A-List] Marx: materialism and humanism ________________________________
* To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > * Subject: [A-List] Marx: materialism and humanism * From: "James Daly" ________________________________ My approach to the controversial topic is partly based on the brilliant insights of Lucio Colletti, summarised in his invaluable introduction to the Penguin edition of Marx's Early Writings (but rejecting his attack on dialectics, which led him to social democracy). As Colletti points out, Marx credited Feuerbach with having: founded true materialism and real science by making the social relations of "man-to-man" [the "I-Thou" relationship, community, species being, universality - JD] the basic principle of his theory. (EW 381). What Marx meant by his *materialism* was the rejection of the *idealist* premise: namely, that (really existing, bourgeois social) reality is intelligible (in the 11th thesis on Feuerbach "interpretable" as reasonable), whether (a) in the sense of "natural" (in the empiricist Robinsonade version from Hobbes to Adam Smith), or (b) in that of being "required by reason" (by the Idea, in Hegel's version). Hegel, by the way, accepts the Hobbesian basis of an individualist "state of nature" -- as Marx argues, absolute idealism has to borrow from empiricism (see Colletti's introduction to the Early Writings), which in its turn leads consistently to the gross (huckstering) materialism of the first thesis on Feuerbach. Marx's emphasis on the biological base of human existence is a rejection of the Hegelian "Germanic Christian divorce of nature and spirit", and its bias towards the intellectual and religious as the essence of history. Marx called his position "humanism or naturalism", and characterised it as neither idealism nor materialism but the unifying truth of both: Communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism. (EW 348). Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism differs both from idealism and materialism and is at the same time their unifying truth. (EW 389). The human essence of nature exists only for social man [i.e. in communism - JD]; for only here does nature exist for him as a bond with other men, as his existence for others and their existence for him, as the vital element of human reality; only here does it exist as the basis of his own human existence. Only here has his natural existence become his human existence and nature become man for him. Society is therefore the perfected unity in essence of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the realised naturalism of man and the realised humanism of nature. (EW 349-50). Marx's idea of human nature is not Hobbesian but Aristotelian. As he says in the introduction to the Grundrisse, there is no individualist state of nature; man is a Zoon politicon (Aristotle), only able to become an individual through community. It has been widely argued, and I think successfully, that Marx's notion of necessity is not the empiricist and positivist one of causal determinism or laws of history, but of realist natural or essential necessity; an example would be the necessity to capitalism of the extraction of surplus labour through the wages system. The first notion of necessity leads to inhuman moral relativism and the justification of inhumanity in the name of progress. The second allows human values back into science, from which they have been banished by the bourgeois divorce of fact and value, is and ought, of morality and realpolitik, political economy and alienated "economics". _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
