ALB
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He’s at it again. Suggesting that Marx was a critic of materialism despite being confronted with the evidence that he described himself as one. It looks as if things are pointing towards option (b).
When someone who has known us for over five years repeatedly accuses us of arguing that socialism will not have to be brought “by the thinking, conscious, proletariat”, there are only three possible explanations. They are either
(a) a troll
(b) a lying bastard
(c) a fruit cakeTake your pick.
BD, I think your interpretation of the passages from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 is correct. In the passage he is arguing against that view God created humans and the rest of nature, not for the view that humans created nature. His argument was that humans created themselves by their labour in the rest of nature, which showed that both they and the rest of nature didn’t require something outside of them — “an alien being above nature and man” — to have come into existence.
In a preceding passage in the same section Marx had written “Generatio aequivoca is the only practical refutation of the theory of creation”, a term which means self-generation or spontaneous generation. Marx was applying this concept to the creation of humans and the rest of nature. This was a philosophical rather than an empirical refutation of creationism. It was not until some fifteen years later, in 1859, that Darwin provided the evidence of how one species spontaneously developed out of another, though even he didn’t know precisely how.
In 1844 Marx was still largely a Feuerbachian materialist but by 1845 had come to see its inadequancies, as he and Engels wrote in 1845 in The German Ideology:
“Of course, in all this the priority of external nature remains unassailed, and all this has no application to the original men produced by generatio aequivoca [spontaneous generation]; but this differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct from nature. For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach.”
Nor for someone else, it seems.
With the addition of the remaining articles from March, May and June, the whole of the first six months of 1923 are now online.
New March ones
Anti-dotes for doped notes
The Commune of Paris, 1871
Thoughts of a scientistNew May ones
Editorial: Building workers trapped again
To a new reader
Correspondence
Who gets it?New ones for June
The consitution of the future
The “benefits” of nationalisation
The only way
You’d be surprised
Be self-reliant!
The pessimists
The working-class
Hunger!
Correspondence. Why political organisation?The articles can be accessed via this page.
There is some discussion on this here on Spopen, our forum for members of our parties in different countries.
TM, I don’t think you are yet quite ready to be accepted into the Roman Catholic Church. The so-called “angelus” is also said and sounded at 6am and 6pm. I don’t know if this is still the case:
“In Ireland, the Angelus is currently broadcast every night before the main evening news at 18:00 on the main national TV channel, RTÉ One, and on the broadcaster’s sister radio station, Radio 1, at noon and 18:00.”
The claim that Marx held that there is nothing outside of human conscious activity is groundless
The view that a tree doesn’t exist unless it is being observed has a long tradition in philosophy. It was expressed by the Irish philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, who got round the problem of this being contrary to common sense by saying that the tree existed because god was observing it, i.e the world external to an inividual existed in the mind of god. The view being groundlessly claimed as Marx’s gets round it by saying that it exists in the collective mind of humanity. The “empiriocriticism” that so enraged Lenin was also in this tradition.
There is no justification whatsoever for attributing it to Marx. Marx had once been interested (very interested) in philosopy but after 1845 left it aside to concentrate on economic and historical matters in accordance with his new “historical” materialism. He doesn’t seem to have been intererested in higher-order philosophical questions such as “ontology” (the nature of existence) or “epistemology” (the nature of knowledge), leaving Engels to deal with this when it arose.
Engels explicitly held that the external world existed independently of human perception of it. If Marx had indeed taken the “intersubjetivist” view that it only exists in the collective mind of humanity he would surely have criticised what Engels published in Anti-Dühring (1878). But he didn’t, from which I think it is fair to conclude that he accepted that the external world existed independently of the whole of humanity and its activity as well as of the individual.
So there is no justiication for attributing to Marx a theory that it doesn’t and for describing this as “Marxist” or as “Marx’s onotology”, especially not for the admittedly innovative addition to it that what the collective, intersubjective human mind decided existed should be taken by a democratic vote.
Basically, Marx didn’t have a view on the nature of existence and didn’t need to for his purposes (analysing how the capitalist economic system worked and helping workers organise for socialism). Like most people, he accepted that the external world existed without feeling the need to go into any philosophical justification for this.
I hasten to add that this means that the view I expressed cannot be called “Marxist” either since it wasn’t expressed by Marx himself. The most I would claim is that it was developed by two other revolutionay socialists, Joseph Dietzgen and Anton Pannekoek (who, as an astronomer, was a scientist himself) who noted that Marx hadn’t any particular theory of knowledge and set out to develop one that was compatble with Marx’s historical materialism.
Actually, the view that scientists are describing rather than discovering the external world is fairly mainstream. The view that the mind simply reflects the outside world is old hat these days.
But he has bombed Syria. Like he said, America is back. I wonder if he will have baseball caps made with that on it.
I finished reading that during the first lockdown, though it is more about the next historical period. It’s heavy going with all the footnotes but good stuff. And you can see how Protestantism was a first step towards secularism (though it took nearly three centuries to get there) and so historically progressive compared to Catholicism.
Just evening up a top-heavy pro-Reformation bias in this country and in the schooling we all received
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. I expect many here will have gone to a Roman Catholic school and been taught by nuns and Christian Brothers and so would not have been taught about Bloody Mary, Guy Fawkes and Mary Queen of Scots being baddies. I imagine they will have been pictured as heroes. Perhaps, anyone here who had a Catholic education imposed on them can confirm this.
Being loath to judge someone just by their name, I thought I’d check first and Duffy is indeed a Roman Catholic, a former member of the Pontifical Historical Commission no less.
Sounds like an attempt to rewrite history from the point of view of the losers. The Roman Catholic Church only defends “religious freedom” when it’s in a minority.
