humanitiesinteraction with nature.

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Notes:

1. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/index.htm

2. In fact this was their second meeting, the young Fredrich had popped into Marxs editorial

office two years previously with a draft article for publication

3. Marx K, 1994, p34

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Chapter 4: The early utopian socialists Chapter 6: The material ist dialectic

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